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Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death
Studies in Musical Iconology
By Kathi Meyer-Baer PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1970 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09110-5
CHAPTER 1
Theories of the Cosmos in Antiquity
For the basic framework or background of the majority of the images and symbols on which this study will touch, it is essential to sketch the cosmologies of some of the ancient peoples. The ideas of the Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks, quite as much as those of the Old Testament authors, provided the original structure and population of the cosmos from which later concepts and figures related to music were derived. Hence, we begin with a brief account of how they envisaged the universe, the number of spheres or heavens they presumed it to contain, the order in which the heavens were arranged, and how, or by whom, the spheres and stars were thought to be moved.
The Structure and Motion of the Cosmos
For the Babylonians, astronomy was the basis of religion, and they logically assumed seven heavens, corresponding to the seven planets. Each planet was thought to move on a sphere, and this sphere was thought to be ruled and moved by one god. The highest god was the sun god, with whom Ashur was identified, and the power of the other astral entities was graded on the basis of their distance from the sun, with the star nearest the sun considered the most powerful. Seven was the sacred number for the Babylonians, and the seven planets were believed to move on solid tracks or rails. Corresponding to the duration of the orbits of the stars, these tracks were visualized as spheres of different sizes, arranged one on top of the other or in concentric circles, with the smallest, earth's, forming the lowest or innermost part. In early Babylonian theory the gods who ruled and moved the spheres were thought to change their abode from one planet to another. In later theory, each ruled a particular planet, and it, in turn, had a certain character. The relation of these characters to men, especially with regard to the time of their birth, became part of the medieval theory of musica humana, and is still alive in astrology. At the time when it was thought each god remained on one planet, people believed there were messengers who transferred the ruling power from one star or god to the other every tenth day. These genii were supposed to be winged and were called in Greek angeloi — messengers — angels.
Cosmic temples, the towering ziggurats, were built to exemplify the construction of the universe. Herodotus describes such a tower in Babylon with seven stories or tiers. There, the person to be initiated had to climb from the bottom to the top, undergoing purification rites on each level. Possibly the Tower of Babel in the Bible was such a ziggurat. There were also towers with three or four levels or floors. Symbolism of the numbers seven, three, and four was also expressed in the number of steps which led from one part of the sanctuary to the next. Certain hymns had to be sung on each step or grade; this is the origin of the songs called graduals in the liturgy of the Church.
In the biblical history of creation, the vision of the universe is different. Heaven is visualized as a canopy or bell-like lid over the earth, and the stars are fixed to this dome. In the psalms the Lord appears to have His throne at the apex. The throne is supported by cherubim, and He is ministered to by seraphim. This heaven is stable, is the firmament. It is only later, in the period after the Captivity, especially in the Book of Ezekiel, that different ideas turn up. Ezekiel opposed Babylonian religion, but did not escape its influence. He writes of winged spirits, described as having two, four, or six wings, and of the tetramorphs. These figures have four faces (man, eagle, bull, and lion), and are clearly modeled after the Babylonian deities for the four corners of the universe — the gods of the winds. Huge wheels move with or beside them, and these wheels are highly reminiscent of the seven spheres of the Babylonians.
The Persian or Iranian cosmology is described in their sacred book, the Avesta. In the earlier version, supposedly completed before the seventh century B.C., the universe is believed to consist of three parts, or heavens: one from the stars to the moon, a second from the moon to the sun, and a third from the sun to paradise. Later versions of the Avesta refer to seven heavens, a change which probably can be attributed to Babylonian influences. The Persians came into contact with Babylonian — or, as they were then called, Chaldean — ideas in the Hellenistic period. In the Mithraic cult, which was related to both Chaldean and Persian culture, there are sometimes three, sometimes seven heavens. The Persian creed says nothing about moving forces, but the order of the heavens corresponds, as shall presently be seen, to a moral scale.
The Greeks imagined the universe yet again differently. In the Homeric period, the earth was seen as a flat disc, surrounded by the river Oceanus. The gods lived on top of a mountain, Olympus. The tradition of such a mountain, based on earth and rising through the spheres, was evidently still alive in the sixth century, for an illumination in the Vatican Kosmas manuscript shows the cosmos with a mountain reaching from the center to the outer spheres (Fig. 5). The outermost circle has twelve compartments, each containing the figure of an angel. This tradition also seems to have influenced Dante's idea of purgatory as a mountain reaching from the inferno to paradise.
The Greek gods moved from one place to another freely, not on fixed paths or spheres. No technical devices are mentioned, except Hermes' winged shoes (tataria) and Eos's chariot, drawn by winged horses. At the end of the world, across the Oceanus, was the island of Elysium, where those humans favored by the gods were allowed to live after death. This island is described as a kind of paradise. The Greeks also believed that the few humans elevated to the rank of demigods were transferred to or transfigured into stars. This would imply that the stars were alive and would make the demigods identical with celestial bodies.
These Homeric ideas had changed by the time of Pythagoras and Plato (fourth century B.C.). Foreign ideas began to intrude, though the question of their origin, whether Egypt or India, has not been settled. Plato gives two different versions of the cosmos, one in his Republic and one in Phaedrus. In Phaedrus, heaven seems to be seen as a bell-like dome. Inside, the gods hold processions along the galaxy, riding in chariots drawn by winged horses. Human souls, as yet unborn, take part in these processions. They, too, are conveyed in chariots with two winged horses, but only one of these horses is good, courage; the other, lust, is evil, and stands for libido. It tries to hamper the flight of the soul to the outer atmosphere, which is the realm of ideas. The outer atmosphere is set in swirling motion by Eros — inspiration. In this Phaedrus version of the cosmos, neither heaven nor the stars move, but Eros agitates the outer realm and affects the movement of the heavenly horses which drive the gods and the souls. It may thus be said that in Phaedrus Plato set the cosmos in motion, in contrast to the stable universe of the Homeric period; and this involved forces to move the spheres. The idea that Eros, who is inspiration as well as love, is the moving force of the universe was adopted by later writers and poets, such as Dionysius the Areopagite, and it is the amore che tutto muove of Dante.
Plato's description in the Re-public is quite different; here he takes the important step of relating the motion of the spheres to music and grading the spheres according to the tones of the musical scale — a vision that ultimately led to the idea of a highest heaven and to the concept of musica mundana. The description of the cosmos in the Republic occurs toward the end, in the tale told by an Armenian or Iranian from Pamphily, that is, Asia Minor. The narrator is supposed to represent Pythagorean ideas. His description of the cosmos is part of the account of the soul's fate before and after death. His story mentions two portals in heaven and two beneath the earth. Heaven seems to be visualized as a huge globe, ringed by a shining band similar to the rainbow. Running between two points along this band is an axis or spindle, which apparently passes through the globe and turns, at one of its ends, in the lap of Ananke, the goddess of necessity. Attached to this spindle are eight discs of four different sizes, which form a double cone, with the apexes at the two ends of the spindle. These discs are of different colors, and on the edge of each of them a siren sits, singing one note of the scale. Their voices result in harmony, and this harmony is the harmony of the universe. The spindle is kept moving by the three Fates: past, present, and future. In the air around the spindle, the souls move.
Among the souls of the dead, some have come from the nether world, where they have to spend a thousand years in purification. Once purified, they rise, and the mouth of the nether world lets them pass into the meadow of delight. If they have not yet attained purity, the mouth roars, and the souls return for another thousand years. Saved souls stay for seven days in the meadow of delight. Here they undergo a test by the Fate Lachesis. They must determine their future life, partly by lot and partly by their own decision. Once the decision is made, they must lead this life for another thousand years. Some of the souls who have reached heaven are sent back down again, while those who have achieved and retained a state of complete purification may stay in heaven. New arrivals have to submit to the same kind of tests as those coming from the underworld.
The Abode of the Dead and the Problem of the Highest Heaven
In addition to Plato's introduction of music to the cosmos, an important aspect of each of his versions is the impact of moral implications, of moral judgments. While the grimmer side of life after death is essentially the subject of the second part of this book, the fate of the soul is also important for charting the place in the cosmos where the blessed are assembled, for outlining the highest heaven. Again, one goes back to the Babylonians and Persians, not merely to shed light on the contrast between Plato and his Homeric predecessors, but also to understand why certain forces and figures later became identical or interchangeable, why in the Middle Ages the souls of the blessed, the angels, the muses, and the sirens became interrelated, and why certain groups of spirits were identified with certain heavens.
The Babylonians conceived of two places where souls lived after death, two islands somewhere to the west. One island was described as surrounded by a stream. The goddess of hell, a monster, was said to guard the entrance to the castle of the underworld situated on this island, which was further protected by seven walls with seven or fourteen towers. The second island was also toward the west, in the midst of the ocean. To reach it, a soul had to travel through darkness for twelve or twenty-four miles. Then the soul would arrive at an entrance guarded by the nereid (or siren) Eridu who submitted the soul to judgment. Once the soul was admitted, Eridu would convey it in a boat across the river of gall, into the garden of bliss, with its fountain of youth and tree of life, according to the myth of Gilgamesh. However, in the myth of Ishtar, when the daughter of the moon goddess journeys to the place of hell, she is accompanied "by spirits like birds, all garbed in cloaks of feathers." This would suggest that the journey takes place through the air and not over water, and such a vision would be more in keeping with the symbols of the tower and the seven tiers, and the purification rites on seven levels. The location of the islands is vague, and it remains unclear whether the direction "toward the west" is along the plane of the earth, downward under the earth, or on an ascent to heaven. But the idea of islands and the judgment of the soul after death are concepts encountered in Plato, as noted above, and do recur in later stories.
In the classic version of the Persian or Iranian religion, that is, in the period before the seventh century B.C., after death the soul traveled through the three heavens of the Persian cosmos. A good man's soul was accompanied by three angels, an unjust man's soul by four demons — making, once again, a total of seven spirits. At the start, judgment was given by weighing the soul, to find if it was light enough to pass into heaven, a view directly opposite to the official Christian version under which a soul cannot enter heaven if it is found too light. Above the highest heaven was paradise, the place destined for the blessed. There the creator, with the sun and moon and stars, would honor the soul with songs of praise.
This story was later incorporated into the Mithraic cult, a later form of the Persian creed and the religion of the late Roman emperors, notably of Julian the Apostate (A.D. 361-363). The cult, which spread to the Rhine and the British Isles, merged a number of Greek and Babylonian ideas. In the Persian Apocalypse of Arda Viraf (third century), the soul travels through seven heavens, accompanied by two spirits, Srosh and Atar. Judgment is passed on the border from the second to the third heaven. The fourth heaven contains the paradise, described as a beautiful garden similar to the paradise of the Bible (in fact, the very word in Persian means an enclosed garden, and this has been a pervasive image). According to Origen, this myth was symbolized in rites by pictorial representation of the heavens and the stars; there was a sanctuary with seven doors and a flight of seven steps — each made of a particular metal corresponding to the character of each of the seven planets — leading to an eighth platform on top.
The Movers of the Spheres and the Figure of the Angel
As long as the earth was regarded as the stable center of the cosmos, that is, until the time of Pythagoras, the movement of the stars was explained as their movement around the earth. Once their courses were understood to follow certain rules, the stars were thought to move on spheres. Only the Babylonian creed, based on astronomical observation, took motion of the spheres into consideration. The Avesta is not explicit on this subject. The heaven of the Bible's early books was stable, and the stars were fixed to the firmament. The idea of motion occurs only later, and through Babylonian influence, in Ezekiel's wheels. In Greek mythology of the Homeric period, the heaven did not move, the gods lived on a stable mountain, Olympus. Nor did the gods move the spheres; they themselves moved about freely, and only Eos and later Helios had prescribed paths.
In both of Plato's versions, however, motion is an important factor in the universe, and in each case we are given detailed facts as to what moves and what are the moving forces. The Phaedrus tells of the whirl in the outer realm of ideas, with Eros the moving force. More motion is represented in the chariots drawn by two winged horses, with courage as the upward force of the good horse and lust the downward force of the bad one. These forces are moral and intellectual values and as such outside the scope of this narrative, except for noting that the good forces drive upward and the bad downward.
The description of the universe in Plato's Republic is relevant in many respects. It provides the first reference to music in connection with the motion of the cosmos. As mentioned above, the narrator of the myth in the Republic is supposed to represent Pythagorean ideas, and Pythagoras is credited with having discovered a correlation between the ratios of musical intervals and the ratios of the orbits of the celestial bodies. Part of the Pythagorean creed was based on the belief that this correlation originated from as well as resulted in the harmony of the universe. In the version in the Republic, the discs around the spindle are the spheres which constitute the universe. Each sphere is guided by a siren singing one tone of the musical scale. Though nothing is said about different values of the spheres, the tones of the musical scale might imply a grading. However, since the discs on the spindle seem to form a double cone, none of the discs is characterized as the highest, and Elysium is not yet transferred to the highest heaven. The spindle is driven by the Fates, personifying motion and time. In addition to this new connection of motion to time and to music, there is the new number nine; there are eight discs plus the surrounding globe. Nine was a sacred number for the Greeks — not, incidentally, for the Pythagoreans; there were nine muses, and nine was to become the number for heavenly choirs. In the Republic's account, souls move outside the spindle. Later they came to be included in the motion of the cosmos and partly identified with the sirens.
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Excerpted from Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death by Kathi Meyer-Baer. Copyright © 1970 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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