Many male authors, composers, and scholars in the Western canon took
as their inspiration a spiritualized female figure. The Greeks gave
us their Muses, with their corresponding mythology of creativity. For
example, we refer to an author's "muse" interchangeably as either an
actual woman who inspires him, or as an abstract spirit of
inspiration. Dante Alighieri's Beatrice is perhaps the most notable
specific instance. The author's "La Vita Nuova" and "Divine Comedy"
detail the process by which an actual, living Florentine woman (Bice
di Folco Portinari) was transformed from a passing fancy, into a
spiritual guide who leads Dante to the very face of God. A
lesser-known example is Sophie von Kuehn, the wife of Georg Philipp
Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (better known by his pen name
Novalis). After Sophie passed away at the young age of 16, she
inspired the young philosopher and mining engineer to produce an
entire body of unique verse, prose, and essays, by which he is
credited as a father of early German Romanticism. Inscribed in
Novalis' wedding ring was the phrase "Sophia sei mein Schutzgeist"
("Sophie, be my guardian spirit"), and he often played on the Greek
meaning of her name: "Wisdom," frequently personified in the
Judeo-Christian tradition as a noble woman.
This spiritualization of the Muse is a process, rather than a static
attribute. It happens primarily in the mind of the creative male
subject, rather than to the female object. The last line of Goethe's
Faust summarizes this process: "Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan"
("The Eternal Feminine draws us on"). Man first experiences love as
concrete and sexual (whether consummated or not). Then, circumstances
(unfulfilled love, separation, and perhaps even the death of the
beloved) train him to disembody and spiritualize that love so that it
becomes a spiritual guide. The lover is drawn on by the noble beloved
to seek higher and more noble things.
The training of the lover by the beloved is a familiar theme from
courtly love. This is particularly fitting since the troubadour often
sings from the first-person perspective of the male lover: the
unattained beloved inspires beautiful music, even as she draws out his
weeping and sighs. In Wolfram von Eschenbach's "Parzival," for
instance, the protagonist's wife is named Condwiramurs, which means
"love guide." Wolfram changes her name from Blanchefleur, by which
she appears in his source material (Chr�tien de Troyes' "Perceval"),
so as to emphasize how the thought of her guides Parzival on his many
lonely journeys and eventually draws him out of religious despair and
back to his quest for the Grail.
This name change also highlights Wolfram's deliberate and arguably
awkward choice to desexualize her first encounter with Parzival, in
which she convinces him to defend her town from a siege. Chr�tien
simply has her seduce the naive young Parzival, who happened to be
passing through her town during the siege. In contrast, Wolfram
emphasizes her chaste intentions: She visits him at night specifically
to convince him to fight for her home, but has no sexual intentions.
It is nevertheless a sexually charged encounter: she crawls into his
bed, clutches him, and weeps. One should also recall the habit of the
time to sleep in the nude. However, "nothing happens," though
Parzival had acted less than nobly with another woman before (he
robbed her of her jewelry and nearly raped her). She asks him "not to
wrestle" (i.e., not to exploit her vulnerable position so as to have
sex with her), and Parzival honors this request. Here, it's the woman
who drives the desexualization process; in other cases, circumstances
drive it. For example, Dante rarely saw Beatrice, and eventually she
married another man and passed away at age 24. Novalis lost his young
wife after only three years of marriage. Parzival does eventually
return to Condwiramurs, but only after finding the Grail.
Sometimes, men enter into this separation process deliberately, rather
than letting circumstances bring it to them. For example, the New
York Times recently interviewed a Buddhist couple who have taken an unorthodox
vow of conjugal celibacy. Sts. Francis and Clare of Assisi form an
analogous (though much less extreme) pair in the Western Christian
tradition. Francis, himself first a troubadour, chooses a religious
life of poverty and preaching, and ordains Clare into the religious
life. Some stories even have the young Francis fall in love with
Clare, and others depict him as dying in her arms. In a traditional
Roman Catholic parish last weekend, the pastor defended priestly
celibacy in his sermon by arguing that though priests in ancient times
were allowed to be married, they were required to live apart from
their wives after ordination. (Whether this is true or not is less
interesting than the fact that he mentions it!)
Situations such as this exploit the tension between spiritual
companionship and sexual desire. At times this tension has theurgical
overtones. On occasion it finds expression directly in terms of the
sexual act: for instance, Chinese emperors of the Qing Dynasty were
taught that forestalling ejaculation whenever possible would magically
add years to their life. More often, it takes a more abstract form as
"courtly love" nonsexual relationships. Charles Williams, the 20th
century English author and poet, was reputed to have followed this
practice. Williams would have been well aware of the theurgical
implications from his training in the Western esoteric tradition. In
that tradition, nonsexual theurgical relationships later devolved into
actual sexual practice (what many self-identifying neopagans call "sex
magick"), as described for example in the novels of Dion Fortune. The
fundamental idea in these nonsexual relationships is to generate
sexual tension, and then by resisting its physical expression,
"sublimate" it into a higher spiritual force. This makes the Muse a
vessel for creative intellectual work, just as the female body serves
(in arguably sexist magical thinking) as the vessel of creation in
physical terms.
In his short story "Calliope," Neal Gaiman unites the intellectual and
physical roles of the Muse: his protagonist author regains his
creativity by magically enslaving and physically raping the Greek Muse
Calliope. This illustrates the dark side of the spiritualized female
figure: she remains Object to the male as Subject. He creates alone,
without her cooperation, and projects an image upon her which obscures
her actual identity and makes her ever more divorced from reality.
She dies, lies unconscious in a coma (as described fictionally in
Williams' 1931 novel "Many Dimensions," whose female protagonist some
have argued was modeled after his lover Phyllis Jones), or is simply
inaccessible and therefore ever more ripe for projection.
Furthermore, Dante Alighieri and Charles Williams were married (not to
their Muses), and Novalis was engaged to marry Julie von Charpentier
the year after Sophie's death (though he died before their marriage).
Keeping a Muse was for them a kind of intellectual (and actual, in
Williams' case!) adultery.
Williams did, however, understand well the consequences of this
projection process. In his 1937 novel "Descent into Hell," one of his
male characters descends so deeply into a fantasized relationship with
a particular woman, that his fantasies become a succubus that leads
him to despair and suicide. While undergoing this process, he
encounters the actual woman, and she is so taken with fear that she
flees from him: he has detached the fantasy entirely from reality.
Despite Williams' dabbling in the darker aspects of Muse-keeping, one
need only read his collected letters to his wife Florence Conway ("To
Michal from Serge") to learn the depths of his intense and very real
love for her. Novalis may have transformed his first wife into a
"Schutzgeist," but he still weeps at her tomb, as depicted in "Hymn to
the Night." One also sees in the "Divine Comedy" how even the
spiritualized Beatrice is still very much a woman who attracts Dante,
whose shining eyes and half-mocking smile have a power over him which
is chaste but by no means nonsexual. The examples of these three
authors -- Dante Alighieri, Friedrich von Hardenberg, and Charles
Williams -- show the moral tension of taking on a Muse, but also show
the importance and value of staying grounded in the reality of the
female person -- physical, spiritual, intellectual, intelligent, an
equal Subject in her own right.
