ARCANE HARMONIES

“One must strive to create songspell without thought,
so that music may follow from within like water.”

When the first shamanic seer lifted his voice in the chant of ceremonial ritual, he discovered the powerful and highly potent phenomenon of music through the simple mesmeric melodies that are known to charm even the savage beast. Simple pulsing rhythms as we all know can easily inspire the human body to dance and find its own artistic visual self expession. Harmonies played on certain instruments possessed the power to enchant one to sleep, love, battle, mental euphoria even death.
The first utterance of the Gods gives forth vibrations and harmonies, whose notes are distinguished by color, number, planets and qualitative functions which influence the whole of our life. Music is the first ordering of chaos. When the music of enchantment ceases to sound, chaos returns. The word "enchantment " literally means to enchant by infusing the listener with the melodic mystery of song. It has long been said that music and literally everything in the extended universe consists of numbers. From this finding, can also be concluded as the German Philosopher Goethe expressed--- that every structural form is, in essence, a piece of "frozen music".
The ancients knew that mystical harmonies were not of earthly origin. By the reckoning of some philosophers, such as the very wise Greek, Pythagoras, a divine music had reverberated through the universe since the beginning of time. He called it "The Music of the Spheres", since the sound came from the celestial bodies as they whirled through the cosmos. The universe as we know it can be likened to a web of tiny interacting octaves of vibration. The tradition of the primal note by which creation comes into being is well attested in many spiritualities. Without a doubt, music has long held charms for the human ear, but not until men learned how to count the vibrations of a harp string and compare them with those of reed pipes (as Aristotle and Aristoxenos tried to do) could they begin to understand the true nature of pitch or harmony or melody or even realize that sound is wave motion.
"There is geometry in the humming of the strings.
There is music in the spacing of the spheres"
......................Pythagoras
Music should be studied in the same spirit and from the same point of view as literature and not a thing set apart from the rest of life. This requires that we not only enjoy music for its entertainment qualities but at the same time listen, think, feel, and finally, analyse the structure of the music in and of itself. When music is undrestood through careful listening, thinking, and feeling, it can stimulate the mind in a most profound way and bring us closer to truth and a harmonious understanding of life. We do not need restrict ourselves to music compositions by great composers we can find incredible symphonies of sound in nature. It is from nature that many composers themselves resort to find ideas and inspiration.

"There's music in the sighing of a reed;
There's music in the gushing of a rill;
There's music in all things if men had ears---
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres."
.....................Lord Byron

Around the world, and in all ages, the diatonic scale, the audible overtones, structure beat and the like, have been and are employed with varying degrees of conscious mastery, completeness and sophistication. All good music rests on the foundation of simple tunes and vital rhythms. Children are endowed by nature with psycho-spiritual and psychological equipment which enable them to show at a very early age that they have joined the musical community. This ability is worldwide, because it arises from the laws of Nature that no one can change. Children are born with endowments which, if nourished, would enable them to know and use their psycho-spiritual resources well and to obey intelligently the sovereign realities. When a child sings he is expressing at the human level principles embodied in atoms and other self-organized natural systems. He is proclaiming his powers as a localization in and out of the cosmos.
Artists make a special point to attune themselves to the arcane harmonies for creative purposes. It has been said that the artist serves as the antenna of humankind. The technique of singing is typical of the artistic method. If the student of voice is fortunate enough to have an intelligent teacher, he learns that tone is formed in the mind and not in the throat. We sing with the mind, through the body. Tone flows out from the tonal center of consciousness as vibration. It is carried on the surface of the will, sustained but never forced by the willpower. The vocal chords transform mental tone into physical sound. The will still controls the tone through the physical medium of the breath. Breath does not create tone, it merely floats tone as the physical carrier of the transformed mental impulse. Singing is a spiritual experience and not simply a physical technique.

"Music exalts joy, allays each grief, Expells disease,
softens every pain...And hence, the Wise of Ancient
Days adored One power of Phychic, Melody and Sound."
.......................Armstrong, Celtic Poet

The art of yodeling is an ancient Aryan practice, and was used as a form of worship and nature-bound prayer to the Gods. Today yodeling is still traditionally practiced in parts of Northern Europe. In 1933 the Erulian and pioneer in runic studies. Siegfried Adolf Kummer first published his book "Runen-Magic". In this work he states that "Yodels are linked to song-like melodies and are sung in specific arrangements of tone and word. There are no arbitrary aspects to these ancient traditional yodels, for they are connected to quite percise formulae----magical powers of the runes and of words." Erulian runemaster Guido von List, also, gives an enlightening explanation in his writing titled, "Primeval Language for Yodeling the Vowels" as to how yodeling is involved with ancient Germanic customs.
Music is one of several important and emotive elements in religious ritual, and it is the context of ritual that religious music has found a foremost area of spiritual expression. In this realm it serves simultaneously as a medium, a language and an independent form of expression in which subjective and objective intertwine. At its best, music can heighten sacred word and ritual action alike and can point beyond itself in its overall exaltation of perfection and beauty.

"Music is the nearest at hand, the most orderly, the most
delicate and the most perfect of all bodily pleasures; it is
also the only one which is equally helpful to all ages of man"
..............................John Ruskin

It is the harmony of music which is the manifesting expression of the will of the eternal good. This arcane harmony is
a state recognized by great philosophers as the immediate prerequisite of beauty. A composition is termed beautiful only when its parts are in harmonious combination. The world is called beautiful and its creator is designated the good, because good perforce must act in conformity with its own nature. And good, acting according to its own nature, is harmony, because the good which it accomplishes is harmonious with the good which it is. Beauty, therefore, is harmony manifesting its own intrinsic nature in the world of form. Man fails to hear these divine melodies because his soul is emeshed in the many illusions and unending distractions of material existence

"Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive.
The beauty of nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not
for barren contemplation, but for new creation."
........................Ralph Waldo Emerson

The universe is made up of successive graduations of good. These gradations ascend from matter (which is the least degree of good), to spirit (which is the highest degree of good). As we work to liberate ourselves from the bondage of the lower world with its sense limitations, these arcane harmonies, the Music of the Spheres, even in the madness of modern times, can again become audible to us with its profound and natural power to enrich our lives. As it was in the Glorius Golden Ages of long ago, so shall music, so wonderful, so divine, forever remain eternal, beautiful and perfect.

"ORPHEUS IN BLUE"

I play, A song, To the morning sun, On my lyre, These, Seven strings, Are strung. To all, living things, I enchant, Subtly, Blue notes, Sweetest love, Wrapped in melody..

Galaxies, Vibrate, With stars, All aglow, In number, The symphonic, Ratio. Eternal nature, Soul and fate, Beauty-harmony-incarnate. Movement, Light and geometry, Compound, In cosmic symmetry!

Harmonia mundi, Song, Of the, Spheres, Caressing the joy, Life's trials, And tears. O sun, Of the soul, My song, For thee, To you, I play, My epopee!

These notes, So divine, Beyond worlds, Beyond heaven, On my golden lyre, With strings, Of seven. From an octave, In segments, This poem, Rings true. Seven lines, To each verse, Titled "Orpheus In Blue"!
......................Ron McVan

Posted in: Editorial,Indo-European