The Greek Muse Euterpe
Mythologies, perhaps, originate as dreams, and their meanings are often open to debate. I like to think that the opportunities they afford for reflection and discussion are the meanings. Linda R. Herzog is an artist I discovered recently when searching online for images of Euterpe (yoo TER pee), the Greek muse of music who is usually depicted playing a flute or double aulos. Herzog tells us that her fantasy visions come to her in the night while she sleeps. They are so vivid and powerful that she wakes up to sketch them before falling back to sleep. Is this how it works … mythology? Her images are fantastic and surrealistic — surprising and fun — but we might be left puzzled at their meaning.
The work depicted above is called Euterpe and was painted in 2006. It immediately made me think of Darwin and the biblical Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The parting waters might also remind us of Moses parting the Red Sea. Euterpe, I naturally assumed, plays the flute. I’d seen images before of Adam and Eve depicted as monkeys. This one stands unabashedly exposed, minus a fig leaf — clearly before the biblical Fall (and perhaps even before the creation of woman). At the same time, he is depicted as a kind of Pied Piper, perhaps luring (a devil in disguise) or leading (Moses in disguise) his people out of slavery in Egypt and toward the Promised Land. The image is at once ominous and hopeful. But why connect the obviously male figure to the female muse?
Not much information is available about Euterpe. Hesiod identifies her only as one of the nine daughters of Zeus and 
Mnemosyne (Memory). Only later, in classical Greece, was she given a flute and associated with music and lyric poetry. We also learn that she became pregnant by the river god Strymon and bore him a son. His name was Rhesus who, Homer tells us in the Iliad, led a small army of Thracian soldiers into the Trojan War, where he was tragically killed by Diomedes.
Don’t bother to look up the etymology of rhesus. I couldn’t find a Greek meaning for the word. The rhesus monkey, as it turns out, was arbitrarily named after the Thracian king. Each one of us has an rh (rhesus) factor helping to identify our blood type. So … the rhesus monkey in Herzog’s painting is not Euterpe, after all. It is representative of the son that Euterpe bore. It emerges out of the river (the god Strymon) and has inherited its mother’s flute. And because we are all blood-connected by the rh element, the painting ultimately depicts our own image mirrored back to us. Maybe we view ourselves as Adam tempted by the knowledge leading to his fall, or maybe we view ourselves as the Thracian king Rhesus fighting for a seemingly noble cause tragically leading to his death. We might even view ourselves as Moses leading “our people” to a better place, or as a semi-dark figure luring others toward an ambiguous end.
The monkey’s shadow connects him to the Tree of Knowledge, and the small bell suspended from a branch above him connects his mother Euterpe to both music and the fruit of knowledge–of both good and evil. When we call upon the muse, do we anticipate a tragic ending or a comic progression, or something else? If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I call it a journey of the dragonfly, my spirit mentor and, increasingly, mirror image of my own psyche. Imagine my surprise and delight, then, upon discovering that Herzog’s paintings were featured in a Kevin Costner film entitled Dragonfly.
Journey of the Dragonfly 