The opening of Disney's
Hercules provides a dazzling example of the Muses as repositories of sacred song, narratives that are 'true' in their sacred space of performance. Notice how the Muses insist that
they are the required medium for mythological song-making; the opening narrator, who drones on in songless stentorian fashion, is shoved aside by the songful Muses. At the very moment when the narrator asks 'what is the measure of a true hero?', the muses are fed up and break in --
they, and not the narrator, are the agents of truth -- and true heroism.
Compare this opening, for instance, with the the beginning of Hesiod's Theogony, 25ff, when the Muses boast of their story-telling: "We know how to say many false things that are just like real things [etuma]. But we know also, whenever we are willing, how to announce things that are true [alêthea]." The Muses admit that they can sing false things and they can sing true things: but we can never know what is true and false because the Muses can make everything seem real. In the Disney clip, the Muses perform a similar trick when they sing of the 'gospel truth': for the space of the Disney movie, the 'gospel truth' is a truth based on faith: on faith in Disney's powers of mimesis, of representing the world through metaphor. It's not literal truth, but gospel truth -- and none the less 'true' (and none the less enjoyable or powerful) for it.
