The Harmony of the Spheres: The Pythagorean Tradition in Music

by Joscelyn Godwin

Overview

Professor of Music at Colgate University and a widely respected musicologist, Godwin traces the history of the idea, held since ancient times, that the whole cosmos, with its circling planets and stars, is in some way a musical or harmonious entity. The author shows how this concept has continued to inspire philosophers, astronomers, and mystics from antiquity to the present day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780892812653
Publisher:	Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Publication date:	11/01/1992
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	1,108,430
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Joscelyn Godwin was born in Kelmscott, Oxfordshire, England on January 16, 1945. He was educated as a chorister at Christ Church Cathedral School, Oxford, then at Radley College (Music Scholar), and Magdalene College, Cambridge (Music Scholar; B.A., 1965, Mus. B., 1966, M.A. 1969). Coming to the USA in 1966, he did graduate work in Musicology at Cornell University (Ph. D., 1969; dissertation: "The Music of Henry Cowell") and taught at Cleveland State University for two years before joining the Colgate University Music Department in 1971. He has taught at Colgate ever since.

Read an Excerpt

That Odd Mary Magdalene

It seems that even among Jesus’ disciples, Mary played a privileged role. Why, then, did the Roman Catholic Church feel obliged to almost entirely erase this female figure and her role? Was it because of a now proven anti-feminism that existed at the heart of the Church from the early Middle Ages? The Christian conception of femininity, which has certainly greatly evolved in the modern world, especially since the council of Vatican II, is due both to Greco-Roman legacy and to the Hebraic options. With the exception of the female characters of Genesis, who are gripping figures to say the least, the scribes of the Bible lowered the status of Woman by making her impure and thus not apt, for example, to play a sacerdotal role. The idea that Mary Magdalene enjoyed total equality with the apostles has never crossed the minds of Church theologians. Because priests are the legitimate heirs of the apostles, such a standing would make Mary Magdalene, on the one hand, a priestess—how horrible!—and on the other, one of those on whom the apostolic sacerdotal filiation was founded.

Yet, when Mary of Bethany washes Jesus’ feet and anoints him with precious perfume, which Judas, the group’s treasurer, believes could be put to a more profitable use, she and Jesus are enacting a kind of sacerdotal and royal ordination—with Mary serving as the priestess who performs the ritual.

Is it forbidden to think that Mary of Bethany, over the course of those long moments spent at the feet of the Lord, could have heard what he had to say or at least sensed the full scope of Christ’s mystery even if she did not grasp it in its entirety? Jesus persistently tried to lead his disciples to realize this—if only in the Fiat of the Transfiguration!—but their hearts remained curiously closed all the way to the end. Mary, however, did perceive and accept it. On that day she knew the moment had come to manifest this mystery in chiaroscuro. In a kind of prophetic intuition . . . Mary anointed the head of Jesus, recognizing and presenting him as King and Priest, and anointed his feet as Messiah sent from God.

Such a presentation obviously involves a rite of enthronement that can be performed only by a person vested symbolically with sacerdotal powers. Jesus was fully aware of this when he answered Martha’s reproaches by saying that Mary “had the best part.”

At that time there were two sites named Bethany: a town two miles east of Jerusalem, where Mary, Martha, and Lazarus lived; and on the left bank of the Jordan, at a ford just before the Dead Sea, where John the Baptist baptized. In addition, there was a place called Bethabara, “house of passage,” by the gates to the desert. John the Baptist and later Mary, each in their own way, granted baptism, initiation, the right of passage, or the means of crossing the threshold. The two Bethanys, then, seem to mirror each other. Magdalene extends the echo of her precursor, John the Baptist. One is a man clad in hides and the other is a woman clad in her long mane of hair. The chief difference between them is that John remains in a harsh and terrible place, screaming in Essenian rigor his curses and his calls to repent, whereas Mary in Bethany, on the opposite where all is blooming and gay, speaks of love and forgiveness and the transition from one world to the next. While Jesus received from John a baptism in water, he did not receive, as the ancient kings had, a consecrating anointing with oil. Just before his Passion and “baptism by spirit and fire”—the crucifixion—he received the perfumed oil from the female Magdalene. The old and ancient notion of the priest-king applies to Jesus, but this royal unction, let me repeat, can only be performed by a priest—or priestess.

The unction in Bethany is surely one of the most important events in the life of Jesus. Furthermore, this is what Jesus himself says to his disciples who are always more or less hostile toward the whims of Woman: He declares to them that this woman truly did “what she had to do,” and even adds, according to Mark 14:9, “In truth, I declare to you, everywhere the Gospel is to be spread, throughout the whole world, one will also recount, in memory of her, the deed she has done.” This is acknowledgment of an uncommon power possessed by Mary that went far beyond a mere gesture of female vanity, which is clearly what the first disciples thought it to be, and underscores the importance Magdalene was given in the very words of Jesus.

Why, then, was Mary Magdalene relegated to such a minor role in the evangelical tradition as revised and corrected by the Church Fathers? Is the Christian sacerdotal class ashamed to owe so much to a woman?

And I cannot forbear from asking myself: what has the memory of the Church done to these words of Jesus? Isn’t there something yet to be explored there? And wouldn’t this something be the consecration of a specifically female ministry of a prophetic and charismatic nature that Jesus would himself have recognized and proclaimed as existing in tandem with the apostolic and sacerdotal ministry? What a unique place woman would hold in the very heart of the Church if this was the case!

The question certainly has been raised—and it seems that Abbe Saunière may have answered it in his own way in the church of Rennes-le-Chateau.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

I. Classical
1. Plato
2. Pliny The Elder
3. Nicomachus of Gerasa
4. Theon of Smyrna
5. Ptolemy
6. Censorinus
7. The Hymns of Orpheus
8. Saint Athanasius
9. Aristeides Quintilianus
10. Calcidius
11. Macrobius
12. Proclus
13. Boethius

II. Medieval
14. Hunayn
15. Aurelian of Reome
16. John Scotus Eriugena
17. Regino of Prum
18. The Ikhwan Al-Safa" (Brethren of Purity)
19. Al-Hasan Al-Katib
20. Anonymous of the Twelfth Century
21. Isaac Ben Abraham Ibn Latif
22. Jacques De Liege
23. Ugolino of Orvieto
24. Giorgio Anselmi
25. Isaac Ben Haim

III. Renaissance
26. Marsilio Ficino
27. Ramis de Pareja
28. Pico Della Mirandola
29. Franchino Gafori
30. Francesco Giorgi
31. Heinrich Glarean
32. Gioseffo Zarlino
33. Jean Bodin

IV. Baroque
34. Johannes Kepler
35. Robert Fludd
36. Marin Mersenne
37. Athanasius Kircher
38. Angelo Berardi
39. Andeas Werckmeister

V. Enlightenment and Romanticism
40. Isaac Newton
41. Jean-Philippe Rameau
42. Giuseppe Tartini
43. Louis-Claude De Saint-Martin
44. Johann Friedrich Hugo Von Dalberg
45. Arthur Schopenhauer
46. Fabre D'Olivet
47. Alphonse Toussenel
48. Peter Singer
49. Albert Von Thimus
50 Isaac Rice
51. Saint-Yves D'Alveydre
52. Azbel

Notes

Bibliography

Index Nominum

Index Rerum