Music, Mysticism and Magic

Music, Mysticism and Magic: A Sourcebook. Selected and annotated by Joscelyn Godwin. Pp. x + 349. (Routledge & Kegan Paul.) 1986. £25.

This book is an anthology of excerpts from philosophers and seers through the ages, and down to the present, revealing the traditional philosophy of music, in a cosmic and spiritual context and on a quite different plane and level from the sterile one of most academic musicology. The author is, nevertheless, an academic musicologist, but one (Gottsei Dank!) of a new breed, with vastly wider vision and understanding. Setting out from Pythagoras as the original Western yogi of music, via Plato, the neo-Platonic philosophers and the Corpus Hermeticum, we see the relation between "the musical consonances and the patterns of astrology", arising in the first place from numbers and pure geometrical figures and applying to all the phases of life, from that between conception and birth onwards. "Each incarnate being sounds, as it were, a different chord of the planetary or psychological harmonies", which is charted in the horoscope, and we are talking about "the powers of the planetary archetypes within the human soul itself and "whether music is truly ... a gateway to knowledge of higher realities"—and astrology, too. This is not, however, a dilemma but a matter of depth or level of perception. "There is a deep underlying wholeness about this view of the world", and this book is dedicated to documenting it—a view that has always been that of true philosophers and also of true composers, who are philosophers in this sense, though it is outside the mental range of most of their commentators. To these it will still appear archaic and "pre-scientific", but in reality it reveals a lost wisdom that we are only now beginning to rediscover.

We find the same exalted "cosmology of many levels of being, linked by correspon- dences", among the philosophers of Judaism and Islam, in the second section of the book. The harmony of the spheres, "that is palely shadowed in our musica instrumentalis",... is not caused by the undulation of air (Suhrawardi). "No, what we have here is the archetypal Image of the sound, and this autonomous Form is itself sound"—forms perceived in the intermediate world, of Hurqualya, the world of the active imagination, or the etheric world of the "formal body", which corresponds to and precedes the sensory world. This is "the universe of archetypal Forms—the spiritual entities of those Spheres with their beautiful forms and exquisite sonorities" (Suhrawardi). "Although the water and earth [of our bodies] have caused a doubt to fall upon us, something of those [melodies] comes back to our memory" (Jalalu 'ddin Rumi).

Following on through mediaeval sources, "the musical harmony of Plato's World Soul serves here to articulate creation on the cosmic, elemental, and embryological levels ... a harmony also known to us as Love": Venus, as the archetype of harmony in astrology. It is also equated with the Holy Spirit and seen as the harmony of soul with body (Jacques de Liege). Marsilio Ficino, in the Renaissance, sees song as a celestial influence and conveyor of meaning. It can be used in conjunction with astrological factors as a medicinal influence.

In Gioseffo Zarlino (1517-1590) we meet "easily the most influential personality in the history of music theory from Aristoxenus to Rameau" (quoted from 0. Strunk). "The foremost theorists of the age (Renaissance)", writes Professor Godwin, "... seem to have entertained no more doubts concerning the cosmic background against which their practical expositions unfold than they did about the dogmas of Christianity". Zarlino compares the four voices in polyphony to the four elements; or, the consonance of the functions or four bodies of man is musica humana.

Professor Godwin sees Kepler as a watershed between the intuitive and the mathematical/ Scientific views of the cosmos, combining both: "by 1619 he was able to give a rational notation of the planets' songs, confirming that their real music is polyphonic, and not some static scale of distances or periods . . . ". After him the currents of thought divided into two streams, the one "leading ultimately to an age of deadly technocracy" and another — "at times an underground one, it is true" — showing that "the spiritual impulse which informed Kepler was never to be completely extinguished."

"At the mid-point of the i7th century the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher wrote the last great work of speculative music in the traditional sense." The harmonies of the spheres are echoed in the earthly realm through archetypal correspondences, and in the same way the earthly things harmonize and relate to one another, on a basis corresponding to musical scales and harmonic laws (very like the chemical periodic table), and to the planetary symbols.

Among nineteenth-century sources is Schopenhauer, who sees music as reflecting the vibratory patterns preceding material phenomena, which he calls "Will", thus seeing the world as embodied music. This was echoed later by Hazrat Inayat Khan — "The creative source in its first step towards manifestation was audible, and in its next step visible" — and by Charles Fourier, not only a pioneer socialist, but the author of "a vast system of correspondences" and a "Scheme of Universal Harmony". This is an expression of the non-Aristotelian, "Hermetic" and a-causal view of the world that persisted, as an underground current in the West, to surface again in this century and be vindicated by advanced science and in a spontaneous re-awakening that is rapidly spreading:
The bad habit that through ignorance and laziness tends to make us flatly deny whatever is outside the sphere of our knowledge, and treat as visionaries or impostors those who have seen in the nature of things that which we do not see.
This is from the treatise La Musique expliquee comme science et comme art by Antoine Fabre d'Olivet, poet, composer and philosopher and "the truest Pythagorean of his epoch". He sees music as a primary and formative force in the world, playing its part in the grand cosmic drama of fall and redemption to which Man is summoned both as spectator and as chief protagonist. "Music", writes Fabre d'Olivet, "does not consist in external forms", and he refers to "Europe, long enveloped in a spiritual fog".'

This last theme is taken up in the twentieth century more than by anyone, perhaps, among Western teachers, by Rudolf Steiner, who also has much to say on music: "If we are at all capable of experiencing a foretaste of the spiritual world, this would be found in music and the effects it has on the human soul . . . echoes of a glorious and wonderful existence". Direct experience of tone in the higher worlds—"the world of tones in the Devachan world", "an ocean of tones"—is described by Steiner: "Through esoteric knowledge the world, and above all the arts, become comprehensible to us". Perhaps the most poetical of these statements, and among the most recent, is that of the French poet Pierre Jean Jouve: "Music makes us plunge into the eternal with the most personal part of our being . . .".

The industry and research that must have gone into collecting all this material is intimidating, and Joscelyn Godwin has given us a source-book of great value to anyone beginning to wake up a little from our "enlightened" age. It shows, moreover, that a vein of great wisdom is to be discovered in Western culture—not only in the East. There is one surprising omission—of a figure that one would have thought most central to the theme—and this is Skryabin . . . one of the greatest composers, in the view of Vladimir Ashkenazy, and certainly one of the most interesting from the point of view of everything in this book. "There have been few specifically mystical composers such as Scriabin" (Faubion Bowers in The New Scriabin) who produced what are still "some of history's most extraordinary sounds". Besides this he was a most profound thinker and philosopher; V. P. Demova, in her study Skryabin's Harmony, refers to his "extraordinary development of intellect" and says: "it is not for us to correct him but to study him". This commendable modesty also heralds a refreshing change in the musicological climate, and it seems that Skryabin is only just beginning to be appreciated. "The purpose of music is revelation", he said. He was conscious of "other voices heard in other worlds" and aimed in his music to achieve "dematerialization . . . incorporeality . . . disembodiment". In Prometheus he set out to incorporate in music the whole theosophical cosmogony.
M. McM.