Dichterweihe

The Dichterweihe — the poetic consecration — is the opening scene of Hesiod’s Theogony: Hesiod, herding sheep on Mount Helicon, is met by the Muses, who breathe into him a divine voice and commission him to sing of the gods. eric-a-havelock reads the Hymn to the Muses that prefaces the Theogony as the first self-conscious statement of the Greek poet’s vocation: “Homer, and, by inference, the epic poets who had preceded him, had been content merely to invoke the Muse as the presumed source of their song. But if Hesiod wishes also to commemorate the Muses at length, as he might have commemorated Apollo or Aphrodite, this marks him off as a rather special kind of poet, and a more self-conscious one. He has chosen as his theme the source or patron of poetry itself” (Havelock 1963).

The Dichterweihe is the founding image of a tradition in which the poet is not the originator of his song but its receiver — a structure that the imaginal tradition will later inherit. Knowledge comes by visitation; the poet becomes “a master of Truth” (Detienne 1996) whose remembered vision is itself Aletheia, the unconcealed.

Relationships

• muses
• mnemosyne
• aletheia-archaic
• theogony

Primary sources

• theogony (Hesiod, c. 700 BCE, proem, lines 1–115)
• havelock-preface-plato (Havelock 1963)
• detienne-masters-truth-archaic (Detienne 1996)