The peculiar archetypal-symbolic vision of the German philologist and musicologist Marius Schneider is splendidly enclosed in this first chapter of "La musica primitiva" (1960) in which the divine forces are seen, through the meticulous analysis of the origin myths of the most varied traditions, primarily as "sound powers".
taken from M. Schneider, "Primitive music", Postal Code. THE
Adelphi, Milan, 1992, pp. 13 - 22
image: Gustave DorΓ©, illustration for
"Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy", London 1892
THE SOUND CREATOR OF THE WORLD
A large amount of information on the nature of music and its role inΒ world comes to us from the creation myths. Whenever the genesis of the world is described with sufficient precision, an acoustic element intervenes at the decisive moment of the action. In the instant in which a god manifests the will to give life to himself or to another god, to make heaven and earth or man appear, he emits a sound. He exhales, sighs, talks, sings, screams, screams, coughs, expects, sobs, throws up, thunders, or plays a musical instrument. In other cases he uses a material object that symbolizes the creative voice.
The source from which the world emanates is always an acoustic source. The primordial abyss, the gaping mouth, the singing cave, Singing o supernatural ground of the Eskimos, the cleft in the rock of the upanisad or Tao of the ancient Chinese, from which the world emanates "like a tree", are images of empty space or non-being, from which the creator's barely perceptible breath blows. This sound, born from the Void, is the fruit of a thought that makes the Nothing vibrate and, by propagating, creates space. It is a monologue whose sound body constitutes the first perceptible manifestation of the Invisible. The primordial abyss is therefore a "background of resonance", and the resulting sound must be considered as the first creative force, which in most mythologies is personified in the singing gods. In myths, the materialization of these gods, in the form of a musician, a cave in the rock or a screaming head (human or animal) is, of course, only a concession made to the more concrete and imaginative language of the myth.
Originally the term Brahman it meant "magic force, sacred word, hymn". It is from the "mouth" of BrahmΔ that the first gods came out. These Immortals are songs. The upanisad they never tire of repeating to us that the sounds OM and AUM are the syllable "immortal and intrepid" creator of the world. According to Nadabindu Upanisad, the voiced breath of tman (i.e. tman itself) is symbolized by a bird whose tail corresponds to the sound of the consonant M, while the vowel A represents the right wing and U the left wing. PrajΔpati, the Vedic creator god, also born of a resounding breath, is a song of praise. His limbs and his trunk are composed of hymns, his activity is therefore purely musical.
βWhatever the gods do, they do it through sung recitation. "(Εatapatha BrΔhmana)
The Yakuts, as well as the ancient Egyptians and some primitive tribes of Africa, imagine god as a great screamer. In Chinese mythology there are numerous gods who operate essentially by means of shouts or musical instruments. The twenty-two characters enumerated by the Sefer Yezirah they are the sonorous and creative emanations of God.
Very often the song of the creator is identified with thunder. This assimilation is certainly very ancient: we find it already in the mythology of primitive peoples such as the Californians, the Aranda of Australia, the Samoyeds and the Coriaki of northern Asia. It also exists in southern Africa (Zulu, Bashilange), Congo, Niger and among the Masai. In America, its diffusion is remarkable and persists in the great civilizations of the Near and Far East. In Africa and North Asia, the voice of God is recognized in the sound of rain or swirling wind.
Very often the creator also presents himself as a roaring quadruped (the Vedic or Persian bull), a buzzing insect, a thunder bird or an anthropomorphic singing god completely white and shining. The god Εiva is a dancer who by playing the drum, the flute, the shell or the lyre makes the world continue to exist. In Africa the creator god of the Kambas is called "Mulungu", which means "happiness, hollow bamboo, flute". In California (Kato, Pomo, Yuki) the creator's thunderous voice is produced by a great rumble. The crocodile (Egyptian and Chinese) who beats its belly with its tail to bring order to chaos is a drum, and it is very likely that the god of Uitoto (America), who extracts the primordial waters from his body, is also a drum. In Asia Minor, the god Ea or Enki is "bulug", the drum ("the Word of the creator"), as are the gods who, guiding creation, are found embodied in talking trees (Lango, Hottentots, Pangwe) , which correspond to the large tree-drums, usually carved in the form of humans or animals. The god Taaroa (Society Islands) begat himself in a shell, probably a sea shell. According to TaitirΔ«ya BrΔhmana, to give rise to the first rhythms of the world (rsi) PrajΔpati shook himself. Was PrajΔpati a rattle?
In some myths, the creative sound is not directly symbolized by a musical instrument, but by some objects to which the ability to resonate is attributed. It is very likely that the cane Japanese myths speak of was a bamboo flute. The smoke of the pipe, in which the great Manitou gathers human souls, symbolizes the sound bridge of sacrifice. Numerous Californian tales tell us that the world arose from the song of a pen or a feather. At first the quill floated motionless on the northern waters, but soon it began to sing and whirl as it headed east, where its sounds made the Earth appear. The rites lead us to suppose that the twirl of the pen drew the shape of a spiral.
The idea of ββthe world generated by a song must have a very remote origin. Its diffusion would suffice to demonstrate it, but it appears very ancient also because it does not imply the pre-existence of a more or less perfected work tool. The most technically advanced civilizations often show us the creator as a potter, a carpenter or a sculptor who, after having shaped the bodies, communicates life to them by means of a cry, a sonorous exhalation or saliva. [...]
If the creator is a song, it is evident that the world it gives life to is a purely acoustic world. There Chandogya Upanisad tells us that the pace gΔyatri it is "all that exists". The rhythms or meters enumerated by the Vedic rites are however many more. Such ceremonies show us that the sound and rhythm peculiar to each being or the name assigned to them were in fact the essence of the gods invoked and of the beings created by them. The root, the power and the form of all existing things are constituted by their voice or by the name they bear, because all beings do not exist except by virtue of the mere fact of having been called by name.
The nature of the first beings is purely acoustic. Their names are not definitions, but proper names or sounds: they are therefore not only vocal supports of the life force of beings, but the beings themselves. Even the supreme god, who creates himself, obtains existence by pronouncing his own name, except in the case in which it is himself generated by the sound of a bell (Java), of an orchestra of drums (India), of a word transmitted with the tam-tam (Uitoto) or a bamboo flute (Zulu). These sounds then constitute, in the order of creation, the highest and most ancient sound degree conceivable.
THE SOUND-LIGHT
In a large number of myths it is said that the first songs of creation brought light or dawn. Primitive peoples often attribute that cry of light to the sun, to the crowing of a divine rooster or to the roar of a hungry beast. In great civilizations this marvelous deed is generally the work of a particularly revered pet. In ancient Persia, light was summoned by the heavenly bull of Ahura Mazdah. Vedic literature speaks to us of the "bellow of a luminous cow" which symbolizes the cloud pregnant with rain. There Kathaka Upanisad describes the Δtman (the supreme being), which is externalized in the syllable OM, as an intense light.
The Tahitians believe that the creative light comes from the mouth of the god Tane. According to the Maori, God created the Universe by means of a word that evoked light. In Polynesian myths, Atua began his song in the middle of the night, and the glow was released only towards the morning. Those songs are therefore now luminous voices, now sounds that produce light. Generally the texts are not very explicit in this regard: in several legends the creation is born from a simple sound or a ray of light, but perhaps these texts are incomplete. It is very likely that the original version considered the fire or the sun-singer as a primordial element, inaudible and hidden in the dark waters. Coming out of the sea, that song (now the creator, now a creature of God) joins the song of the waters and the dawn appears. If we stick to the symbolism of the storm, the creative thought of God is the cry-lightning that produces the thunder, and only after the storm does the song of sunlight begin to radiate.
La MaitrΔyana Upanishad considers Δtman as the "first" sun from which numerous rhythms emanate which, after "shining, pouring rain and singing hymns", return to the "cave" of the supreme being. Sometimes this sonic cavern or this primordial sun is symbolized by a shining egg or a shining shell from which the solar star emerged. After the Egyptian god Amon, in the form of a goose, had hatched the solar egg, with his voice he announced the light. According to Chandogya Upanisad, everything that exists developed into an egg with a slit from which the singing sun came out. Now, symbolically, the egg with the crack corresponds, on the anthropological level, to a head whose mouth emits the first song of creation. L'Aitareya BrΔhmana it tells us that the egg hatched by the Atman "opened like a mouth" to utter the first word or to give birth to the head of Purusa (the cosmic giant). The Rg Veda signals us the seven Rsi, mythical poets or poetic meters whose song generated the first dawn and formed the head of PrajΔpati, charged with pronouncing the creative syllables of the world. According to another version, PrajΔpati was born from a concert of seventeen drums.
The image of the head as a symbol of the egg or the cave can facilitate the understanding of certain formulas frequently used in the description of this first, purely acoustic, stage of creation. Say that the gods "produce" and "fertilize" through the mouth, while they "feed" and "conceive" through the ear, is only a symbolic way of expressing oneself to signify that, during the first stage of creation, all acts were acoustic in nature. [β¦] By singing to themselves first, the gods realize the parthenogenesis, characteristic of the beginnings of creation. Thoth, the creator god of music, dance and writing, and also the sun-god therefore fertilize themselves by laughing or shouting a cry of light. The Heliopolis school presented the story of creation in two different versions. According to the first, the sun-god generated the other gods by means of a cry of light. In the second version this cry is replaced by an act of masturbation or by an expectoration of the sun.
Since the word, the sun or the egg are first immersed in the night of the eternal waters, it is evident that when they evoke the dawn they are impregnated with moisture. In the cosmogony of the Dogon (Africa), this "humid and luminous word" intervenes in all the stages of the first phase of creation. The role of enlightener attributed to the gods-musicians seems to imply, from the very beginning of creation, the position that ancient civilizations also recognized music within human culture. Situated between the darkness and the light of the first day, on the human level music is between the darkness of the unconscious life and the clarity of the intellectual representations; it therefore belongs largely to the world of dreams. In the first stage of creation, during which sounds gradually become clothed with light, music precedes intelligible language as the dawn precedes the day. It contains both darkness and light, waters and fires at the same time. Music is the humid sun that sings the dawn. But, as the sounds become more precise, this primary "language" is divided: one part is on the way to becoming music proper; another is embodied in language composed of clear and distinct sentences, subject to logical thinking; the third part gradually transforms into matter.
The strange characteristic that these myths have of often mentioning, at the beginning of creation, some concrete elements (waters, fires, egg, head, feathers, animals) that are already created objects, has been pointed out several times. In reality, these elements are but material symbols of first purely acoustic phenomena. In that humid world of sound and light, music is the only reality, and is partially transformed into fire, water and other concrete objects only after the appearance of matter. The darkness and the waters probably symbolize pure sound, while the light that gradually defines the contours of the waters corresponds to the meter. The "eternal waters embodied by the rays of the dawn" can only be interpreted as a symbol of primordial music.
Such music seems to be composed now of cries or magical syllables, now of groans or inarticulate noises. In this respect the documents are contradictory, but it is very likely that it is a cry of joy mixed with pain, since all these gods have a dual nature. In symbolic language, the hermaphroditic character of that music is clearly expressed by its identification with the dawn, since the fusion of night and day, of waters and fires or rain and rays of the sun "in the noise of the bright wedding of the 'aurora "(Rg Veda) is a metaphor for marriage, i.e. of a rhythm produced by the union of sound and meter. Music is the prototype of the concertante principle of the forces of nature. All the other phenomena of concrete nature which present two antithetical aspects are only material expressions of an essentially musical law. The ancient philosophers therefore did not tire of using metaphors drawn from music, which is the prefiguration and essence of heaven and earth.
He posted it back up DIAKOSMESIS.
And if the vibration were not only acoustic but referred to the waves, or rather the fields that we perceive as waves when they are perturbed with the relative movement of particles, which form the matter itself, generated precisely after a blow comparable to a scream or a din , followed by the first light? It would be a perfect confirmation that what has been handed down in symbolic form also corresponds to a real knowledge of the deeper functioning of the cosmos. Even the Atmat would have its place, as the omnipresent and primal totality of matter, space-time and related forces. Creation is an exception, a temporary experience of the Whole, to which we will eventually return, restoring the entropic stability of the absence of vibrations.
(correction) * Even the Atman would have its place, as an omnipresent totality devoid of matter, space-time and related forces.
Certainly, I believe that reading Schneider's book one understands well how he sees the "Cosmic Song" of the various cosmogonies not only as Sound or Word (Logos) but also, in accordance with the "Corpus Hermeticum" I add, as Vibration, Wave which shapes and orders matter on various levels. On this subject, the science of Kymatica itself and other more recent scholars (Rupert Sheldrake comes to mind) would have a lot to say. Thanks for the observation, very punctual.
MM
Thank you very much, the texts cited seem really interesting and I am happy that after all Micro and macro are really always the same, on several levels. The concept of a string vibrating to compose a great symphony (see String theory) is so elegant and satisfying.