THE SPIRITUAL POWER OF MUSIC #3

The Chaldeans were apparently the first to suppose that all the heavenly bodies joined together to create music as they orbited space. The San Bushmen may have preceded them and the mystics that wrote the Zohar followed them.

Pythagoras was apparently the first of the Greek philosophers to postulate the
"Music of the Spheres."
He theorized that the sun, moon and planets emit their own "hum" as they orbit which reflect celestial sounds imperceptible to human ears. 
Plato agreed with him and also assumed there was a numerical component to them.

"There is geometry in the humming of strings.

There is music in the spacing of the spheres.

Number is the within of all things."

Pythagoras 

 "Pythagoras alone of mortals is said to have heard this harmony ... If our hearts' were as chaste and as snowy as Pythagoras, our ears would resound and be filled with that supremely lovely music of the wheeling stars."

John Milton

All energy and matter are vibratory and their atomic make up helps us understand how maybe the Creator sang the world into existence. Hence the Music of the Spheres generated by their orbiting makes sense.

If the sun, the moon and all these huge bodies are rotating it is possible that they do generate sound. It is also likely that since we are born with this subtle music from light years away in our ears we may no longer be able to hear it or even know it is there, unlike the Bushmen who are pure of heart like Pythagoras. 
They also benefited from having little noise pollution.

Pythagoras believed that not only the stars but all creatures and objects have energetic signatures which could be translated into numbers, fractions or geometric structures and that the Creator "geometrized" the universe in sound vibrations.
This would fit with the idea that music is the mathematics of God.
Many musicians are above all, also mathematicians.

The Zohar states that God animated the Still Beings, Growing , Wild and Talking Beings with "Four Winds" (Breath; Ruach in Hebrew, Prana in Yoga.) Each Being is animated with its own "Wind" or vibration.

"A river arose out of Eden forming Four Rivers and Four Winds. They joined to form a singular spirit which animates all creation."
 The Zohar
(The four sacred rivers are thought to be the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile and Ganges.)

Click to highlight and then play Oran Mor, (the sacred tune of the universe of the Celts.)
10 Oran Mor 1.mp3


Ever since the Greeks until fairly recently music has been considered sacred and an  attempt to mimmic the voice of the Divine.

Cicero spoke of music as enabling humans to return to the Divine regions, a place once lost to them.

The Greeks and others felt that sound should follow a certain "objective moral order." This is the reason classical music has such appeal.

The great classical composers followed this idea. Pre-modernistic music kept these principles up until the last century.

We will see in future blogs how much this has changed.