Harmonies of Heaven and Earth by Joscelyn Godwin

Author:Joscelyn Godwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music/Philosophy
Publisher: Inner Traditions International
Published: 2002-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

MUSIC and the CURRENTS of TIME

We turn now from our scrutiny of the transforming work of music within the individual to consider how it has worked, and is working, on the whole human race. And since this study has, for the most part, concentrated on Western civilization, it is particularly the development of music in Europe over the past nine hundred years that concerns us now.

Every historical account necessarily unfurls against the background of the historian’s own assumptions concerning universal history. Usually these are unspoken, if not actually repressed, but even those historians who consider themselves agnostic already hold an assumption, namely that we do not and cannot know the wider context and above all the meaning of events. Esotericists do not hesitate to supply what the professionals disdain to consider, for they feel obliged to situate humanity within its whole hierarchical and temporal being. So, because esoteric psychology (or, for that matter, esoteric musicology) explores dimensions that do not exist for the common variety, there are currents of history that we must take into account before we try to understand our present strange predicament and the musics that accompany it.

The Hermetic teaching is that if one can understand the human microcosm, then one can understand the cosmos; and that means, in the first instance, ‘knowing oneself ’. For where else is one to start? Hermeticism also holds that ‘what is above is like that which is below’, and vice versa, ‘for the perfection of the One Thing’. It is therefore through introspection that one comes to a vision of the universal, using the known to explain the unknown.

Let us now expand the alchemical analogy used in the last chapter to a macrocosmic scale, and cast God—that is, God the Creator and Demiurge, not God the Absolute, which has no hand in history—in the role of the Alchemist. The entire human race, body and soul, is then his Prima Materia. In this raw first matter lies hidden the seed or spark of divine light that, if properly cultivated, can come into manifestation as the philosopher’s Stone or the Tincture, able to transmute every metal into gold. Thus the human race might, if the experiment succeeds, become the agent for the transmutation of the whole Earth, and even more.

The alchemist is the most patient of men. Day in, day out, he works on the substance which he has gathered with such care: feeding it, cooking it, reducing it to a dry powder and revivifying it with dew and the extracts of green plants. He is always attentive to the configurations of the stars and planets; always he is praying. Sometimes he has to wait a whole year for the right season to arrive for a certain procedure; at other times he must seize the hour and minute, or all will be lost.

These ‘years’ and ‘days’, when we transpose them to the larger stage, are quite well known to that part of esoteric science that studies cosmic cycles. The Greeks and

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