Satan's Secret Daughters: The Muse as Daemon

Satan’s Secret Daughters explores the nihilistic fate of demonization that muses undergo in the wake of Christianity. Heraclitus names the being calling us to our fates a daemon. Homer’s Iliad affirms Athena as Achilles’s daemonic muse. In Proverbs, Wisdom inspires God to let the creation be. But the New Testament knows the daemonic as demonic, as being of Satan and so ultimately of nothingness. Displaced by Christ, Wisdom joins Athena in the exile into nothingness that Christian monotheism would effect. However, Athena and Wisdom return in English literature as ambiguously daemonic and demonic muses who inspire their votaries to grapple with nihilism. Satan’s Secret Daughters tracks the fate of daemonic muses in Shakespeare’s Othello, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Melville’s Moby-Dick. Such muses come to an aging mercenary (Othello), a prideful archangel (Satan), and a wounded sea-captain (Ahab), inspiring each toward an impossible restitution. Satan’s Secret Daughters concludes with an examination of Sandy Florian’s The Tree of No, a culmination of and reply to the tradition of the demonized daemonic muse.