Philo of Alexandria 20 BCE-50 CE:
God is an author in whose work
you will find no myth or fiction, but truth's inexorable rules all
observed as though graven on stone. You will find no metres and
rhythms and tuneful verses charming the ear with their music, but
nature's own consummate works, which possess a harmony all their own.
And even as the mind with its ear turned to God's poems, rejoices, so
the word in harmony with the meanings of thought and in a way
approaching it, is necessarily glad. [...]
The Creator says that He knows that the uttered word, being brother
to the mind can speak, for He has made it like an instrument of sound
to be an articulate utterance of our whole complex being. This Logos,
both for me and for you and for all men, sounds and speaks and
announces our thoughts, and, more than this, goes out to meet that
which reason has thought.
Joscelyn Godwin in Harmonies of Heaven and Earth writes:
The Song of the Angels is their Gnosis; or, to put it another way,
what they know cannot be spoken, only sung.
This tradition has been continued by two myth-makers of our own time.
In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion, the first chapter is entitle
'The Music of the Ainur', and it describes how 'Eru, the One, who is
called Iluvatar' declared a mighty theme to the Ainur ('the Holy Ones.
that were the offspring of his thought'). Iluvatar said:
[Of the theme that I have declared to you, I will now that ye make
in harmony together a Great Music. And since I have kindled you with
the Flame Imperishable, ye shall show forth your powers in adorning
this theme, each with his own thoughts and devices, if he will. But I
will sit and hearken, and be glad that through you great beauty has
been awakened into song.
Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto
harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and orgam, and like
unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme
of Iluvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless
interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing
into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling
of Iluvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of
the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.]
I love Philo's (Philo of Alexandria 20 BCE-50 CE) dance as he
processes the special nature of the "poetry":
God is an author in whose work you will find no myth or fiction,
but truth's inexorable rules all observed as though graven on stone.
You will find no metres and rhythms and tuneful verses charming the
ear with their music, but nature's own consummate works, which possess
a harmony all their own. And even as the mind with its ear turned to
God's poems, rejoices, so the word in harmony with the meanings of
thought and in a way approaching it, is necessarily glad. [...]
The Creator says that He knows that the uttered word, being brother to
the mind can speak, for He has made it like an instrument of sound to
be an articulate utterance of our whole complex being. This Logos,
both for me and for you and for all men, sounds and speaks and
announces our thoughts, and, more than this, goes out to meet that
which reason has thought.
The music analog. What they know cannot be spoken, only
sung.
Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains
work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a
human mind. ~Lewis Thomas
Shakespeare, in The Merchant of Venice:
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
Enter Musicians
Come, ho! and wake Diana with a hymn!
With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear,
And draw her home with music.
Music
JESSICA
I am never merry when I hear sweet music.
LORENZO
The reason is, your spirits are attentive:
For do but note a wild and wanton herd,
Or race of youthful and unhandled colts,
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood;
If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,
Or any air of music touch their ears,
You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,
Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze
By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet
Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods;
Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage,
But music for the time doth change his nature.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
"Never speak it," the old magicians cautioned. Only sing.
The Word :
ineffable, paradoxical, impossible to be grasped in pure conscious
thought.
The concept of logos in Heraclitus, Philo, the Platonic, as well as
the broad personification of such concepts reflected in daimon, genius,
eidolon... all relate to an awareness of the origin of consciousness
(and, ultimately, the differentiation and relationship between ego and
Self). The early Greeks who prized oral tradition were followed by those
who were long suspicious of written things, who felt it was the direct
connection to the gods speaking through us that was important. Like
Beauty, the concern was to mainline the Forms: a direct experience of
the Forms (or Logos as Philo, a mystical Greek Jew, defines it), as
opposed to the written word which could never be better than twice
removed.
It's as if they were too aware that the conscious mind we define
ourselves by had not long been broken off from the unconscious, an
awareness of consciousness so new and so threatening--exciting, I
suppose--that it inspired myths of eating at the tree of knowledge,
woman and her snake... (sadly, the misogyny floating around at least
since Homer).
Consciousness moved individuals to "think from their own
center" as opposed to the reflex of tribal dogma. But to deny the shadow
sublimated within its workings, to hamstring investigation of it--to not
allow mystery-- it's what Jung is writing about in The Spirit Mercurius
(CW 13). He cautions:
[It seems to me that Augustine apprehended a great truth, namely
that every spiritual truth gradually turns into something material,
becoming no more than a tool in the hand of man. In consequence man
can hardly avoid seeing himself as a knower, yes, even as a creator,
with boundless possibilities at his command. The alchemist was
basically this sort of person, but much less so than modern man. An
alchemist could still pray: "Purge the horrible darknesses of our
mind," but modern man is already so darkened that nothing beyond the
light his own intellect illuminates his world. "Occasus Christi,
passio Christi." That surely is why such strange things are happening
to our much lauded civilization, more like a Gotterddmmerung than any
normal twilight.
Mercurius, that two-faced god, comes as the lumen
naturae, the Servator and Salvator, only to those whose reason strives
towards the highest light ever received by man, and who do not trust
exclusively to the cognitio vespertina. For those who are unmindful of
this light, the lumen naturae turns into a perilous ignis fatnus, and
the psychopomp into a diabolical seducer. Lucifer, who could have
brought light, becomes the father of lies whose voice in our time,
supported by press and radio, revels in orgies of propaganda and leads
untold millions to ruin.]
This last bit we see today in the self-fulfilling prophecy of the
Rapture and Millennialism, a cult's unwavering conviction that only they
know "the natural order", which is to say, their definition of their
God's mind, the Word as only they, the saved, can hear it.
The Greeks
had plenty to say about those who thought themselves god's equals, able
to speak music. So would Philo.
Piaget described the process of
consciousness evolving out of unconsciousness in the individual. In the
same way, levels of consciousness evolve in humans, both self-awareness
and awareness of the process itself. Like any evolution, the process can
go either way--thus the scary collectives Jung and Bruno address.
I
caught a snip of movie from just after the WW2, a melodrama in which a
boy supposedly watched films of the Nazi Holocaust. The voice over told
him that Hitler was opposed to Christianity, that he planned to wipe it
out. It also said that 'perhaps' the greatest harm was done to the
Jewish people. Perhaps! But the truth was that there were good people of
Christian faith who stood against Hitler. Most did not. Hitler was
himself an Millennialist, as are so many Fundamentalists today. One only
has to look at Tom Delay or John Ashcroft or Ted Olson to see the hand
of the dead on the shoulder of the living, making choices to that inner
voice of the Divine they identify with -- when they're not calling it
the devil.
They also seek to rewrite History, which has always been
written by the victor and in no way can truly reflects its time.
Take Philo. He was spared by Constantine's PR man Eusebius because he
had some utility in forming the Church Canon. Where are the sources for
that tradition he extrapolates? Gone. Yet too developed to have been
only his ... and even yet it goes on, sublimated into the Kabbalah and
magick.
Jung didn't view the unconscious as a cesspool needing to be
purged, pulled up in buckets and dragged to destruction, but as the dark
living ground of all creativity. Individuation is about centering,
working at a stillpoint in accord with an ineffable nature, "an
instrument of sound to be an articulate utterance of our *whole complex
being*." Thus, Rationality alone, pure Thinking fx, becomes a blinding
light, a sneer too ready--just as pure intuition degrades easily to
superstition.
For all our conscious pure intellectual light, we don't
begin to know much about time or space or matter or where they begin or
end.
http://www.biophysica.com/quantum.htm In science, we build the
model, not the thing. In revealed religion, we project ourselves as
Deity.
We get down and wallow in the mud we came out of (mud made of
stars); we dance, we are irrational. We are body, and our thoughts are
more than body. We can map out chemicals and genes, we follow
neurotransmitters and the formation of memories. We can give pills to
wipe memory out of the conscious mind, and we understand that each time
we draw a memory up, we also rewrite it. But there is no chemistry that
accounts for the sudden understanding of a concept. There are no
chemical, electrical changes in the ah-HA, the momentary leap of the
heart.
Symbiosis, balance, accord: we're dying for it.
What is the use of a religion without a mythos, since religion
means, if anything, precisely that function which links us back to
eternal myth? ~CGJUNG
Look upon your heart