Astrologie et Musique

May 1983 Vol. 44 No. 2
Astrologie et Musique ("Iconographie Musicale", Vol. V). Par Albert P. de Mirimonde. Pp. 243. (Editions Minkoff, Geneva.) 1977.
It is a very suitable moment for a book with this title to come up for review, for it coincides with the approach of a new kind of awareness of music, and of its relation to life and reality, and with a very significant and widespread renaissance of astrology. Up to the seventeenth, and—especially—the eighteenth centuries, says de Mirimonde, and descending from the discovery by the Pythagoreans of mathematical laws which seemed to apply to the whole universe,
the cosmos was considered as obeying the laws of music. The divine harmony of the spheres controlled the course of the stars and . . . terrestrial music was reputed to be its faint echo. In other words, music is the medium through which a higher reality is made perceptible. "For millennia", he writes, the cosmos was assimilated to an immense organism, of which all the parts were united by the incessant exchange of forces, knowable or mysterious. The first were related to a pro-scientific study, the second to occultism.

This view of the cosmos is now returning in the post-scientific, or rather the post-materialistic era, but on a new level; for this reason a new convergence of music and astrology is very much in the order of things. On this new level we are not concerned with "forces" (unless perhaps still in an occult context) so much as with what Jung called "synchronicity"—that is, an a-causal principle of correspondences, depending on the total configuration of the universe at each successive moment in time. It is a question of Gestalt—and this view is the basis of "non-Aristotelian" logic and is also now valid for the real thinkers in modern science, as opposed to the rank and file of soi-disants "scientists", who are still, with the political and economic systems, compulsively stuck in the nineteenth century. Astrology uses the astronomical configurations as the hands of a clock, to read the interlocking of cosmic cycles at each moment and interpret them in terms of archetypal symbols, the meaning of which has been arrived at empirically over millennia and which are being rapidly modified and expanded in their modern applications. In fact, an extraordinary effervescence is taking place in astrological thinking and research, which is extending into many fields of study, and it is now time to think about its application to music.

The ways in which it can be so applied remain to be developed and they are likely to prove extremely rewarding in the sense of helping to reveal undreamt-of meanings. De Mirimonde mentions the sixteenth-century savant, Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, who assigned the musical modes to planets and stars according to their character. It is possible that the keys of the diatonic system can be so associated—I myself have experimented with seeking a correspondence between the twelve notes of the chromatic scale and the twelve signs of the Zodiac and their planetary rulers, with partial, but not 100 per cent success so far. On the other hand, I believe that the application of certain planetary symbols (archetypes of the collective unconscious) and all that they imply to the interpretation, or the elucidation, of the trilogy of late quartets of Beethoven has proved very successful and very revealing. Such applications as these of astrology to music are aside from the obvious one of studying the horoscopes of composers, but this too can be extremely revealing, especially in the case of such phenomena as Bach or Beethoven, direct exponents of this higher reality of which music can be the medium.

The book under review, however, is not concerned with future associations between astrology and music but only with those of the past, as represented allegorically in the graphic arts of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There is a minimal amount of text, with a short introduction, from which I have quoted, and there are 150 plates, consisting of reproductions of works of art, including two of musical instruments incorporating astrological motifs in their design. These plates are divided into three main sections: those concerned with Mercury, or Hermes, and all his atttributes; those illustrating Venus; and those connected with the Zodiacal sign Gemini. Each plate is provided with a short explanatory text, and there is an introductory review to each of the three sections, giving a resume of the historical origins of the various attributes illustrated of the three symbols, or astrological motifs, and their connection with music. Mercury-Hermes: the inventor of the seven-stringed lyre, the musician, and also the representative of the logos, the mediator between heaven and earth; reason, language, all communication; Prometheus. Venus-Aphrodite: music and art, beauty, everything of value, luxury, the feminine principle, Eros, social relations; "If music be the food of love . . ."; "The enemy of Hermes, who symbolizes progress towards an intellectual ideal". Gemini: connected with music in so far as it is one of the signs ruled by Mercury but mainly here, it seems, on the strength of a characterization by Manilius, astrologer and poet of the time of Augustus. In modern astrology neither Gemini nor Mercury are particularly associated with music, but Venus and its signs, Taurus and Libra, are so—and above all Neptune, the higher octave of Venus, unknown until 1846 as an astronomical entity. The association of Gemini with love and music must arise from the confusion between the Zodiacal sign and the constellation of stars of the same name. Owing to the precession of the equinoxes, the constellation Taurus is not where it used to be, in relation to the seasons, and a planet in the constellation Taurus would in later times be in the sign Gemini. Unfortunately, M. de Mirimonde, like others who are entirely ignorant of the subject, seems to think that this fact, known perfectly well to every beginner in astrology, invalidates it. But astrology is dealing in the cycle of the seasons and, therefore, in signs, which are symbolic, and not constellations. 0° Aries is the spring equinox, which remains constant and no longer has anything to do with the constellation Aries. The precession of the equinoxes is itself a much larger cycle with its own significance astrologically. Due to the rotation—or, rather, gyration—of the Earth's axis, its Zodiacal periods constitute the twelve months of the Great Year, or Platonic Year, of about 25,868 solar years.

This book is somewhat misleadingly entitled, as it is really an anthology connected with the graphic arts and does not tell us much about either astrology or music except that they have been traditionally associated throughout history. Its value lies much more in its explanation and selection of allegorical works of art on three particular themes, some of them very interesting, some curious, and in the quality of production of the volume.

M. McM.