The Musmans are Tibetan feminine divinities. We do not know how many of them there are, although they all have common characteristics. Each Musman can take possession of a human and inspire their actions, to the point of guiding them into magical acts that they could not otherwise perform. They are forces connected with mountains, elevation, and silence. The depiction of a Musman in the Damanhur Calendar 2020 has a female face with Tibetan characteristics. The goddess is adorned with necklaces, large pendants, and hair decorations. Sometimes, Musman takes the shape of a snake to blend in with the sparse vegetation of the high peaks of Tibet.
Musmans are forces who unite different souls and vocations (indeed, they represent a class of divinities, not a single entity) and they create a bridge between different planes of existence. They are feminine divine forces but the bodies they possess are masculine ones, and when they take on material consistency, they do so in order to perform magical actions.
Moreover, they are sometimes represented as a sleeping woman, intent on connecting the waking world with the world of dreams. They are a poetic and moving presence, one that makes us think of “Sleeping Beauty,” one of the most famous traditional European fairy tales. Originating from popular fantasy, it was then formalized by great fairy tale writers such as Perrault and the Grimm brothers. In the 19th century, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky transformed it into a famous ballet, and in the last century, Walt Disney produced a film version: a Russian genius and an American one, which underlines Musman’s ability to unite diverse forces.
About the sleeping woman: did you know that the contour of the mountains behind Damanhur, which are the first peaks of the Alps, form the profile of a sleeping female figure? A “Sleeping Beauty” – as everyone here calls this mountain – witnesses our shared history, and through her dreams, she connects the earthly world with the subtle one. As it happens, she does so from the mountains, her home. Even today, her silent presence is very precious. In a world made up of opposites, of distance, of poles that instead of attracting each other seem to repel one another, Musman is a force that sews together, unites, and connects dimensions.
Musman respectfully lets everyone express their own characteristics, although she manages to make them empathic with one another, weaving together a common result. Musman does not transform different things into one single thing, she does not merge different kinds of energy into one, rather she respects diversity in order to create a more complex and multiform fabric of connection. In Musman’s name, great migrations can be the integration of peoples and not the destruction of culture and suffering. Competition in finance, art, and culture can be a stimulus to reach higher levels of creativity and not the pursuit of supremacy over others. Illness – a fundamental topic all around the world right now – can be a moment of transformation and not one of pain and loss.
So, there is a great desire to hear her voice and perceive the advice she sends to us with her intense gaze, emanating from her image in the calendar on the wall. We can immediately intuit what her strongest message is. When she wants to support human actions,
Musman infuses feminine energy into a masculine body.
She asks and encourages us to unite the two polarities of the feminine and the masculine, which are inside each one of us… to use the masculine characteristics of strength, resoluteness, and action, while allowing them to be guided by the feminine qualities of inspiration and acceptance. In this way, we can give space for opposites to meet, and we can transform what seems to be problems into great opportunities. We can transform the pain of the world into hope. Each one of us can choose to do so in the small piece of the universe that has been entrusted to us. Each one of us is like a small force that belongs to a larger community of forces, which together transform the world. Does it seem like a dream? Then it is surely the right direction because Musman is awake and asleep at the same time and never stops working her magic.
