The wrath of Peleus’ son, the direful spring
Of all the Grecian woes, O Goddess, sing!

Western culture begins with the invocation to the Muse at the beginning of the Iliad: from this consideration we can grasp the meaning of the essay Walter Friedrich Otto published in 1954 on the controversial topic of the origin of language: The Muses and the Divine Origin of Word and Song.

Otto’s study begins with the Nymphs, the mythical creatures who populated the natural elements and who provoked in those who abandoned themselves to the contemplation of nature a spiritual earthquake similar to that of poetic infatuation. Like the Nymphs, the Muses also enrapture the souls of mortals, elevating them to the role of poets.

The Muses, from whose name derives that powerful realm of sounds we call “music,” were daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. These daughters of the father of the gods and of the Titanic mother who symbolizes memory, the nine Olympian deities gave voice to the wonders of the world.

Mythology has also handed down the stories of the sons of the Muses—Linus, Orpheus, Thamyris, and Rhesus—who represented the different forms of expression in song and poetry.

In the Christian era, in the year 404, a fire destroyed the statues of the Muses in the Senate of Constantinople. According to Zosimus, who reports the episode, this was a sign of the profound miseducation that was about to overtake the human race.

Otto believes that the myth of the Muses is the most convincing demonstration of the divine origin of language, which was born primarily as song. Indeed, language can be a simple system of acoustic signaling, but when expressed through articulated song, as also occurs in some animal species, language presupposes an attitude of self-representation that connects a being with the world: in song, a living knowledge resonates.

As von Humboldt argued, things become present in language: they appear to the word as mythical entities. Proof of this is the many abstract concepts that originated as personifications: love, freedom, fidelity, victory…

And not only do the Muses sing, they also dance, and in dance the body rediscovers itself entirely, in the rhythmic movement that follows the music.

Modern theories on the origin of language speak of the birth of words due to utilitarian motives. But in reality, every human language possesses an astonishing richness and capacity for nuance, and if language were to satisfy only material needs, it would be enough to express itself with the sounds of animals.

Precisely for this reason, poets and musicians are the representatives of an absolutely original form of language. Goethe also expressed a similar concept when he said that listening to Bach’s music, he felt as if he were hearing something that had happened in God’s heart shortly before the creation of the world.

Otto’s book is still formative reading for scholars of classics and linguistic disciplines, even if in some respects the essay has been surpassed by more recent philological research (for example, Otto reports the old etymology of Juno Moneta, recently clarified by Jean Haudry).

Otto’s conclusion somehow recalls Heidegger’s idea of ​​”listening”: the words are one with the goddess’s song, that is, the revealing opening of the world and the divine.

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Walter Otto, Die Musen und der göttliche Ursprung des Singens und Sagens, Diederichs,, 1956