Mario Garza | The Temple of the Muses: Decoding Chaos and the Origin of the World
Mario Garza of Symbolic Studies returns to InnerVerse to analyze the esoteric illustrations contained in the 1733 book, The Temple of the Muses. Mario recently gained access to this treasured tome, and in tonight's live episode we will explore the occult information encoded within its sublime sketches, which depict mythological mysteries and fantastic fables of the ancient world, many from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
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In this episode
Core themes
A book that actually draws chaos
Mario Garza brings Chance Garton an original copy of The Temple of the Muses, published in Amsterdam in 1733 by Zachary Chatelain with engravings led by Bernard Picart. Sixteen plates illustrate myths taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the very first one is titled The Chaos and the Origin of the World. Mario, a graphic designer of twenty years, says the sheer quality of the engraving is what pulled him down the rabbit hole. Both men note how unusual the plate is, since chaos is normally described in words and almost never given a picture.
Whether matter was always here
Chance reads his own translation of the French commentary that accompanies the chaos plate. Its anonymous author mocks the pagan poets for imagining matter was eternal, insists revelation teaches that God drew all things from nothing, and even sneers at the artist for ignoring sound philosophy. Chance takes the poets' side. Leaning on Higgins and his 1823 volume, he argues Genesis 1:1 is better rendered as by wisdom the Elohim created the heavens and the earth out of matter previously existing. Non existence cannot cancel existence, he says, so existence simply is, with no beginning and no end.
Six pairs instead of twelve signs
The plate scatters the zodiac in mismatched couples, and Mario uses that to make a case for reading astrology as six pairs rather than twelve separate signs. Aries with Libra, Taurus with Scorpio, Sagittarius with Gemini, Capricorn with Cancer, Aquarius with Leo, Virgo with Pisces. Chance calls the Aries and Libra pairing karma on the sky clock, action and consequence. They trace Mithras and the scorpion at the bull's testicles, the gate of man and the gate of the gods, and Pistis Sophia hiding inside the word Pisces. Every sign, they argue, is depicted beside its own adversary.
The seven stars and the bear
Mario counts the stars in the engraving and finds seven, then notices that one of them has seven points instead of six and sits directly above a solitary bear. He counts seven long rays coming off a bright white spot nearby, two of them partly hidden by a paw and a rock. His conclusion is that the artist encoded Ursa Major and Ursa Minor and the pole star rather than the sun. Mario recounts the myth of Callisto turned into a bear by Hera, and Chance reads Zeus, Hera and Callisto as a version of the Trinity.
The pole that separates and connects
The heart of Mario's argument is that order came from separation, and that the thing doing the separating is a pole. He walks through later prints of a god parting heaven from earth, the Masonic weeping virgin having her hair untangled by Father Time, Marduk cutting Tiamat in half with a weapon, and dragons killed with long crossed spears. Chance layers word play on top, connecting pole, hole, post, phallus, world tree and the axis mundi. Mario ends on the fool as chaos numbered zero and the magician as the one who separates above from below.
Quotes
“So a lot of the information Higgins had access to and probably some of the ideas in this book, The Temple of the Muses from 1733, they're not really, you know, those ideas aren't as accessible to the modern seeker.”
“I think that it wasn't uncommon to encode perhaps letters from who knows what alphabets, symbols, subliminals. There could be mirror magic going on here. I think that there's a possibility that there's multiple things on different levels that are being expressed that I have yet to even uncover myself.”
“But a more accurate translation is by wisdom, the Elohim created the heavens and the earth out of matter previously existing. So, you know, it's not in the beginning. It's by wisdom. It's not God.”
“I really think that studying astrology, if you want to look at astrology and study astrology, you know, in a way that's going to give you a lot of new insights, look at the zodiac as a pair of six signs and not necessarily 12 separate signs.”
“Before that, it would be chaos because, you know, if you didn't have a language, things would just, you would just be in this soup of the eternal now. And there wouldn't be like all this story that we have. And without the story, where's the history, right?”
“The northern sky is like my jam. It's the thing that I really, really care about. And it just like gets me going. It's the gift that keeps on giving because there's so much esoteric, brilliant, mind blowing information connected to the Dippers.”
“I think as part of our whole inversion confusion is that we're mistaking the map for the terrain. We're mistaking the description for the feeling in almost every possible way we can. We're putting the word before the matter in a sense.”
“I've said this before, but I think it might be more accurate to say that we live in a polar system over a solar system. And so the pole is what brings order. The pole is what the heavens revolve around.”
Mario Garza is the artist and researcher behind Symbolic Studies, a project sharing symbolic insights on the zodiac, mythology, folklore and world religions, with astrology as its foundation. A lifelong artist who has worked as an art director and graphic designer for nearly 25 years, he runs Symbolic Studies from the Pacific Northwest alongside his wife Michelle, who co-hosts the podcast with him. His work traces syncretic threads across tarot, occultism and comparative religion, including the argument that the major deities of antiquity were originally polar gods before a solar model was laid over them. He also offers symbolic birth chart and tarot readings, private lessons and freelance design.
See all Mario episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
