Music & the Occult Philosophy of the Renaissance

 

The visionary effect of music is the beginning of Renaissance occult, magical science of music based upon Pythagoras and Orpheus, which Marsilio Ficino and Robert Fludd practiced. Central to this occult music magic was the concept of "soul," since it was this that music effected. Those who are affected by music can be divided into two classes: those who hear the spiritual meaning, and those who hear only the material sound.

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The enchanted atmosphere of “music magic” on RE-VISION RADIO takes you back —”way, way back”—to the long-ago-and-far-away Romantic atmosphere of the Orphic “Temple of Music,” where the Renaissance idea of Magic & Music (through Hermetic-Neoplatonic philosophy) is etched in stone. Inspired by the divine visitation of the Muses, “Pythagorean magic” and “Neoplatonic poetic furor” combine to evoke various heightened ideas and emotions. This definitive “poetic furor”—also referred to as “frenzy” and “rapture”—was believed to manifest in poems & songs:

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“Whoever is possessed in any way by a deity indeed overflows on account of the vehemence of the divine impulse and the fullness of its power: he raves, exults . . . therefore this possession is called furor .... No one under the influence of furor is content with simple speech: he bursts forth into clamoring and songs and poems.”

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Furthermore, the highest reaches of “poetic flight”—inspired music and poetry associated particularly with “poetic furor”—were attained by the soul in the throes of Venus's “amatory” or “erotic furor,” which suggests an infused, over-flowing soul rather than an absent, disembodied state. And because the occult power of the spoken word & music was taken for granted—as poetic magic—, this phenomenon of “musico-poetic furor” was seen by Neoplatonic occultists, like Marsilio Ficino, as evidence of the presence of numinous forces.  (Ficino "translated the works of Plato and the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin" and "was responsible for recreating the Orphic incantations and for giving music a high place in his scheme of planetary magic.")

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“In the light of Ficino’s suggestions, the marvelous psychological effects of music described by writers of Antiquity now take on a new meaning: they are not records so much of music as of ceremonial magic, of precisely the kind Ficino was trying to revive.”

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The correspondence of word, image, music, soul, and the planets suggested an “imagistic” conception of words & music that united in song intellectual content & sound, as perceived by soul. Yet, this Italian Renaissance conception of musical magic (“word, image, and music”) most probably has its beginnings in an earlier period, also known as a cultural rebirth—the “Twelfth-Century Renaissance” of the Troubadours, who also venerated Orpheus. Here, too, “music was seen as having magical powers.” Throughout the Middle Ages, the pitches used in western music were consistently linked with the Pythagorian musical spheres of the universe. The spheres, in turn, were intimately bound up in astrology, a cornerstone of medieval magic. (The tradition goes back as early as Pythagoras and Plato.) The connections between singing and Troubadour story-telling is emphasized in the root for “song;” cant. This root takes on considerable significance when we realize that the word for magic in certain romances is encantement (en-cant-ment, literally “en-song-ment”). Thus, we have the link between singing, story-telling performers, and magic.

 

This link seems to have been taken up again and perfected by the Renaissance occultists, who believed in the power of words and song for moving the soul and gaining celestial benefits and climbing the Platonic stairway to heaven. Once concretized in the Renaissance “Temple of Music,” these celestial raptures can today be gained by climbing high up in the TOWER OF SONG. So RE-VISION RADIO, going back—“way, way back”—would use its Orphic, magical, and amatory, Song-form—the Essay-with-Soundtrack—to get down to the roots of Medieval Troubadour and Renaissance Magical Music traditions in order to reveal their revival and continuation in the popular music of the Sixties. Thus Everybody Knows: “The powerful pulsing of love in the vein .... / These are the roots of rhythm / and the roots of rhythm remain.” And every time you hear the Orphic medley or philosophical acoustics of RE-VISION RADIO’S Essay-with-Soundtrack you hear something new and novel, because it's full of those hidden or Hermetic correspondences, resonances, and connexions. However, listening to its Orphic melodic rhythm isn't just about the words or just about the music but, as in Renaissance music magic, it’s about how their synergy moves your soul. Thus, RE-VISION RADIO’s version of “Magic Song,” because of its synaesthetic mix of sound & image—”radio-graphics”—, has musically-determined meanings that evoke an occult Musekal Philosophy through the ceremonial magic of hosting RE-VISION RADIO. And because RE-VISION RADIO expresses its esoteric Philosophy best in magical Song (“That’s why I’m telling you in song” –Van Morrison), it hopes that its listeners would ask: “What I want to know is: how does the song go?” (Grateful Dead) And, Everybody Knows, it goes, ultimately, to the TOWER OF SONG.

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The Renaissance “Philosophy of Music and Magic” becomes, on RE-VISION RADIO, the music of philosophy through its Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, since, according to the occult philosopher, Agrippa, the right words when joined to the right music fill the listener with heavenly energies:

 

“Besides the virtues of words and names, there is also a greater virtue found in sentences, from the truth contained in them, which hath a very great power of impressing, changing, binding, and establishing, so that being used it doth shine the more, and . . . of which sort are verses, enchantments, imprecations, deprecations, orations, invocations, obstestations, adjurations, conjurations, and such like. . . . They that desire further examples of these, let them search into the hymns of Orpheus, than which nothing is more efficacious in Natural Magic . . . . [which will] confer a very great power in the enchanter, and sometimes transfer it upon the thing enchanted, to bind and direct it to the same purpose for which the affections and speeches of the enchanter are intended.” (“Of many Words joined together, as in Sentences and Verses; and of the Virtues and Astrictions of Charms”)

 

However esoteric and transcendental this magical power may sound to the average person, it should be noted that it is fundamentally a natural magic of human expression:

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“For we are not now speaking of worshiping divinities but of a natural power in speech, song, and words.” ~Ficino

 

This is, then, the only claim that RE-VISION RADIO’s makes: to exercise the natural magic of the blend of words and music. So, whether it is this magical theory of Agrippa, or Ficino’s notion of the “power of words and [planetary] song for capturing celestial benefits,” or Robert Fludd’s notion of “the occult and wondrous effects of the secret Music,” RE-VISION RADIO’s magic of Musekal Philosophy is to rediscover the Renaissance “Temple of Music” in the TOWER OF SONG.

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Because the esoteric Renaissance “Philosophy of Music” is inseparable from Ficino’s Neoplatonic concept of soul (“Music and the soul’s longing;” “Other melodies and rhythms have the power of transporting the soul from one state to another;” “the soul awakened by music;” “the soul’s ascent through music;” “music as an occult numeration of the soul”), RE-VISION RADIO’s enchanting mix of words and music is its own special kind of “soul-music;” a “soul-manifesting” music.

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So the magical musicology of RE-VISION RADIO’s Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, with liquid measures flowing, creates a hypnotic atmosphere, or shamanic trance-state of mind; an intellectual mood-piece for radio that strikes a “mystic chord”—a deep, soulful chord: “Music that can deepest reach” (Emerson). So Everybody Knows that the “deepest reach” of RE-VISION RADIO’s music is for “the perfect union of words and music”—the radio-quest or night-journey that is also a search for the “Unending Melody.” For Everybody Knows, also, that this quest goes back—”way, way back”—to Ancient Greece; to the Pythagorean view of music as a microcosm—an esoteric system of sound & rhythm ruled by the same mathematical laws that operate in the macrocosm of visible creation: “Music, in this view, was not a passive image of the orderly system of the universe; it was also a force that could effect the universe—hence the attribution of miracles to the legendary musicians of mythology.” And, thus, Everybody Knows RE-VISION RADIO’s Orpheus—hence the ancient magical connotations and extensions of music come to be understood as the power in music akin to the power of words for influencing human thought & action.

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So Everybody Knows, too, that the power of music is a mysterious power we don't fully understand; a magical power for reflection and creative exploration. Because RE-VISION RADIO’s believes with Emerson that “the manner of using language is surely the most decisive test of intellectual power,” it would ask in unison with the “American Plotinus:” “Who does not feel in him budding the powers of a Persuasion that by and by will be irresistible?” And Everybody Knows that these magical “budding powers of Persuasion” are maximized in the TOWER OF SONG.

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RE-VISION RADIO's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, in mixing Philosophy & Music --dialectics/argument and song--, also broadcasts a confluence of the ancient "Infinite Conversation" & "Unending Song." Again, this goes back to the legendary Orpheus, whose favorite pursuits were rhetoric and music--Orpheus, "singer of love songs."