[UA] The Muse

[Nick Wedig]

>The other reason is that, on reflection, the whole muse idea may not fit too well into UA's cosmology.  The archetypes we've seen so far are all pretty definitively human-- they're exaggerations of recognizably human impulses.  The classical idea of the muse derives a lot of its power from the notion of the creative impulse coming from Outside; artist as shaman channeling stories from the heavens and all that.  While I like your writeup, I think it kinda muddies the waters of the statosphere some.  Make it the Artist, keep the channels the same, only based on a physical object as a vector (still transmits ideas, but to people in general instead of to just one) and I think it'd work great.

This is one thing I meant to address and forgot to when writing it up.  I was trying to make the Muse be more the normal people who inspire art in the artist.  Less seeing the artist as a shaman channeling higher powers, I was trying (and, perhaps, failing) to make the Muse the person who brings forth ideas and emotions already in the artist.  An attempt was made to make the art partially part of the artist sublimating his desire for the Muse and making that into the art.  The basic example I'm thinking of is Lord Byron seeing a woman pass him on the beach once when he was 15, and then going and writing a poem as an outlet for the emotions she caused in him (If I could remember her name, she'd have been in the suspected avatars section).

I don't really want to make the archetype into the Artist as I have my own ideas on the archetype (that are still far too vague to write any time soon) and would want to make them a pair of mutually reinforcing archetypes.  Artists with a Muse hanging around tend to advance faster, etc.  

Mr. Teapot
starving artist

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