ToS 1

The "Tower of Song" begins, at least for the Gypsy Scholar, in the Renaissance with the "Temple of Music."

Known to the Renaissance occultists as “The Temple of Music,” it was written that: “No other invention, ancient or modern, is more seemly for consorts nor more desirable for symphonies, nor more admirable to the ears of listeners. Time destroys not the sweetness of its sounds, neither do fickle inventions seduce men’s affections from it, however rare, unusual, or more easily learnt these may be.” This “pagan mystery” of the Renaissance was a magical device whereby the Magus, using hermetic/kabbalistic interpretation, contemplated the harmonic relationships (of which the musical was itself a metaphor) and entered the Temple of Music in order to “hear Apollo’s lyre, i.e. experience the celestial worlds” in a scaled flight of soul through the cosmos.

Pythagoras can be seen through the main archway on the bottom floor, entering through a door. Directly above, in the alcove beneath the twin portals representing ears, a Muse stands pointing at a musical phrase in three parts. Above and to the left, the god of music and father of the Muses, Apollo, plays his lyre in the archway below the clock.

Today, we may be witnessing the revival of Pythagorean musical mathematics and its Renaissance towering music magic by way of the music generated by the fractal chaos mathematics.

$fractal-wave_music.jpg$

ToS 2

The Background & History of the

Gypsy Scholar's "Tower of Song" Program

The Gypsy Scholar actually started in radio from a high tower. It was 1973, at an Ivy League college that had a traditional tower at the center of campus. He helped out his college dorm mate, who had a radio program in a studio atop the college tower.

When the GS was an undergraduate student of literature, a younger breed of professors were beginning to breech the academic code that kept popular culture off limits as a serious subject of study. Thus, there were studies (books and essays) on high-culture poets and writers having epigraphs (and maybe more quotations throughout) from Beat poets and popular 60s singer-songwriters, such as Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen. These groundbreaking professors, coming of age in the academy of the 1970s, represented a new sensibility for literature, one that was informed by the revolutionary period in which they lived. However, the young GS wasn't even satisfied with the occasional academic reference to popular Sixties music. The GS wanted serious studies dedicated to it (feeling that the popular rock-music critic should be part of the constituency of academic "literary critics."). As a student of the Romantics, he felt like Bono felt about Leonard Cohen (whose critics were aghast when this academically-trained poet "prostituted" himself to become a popular singer-songwriter!): "Here was a man, who inside of a pop-song ... you know, puts big ideas, big dreams. It reminded me of Keats or Shelley or, you know, they were poets I was reading as a kid. I said this is our ... Shelley, this is our ... Byron. You know, there was an otherness to the language. It was just a sensory overload of the language that first got to me." [I'm Your Man, 2005] The GS had, in other words, realized that the Sixties musicians were the heirs of the Romantics—and to study the one meant to also study the other. Always listening to music when he studied (and thus experienced a steady stream of correspondences between the ideas and the music), the GS wanted more than academic tomes just referencing Sixties singer-songwriters—he wanted snippets of song verses jumping out everywhere between the lines of essays on literary texts! But, he recognized this was clearly impossible (unless a professor of literature could provide an audio tape with his book). However, the GS did come up with a way that this could be done (i.e., in another medium of communication), but it was only well after he left the university.

Since the GS's university days, the split between academic high-culture and popular low-culture has been largely overcome, as a result of popular culture, most prominently in the form of music and movies, infiltrating the precincts of the Ivory Tower. For instance, you can now find academic works on popular singer-songwriters, such as Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen. Thus, today, there are bona fide university departments dedicated to the study of media and popular culture, and find entire books written on the subject of how the elements of popular culture are the equivalent of serious, canonical literature: "At the same time, it became important ... to argue that popular culture representations were as potentially complex and worthy of interpretation as the ‘great’ canonical texts of European literature that were always being used to demonstrate the poverty of popular culture and of youth culture in general." (Carla Freccero, Popular Culture) Furthermore, you know that the exclusive walls of the Ivory Tower have been totally breeched when Sixties singer-songwriter Bob Dylan is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature!

Yes, the GS did find a way, in the early 1990s, to not only bridge the gap between high academic culture and low pop-culture but also to realize his fantasy of liberally punctuating essays with music—song-lines jumping out of the text. It was through the medium of radio, when the GS invented his own form of "radio-text;" i.e., the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack. "Songs will literally jump out at you at the perfect moment and talk to you." (DJ at a community radio station) Here, on radio, the "Gypsy Scholar" didn't present his academic essay from the Ivory Tower, but from "that tower down the track"—the TOWER OF SONG. Back then, on "community radio," the GS was actively doing something—with his "romance of scholarship" and "flowers of discourse" notions—that some daring academics now call "Re-enchanting the Academy." (And, as far as the academic essay is concerned, the word "enchantment" comes from the Latin word incantare [in = En- + cantare = sing]; lit., in-song-ment.) Thus, the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is a "Re-enchanment" of the academic form of the essay.

The TOWER OF SONG program is designed to harken back—"way, way back"—to the early days of what was called "underground" (or "freeform," or "alternative," or "progressive") radio of the 1960s and '70s, most especially nocturnal (FM) radio, with its experimental "non-format format" of mixing not only different musical genres but also music and talk (of the new "flower-power" radio stations). It is predicated on the notion that there is not only an economic difference between commercial and non-commercial radio, but also a biological difference between the diurnal rhythms of day and night; the night having a special reality of magic that is absent from the day (and the noisy busyness of daytime radio). Therefore, the TOWER OF SONG program is about a different radio sensibility, one designed to cater to the rhythms a special kind of listener. [See "School of the Night" page.]

The TOWER OF SONG is the great metaphor/symbol for the Gypsy Scholar's once-and-future program, "Everybody Knows / Tower of Song," which he conducted for seven years, beginning in 1989 on community radio station KKUP. Conceived on the model of sixties "underground radio," its range covered topics from the spiritual to the political. With this midnight program, the GS presented an alternating program format of dialectics (interviews or spoken-word essays) and popular music. The program began with this introduction from the GS's "Re-Vision Radio Manifesto & Visionary Recital":

The noetic EVERYBODY KNOWS segment alternates with the mythopoetic TOWER OF SONG segment—an eclectic mixing of music and spoken-word readings from a variety of texts. It's hosted by the Gypsy Scholar, with flower in one hand and sword in the other. Thus, Everybody Knows, it's "flower-power" radio—with the philosophic power of Blakean "Staminal Virtue." It is, then, RE-VISION RADIO: a "Soul-making" Philosophical & Literary inter-view program that re-views—looks once again in-depth at—ideas, books, issues people in the news religion and politics movements and movies. RE-VISION RADIO is, as Everybody Knows, not for everyone but for "Romantic Outsiders" only (like its counterpart, the 1960s "Magic Theater" of the Imagination—"for madmen only").

Thus, this was the "Everybody Knows/Tower of Song" program, with its unique mix of talk (dialogue and interviews, with phone-calls from listeners) and essays put to popular music—high philosophy & deep song. Little did the GS know then that around the same time a film by well-known director Oliver Stone had come out, Talk Radio (1988), which told the story of a popular and controversial radio host. Viewing it later on video, the GS couldn't help but feel that the coincidence of the controversial host's first name with his first name was too uncanny! But this weird coincidence was shortly to be matched by another. Significantly enough, not long after the GS began his own "underground" style of radio out of a converted garage (KKUP), he received another uncanny match to his own novel radio conception when the 1990 film, Pump Up the Volume, hit the theaters. It opened with the protagonist starting a pirate radio program in his "basement" (literally "underground radio"). And his theme-song? You guessed it—"Everybody Knows"! (By chance, did the filmmaker once hear the GS's radio program?)

ToS 3

How I Became a “Gypsy Scholar”: a Countercultural Biography

Let us bring to bear the persuasive powers of sweet-tongued Rhetoric and . . . let us have as well Music, the maid-servant of my house, to sing us melodies of varying mood.

~Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy

As a young, aspiring scholar at college, when assigned to write papers, my predilection was to take a controversial position on an issue and argue an unpopular opinion, challenging the status quo. However, as far as the composition of a paper was concerned, because of my passion in polemical argument, I oftentimes felt a certain limitation, a constriction, with formal academic writing. This restriction of expression made me yearn for something more than a dry academic essay. This lead to fantasizing a different kind of expository essay; something more energetic and edifying, which—when read aloud—was on the order of heightened speech.

Indulging in these flights of imagination, I soon came to have a secret fantasy I dare not share with any of my professors. I imagined a professor at a lectern giving a lecture with such passion that his speech becomes heightened, so much so that he must finally break off the formal lecture altogether. At that point, he picks up an electric guitar and sings the rest of his orphic lecture, whereupon the lecture hall magically transforms into a concert hall. This wild fantasy was for me the antidote to the ponderous academic essay; so that the end of the academic essay is not “murders to dissect” (Wordsworth’s Romantic complaint) but instead a kind of intellectual ecstasy, which leads to a quasi-mystical contemplation. Thus, it followed that the ideal scholar was not the sedate academic but rather the (Renaissance) “Inspired Scholar.” However, if I wanted to be serious in pursuing such an off-the-wall academic fantasy, I had to ask myself if there was actually any model of this kind of alternative scholar in the real world, particularly one in the modern period who had solid academic credentials. (For a laying out of this academic fantasy pictorially, see the last section of the Gypsy Scholar’s “Musekal Philosophy” page of the Tower of Song website.)

After much research, finally a name came up: Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was known as the quintessential “American Scholar.” But, upon further researching, I discovered that Emerson was identified with another title: “The Orphic Scholar.” (What applies here about the legendary Orpheus, the archetypal musician as magician, is that he is described as not only “singer of love songs” but also a “divine rhetorician.” “Orpheus is philosophy personified.” –Francis Bacon) What I came to understand about what I had discovered was the idea that scholarship (at its highest level) has a musical dimension, which issues not in an end-state of critical reason but rather one of a transcendental joy. This is eloquently and powerfully described by Emerson—rejecting the model of scholarship of his day—as the “joyous science” (from the 12th-century troubadours’ gay saber):

“Ah ye old ghosts! ye builders of dungeons in the air! why do I ever allow you to encroach on me a moment; a moment to win me to your hapless company? In every week there is some hour when I read my commission in every cipher of nature, and I know that I was made for another office, a professor of the Joyous Science, a detector & delineator of occult harmonies & unpublished beauties, a herald of civility, nobility, learning, & wisdom; an affirmer of the One Law, yet as one who should affirm it in music or dancing, a priest of the Soul yet one who would better love to celebrate it through the beauty of health & [the] harmonious power [of music].”

And Emerson elaborates on what he means by “the power of music:”

“The power of music, the power of poetry, to unfix and as it were clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus. I do not wonder at the miracles which poetry attributes to the music of Orpheus, when I remember what I have experienced from the varied notes of the human voice. They are an incalculable energy which countervails all other forces in nature, because they are the channel of supernatural powers.”

Thus, the orphic scholarship of an enthusiastic “joyous science” means that “The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise and to guide men by showing them facts amid appearances.” Emerson, as the “Orphic Scholar,” is the Professor of the Joyous Science and thus what cold be called a “Troubadour of Knowledge.”

With is fateful discovery, the young, aspiring scholar looking for his own out-of-the-way mentors—his own spiritual kin—had all he needed to affirm and authorize his wild, undergraduate fantasies. Thus, sometime after my English Literature graduation, I came up with a designation for this mode of alternative scholarship, a moniker that would express the sense of an independent or outsider-type of scholar, or even renegade scholar, who is a defector from the Ivory Tower’s halls of academe. Riffing off of Matthew Arnold’s most popular poem, ”The Scholar Gipsy" (1853), I came up with “The Gypsy Scholar.” (Arnold prefaces the poem with an extract from Joseph Glanvill, the 17th-century English writer, philosopher, and clergyman, which tells the story of an impoverished Oxford student who left his studies to join a band of gipsies, and so ingratiated himself with them that they told him many of the secrets of their trade. He learned that the gipsies “had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power of imagination, their fancy binding that of others.” Actually, Arnold’s poem was a perfect model—not only because of its message of the “power of the imagination” but also because of its musical reference; that is, it is also familiar to music-lovers through Ralph Vaughan Williams' choral work “An Oxford Elegy.”)

It was shortly after my graduation that a related academic fantasy began to be entertained—writing a book that came with a CD in order to adequately express one’s ideas. (And this made me ask, rhetorically, shouldn’t all scholarly books come with a CD?) I confess that I can’t now recall exactly how I came to such an odd-ball notion in the first place—I mean blending argument and song. It must have started (as far as I can remember anyway) with something a simple as my undergrad habit of reading papers and books (many of which were extracurricular, “out-of-the-way books” [Coleridge]) while listening to popular music. I would sometimes experience an odd coincidence of the lyrics of a song matching (in some curious way) what I was pondering in regard to the reading (and sometimes it was as if the song lyrics were like marginal notes as running commentary on the text). When this type of synchronicity accumulated enough to become my personal heuristic method, I found that the act of reading became intensely associative, invoking my imagination to come up with connections between seemingly disparate things that would ordinarily not be associated, which allowed me to gain insights into matters I was studying. Thus, when I had this type of hermeneutical mojo on full blast, I would experience what Theodore Roethke described in one of his poems as “a steady stream of correspondences.” These were a series of correspondences between text and song, a sometimes complex and convoluted tapestry of correspondences that defied any systematic accounting for meaning—it was enough to make your head spin! (The Gypsy Scholar has tried to replicate a small portion of this kind of synchronous hermeneutic on radio through this “Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack.” When the orphic magic works, it gives the illusion that the song that punctuates an idea or a set of ideas in the essay was tailor-made for the essay.) In any case, perhaps the vocation of the “Gypsy Scholar” started with reading with music in the background. (For an in-depth exposition of what the “Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack” is all about, see the Gypsy Scholar’s “Re-Vision Radio Manifesto” page on the Tower of Song website.)

However, in the working world after graduation, it was difficult to ply my idiosyncratic trade of orphic scholarship. Until, that is, I found the perfect outlet— community fm radio. In this popular medium of communication, working as a “public intellectual,” I could combine ideas with music to realize my longtime academic fantasy. And, since this was in the social context of the countercultural music revolution that started in the 1960s, I could drive home the points made in my academic essays via the ecstatic mode of folk-rock and rock songs. (Actually, this was now a more accepted combo, since sixties singer-songwriters, such as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, had breached the exclusive walls of the Ivory Tower, for now their music was accepted as a bona fide subject academic study. Indeed, professional literary critics devoted much scholarly ink to popular singer-songwriters and, conversely, popular music critics started to come across as major intellectual interpreters of culture, producing scholarly and literary essays that placed rock music in a broader framework of culture and politics; e.g., Rolling Stone’s Greil Marcus.)

Now, the unequal balance of elite, high culture over popular, low culture had shifted. (This began to take place around the late 1970s. Thus, today, you can find entire university departments devoted to the study of “popular culture;” e.g., UCSC.) You could say that it was during this countercultural time period that I came of age vocationally, at the same time as being a college student. I remember the first evidence of the shift in the relationship of high and low culture. There were a younger generation of scholars who, when writing either academic papers or books, would head their sections or chapters of literary criticism concerning serious poetry or novels with choice epigraphs from the lyrics of singer-songwriters, such as Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell., or et al. I remember the profound influence this had on an impressionable college freshman. However, as my college years went by, I was no longer completely satisfied by such partial intrusions of a popular culture art form into the hallowed halls of academe. No, I wanted something more—a full-scale invasion of low-brow, popular culture into high-brow, academic culture. I desired the liberal arts text to be punctuated with intervals of associative song lines; song lyrics breaking out all over the page (hermetic correspondences all over the place)! I desired serious, academic studies of the music of our generation of popular singer-songwriters—introduced with choice epigraphs from high-brow poets and writers. In short (like the premodern “carnivalesque” phenomenon I’m now so fond of presenting to my listeners), I desired the “world turned upside down”! And, today, I’ve lived long enough to see my wild, undergrad fantasies impinge upon the real world (“Ah, the dreamers ride against the men of action / Oh, see the men of action falling back!” ~Leonard Cohen), as reformist movements seek to revision the nature of the academy, such as the one called “Re-enchanting of the Academy” (re-enchantment, lit. re-singing), which I interpret as a move away from the reality-principle of logos to the pleasure-principle of eros, which issues in unity, liberation, contemplation, and joy. (In Nietzsche’s terms—that other 19th-century philosopher of the troubadourean “joyous science”—it is in terms of replacing an “Apollonian” mode of discourse with a “Dionysian” one. And, here, I owe a debt of gratitude to one living professor who did encourage my undergrad fantasies about an alternative kind of scholarship—N.O. Brown. He probably started the reform movement early on in the 1960s by rejecting the academic orthodoxy he called “Protestant literalism,” which is based upon the literal interpretation of Scripture. Indeed, he identified it with modern scholarship: “Protestant literalism is modern scholarship…. Textual criticism is part of the search for one true and literal meaning…. Modern humanistic, literary and historical scholarship, Geisteswissenschaft, is the pursuit of literal truth …. There is also the new hierarchy of scribes, controlling the interpretation, the higher scholarship.” Because “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life,” Prof. Brown advocated an alternative form of scholarship that he called “Dionysian symbolism.” “The spirit inspires: the god is Dionysus.”) In other words, to me, this (Romantic-oriented) “re-enchantment of the academy” means moving out of the narrow “halls of academe” to the spacious outdoors (perhaps the pastoral environs of “Scholar Gipsy”) of its original home; to wit, “the groves of academe.” (And over its garden gate an inscription from Horace’s Epistles, Atque inter silvas academi quaerere verum, which translates from the Latin as “And Seek for Truth in the Garden of Academus.”) This is an environs where the “romance of scholarship” can blossom in flowers of discourse.

Therefore, it was here in this radio medium that the free-lance “Gypsy Scholar” found his niche in the wall of the Ivory Tower. Here, the Gypsy Scholar could ply his trade by invoking the image behind the concept of his “Tower of Song” program: “Not the Ivory Tower, but ‘that tower down the track / the tower of song’.” (L. Cohen) This meant that the Gypsy Scholar could apply the high form of the academic essay to radio and, at the same time, complement it—and enhance it—with the low form of popular music (a format that he dubbed “high argument and deep song” in the form of “Argument & Song,” the latter term lovingly borrowed from William Blake’s structuring of some of his poetic works). However, for the Gypsy Scholar, whose “orphic musical essays” were designed to both educate and entertain, the emphasis of these two contrasting cultural domains was always on the “low.” Here, again, he could look to the “Orphic Scholar,” Emerson, for the model: “I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.” Because it was the popular song that gave the energy, passion, and ecstatic undertone to the academic essay. (The Gypsy Scholar was wonderfully validated in conceiving of an essay supercharged with rock music when he found this from singer-songwriter Patti Smith: “Three-cord rock merging with the power of the word.”) It was all the justification the Gypsy Scholar required in order to call what he does on radio “scholarship as performance at.” (Again, taking his cue from Blake: “Mental Studies & Performances.”) Gypsy Scholar likes to think of his radio program as doing his small part in the (Romantic/Dionysian) project of “re-chanting the academy.”

This, then, is how I became the “Gypsy Scholar.” (That said, it’s lucky that the radio handle of “Wolfman Jack” was already taken!)

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The Tower of Song Musekal-Memorial Library

as a Temple of Wonder, Temple of Knowledge, and Universal Library

The Tower of Song houses a library, the Musekal-Memorial Library & Imaginal Museum.” As such, it retains the memory of the earliest “sacred libraries” of old and, more specifically, the “Universal Library” and “Museum” (“home of the muses”) at Alexandria, one of the “wonders of the ancient world,” and now known as the “Vanished Library.”

Historians have told us that “the germ of the library is as early as man's mind” (thus the “library” is a psychological archetype) and that “The oldest of alleged libraries are the libraries of the gods.” For example, the “sacred libraries” of ancient Egypt, where the “House of Books” was presided over by the god Toth (Hermes) and the goddess Hathor-Seshat, who was called the “Lady of Libraries” and “Mistress of the Hall of Books.” (The moon-goddess Seshat was an aspect the Great Goddess, Isis, herself.) According to some historians, Seshat is older and more primary than Toth. As Hathor, she was called “Maat,” (Truth) and functioned as the “inventor of writing.” Thus, Hathor-Seshat is assimilated to “the great mother” and “is one of the favorite goddesses among the Egyptian pantheon.” Thus, Egyptian libraries were also the shrine-oracles of the gods (most usually of goddesses).

Our great modern libraries have their origins in such early “sacred libraries.” Indeed, the religious mythologies of the world claim there were book collections even before the creation of the world. For instance, in the Hindu Vedas it is claimed that a library existed even before the creator god, and the Koran maintains that such a collection co-existed from eternity with the uncreated God.

Furthermore, many of the creator gods were described in terms of knowledge or the Word (logos), and were even looked upon as incarnate libraries. In some mythologies all creation is looked upon as a “vast library,” and thus the stars in the heavens were seen, astrologically, as a book in which can be read the secret destiny of heaven and earth—a “house of wisdom.” There is also the ancient notion of the creation as “The Book of Life.” Other mythological traditions tell of the “Pre-Adamite” or “Antediluvean Library” written by Jehovah in several volumes, which composed Adam's entire library until the Fall. After the fall, it is reported that Jehovah wrote a revised edition in one volume on stone and placed it in a “house” on a mountain east of the Garden of Eden, where lived the Cherubim. This may be why angels were often associated with libraries—and still are to this day. (For example, the 1987 film Wings of Desire.) This was thus the very first “House of Books” and, accordingly, the angels became the first librarians, or “keepers of the stone books.” This divine library was bequeathed to Noah, which he preserved from the Flood (thus the mythical “Antediluvian Library”). Legend has it that this library was dug up after the Flood and became the nucleus of the great libraries of the ancient world. These original libraries of the earth were all “sacred libraries,” since they seem always to have belonged to the temples. As historians inform us: “It is no accident that libraries have from the earliest times been associated with holy places. It is no accident that libraries have from the earliest times been associated with holy places.... Awe decreases with familiarity, and today we tend to forget the reverence ... paid the scholar. Writing is indeed a miracle that conquers time and space, and penetrates the mysteries of the universe. Most men in their hearts still acknowledge the marvel of this miracle. Learning has its own mysteries incarnated in pen and ink, and if we have the eyes to see, the magic of it overwhelms us. The instinct which invests learning with holiness is sound.” Thus, even in the medieval period, the great architectural achievements, the Gothic cathedrals, were sometimes called “books in stone.”

Given, as previously stated, a feminine spirit has, from the beginning, been associated with great libraries as a tutelary deity (e.g.; the Egyptian “Lady of Libraries”), the legacy of tutelary deities presiding over libraries still persists (although it’s merely a formality today), in some of our modern libraries. For instance, a bronze bust of Athena-Minerva, goddess of wisdom, is above the north entrance of Doe Library on the UC-Berkeley campus.

The Tower of Song’s “Musekal-Memorial Library & Imaginal Museum” has its real-world archetype in two libraries of the past.

The first is the ancient library at Alexandria in Egypt, which was one of the “wonders of the ancient world.” Founded by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, built and enlarged by Ptolemy I, Alexander's successor, the city's library comprised perhaps as many as 700,000 manuscripts, which was whole corpus of knowledge accumulated by ancient poets, philosophers, and scientists. And it was all contained in a magnificent building considered by the ancients to have been of surpassing beauty.

The library was likely created after Ptolemy had built what would become the first part of the library complex, the “Temple of the Muses”—the Mouseion (The Latin word “museum” is derived from this Greek word.) The Greek Mouseion was much more than what we understand to be a library today. Besides a library or gallery of manuscripts (also a gallery of sacred texts), it was the home of music, poetry, and a philosophical school, such as Plato's academy of philosophy. The Musaeum (in the 3rd century BCE) was directed by a group of literary and scientific scholars who received support from the Ptolemies.

The great Library of Alexandria, the “Cathedral of Books,” was “a building devoted to learning and the arts, regarded as the home or seat of the muses” (museum) and housed an esoteric community of adepts, who were “isolated from the outside world and equipped with a complete library and retreat were they could cultivate the muses.” This “Universal Library” contained more than the sum of its two most outstanding literary traditions, Greek and Egyptian, because it included Jewish, Babylonian, Zoroastrian and many other writings including manuscripts from as far away as India. Buddhist writings were also there, since Buddhist monks were part of a special envoy sent by the emperor Asoka to Alexandria during the time of Ptolemy II Philodelphus.

The Alexandrian Library was modeled on the Egyptian “sacred library” that was not only a “House of Books” but also a labyrinthine “temple of initiation” (both buildings were labyrinths). The library slowly declined over the next four centuries, until by 400 CE it had vanished altogether, and the era of Alexandrian scholarship came to an end a few years later. But the memory of the ancient Library of Alexandria lived on. It continued to inspire scholars and humanists everywhere. The reputation of the Musaeum as a venue of knowledge and learning spread through the centuries. Many dreamt of one day reviving the great Alexandrian Library. In some sense, the Alexandrian Library was the forerunner of today's great national and university libraries, since its mission was to collect all the important works of Hellenic civilization.

There is one further aspect of the Alexandrian Library Musaeum and its “cultivation of the muses” that’s important to mention regrading the meaning of the Tower of Song’s “Musekal-Memorial Library & Imaginal Museum.” Inscribed over the entrance of the chamber of oldest library of the ancient world (in Egypt), the following enigmatic words: “THE PLACE OF THE CURE OF SOUL.” The words “psycheis therapeia” denote “the dwelling or workshop where the Ka [soul] resides and where it operates.” This is why some translate the enigmatic inscription as “The Hospital of the Soul.” Thus, if we go back far enough in the history of libraries, we can re-vision what we today understand as a “library”—what it really is and what it is for. In the final analysis, it is the “House of Soul,” a special place where is kept not only a storehouse of memory (memoria) and the “home of the muses” but also a hospital for “the cure/care of soul” (which is the original meaning of “psycho-therapy;” and thus the “cure/care of soul” may be synonymous to the “cultivation of the muses.”). This makes sense, since, concerning the Alexandrian Library, the greatest librarian of the ancient world was Hypatia, who was not only called “The Philosopher” (of Neoplatonic philosophy) but also “The Nurse”—for the “cure/care of soul.” Thus, the following equation can be made: libraries = muses = goddesses = angels = memory = wisdom = care of soul.

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Why a Mus-e-kal Library? A Note on the Muses and Libraries

Muses and libraries were clearly considered a natural association by the first century BCE. The relationship was most fostered by the library at Alexandria, which had its own museum with its own statuary muses. The dates are significant. The library at Alexandria was established at the beginning of the third century BCE. Plato, in the fourth century BCE, sets up one of the first, if not the first, “mouseion” (museum). Within Plato's Academy at Athens, there is an altar to the Muses and another to Hermes. Here, it can be seen that Plato feels the necessity of surrounding himself and his school with the reinforcers of memory and hence learning. This union of the muses and learning continued throughout classical antiquity.

The Muses were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory). They presided over song, and prompted the memory. They were nine in number, and each of whom presided over a particular department of literature, art, or science. Therefore, while it is true about the Library of Alexandria that “not a trace of it survives” (“The Vanished Library”), in another sense (or dimension) it truly does still survive—as the imaginal place, that archetypal library in the mind that the Gypsy Scholar calls the Tower of Song’s “Musekal-Memorial Library & Imaginal Museum.”

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The second real-world library that the Tower of Song library retains a memory of, that serves as a model for, is the hilltop library called the “Tour Magdala” in Southern France (the home of the troubadours). Legends say that Mary Magdalene came to southern France, after arriving on its coast by boat at Les Saintes Maries dela Mer (with the Grail Cup, and thus imitating the romance literature of the Holy Grail). Her name and memory are all over the Languedoc region, especially at the hilltop village of Rennes-le-Chateau, where over a 100 years ago the Abbe Saunière built the Tour Magdala that he dedicated—as well as the church—to Mary Magdalene. It is said that the Tower of Magdala was built over a cave that descends into the earth. Both the tower and church were built on an ancient temple site to the goddess Isis. It is also believed that beneath them lies part of a magnificent Venus Temple covered with earth during the Deluge thousands of years ago. The hillside town of Rennes-le-Château is located in Languedoc (Southern France), the epicenter of troubadour activity. The little village has played a key historical role, both as the center of the troubadour-related Cathar heresy in the region and its subsequent suppression, as well as in traditions connected to the Templar movement and its complete annihilation. Archeological surface findings around the hilltop and the church suggest the area has long historical past including pre-Christian pagan religious sites and as a provincial center in the Greco-Roman period.

Here is a description of the Tour Magdala: “But what was this Tower Magdala for, other than for viewing the area? It was used as a library, yes, but it doesn’t look like a library. What it looks like is a symbol of something, a sample of greater splendor, say, a miniature of what Saunière was dreaming of. This is a tiny castle. A castle that suggests or leads to a larger castle, perhaps a ‘castle-in-the-air’ to those who have eyes to see, the castle in which the lost Magdalene could feel at home. Or perhaps it’s meant as a gateway to some sort of spiritual Grail Temple or Refuge, as others have speculated. Whatever, it may be significant that its door does not open to the outside. You must be inside Saunière’s park to climb up to the esplanade to enter the door. Does this symbolically convey that one must be an ‘insider’ to enter the Mystery? There is a well-known notion that the Gothic cathedrals were ‘books in stone,’ and possibly even ‘alchemical books in stone.’ It would seem that Saunière’s entire estate, but especially his tower, combine with his church to add up to some sort of non-verbal book. Which says, ‘let those who eyes to read, read.’”

This description of the Tower Magdala and its library is another key to the nature and function of the Tower of Song’s library. In short, “The Musekal-Memorial Library & Imaginal Museum” could be said to fit the description: “What it looks like is a symbol of something a sample of greater splendor, say, a miniature of what Saunière was dreaming of. This is a tiny castle. A castle that suggests or leads to a larger castle, perhaps a “castle-in-the-air” to those who have eyes to see ….” In other words, “The Musekal-Memorial Library & Imaginal Museum” could also be called “The Magdalene Musekal-Memorial Library”—that refuge or sanctuary, “where the poetic champions compose,” and, for feeling at home, that visionary “Retreat and View” (Van Morrison)—is actually, to the imaginal eye, a “book in stone.” (The archetypal “castle-in-the-air” has, with the modern technological invention of radio—that “revolutionary new force in modern life”—become a real phenomenon, defying the realist’s derogatory usage of the term. See the book The Empire of the Air for the “American visionaries whose imagination and dreams turned a hobbyists’ toy into radio, launching the modern communication age.”) To put it another way, the Tower of Song’s “Musekal-Memorial Library & Imaginal Museum” is “a symbol of something, a sample of greater splendor, say, a miniature of what” the Gypsy Scholar “was dreaming of.” This is why the Gypsy Scholar can say that “Our Dark Lady of the Romantic Tower of Song—Magdalene Sophia—is the Goddess-Muse of Eternal Wisdom & Wit and ancient Lonely-Tower Libraries.” [From “Re-Vision Radio Manifesto & Visionary Recital.”]

Yes, a “castle-in-the-air to those who have eyes to see”! Therefore, the question is, concerning the history of the “Tour Magdala” esoteric library in Southern France, the home of the troubadours: What was the Gypsy Scholar “dreaming of” when he began investigating the troubadour phenomenon and envisioned the Tower of Song and its “Musekal-Memorial Library & Imaginal Museum” for radio? [For a comprehensive view, for “those who have eyes to see” and want to “see what I mean” by the metaphorical title of the “Tower of Song” and its symbolic nature, go to the “Metaphorical Key to the Tower of Song” page.]

There is one more thing to be considered for a full view of the meaning of the Tower of Song and its “Musekal-Memorial library.” This is that the Tower Magdala library was not only a “temple of books” but also a “temple of love”—the Mari-Ishtar-Aphrodite “Temple of Love.” In medieval legend, Mary Magdalene is equated with Venus, goddess of love, beauty, and sensuality. [For “The Magdalene” as high-priestess of the Aphrodite-Dianic cult of love in Southern France, see subpage “Our Dark Lady.”] However, as fanciful as this may come across to the average person, there is a history of speculation regarding the relationship between libraries (and philosophy) and erotic love (eros).

A good place to start is at the beginning of Western philosophy with Socrates and the priestess Diotima, “the teacher of love,” whom Socrates claimed taught him everything he knew. Plato’s dialogue, The Symposium, records the drinking party in which Diotima appears and makes her famous speech on the inseparability of philosophy and eros. Then comes the Alexandrian Library and its legacy. Since the institution of the library in the Western world begins with the founding of the “Universal Library” and “Museum” at Alexandria by Plato's student Aristotle and his Peripatetic School, and since the beautiful and learned Hypatia resided there, we can make the connection between eros, philosophy, soul, and libraries. (“‘Give attention to the soul’ is a phrase that practically defines the whole teaching of Pythagoras and Socrates.” —Jacob Needleman) Therefore, the Gypsy Scholar would re-vision the “Magdalene Musekal-Memorial Library” as both temple of learning and love, with “Our Dark Lady of the Tower of Song” as an erotic librarian, guiding lovers to the secret places between the stacks. That's why everybody knows that “Our Dark Lady of the Tower of Song”—fusing the heights intellectuality with the depths of sexuality—gives good read! “The liberation of the Imagination is always an erotic event” —James Hillman)

The following essay on preserving public libraries came along after the fact to magnificently capture all the Gypsy Scholar has imagined about the Tower of Song’s “Magdalene Musekal-Memorial Library” as a temple of learning and love.

“I wonder how many people have fallen in love in a library. The place is a hotbed of romance. The sight of someone pouring over a book, devoted. The beatific inclination of the head. In no other pose does the human body look at once so strong and vulnerable, tense and at ease. Something beautifying happens to a person in the process of reading a book. There's the soft library light and the quiet helps too, but mainly it has to do with the act itself; the words, the ideas, transferring from one mind to another, and the recipient mind glowing like a smitten teenager. The library is a love nest, hot. You'd think they'ed shut the thing down. In New York, in fact, that's exactly what the powers have contemplated: shutting down the public libraries, permanently closing the local branches, or shortening the hours. What this amounts to, at the moment, is lost love in the city of New York. But with the economy falling apart everywhere, library closings could occur in any city. America without public libraries! Think of it. Where would you find the reader of your dreams? What such closings will mean is not merely the end of libraries but the end of books. Many people can perceive that end eventually, with or without public libraries. But the removal of libraries will speed the process hectically. The kid in Brooklyn, Queens or Houston, Texas who is inclined to read and finds no books available to him, will soon incline toward television or nothing. Books will become the special property of the rich or of oddballs, and reading will become a hobbyist activity equivalent to pinning butterflies on a page. In the term "public library" the emphasis is on the word public, an emphasis important to this country. In a set up like ours, the public library is an essential equal opportunity institution. Anybody, anywhere, can grace his mind—that is the deep and real romance of a library. Every book, on every shelf, in every stack holds the promise of more. The politicians talk of merely closing the libraries a couple of days a week, but that will kill them too. The beauty of the place is that its there, always there, waiting for everybody, open like a pair of arms. Closing the public libraries should not be lamented; it should be forbidden. People—all people—should rise in outrage and self-interest to keep the institution going forever. Picture him, picture her, poised over that book, the book that broke into their hearts and gave them life. Think of yourself at the moment of liberty, when the feelings of the book became your feelings, its thoughts your thoughts; its information yours—all in the marriage of true minds. There you were never lovelier.” —Roger Rosenblatt

ToS 4

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ToS 5

Top: Lady Philosophy Presenting Seven Liberal Arts to Boethius (Henri de Vulcop)

Bottom: Lady Philosophy offering wings to Boethius, so his mind can fly aloft (French School 15th c.)

Philosophy For The Masses & The National Love Affair With Philosophy

“Music has depth and attempts philosophical thought and meaning with discussion of infinity, eternity, and mortality.” (David Gilmore of Pink Floyd)

Jacob Needleman, Prof. of Philosophy (Harvard, Yale, San Francisco State,) writes in his book, The Heart of Philosophy [1982], that he wants to “show the place that great philosophical ideas can occupy in the everyday life of contemporary men and women….” He cannot overestimate the importance of “philosophy” in our times: “The love of meaning, the search for meaning, is the only real, objective force for good in the life of modern man. Everything else we hope for and wish for ourselves and our children depends on it…. Man cannot live without philosophy.…” Prof. Needleman believes that “There is a yearning in the human heart that is nourished only by real philosophy and without this nourishment man dies as surely as if he were deprived of food and air.” (Emphasis added)

In this introduction, Prof. Needleman asks the question: “Philosophy, Where Are You?” He explains that when he began teaching philosophy twenty years ago, his colleagues didn’t take him seriously. But he points out that this depreciation of the value of philosophy was part of the general cultural malaise: “But this part of the human psyche is not known in our culture…. As for people outside the academic profession, their matters were even worse. Anyone foolish enough to admit he was a philosopher invited either outright ridicule or else victimization ….”

This is a very unfortunate state of affairs, because of the “philosophical” nature of human life: “In human civilization, and in the individual life of every human being, behind every problem to be solved, there is a question of philosophy to be asked — and not only asked as we usually ask but to be pondered and live with as a reminder of something we've forgotten, something essential….”

However, at the time of writing his book, things have changed: “Things are different now. In fact, it is nothing short of remarkable to see what the word “philosophy” now invoke some people from all walks of life…. not a trace of ridicule…. Open today's newspaper and you will see: Events are becoming “philosophical.”

Traveling on the lecture circuit, Prof. Needleman discovers something astonishing to behold concerning “philosophy” in our time—a veritable “secret national love affair” with philosophy:

“I am astounded by how many successful men and women in our society seriously study philosophy in their youth…. Asked to speak about those studies of philosophy, they undergo a change. Certainly, their faces were young, and then, Justice suddenly, they smile sadly or cynically. Their numbers are truly astonishing. I feel as hough I encountered a secret national love affair…. It is not hard to see that these people are still carrying a torch.” (Emphasis added)

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Jack Bowen, a teacher of Philosophy, has written a book on the subject of philosophy with the catchy title If You Can Read This: The Philosophy of Bumper Stickers. [2010] Bowen has definitely brought the arcane subject of philosophy out of the Ivory Tower; indeed, he has literally brought it right into the streets! Talk about “popularizing” philosophy! Using car bumper sticker slogans as a lens to explore philosophy, Bowen wants to get people away from the idea that philosophy is some elite enterprise, fit only for guys in togas (referring to Plato and company) and guys in caps and gowns.

Below is a snippet the Gypsy Scholar transcribed form the interview with philosopher Bowen on KUSP radio. (April 11, 2010).

JB: Yeah, I think you're exactly right. And that's what got me going writing this book, because I realized people are doing philosophy all the time, and we don't need bumper stickers to tell us that. When we're talking about—we're talking politics and we're talking rights and duties and how we aught to distribute healthcare and money, we're talking philosophy. When we're talking about love and relationships, we're talking philosophy. Bumper stickers are just a really great catalyst for getting that going, because a typical bumper sticker is very catchy; it's got some rhetoric, often some sarcasm, but it really gets you engaged, and once your engaged you're willing and excited to talk about the issues behind it. (Emphasis added)

JB: As writer of pop-philosophy books, I'm hoping to show as many people as possible that it's not this thing with old stodgy men in the tall ivory towers of academia. I mean that's clearly being done in every discipline. But I want to show that philosophy is fun and it's accessible and its relevant in our current day, and there are philosophers from many different demographics and many different ages and that we're all capable and actually, I think, are core philosophers. (Emphasis added)

Interviewer: And it also suggests, I think, interestingly, that, you know, philosophy is fun. It can be entertaining, and that in the most intellectually challenging and interesting philosophy is also some of the most entertaining stuff out there. (Emphasis added)

JB: I would certainly think so!

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Prof. Christopher Phillips (who has taught at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania) is another academic philosopher who has brought philosophy out of the Ivory Tower—this time into the cafes! He is an award-winning scholar, author, sought after speaker, consultant and moderator. He is known best as a foremost specialist in the Socratic Method through his books, Socrates Cafe: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy [2001] and Six Questions of Socrates: A Modern Day Journey of Discovery through World Philosophy. [2004] His mission in writing and lecturing is to revive the love of questions that Socrates inspired long ago in ancient Athens. To this end, Prof. Phillips started what he called “Socrates Cafes,” which are Socratic discussion meetings in a variety of venues such as cafés, libraries, nursing homes, churches, schools, and prisons (where the gatherings are sometimes called “Philosophers' Clubs”). This is why Public Radio International called Phillips the “Johnny Appleseed of Philosophy.”

Dr. Phillips travels the world over holding dialogues with people of all walks of life. He encourages people to become “philosophers” themselves by asking questions like Socrates did “about the way one should live.” In this way, he believes, people can become our own best thinkers (with profound reflections on the meaning of love, friendship, work, growing old, death—“Life’s Big Questions”) and discover their own unique stories of wisdom. He says his goal is to inspire curiosity and wonder of a transformative sort, one that nurtures self-discovery, openness, empathy.

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These three professional philosophers, each in their own way (two of which start with Socrates and Plato), all demonstrate the desire to liberate "philosophy" from the specialist confines of academic departments and let it run wild in the world of everyday people. And this is because people “can’t live without philosophy” and “behind every problem to be solved there is a question of philosophy to be asked,” because “great philosophical ideas” are part of the “everyday life of contemporary men and women,” because “events are becoming philosophical,” because “people are doing philosophy all the time” by “talking philosophy” in all areas of their lives, because everyday people are themselves “core philosophers” without knowing it, and because, on top of all this, “philosophy is entertaining and fun.”

Given that this is the situation of “philosophy” in the world today, the Gypsy Scholar, a twenty-year veteran of radio, feels that his program—one which both educates and entertains—can be “philosophical,” because it's dedicated to the “life of the mind,” and because of a philosophical attitude to whatever topic is discussed. Thus, the Tower of Song program is about Ideas; the ideas in the music and, conversely, the music in the ideas.

However, the Gypsy Scholar has one minor misgiving concerning Dr. Phillips’ range of venues for philosophy discussion. The GS can't help but wonder why he leaves out “drinking party” for his “Socrates Cafe” venues, since that’s where Socrates did some of his best philosophizing [i.e., at the Symposium]! But, seriously, the Gypsy Scholar would want to see Dr. Phillips have “Socrates Cafes” in another venue apparently not yet utilized for philosophizing—a radio station! But, come to think about it, since the Dr. Phillips’ idea is for people to start their own Socrates Cafes, the Gypsy Scholar might have already started such when, back in the mid-1990s, he presented on radio his Essay-with-Soundtrack entitled “Notes Towards A Musekal Philosophy,” which focused on “philosophy” as Socrates and Plato conceived of it.

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A Footnote: Philosophy & Love

“You can call my love Sophia, / I call my love Philosophy.” -Van Morrison

Because Socrates defined philosophy as “the love of wisdom,” Jack Bowen makes the connection between “philosophy” and “love.” (This is probably having to do with the fact that in the Symposium Socrates invites Diotima, “the teacher of love,” to discourse on how love, eros, raises the philosopher the highest level of being.) The Gypsy Scholar was very pleased to hear this, because he remembered what he had written in one of his past musical essays, “The Troubadours & The Beloved:”

“Thus, since philosophy & love are so dialectically intermingled for the poets and minstrels of the Middle Ages, everybody knows by now that, in the final (mythopoetic) analysis, nobody knows whether the poet-philosophers are singing the praises of love, or the minstrel-lovers are discoursing on the virtues of philosophy.”

Now, the Gypsy Scholar might be faulted for gross exaggeration here, if it weren't for the fact that (a) he’s already cited philosopher Jacob Needleman in declaring he discovered “secret national love affair with philosophy” and that the sheer excitement some people demonstrated for their once youthful love of philosophy indicated that “these people are still carrying a torch;” (b) there are professional philosophers themselves who declare their relationship with philosophy as a “falling in love” The book, Falling in Love with Wisdom: American Philosophers Talk About Their Calling, edited by Karnos and Shoemaker [1993], presents sixty-four memoirs by academic philosophers on their love of philosophy. One statement in the collection stands out for the Gypsy Scholar: “I sometimes think that one becomes a philosopher the same way one becomes … a lover ….” (It should be noted that in both the Greek philosophical tradition and the later Judeo-Christian tradition wisdom was personified as female; e.g., “Sophia,” or “ Lady Wisdom.”)

As for the Gypsy Scholar’s own secret love affair with “Lady Philosophy,” he, too, studied philosophy as a young student—and now he’s “still carrying a torch.”

I'm carryin' a torch for you
I'm carryin' a torch
You know how much it costs
To keep carryin' a torch

Flame of love it burns so bright
That is my desire
Keep on liftin' me, liftin' me up
Higher and higher

You're the keeper of the flame
And you burn so bright
Baby why don't we re-connect
Move into the light

I've been going to and fro on this
And I'm still carryin' a torch
You must know how much it's worth
When I'm carryin' a torch (alright)

Baby you're the keeper of the flame
And you burn so bright
Why, why, why, why, why, why

Don't we re-connect
And move on further, into the light

Cause I'm carryin' a torch (yeah)
Cause I'm carryin' a torch (yeah)

Van Morrison, 'Carrying A Torch'

Anchor 6

A Note on the Dating of Beltane

Because the dating of the Celtic Beltane festival can be confusing to the general public, the following explanation is offered.

Beltane (the Celtic May Day known in Ireland as “Old May”) is a mid-Spring seasonal festival welcoming in the summer. It is celebrated (in the Northern Hemisphere) on the eve of May 1st (since the Celts marked the new day at sunset). This has become, in the modern period, the customary date on which Beltane begins. However, this festival date (like the other three “cross-quarter” festival dates on the four-spoked “Celtic Wheel of the Year”) is not a precise date on our solar calendar. This has to do with calendrical changes; (a) the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar and (b) the Celtic use of a lunisolar calendar. Thus, the dates of the festival are different depending on which Celtic country it's celebrated in. For example, in Ireland Beltane began the evening of the 11th of May, while Scotland it was commonly celebrated on the 15th of May. Before the use of calendars, it is said that many Paleo-Celtic peoples celebrated Beltane when the first pinky-white blossoms of the sacred hawthorn tree (also known as “the May”) blossomed during this month in Ireland and the British Isles.

Again, these different calendar dates marking the time of Beltane are due to various calendrical changes down through the centuries. However, besides the “Fixed Date” on the calendar (“Calendar Beltane”), there is a second method of dating, which is the “Astrological Date” and is called “True Beltane,” because it’s astronomically accurate. Thus, the calendar date of Beltane is not the same as its astrological date. Beltane in this astrological calculation occurs when the Sun is at 15° Taurus, the exact astronomical midpoint between the Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice, or the full moon nearest this point. (This means that Beltane is not just a day in duration, because in astrology a date is never just a date but a degree of the Zodiac. Thus, the celebration of Beltane was not traditionally just one day, as it is now customarily celebrated. Historically, in many locales the celebration of either Beltane or May Day lasted anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks and, it some locales, an entire month, thus the famous British appellation: “The Merrie, Merrie Month of May.”) Hence, the “True Beltane” falls around May 4th eve and May 5th, but even this can vary from year to year. (It should be mentioned that there is also “Astronomical Beltane,” which occurs when the constellation Pleiades can be seen on the dawn horizon. It is said that the ancient Celts, who were well-versed in astronomy, would have been aware of changes to the stars that heralded a change in seasons. Thus, they knew the time of Beltane was near when they saw the rising of the constellation Pleiades on the dawn horizon. The Pleiades are also known as the Seven Sisters and the first born and most beautiful of the Sisters is named “Maia,” from whom the month of May is named.)

That said, trying to pin down the “real” date of when the ancient Celts celebrated Beltane is impossible. However, since the Celtic year was based on both lunar and solar cycles (a lunisolar calendar), it is possible that the holiday was celebrated on the full moon nearest the midpoint between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice; i.e., the full moon of Taurus as it passes through Scorpio. (The first full moon in May is called “Lunar Beltane.”) This astrological date has long been considered a “power point” of the Zodiac. Again, this date, like all astrologically determined dates, may vary by a day or two depending on the year. However, it may be calculated by determining the date on which the sun is at 15° Taurus, usually around May 5th. Therefore, astrologically calculated, Beltane occurs in the mid-point of Taurus, when the Sun reaches 15° degrees Taurus. (It should be pointed out that the “Fixed Date” was a later development in calculating when to celebrate Beltane. The early Celts used their Coligney calendar, a lunisolar calendar, which was different from our Gregorian calendar. Prior to this, because of the change from the Roman Julian to the Gregorian calendar, Beltane fell on May 13th or 14th. Actually, there is nothing astronomically significant about the May 1st date, nor was it significant to the ancient Celts, since it’s based on the Gregorian calendar which was only invented in 1582 CE., when Pope Gregory XIII moved the date backwards by 11 days in most European countries. Overnight, May 12th became May 1st. To add to the complication of the dating of Beltane, England and America did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752. Furthermore, in Medieval and Renaissance times, these Beltane celebrations took place 11 to 15 days later in the season, at a time when the weather was noticeably warmer, dryer, and when many more spring flowers bloomed.)

Concerning the astrological dating of Beltane (“True Beltane,” May 4th or 5th) Celtic folklorists call it Beltane O.S. for “Old Style” and neopagan Wiccans often refer to this date as “Old Beltane.” (The neopagan or Wiccan calendar is closely intertwined with astrology.) However, within the neopagan community there are different schools of thought about when exactly Beltane is supposed to be celebrated. Furthermore, even if there were general agreement on the “Fixed Date“ of May 1st, discrepancies in the actual time of celebration arise because of convenience only. Hence, one can find this or that neopagan group celebrating on a weekend before or after May 1st, if Beltane falls on a weekday.

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Beltane on the Celtic Wheel of the Year

In ancient Celtic times, the four-spoked Wheel of the Year honored the turning of the seasons in the Northern Hemisphere. (The modern, Neo-Pagan Wheel of the Year is eight-spoked, adding the two equinoxes and two solstices.) These four major seasonal points on the Wheel of the Year are known as “cross-quarter” days and recognized by the ancient Celts as “Gates of Power” and, therefore, magical times. Still celebrated today for their imaginal power, these “fire festival” days are Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane, and Lughnasadh. These were traditionally celebrated on the calendar “Fixed Dates” of the eve of October 1st, February 1st, May 1st, and August 1st respectively. There are also the precise “Astrological Dates” of the festivals, which were periods when the sun was at the midpoint of the fixed signs; i.e., Scorpio, Aquarius, Taurus, and Leo. They always occur when the Sun is at the midpoint of 15º of a fixed sign. (For more information on the complex methods of the dating of Beltane, see my accompanying “A Note on the Dating of Beltane.”)

The ancient Celtic peoples found the mid-point of the fixed signs to be magical and called them the “Gates of Power,” the most potent moments for transformation. Astrologically speaking, the Beltane “Gate of Power” occurs in the mid-point of the Earth-sign Taurus, which technically occurs either May 4th or May 5th when the Sun reaches 15 º Taurus. Beltane falls exactly between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice, with the Sun in Taurus, exactly at the opposite end of the ceremonial year to Samhain (our Halloween) and celebrates life as Samhain honors death. (This is because to ancient Celts divided the year into two basic seasons, the dark half and the light half. The dark half began with Samhain and the light half with Beltane. More on this will be found below.)

It is said that the ancient Celts called the cross-quarter festival “Beltane” (or Beltaine), from the ancient word for “bright fire” which honored the god Bel, the god of solar light. Thus, Beltane is sometimes literally translated as “bright” or “brilliant fire,” and is supposed to refer to the bonfires lit by a presiding Druid in honor of a proto-Celtic god variously known as Bel, or Belenos. (The actual translation of the word is debatable. Scholars agree that taine or teine means “fire” because the word is used to express fire today in both the Scottish and Irish Gaelic languages. The first syllable, Beal or Bel is not clearly defined. One theory is that the festival is named after the Celtic god Bel, also known as Beli, or Belenus. While the second part of Irish Beltaine and Scottish Bealtuinn dearly means “fire,” from the old Celtic word teine, linguists are uncertain as to whether Bel refers to Belenos, the Gaulish Apollo, or is simply derived from bel, meaning “brilliant.” Another theory says it might even derive from bil tene, or “lucky fire,” because the jump between two Beltaine fires was sure to bring good fortune, health to your livestock, and prosperity. However, most scholars agree that the old Irish “Beletene” means “bright fire.” Therefore, “Beltaine” probably means “fires of Bel.” Beal, the Gaelic word for “shining one” or “brilliant,” gives Beltane the meaning of “brilliant fire.” The Gaelic “Bealtaine” means the month of May.)

In Irish Gaelic the month is known as Bealtaine and the festival as Lá Bealtaine (“day of Bealtaine” or, “May Day”). In Scottish Gaelic the month is known as either an Cèitean or a' Mhàigh and the festival is known as Latha Bealltainn or simply Bealltainn. As an ancient Gaelic festival, Bealtaine was celebrated in Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. There were similar festivals held at the same time in the other Celtic countries of Wales, Brittany, and Cornwall. Due to the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, Bealltainn in Scotland was commonly celebrated on the 15th of May while in Ireland Sean Bhealtain / “Old May” began about the night of the 11th of May. The lighting of bonfires on Oidhche Bhealtaine (“the eve of Bealtaine”) on mountains and hills of ritual and political significance was one of the main activities of the festival. In modern Scottish Gaelic, Latha Buidhe Bealtuinn (“the yellow day of Bealltain”) is used to describe the first day of May. This term Lá Buidhe Bealtaine is also used in Irish and is translated as “Bright May Day.” In Ireland it is referred to in a common folk tale as Luan Lae Bealtaine; the first day of the week (Monday/Luan) is added to emphasize the first day of summer.

However, astrologically speaking, the May 5th date has long been considered a “power point” of the Zodiac and is symbolized by one of the four main symbols of the constellations, Taurus the Bull. Astrologers know these four figures as the symbols of the four fixed signs of the Zodiac (Scorpio, Aquarius Taurus, Leo), and these naturally align with the four “Great Sabbats” of the neopagan religion of Wicca. Some say that wherever one is in the world and whatever tradition one follows this date is still a “power point,” celebrated many places in the Latin world; for example, as Cinco de Mayo, May Day and other holidays.

For the ancient Celts, time was circular rather than linear, and their calendar was both solar and lunar (i.e., lunisolar). This is reflected in their commencing each day, and each festival, at sunset rather than dawn, a custom comparable with that of the Jewish Sabbath. Caesar confirms this by an explanation in his Conquest of Gaul: “The Gauls claim all to be descended from Father Dis (a god of death, darkness, and the underworld), declaring that this is the tradition preserved by the Druids. For this reason, they measure periods of time not by days but by nights; and in celebrating birthdays, the first of the month, and New Year’s day, they go on the principle that the day begins at night.” (Gauls were ancient Celtic tribes of what is now France, Luxembourg, Belgium, most of Switzerland, and parts of Northern Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany.)

Thus, traditionally beginning on the night of May 1st (April 30th), Beltane is a mid-Spring festival about rebirth after the cold and dark of winter and the sprouting season of early spring, when plants are coming out of the ground, and young animals are being born. Anticipating the summer, it is a time to celebrate the rebirth of life, growth, love, and sexuality: “the force that drives the green fuse through the flower,” in the words of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

Of the four great cross-quarter festivals that turn the Celtic Wheel of the Year, the two greatest of these are said to be Samhain (October 1st) at the beginning of winter, and Beltane (May 1st, or May Day), the beginning of summer. Being opposite each other on the Celtic Wheel of the Year, they separate the year into halves, the dark and light halves. Samhain is recognized by some folklorists as the “Celtic New Year” (since the Celts marked the new year beginning with the dark half of the year and, concomitantly, recognized the new day beginning with the sunset) and is generally considered the more important of the two, though Beltane runs a close second. Indeed, in some areas (notably Wales) it is considered “the great holiday.” According to Celtic folklorists and neopagans, the ancient Celts were attuned to the time cycles of seasonal changes. They believed that Samhain is a good time to become more introspective and plant the seeds of new projects, allowing them to germinate over the winter months. On the other hand, they believed that Beltane is a time to embark on projects requiring courage and energy. It was a time for feasts and fairs, for the exuberant mating of not only the animals but also for people. And, like Samhain, because the veil between the worlds was at its thinnest, it was a time for travel between the worlds, from this world to the “Otherworld” (the realm of the Si or faerie folk). Beltane was also a magical time when the legendary poet Taliesin is said to manifest. Harsh climates throughout Europe and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, compounded by lack of food, supplies, and medicine, provided long and challenging months. Surviving these winter conditions of hardship with one’s life intact in the warmth and renewal of spring was indeed something to celebrate. On the eve of the “fire festival” of Beltane, bonfires were lit throughout the land to invoke protection for the crops and for the purification of farm animals for the coming year.

“. . .

Gotta get through January

Gotta get through February

Gotta get through January

Gotta get through February

Gotta get through January

Spring in my heart

Fire in my belly too

I come apart

I don't know just what to do

Got a heart and a mind

And a fire inside

And I'm crazy about you . . . ”

~ Van Morrison, “Fire In The Belly”

Anchor 8

The Troubadour Genre of the Alba & the Kalenda Maya

"Kalenda Maya" by Raimbaut de Vaqueiras

Kalends of May
Nor leafy spray
Nor songs of birds, nor flowers gay
Please me today
My Lady, nay,
Lest there’s a fine message I pray
From your loveliness, to relay
The pleasures new love and joy may
Display
And I’ll play
For you, true lady, I say,
And lay
By the way
The jealous ones, ere I go away.

My belle amie
Let it not be
That any man scorns me from jealousy,
He’d pay me,
Dearly indeed
If lovers were parted by such as he;
Never would I live happily,
No happiness without you I see;
I’d flee
Run free
No man would find me readily;
An end
Of me,
Fine Lady, were you lost utterly.

How could I lose her
Replace her ever
Any fine Lady, before I had her?
No beloved or lover
Is just a dreamer;
When he’s a lover, no more a suitor,
He has accrued a signal honour,
A sweet glance produces such colours;
Yet I here
Have never
Held you naked, nor any other;
Longed for,
Lived for,
You without pay, I have though, forever.

Should we part ever,
Sorrowful, my Beautiful Warrior,
For my heart never
Seems to deliver
Me from desire
Nor slakes it further;
Gives pleasure only to the slanderer
He, my lady, who finds no other
Joy, the man there
Who’d feel my utter
Loss, and thanks would offer,
And consider
Insolent starer
You, the one from whom I suffer.

Flowers so kindly,
Over all brightly,
Noble Beatrice, and grows so sweetly
Your Honour to me;
For as I see,
Value adorns your sovereignty,
And, to be sure, the sweetest speech;
Of gracious deeds you are the seed;
Verity,
Mercy,
You have: and great learning truly;
Bravery
Plainly,
Decked, with your generosity.

Lady so graced,
All acclaimed and have praised
Your worth with pleasure freighted;
Who forgets, instead,
May as well be dead,
I adore, you, the ever-exalted;
Since you have the kindest head,
And are best, and the worthiest bred,
I’ve flattered
I’ve served
More truly than Érec Énida.
Words are fled,
All is said,
Sweet Engles – my estampida.

Anonymous (10th Century)

With pale Phoebus, in the clear east, not yet bright,

aurora sheds, on earth, ethereal light:

While the watchman, to the idle, cries: ‘Arise!’

Dawn now breaks; sunlight rakes the swollen seas;

Ah, alas! It is he! See there, the shadows pass!

Behold, the heedless, torpid, yearn to try

And block the insidious entry, there they lie,

Whom the herald summons urging them to rise.

Dawn now breaks; sunlight rakes the swollen seas;

Ah, alas! It is he! See there, the shadows pass!

From Arcturus, the North Wind soon separates.

The star about the Pole conceals its bright rays.

Towards the east the Plough its brief journey makes.

Dawn now breaks; sunlight rakes the swollen seas;

Now, alas! It is he!

Giraut de Bornelh (c. 1138 - c.1215)

Glorious King, true light and clarity,

Lord God all powerful, if it please Thee,

help my companion faithfully, for I

have not seen him since night came on,

and soon it will be dawn.

Fair companion, do you sleep or wake?

Sleep no more, but get up gently,

for in the East the morning star rises,

bringing day—l can see it clearly—

and soon it will be dawn.

Fair companion, I call to you in song:

sleep no more, for the birds sing too,

seeking daylight through the woods,

and I fear some jealous fool might come,

for soon it will be dawn.

Fair companion, come to the window

and look at the stars in the heavens!

You shall see I’m a faithful messenger;

you must, or harm will come to you,

for soon it will be dawn.

Fair companion, I have not slept

since I left you, but remained on my knees

praying God, the son of Saint Mary,

to bring back your loyal companionship;

now soon it will be dawn.

Fair companion, outside on the stairs

you begged me not to be drowsy

but to watch all night till day came,

and now my song and presence displease you,

yet soon it will be dawn!

Fair sweet companion, so rich is my delight

that I wish dawn and day would never come,

for the gentlest lady ever born of mother

I now hold in my arms; what then care I

for jealous fools or dawn!

[This well-known alba is identified by the title Reis Glorios, “Glorious King”.]

Raimbaut de Vaqueiras (c. 1155 - c. 1207)

Keep a watch, watchman there, on the wall,

While the best, loveliest of them all

I have with me until the dawn.

For the day comes without our call,

New joys all,

Lost to the dawn,

The dawn, oh, the dawn!

Watch, friend, watch there, and call and cry,

I’m rich indeed, all I wish have I.

But now I’m vexed by the dawn,

And the sorrows, that day brings nigh,

Make me sigh,

More than the dawn

The dawn, oh, the dawn!

Keep a watch, watchman there, on the tower,

For your lord: jealously he holds power,

He’s more vexing than the dawn:

While words of love we speak here.

But our fear

Comes with the dawn,

The dawn, oh, the dawn!

Lady, adieu! No longer dare I stay;

Despite my wish, I must be away.

Yet heavily weighs the dawn,

How soon we’ll see the day;

To betray

Us, wills the dawn,

The dawn, oh, the dawn!

[An alternative translation has the second stanza read: “Stand sentinel, my friend, and keep watch and cry out and shout, for l am rich, and I have what I most desire. But I am dawn’s enemy, and the swindle that the day works on us displeases me more than the dawn.”]

Anonymous Albas (12th - 13th Century)

(Translation #1)

In a deep bower under a hawthorn-tree

The lady clings to her lover closely,

Till the watchman cries the dawn he sees,