Orpheus' Hymn to the Muses

H.P. Blavatsky, R.W. Emerson, G.R.S. Mead, Thos. Taylor · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 15 pages

A fifteen-page compilation built around the Orphic hymn to the Muses, with commentary from Thomas Taylor and further material from H.P. Blavatsky, R.W. Emerson and G.R.S. Mead. An abstract and train of thoughts stands at the front. Its companion in this section is the hymn to Apollo, whom the Muses are described as attending.

The heading calls the Muses the nymphs of the Greek poets, eager to investigate the laws of nature and to study philosophy, and intoxicated with the nectar of divine knowledge. After the hymn itself, Taylor's commentary supplies the reading the compilation is arranged around: that the Muses harmonise our triune energies by elevating them to the noetic unity of spirit, and that philosophy is the greatest music, since it causes our psychical powers to be moved harmoniously, in symphony with real beings and in accordance with the orderly motions of the celestial orbs. The Muses are then described as the sources of the variety of harmonies, imparting to souls the investigation of truth and to bodies a multitude of powers, while the Musagetes himself unfolds truth to souls according to one intellectual simplicity; and they are identified as celestial souls, progressing alongside the celestial spheres, the sensible world, the whole soul of the universe and the souls of ordinary men. Emerson is brought in on Plato domesticating the soul in nature, and Mead on gods and their shaktis, with a table of the correspondence of elements and spheres with their gods and shaktis. Two closing identifications give the compilation its practical point: that the Muses are the powers of remembrance of spiritual knowledge enjoyed by the soul in past births, and the beneficent actions of awakened spiritual powers — while the Sirens are the allurements of opened psychic powers.

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