Deborah Castellano
If you’re not an artist, a musician, or a writer, you might think you don’t have a muse. Wrong. Everyone does. Just because yours is different from the media portrayal of the muse doesn’t mean she1 doesn’t exist. What media portrayal currently describes your struggles and your life right now? What, none? Exactly.
My mom’s muse can’t be bothered with airy-fairy artiste junk. She barfs up snarled balls of yarn full of knotted and tangled tax code. It’s up to my mom (and her muse) to wrangle that hot mess into order. My mom’s muse answers to the name Mrs. Emma Peel and dreams in numbers.
The character of Don Draper is frequently seen as the Establishment on the TV show Mad Men. He’s full of hetero white-guy privilege during a time when it was extra tasty and delicious to be a hetero white guy due to the buckets of money, ease of middle-class life, and all the underpaid female labor there to help you at the office and at home. Don’s a brilliant ad man, and his words and images evoke beauty and longing, which is very useful when you’re in advertising. His muse creates artistic advertising with him.
What Do You Dream About?
What is your Great Work? Take some time to ponder that question, as it will define your relationship with your muse. I don’t feel everyone’s
Great Work is necessarily based in the pursuit of occult knowledge. Maybe your Great Work is in the occult arts, but maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s math, maybe it’s science, maybe it’s cooking, maybe it’s cleaning, maybe it’s flying a plane, maybe it’s making a really fantastic cup of coffee. But it’s in there, in you. Where is the heart of your passion? What would you regret not accomplishing in your life? Distill this into one sentence. You can work on other quests later, but for now, content yourself with identifying just one.
What is your Great Work? Take some time to ponder that question, as it will define your relationship with your muse.
Meet Your Muse
Muses are slippery creatures by nature. While the muse is often referred to as a female, there is no reason yours can’t be male or some other gender altogether. One thing most muses have in common is that they tend to be very clear about who is the dominant party in the relationship. Here’s a hint: it’s not you.
Have you met your muse yet? If not, it’s going to be a lot of work getting to her. Not impossible, by any means, but work. Chances are she’s been asleep at the wheel for a while. If you’ve already met your muse, chances are your relationship with her is not optimal, which is why you’re attempting to develop a more open and honest connection with her. That will be even harder, as she’s likely irritated with you.
Let’s start with the first scenario: that you haven’t met your muse yet. On a Friday, pour out a libation that you think your muse will like best, whether that’s champagne, Red Bull, Scotch, pomegranate juice, Clamato juice, or a cup of tea. Your muse is a part of you (and you are a part of her), so this is a scenario in which you honestly know best. Put out a small plate of treats for your muse. This could be cherries wrapped in prosciutto, a marrow bone, or a glorious piece of chocolate. Take a small pink candle and light it with your intent to commune with your muse. Write on a piece of joss paper (sold in Asian supermarkets) why you want to be friends with your muse. Don’t let your pen leave the paper as you write; if it does, start over. (You will end up with a lot of loops when you dot the i’s and cross the t’s.) Roll the paper toward you with a little ginger powder dusted on it, then light the paper in the candle and let it burn in a heat-safe container, such as your cauldron.
Wait a week to see if you get any feedback. Did you hear a specific song repeatedly on the radio, in the supermarket, and in your playlist? Did you see some kind of omen that wasn’t there before, like seven bunnies in every empty field you passed? Did your muse appear to you in a dream or in your meditation work? At two o’clock in the morning was that royal pain kicking your bed with a brilliant but inconvenient idea? If so, then you’ve made contact. Congratulations! You’re on your way to a more interesting life.
If you haven’t heard from your muse in a week, then obviously she didn’t like your presents. She’s a vegan, she thinks cherries are gross, she doesn’t eat sugar anymore, gluten makes her stomach cramp, or whatever. Or maybe she’s playing hard to get. That’s a fun game muses like to play. In that case, continue offering different things on a Friday with a new candle and a new petition, waiting a week for her reply, until your muse shows up. Usually this approach is not one that I recommend with the goddesses and spirits (as well as humans), because sometimes, friend, they’re just not that into you. That level of persistence is stalkeresque, which is a turn-off in 99 percent of the situations you will find yourself in. But this is an exception to the rule—because your muse is a piece of you and you are a piece of your muse. Due to that symbiotic relationship, it’s fine in this one particular case to chase your muse like a lovesick puppy—because it means you’re also chasing yourself (and running away from yourself) like a lovesick puppy, which will blow the doors off your brain when you get deeply involved enough with your muse.
Here’s something to remember: while, yes, your muse is a part of you and you are part of her, she’s still also her own spirit/being. Take your muse’s cues and do not antagonize her for the sake of antagonizing her, because it’s just going to make everything more difficult for both of you in the long run. Trust me.
Rekindle Your Bond with Your Muse
If you’ve already met your muse and you’re reading this, chances are she ditched you. She climbed out the restaurant’s bathroom window while she claimed to be powdering her nose. It is possibly even more challenging to get in touch with your muse if you’ve already met her and she’s given you the slip because—surprise!—she’s annoyed with you. How do you know if your muse has checked out and is no longer responding to your calls? Well, have you been devoid of inspiration? Have you been stubbornly sticking to a routine that leaves no room for creativity and thus no room for your muse? If so, that means you’re too boring to bother with. You need to spice up the relationship again.
To figure out where your muse has been hiding, let her know you’re looking for her by nightly stating your intention out loud that you want to find her. When you start receiving omens that she has received your intention, you need to begin wooing her back by making offerings to her (as outlined previously) until you receive omens that she has returned to your life.
That will not be enough for your relationship to be saved, however. You are going to need to offer her a sacrifice. Chances are she’s really aggravated with you, which is why she dumped your rump like a bad habit. People, spirits, and goddesses like a pound of flesh when they feel wronged by you; it’s just the nature of anger. The good news is you probably won’t have to give her an actual pound of flesh. The bad news is it’s called a sacrifice for a reason.
I can’t speak for your muse any more than I can speak for, say, all women everywhere, but I can tell you that my muse likes the sacrifice of time, routine, and money best. As I get older, I get more tight-fisted and regimented about all of the aspects that make her roll her eyes so hard she could be in a television teen drama. I’m a writer, so my muse is completely uninterested in what I need to do to survive and be mentally stable. Working, being in a long-term relationship, paying off bills, maintaining a home, and staying in most weekends? Booooooooring! She doesn’t want to be bothered with the petty details of how I maintain my existence; she wants to eat waffles while wearing an expensive men’s shirt after a night at a gala and then have me write about how witty, charming, and clever she is.
As a writer, it’s hard to write exciting things if your life isn’t terribly interesting, which is likely part of your muse’s motivation. It’s hard to dream of new, exciting worlds when you’re too weighed down by the laundry that has to be done in this one.
Am I saying that you should give in to every demand your muse makes of you, as if you were some kind of slave? Do you conduct any relationship in your life like that? Um, no. Learn how to negotiate.
My muse may want the life of an Upper East Sider in New York City, but she’s attached to a suburban girl from New Jersey. I don’t have the means or the connections to truly give her the kind of life she wants. So we negotiate. Going to see an electric cello ensemble concert was a sacrifice she found acceptable, as it had the elements she likes: time (schlepping out to Philly after a week of ten-hour work days when I was exhausted), money (cost of drinks, transportation, and new fishnet stockings), and effort (I could have gone in a little black dress, but I went all out in my most elegant gothic wear, and dancing is not as easy as it once was for me). Voilà!
Sounds lovely and fun, right? Sometimes part of your sacrifice will be nonconsensual; that’s why it’s called a sacrifice. My muse likes to punch me where it hurts when she’s mad at me. After the concert, she also took two paying gigs out from under me at the very last minute. Our relationship is always contentious, though yours doesn’t have to be with your muse.
Sacrifices to Your Muse
First, think about your muse. How do you see your muse? What is she like? What does she look like? How does your muse communicate with you typically? How would you describe your relationship with your muse?
Now think about your personal Great Work. What are you trying to accomplish and why?
With that information (and, ideally, feedback from your muse), think about what would be a good sacrifice. Time, money, and effort are common modern-day sacrifices. And there’s always a gaes, which is when you and your muse come to an agreement that you will do (or not do) X or Y thing for Z amount of time. The easiest modern example of this would be when a Catholic gives something up for the forty days of Lent. A gaes is a vow. If you make a vow to a spirit or a god, you better mean it, because bad things will quickly follow if you don’t. So make sure you mean it and it’s something you can accomplish. You’ll know your sacrifice was accepted when you start to see movement in your Great Work and/or feel (divinely) inspired. Until then, keep sacrificing and contacting until you get somewhere.
Why Go to All This Trouble
to Work With Your Muse?
That’s an excellent question. If you want to see extraordinary results in your Great Work, then you need to be willing to work hard. Collaborating with a muse is hard. For one thing, your muse doesn’t see it as collaborating. If you think you can completely control your muse, you are hilarious. That’s like saying you can completely control your mother.
So why deal with the unknown and the untamed? Why potentially be burned? Um, why do you do magic? Your relationship with your muse is magical, like any relationship with a spirit. Most people choose not to do magic or commune with spirits. Many people spend much of their lives on Facebook and playing Candy Crush. Do you want to spend most of your life on Facebook and playing Candy Crush or do you want to get somewhere? Right.
Too Much! Too Much!
So you did everything you were supposed to do and the results are more than you’re prepared to handle. You reached your goal, but now you’re feeling overwhelmed. First, make sure that you really want to put the brakes on this. Are you just feeling scared and overworked? As I can tell you from experience, your lizard brain hates fear and uncertainty and will do just about anything to convince you to go back to the status quo.
Take a sick day and pretend like you’re going to live a normal human life like a normal human being for a day. After that day, reassess the situation and remind your lizard brain that you didn’t come here to be a normal human.
Still not ready? Even the fiercest Witch has moments of weakness. It’s time for you to regroup and give your muse the slip for a while.
For the next two weeks, you are to have the most boring, mundane life possible. Go back to how you were living when she gave you the slip in the first place. Eat boring food, go to work, watch television at home, do laundry, don’t have any sex, and don’t do anything creative or fun. Fly under the radar until things settle down enough for you to ride the tiger again.
Then get to it!
Deborah Castellano writes for many of Llewellyn’s annuals and has a blog on PaganSquare where she gives unsolicited opinions on glamour, the Muse, and the occult. Her online shop, The Mermaid & The Crow, specializes in handmade goods. She resides in New Jersey with her husband, Jow, and two cats. She has a terrible reality-television habit she can’t shake and likes St. Germain liqueur, record players, and typewriters. Visit her at www.deborahmcastellano.com.
Illustrator: Rik Olson
1. I have chosen “she” as the third person neutral for this piece because that’s what’s organic for me. Feel free to insert whatever pronoun you like.