Well, Odysseus is in the news, and given our theme of music, mythology, and the Return phase of the hero’s journey, I remembered the Sirens’ song he faced on his return home. Now, the recent movie didn’t stick perfectly to the original text, and my musing here strays outside the canonical Campbellian lines, but it all set me to musing about things that keep us from getting home to our own Ithacas…and how music can distract us. The Sirens posed a dangerous temptation...

The Mythblast series is looking into myth-and-music this year but, if you want the mythic in music, we need to reflect first of all on the bedrock of music—and to our hearts when they open to the call of music: the call of the Muses. So before we rush off to analyze our Spotify playlists, let’s take a moment to relocate the Muses in music, how music is Muse-ical, and how the Muse-ical is mythical. Now, depending on the Muse, this can go a couple of different ways: there are nine of them.

Symbolically speaking, the Magician, or Magus, (typically in the guise of an ancient Wise One) initiates a transformational, alchemical process in the world or, more to our purposes here, in the psyche of someone on their pilgrimage to a more “heroic” or authentic life. They do this by articulating the Word, the Logos, that manifests those alchemical processes in the world, or in the consciousness of everyday life—and sometimes even in the form of “the word made flesh.”