The Gates of Horn and Ivory, Chapter 9.1 Inspired

Every four years in the middle of summer, the mortals gathered to celebrate the muses in a gentle valley at the feet of Mount Helicon.

The nine daughters of Mnemosyne, they weren’t your usual goddesses; they were a gift to humankind. Nobody talked about them as such, out of fear these wonders that fired the human mind to create masterpieces might be taken away, to leave mankind only the toiling and the wars, a drab existence made of hopeless and uninspiring days, all the same.

The muses were born of the goddess of memory and the highest of the gods, a splendid metaphor for the mind’s union with the sublime.

And, just as happens with the human minds, their relationships and connections with other gods and with the mortals got complicated from there.

Unexpected friendships and mentoring roles emerged, and if one wanted to understand them, one had to know their whole family history.

Pegasus himself had struck the ground with its hoof to open their source of inspiration, the stream of Hippocrene.

Their mother, Mnemosyne, the keeper of the fount of memories in Hades, was Hypnos’s neighbor and friend.

Remembering is the opposite of forgetting, and therefore, it embodies the same concept. They are two halves of the same whole.

Every object in a universe of duality must have an opposite, and the two opposing elements are intrinsically the same essence. 

They are what is, reflecting itself into what it is not.