Judaea
In Genesis, the acts of creation out of the tohuwabohu of the primordial waters begin with the words: “And God said: Let there be light ... And God said: Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters ... And God said: Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear ... And God said: Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens ... And God said: Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth ... And God said: Let the earth bring forth living creatures ... And God said: Let us make man in our image ...”
And it was so! Thus the act of creation, the work of six days, is
accomplished in succinct beats, through the medium of speech, the word,
and therefore through the medium of tone.
Psalm 19 begins with the verses: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words
to the end of the world.” To tell, say, inform, sound, speak-all these
acoustic things, psychically intensified through the antitheses
“without speech, without words, with an inaudible voice,” through this
secret ̔αρμονία ̕αφαρής, the inaudible harmony of the Pythagoreans:
who could overlook the acoustic-harmonic influence that pervades the
entire Old Testament, just like an “inaudible voice”? The Judaic
philosophy of religion is also full conscious of this. Ben Joseph writes: “Judaic logic is acoustic, not intuitive. Judaic thought is predominantly an inner speech, words in the heart, Debarim sche be leb,
which consciousness perceives and judges. In the language of the Bible,
instead of 'I think, I have thought,' it reads: 'I speak, I have spoken
in my heart.'” Singing, here as in all ancient religions until
Christianity, has not only coincidental but substantial significance in
the sense of a strong emotion, an aspiration of the soul towards God.
In the Zohar, the main book of the Kabbalah, which still preserves
ancient traditions of Judaic mysticism, there is a wonderful passage
about “the hymns of the angels”:
“Now at sunset, the cherubim who stood at that place and had their
domain in the 'sign,' beat their wings and spread them, and the music
of their wings was heard above. Then those angels who sang hymns in the
night began to sing, so that the glorification of the all-holy rose up
from below … And at the second vigil, these cherubim again beat their
wings upwards, so that the music of their wings was heard. Then those
angels who held the second vigil began to sing … And at the third
vigil, the cherubim again beat their wings, and the angels sang:
Hallelujah, sing praises, ye servants of Jehovah, praise the name of
Jehovah … thus sang all the angels who held the third vigil, and all
the planets and constellations in the heavens began to sing.” The
origin of this “singing” is in acoustic articulation, which is
correspondingly pervaded by consciousness. The same Zohar
reads: “'Those using consciousness will illuminate'-i.e. consonants and
vowels, 'like the light'-i.e. the melody; 'of the firmament'-i.e. the
expansion of the melody: the way the notes spread out and flow along in
the melody. 'And give justice to the multitudes': i.e. the pauses of
the tones in their continuation, through which the word is heard.”
Before the actual acts of creation at the beginning of Genesis, introduced by the repeated phrase “and God said,” it reads: “And the breath (ruach) of God moved upon the waters.” Luther translates ruach as “spirit.” In the Zohar, however, there is the following commentary: “'But 'Ruach' is the great voice, which rules over the Bohu
and grasps it and leads it to where it is needed. This secret is spoken
in the words: 'The voice of Jehovah is above the waters,' in the same
sense as in the sentence: 'The spirit of God moves upon the waters.'”
Furthermore: “The world was made at once through the word and through the breath. As it reads: 'The heavens were made from the word of Jehovah, from the breath of His mouth all its multitudes.'”
It is well known that the meaning of the “word” at the beginning of the
Gospel of St. John is related to the concept of the “Logos,” in which
“word” is unified with “spirit,” i.e. the acoustic with the
metaphysical principle, whereby the Logos is identified with Christ.
Babylon
In Babylonian mythology there is an ancient Sumerian hymn, a lament to
the destroyer-god Ellil, reminiscent of the “curse songs” that endured
into the Middle Ages. Bruno Meißner
introduces this hymn as follows: “Remarkably enough, the means by which
Ellil brings forth all these disastrous effects is above all his word.
Ellil's word is omnipotent here, similarly to the Logos in
Judaic-Alexandrian philosophy. Later, other gods also stepped up to
this position, especially Marduk, as in the following song, whose
surviving form is recent but whose later interpolations can mostly be
easily removed: 'The word, above / makes the heavens tremble; the word,
below / makes the earth waver; the word that makes the Annunaki /
nothing. His word has no seer / has no indicator; his word is a rising
tidal wave / that has no opponent. His word makes the heavens tremble /
makes the earth waver; his word wipes away mother and daughter / as one
wipes off a rush mat.' These hymns were accompanied by temple music,
performed elaborately. As we already saw, two choirs usually stood
across from one another, alternating their voices in antiphony.” Of
course, these choirs did not only sing curse songs like the one above,
but also mainly hymns of praise and thanks to the gods.
Persia
In the ancient Persian rites of the Avesta, the meaning of the “word”
often changes into the more concrete meaning of the “name.” Zarathustra
asks the creator Ahura-mazda in the Khorda-Avesta:
“What is ... the most triumphant, the most powerful, the most majestic
..., what of the whole world, endowed with bodies, is that which
purifies the inside the most? To this answered Ahura-mazda: Our names
... O holy Zarathustra ... the most powerful, most triumphant, etc.”
And to Zarathustra's further question-what are these names-Ahura-mazda
refers to twenty qualities, such as purity, understanding, wisdom,
etc., and calls on him to “retain and utter these names, day and night,
sitting and standing.” In another passage, Ormuzd says to Zarathustra:
“You should return me, proclaiming the word, to my initial condition, which was all light...” “Speak, O Zoroaster, my pure word,
when language deserts you and you are without hope. Whoever speaks the
pure word in my domain, the world, and sings it in proper form with the
high voice of harmony, his soul shall soar freely into the heavenly
realms; I, Ormuzd, will make the bridge three times wider for him; he
will be heavenly, celestially pure, and will shine.”
A great, nearly forgotten scholar of this ancient mythology writes: “Zoroaster thinks of the act of creation as mediated not simply through the speech
of the great deity, as occurs in other sensorily perceiving religions,
although this speech with his idea of the great deity as a great space
is wondrous enough; instead he thinks of the enunciated creating word
as an independent, spiritual, divine being, just like the other
primordial elements, which is an even stranger idea. This creator-word,
Honover, appears often in Zend writings, and is also applied to other divine beings. According to the Yacna, it existed before all other created beings: 'The pure, holy, speedily working word (honover),
O Zoroaster, was before the heavens, before the water, before the
earth, before the hearths, before the trees, before the fire [!],
Ormuzd's son, before the pure people, before the Devs [demons], before
the entire existing world, before all that is good, all pure seeds made
by Ormuzd.' Like the primal lights, it is 'existing for itself,
independently created' and has, like Ormuzd, a spirit and a
light-radiating body.” Surely this idea, considering the Avesta as a
religion of light (fire cult, etc.) is “wondrous” and “strange” enough,
as E. Röth writes. But if we can grasp the real depth of this “word” as
a concept central to akróasis, then we know that the “sound of the
world” is expressed in this acousticon,
as in all ancient religions and mythologies. Likewise, the Biblical
“word of God” must also be understood not literally, but in the sense
of a pervading akróasis.
India
In the Indian esoteric doctrine, the Upanishads, and related writings, there is a metaphysical acousticon related to the Persian “honover”: the holy syllable “Om.” Here Prajapati, creator-god of the Brahmanas, instructs the other gods regarding Atman and the Om-sound:
“The gods spoke to Prajapati: Instruct us, O exalted one, about this
Atman as the Om-sound! [Prajapati answers:] This universe never even
exists, only the Atman resting in its own majesty, unlimited, unique,
self-observing, self-illuminating. You
yourselves are it [Atman], I say. If you saw it, you would not
recognize the Atman, because it is the self, not the other. The Atman
is without worldly adherence. So you are it yourselves, and the light
with which you illuminate is your own ... Thus although you do not see
the Atman, you should observe it [i.e. hear inwardly] through the word Om.
This is the truth, the Atman, the Brahman, because the Brahman is the
Atman. Yes, it is not to be doubted: Om is the reality; it is what the
sages see. Yes, this toneless, feelingless, formless, etc. ... is what
the Upanishads teach as nobly illuminating, glowing in unity, nobly
enlightening this whole world, timeless, see, I am it, and it is I!”
And at another passage (op. cit., fol. 226) it reads:
“Know the holy call [Om] as God,
Enthroned in all hearts;
The wise one, who knows the Om-sound
As all-pervading, will not be sad.
Of infinite divisions and undivided,
It is the blissful repose of duality;
He who knows the Om-sound as such
Is a Muni [silent observer], and no other.”
It is also highly remarkable that here, in a clearly optical context of observing, self-illuminating, glowing, looking, the acousticon
of the Om-sound suddenly appears as something that bypasses all other
discursive and meditative means of perception as a direct way to the
Atman (Brahman), and indeed is explained simply as “reality.” In
akróasis, however, we understand this holy syllable Om (actually AUM)
as the highest concentration and abstraction of spoken enunciation; in
murmuring it, he who prays and meditates senses the sound of the world,
just as the Parsee does in the calling and honoring of the “creator
word.”
Egypt
In Egyptian mythology, the first creator Kneph-the original, immortal
god, the spiritual principle corresponding to the Greek Zeus, according
to Plutarch-breathes the cosmic egg from his mouth, from which Ptah, the second creator, emerges: the orderer, the artful. “He [Ptah] created all gods, Atum, and his divinity-truly, every divine word emerges from the thought of the heart and the mandate of the tongue ... He became the tongue, and he became the heart as part of Atum.”
The highest spiritual principle, Kneph, breathes the cosmic egg from
his mouth; Ptah, the demiurge, emerges from it, the actual former and
arranger whose tongue speaks the divine word; and thus the world is
first articulated!
The akróatic element is present to a far wider degree in the legend of
Memnon. Admittedly, it overlaps strongly with Greek mythology; the
Egyptian mythological sources are sparse here, but are concentrated in
the Colossi of Memnon, still surviving, around which grew the
well-known legends of a mysterious connection between tone and light.
This is inferred more precisely from Greek sources, which refer
specifically to Egyptian origins.
All of the Near East had so-called Memnonia-Memnon shrines. Of two it
is reported: “And in Meroë and Memphis, the Egyptians and Ethiopians
make sacrifices to him (Memnon) when the sun sends forth its first
rays, when the statue lets a voice sound to greet its worshippers.”
Today in Thebes, the so-called “Columns of Memnon,” the two weathered
colossi of Amenhotep III (1400 B.C.), still guard his mortuary temple
(now entirely vanished), one of the greatest and noblest works of art
ever created in Egypt. They were originally over 20 meters high and (as
shown by the graffiti on their bases) were visited around the time of
Christ by many Greek and Roman travelers who wanted to hear the
wonderful voice, which one of these colossi in particular gave forth
every morning at sunrise. Physically, this is explained by the fact
that the monoliths, made of a hard conglomerate of pebbles, acquired
cracks through sudden changes in temperature, and this gave rise to a
sound-a phenomenon that was lost through later restoration.
The spiritual akróatic content of the Memnon legend is more important for us than this deliberate or fortuitous sensory acousticon
of a monument. The elements of this myth are light and color, tone and
song, water-stream and time-flow, auspicy and plumage, celebration of
joy and sorrow, and tombs built on the banks of the rivers. All these
elements are harmonic through and through. Light and color blend into a
unified concept in the “harmony of the spheres”; tone and song are
added to this when the priests sing of the planetary gods, and Memnon,
the spirit of light, is greeted with psalms at sunrise. Water-stream
and time-flow refer to the eternal melody of events; in auspicy and
plumage we remember the beating of the wings of the singing angels in
the Zohar, the personification of the toning spheres through the
Sirens, the mythos of the singing swan; the expressive basis of the
celebration of joy and sorrow lies in the two prototypes of major and
minor, whose chords could be played on any ancient Egyptian harp, and
the tombs on the banks of the rivers indicate a connection between the
Memnon legend and the flowing of rhythmical waves. All these typical
harmonic indicators gather in the rich mythology of Memnon like points
on the circumference around the center, the form of Memnon himself.
“And as Titan rose up, forging through the ether with his white horses,
and as he reached his eventide goal of the Hours, Memnon, touched by
the rays, opened his clear-toning voice”-thus wrote a poet of his
impression of image and legend in the hard stone of the Memnon column.
China
In the 3rd
century B.C., a wealthy Chinese businessman and patron called Lü Buwei
commissioned from savants an encyclopedia of the knowledge of his time:
Spring and Autumn of Lü Buwei.
In this oldest extant Chinese work, which contains a music theory
strongly pervaded by number-harmonic elements, it reads: “The origins
of music go a long way back. Music emerges from measure and is rooted
in the great One. The great One generates the two poles [1/n ← 1/1 → n/1];
the two poles generate the power of darkness and light. The power of
the dark and the light changes; one rises up high, the other sinks down
low; they unite and form bodies, surging and undulating. If they are
separated, they unite again; if they are united, they separate again.
That is the eternal progression of the heavens. Heaven and earth are
held in a cycle ... the origin of all beings is the great One; they
build and perfect themselves through the duality of darkness and light.
As soon as the seeds begin to sprout, they develop into a form. The
bodily form is within the world of space, and all spatial things have a
sound. Harmony emerges from their concord. Harmony and concord are the
roots from which the music appeared which was written down by the
ancient kings. When the world is at peace, when all things are at rest,
all following their superiors in their changes, then music will perfect
itself. Perfect music has its effects. When desires and passions do not
follow false paths, then music is perfected. Perfect music has its
origins. It emerges from equilibrium. Equilibrium emerges from the
right, the right emerges from the meaning of the universe (Tao). Thus
one can only talk about music with someone who has known the meaning of
the universe. True, fallen nations and people ripe for decline do not
dispense with music, but their music is not serene ... great music is
something in which prince and official, father and son, old and young,
delight. Joy comes from inner equilibrium; inner equilibrium comes from
meaning (Tao). What one calls 'meaning' (Tao) is something one looks at
without seeing it, listens to without hearing it; one cannot perceive
it physically. Whoever sees the incommunicable, hears the inaudible,
knows the form of the formless, he approaches true knowledge.” In the
speeches and parables of the Taoists Chuang Tzu and Lie Zi,
there are wonderful allegories and myths about the universal meaning of
“music,” which in the sense of akróasis are some of the deepest and
most beautiful writings about this art-and no less than two and a half
millennia ago!
Polynesia
Our short summary of non-European peoples and their attitude toward the
acoustic and tonal in a broad sense would be incomplete were we not to
consider a race whose entire feeling and thought is directly pervaded
by the akróatic way of thinking: the Polynesians. We have E. Reche's
book, Tangaloa,
to thank for an elucidation of this. Reche, apparently a Marine
officer, was able to study the thoughts and psyches of the natives at a
time when the plague of European colonization had not yet destroyed
everything. The entire psychic life of these people is based on two
concepts of image and hearing: “Moana,” the blue without surface, the
infinitude without reality, the sea-and “Langi,” singing, creation, the
ungraspable stream of eternity. Reche writes: “But is there then a
seeing, which is nothing other than time? His [the 'Tangata's']
color-eye leaves him here, he turns to the ear-talinga
(the answering, that which answers to the vibration of the world).
There the waves roar, the winds sigh, the storm sings its wild song,
and then again in the later silence of the sea, the entire world is
silent around him ... Music is the world-it is singing-langi-singing, creation, cosmos. There he has the word. The all, the heavens are langi and the earth is laloangi,
the singing below ... but then does the whole world sing, do all things
sing? Is the world also silent? Is there a song to be heard, then, in
the stillness of the sea and the silence of the forest? 'Yes,' says the
Tangata, 'every silence also has its world of tones-but you cannot
listen in casually (fa alongo = to hear, literally: to make an answer), you must listen keenly with your innermost ear' (fa alolongo
= doubled hearing = silence). 'Then, Tangata,' I say, 'sing me a song
in harmony with the tones that you take from the foaming of the waves,
the thunder of the surf, the rustling of the leaves-but also sing me a
song on the accompanying harp of silence! Then I will know whether you
really hear something.' And a flower-decked host of girls stand on the
beach before the fuming surf of the lagoon reef, and I ask them, who
are always happy to sing, to sing me a song. The song begins-every
throat instantly has exactly the same tone. Where did they find it,
where did they grasp the beat? And how wonderful this song is! What is
its charm? I still feel it now: It is the harmony of the environment,
the voice of the surf, over which the tones of the song glide. And I
wander further along the shore, and again I meet a group of Samoan
girls. 'E fua, langi ia le pese lelei o le na ou fa alongo anamuna!'
(Hey! Flowers! [young girls are addressed thus] Sing me the most
beautiful song that I have ever heard) I call to them. They all laugh,
and one walks forward, shakes her flower-bedecked head and says: 'E
lemafafali i matou' (we can't do that). And now I learn that they all
know the song very well, but do not want to sing it at this place, no,
they claim, they can't sing it. And finally I find out that at this
point on the coast the surf roars differently and crashes upon the reef
with different intervals. The accompaniment is not in tune with the
song-and disharmony is a moral offense ... and love? When the hearts of
a boy and girl find each other, they both know it well, but the boy may
not ask. One day the girl says to him, at a holy hour: 'Ua se langi i
lou loto' (there is a song in me). Then he knows that he is the song in
her heart.”
Plato's and Aristotle's position on akróasis
The position on akróasis of the two great ancient philosophers, Plato
and Aristotle, is interesting to us. Today it is agreed that for the
ancient Greeks, “music” (understanding this concept in its broadest
meaning, i.e. “akróasis”), like poetry (which is also perceived through
the medium of the ear), was not merely an art, but that they sensed the
singing and the order of the cosmos in the phenomenon of tone. Physiologically, the eye was more spiritual for Plato; for Aristotle, the ear. Plato gives the eye the predicate “sun-like,” and speaks of an “eye of the spirit.” Aristotle
was of the opinion that the ear is the most spiritual organ of the
human senses (!). For both however, Plato and Aristotle, the high value
of “music” and the musical in educational and ethical terms is
self-evident. The two thinkers only differ regarding their
physiological priorities in that Aristotle, especially in his Metaphysics,
argues against the Pythagorean speculations numbers. The examples he
gives show clearly, for those who have worked over the actual
Pythagorean tone-number system and analyzed its forms, that Aristotle
did not know the concrete basis of Pythagorean harmonics, and therefore
did not understand many of the traditional Pythagorica. Plato, on the
other hand, only objects fundamentally to the “haptification” of those
Pythagoreans who treated tone-number like “hair splitting,” and seeks,
in the acoustic phenomena in question, an ascent to the spiritual, to
the Idea. In the Philebus,
Plato introduces the arrangement of the sound system in speech with
these words: “Some god or divine man observed that the voice [phonè]
was infinite...” In his later works, he returns openly to
Pythagoreanism, presumably as a result of personal contact with
Pythagoreans in Sicily and southern Italy. His harmonic derivation of
the soul of the world in the Timaeus
is both famous and infamous. Since Plato was avowedly an initiate (see
his Seventh Letter), he gave this derivation only in veiled language.
However, for those who know, there is no doubt that the two series
given by Plato, 1 2 4 8 and 1 3 9 27, joined in the correct way,
produce what is still the only correct formula for the diatonic scale,
and therefore a law on which not only all practical music is based, but
also, for the ancients, the music of the cosmos; which is exactly what
Plato wished to show. Plato's thoughts are even closer to
Pythagoreanism in his enigmatic posthumous work, the Epinomis.
This has long been assumed to be the work of his student Philippos of
Opus, but arguments are now being made for its authenticity. It is possibly a transcription of one of Plato's later lectures. “If the Epinomis is authentic, then its special significance lies in the fact that it represents Plato's closest approach to Pythagoreanism.” The subject of the Epinomis
is the question: what must mortal men learn in order to be wise? The
individual observations of this work continually lead back to number.
Everything unintelligent, incalculable, unordered, non-rhythmical, and
inharmonic is lacking in number-ratio. Number is the gift of the divine
universe. The harmonic
idea of unity rules the forms of the upper and the lower world, and
also determines that in which man is absent: at death the multitude of
sensory perceptions are extinguished, the dying go from the condition
of multiplicity to that of unity and thus attain perfect wisdom and
happiness. Looking at the “Lambdoma”
or simply at the “partial-tone coordinates,” one can see the tendency
of all tone-values to return to the unity of the generator-tone line,
and from there to achieve the “perfect wisdom and happiness” of the 0/0. In the series of mathematical sciences, from arithmetic to geometry and stereometry to the harmonic intervals, the Epinomis
gives special attention to the arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic
proportions. I suggest that the reader look at Fig. 179 in this book.
These three proportion types were therefore present in the original
Pythagorean diagram, which may serve as further proof of the connection
between Plato's later works and Pythagoreanism.