Twists of fate:
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If it were true without qualification that madness is an evil, that
would be all very well, but in fact madness, provided it comes
as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the
greatest blessings. Take the prophetess at Delphi and the
priestesses at Dodona, for example, and consider all the
benefits which individuals and states in Greece have received
from them when they were in a state of frenzy, though their
usefulness in their sober senses amounts to little or nothing.
And if we were to include the Sibyl and others who by the use
of divine inspiration have set many inquirers on the right track
about the future, we should be telling at tedious length what
everyone knows. But this at least is worth pointing out, that
the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or
reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected
with it the name of the noblest of all arts, the art of discerning
the future, and called it the manic art...
In the next place, when ancient sins have given rise to severe maladies and troubles, which have afflicted the members of certain families, madness has appeared among them and by breaking forth into prophecy has brought relief by the appropriate means: by recourse, that is to say, to prayer and worship. It has discovered in rites of purification and initiation a way to make the sufferer well and to keep him well thereafter, and has provided for the man whose madness and possession were of the right type a way to escape the evils that beset him. The third type of possession and madness is possession by the Muses. When this seizes upon a gentle and virgin soul it rouses it to inspired expression in lyric or other sorts of poetry, and glorifies countless deeds of the heroes of old for the instruction of posterity. But if a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane companions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman. |
Exhibit B always gets me going--words of Melancholy Jaques in Shakespeare's As you like it (Act IV Sc. I):
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I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation, nor the musician's, which is fantastical, nor the courtier's, which is proud, nor the soldier's, which is ambitious, nor the lawyer's, which is politic, nor the lady's, which is nice, nor the lover's, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry's contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness. |
Most of the prodigious neo-Platonic musical output with which we're familiar revels in what would be called--by today's standards--psychological depression. But this sadness is just the most accessible level, and these pieces work their magic on many levels. The neo-Platonic subtext is as passionate, though perhaps as narrow, as that of the 60s counter-culture: In darkness let me dwell is only about despair to the extent that, say, Puff the magic dragon is only about a lizard. As I dig into successive levels I find myself wondering "Did they really believe this stuff?", and I'm struck with the many parallels to that counter-culture I also so immersed myself in. (Rosicrucian Brothers in the 1620s, Ken Kesey in the 1960s--the rumors flew but nobody really knew where they were.) With any movement for world harmony there is a core philosophy with its noble goal and ardent proponents, and there are also the inevitable hangers-on and poseurs.
Weelkes's Thule, period of cosmography is, I believe, a quintessential statement of the Elizabethan neo-Platonic mindset. The incipit is not so weird as it may appear: Thule is the mythic northern realm, and it's the meaning of "period" now used only in punctuation, so "Iceland, at the end of the earth". Or Greenland. Or perhaps even beyond--Martin Frobisher's well-chronicled voyages between 1576 and 1578 in search of the Northwest Passage had pushed public consciousness of this fabled spot of ultimate bleakness as far as he had gotten--Baffin Island, Canada. It was a time of great change, and the song's text speaks of many of these newly-discovered wonders of the world, using all the musical devices of the era to reinforce the message, e.g., the sudden chromaticism along with "...how strangely Fogo burns" (Fogo is a volcano in the Canary Islands). But each verse ends with the couplet, "These things seem wondrous, yet more wondrous I/ Whose heart with fear doth freeze, with love doth fry." It seems on the surface like a ridiculous conceit, but it is a passionate statement of the Platonist cosmology, the macrocosm in microcosm--all the patterns of the universe, accessible through the frenzy of melancholy, are reflected in the human heart.
But no composer is more associated with the image of melancholy than John Dowland. He wrapped himself in it and its highly metaphoric and evocative language. It certainly appears that Dowland deeply tapped into alchemical and numerological allusions in his music, but if he did, there is no evidence that he ever practiced or even read about any of the Hermetic arts on which the allusions are based. He was an educated man, regarded as the finest lutenist in England, but he did not travel in the circles of the great neo-Platonists of the day--John Dee, Philip Sydney, Robert Fludd. He was a sensitive but naive man, who converted to Catholicism at a highly impolitic time to do so in England, and then journeyed through some of the more religiously intolerant areas of Europe just as the intrigues that ignited the Thirty Years War were about to boil over. Although there are musicologists and performers who wax passionate about the "Orphic resonances" in Dowland's music, it's hard to find any corroboration for his having explicitly put them in. Dowland was for most of his life bitter about not achieving the fame he felt he deserved--Elizabeth never appointed him Court Musician. Ultimately her successor James did, and Dowland curiously stopped dwelling in his darkness. But while he did dwell in it he milked it for all it was worth, and fortunately for posterity, psychopharmacology was still in its infancy.
Let's start at the beginning, though, with the four humours, which the Greeks believed determined one's constitution: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. According to Galen, and pretty much every other doctor since then until the dawn of modern medicine, these four fluids had to be in balance for a person to be healthy. It may seem ridiculously simplistic nowadays, but it was taken as fact for only about 25 centuries, and really, how far are we from such a taxonomy with our Meyers-Briggs scale and other such inventories? Anyway, those four humors determine the four temperaments: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic (melancholy means "black bile", the prefix melano-, as in melanin, meaning dark), and the fluids to which they refer were often physically extracted by medical professionals--well into the last century--if a surplus was deemed to be causing poor health. Except for black bile. Because, aside from the occasional foul pus that might drain from a long-infected wound, there was no such bodily fluid understood really to be produced by any organ. Melancholy was an odd humor, but it made sense: It had no real fluid, but then it also had no physical symptomatology either. The overly sanguine person was lusty, the choleric angry, the phlegmatic slow. But the melancholic was, well, troubled. Melancholy--what we would now call bipolar disorder, depression and mania--was an imbalance of the mind that had no single outward manifestation. And it still doesn't.
The Greeks were as perplexed by this odd humor--that didn't fit in but then neither did those most afflicted by it--as we are today. If excess of this fluid is so bad, well it's right there in Aristotle's Problem XXX: "Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry, or the arts are melancholic?" Aristotle did not have an answer. His teacher, Plato, does not seem to have ever asked the question. What Plato did, to get his name affixed to this philosophy, in one Socratic dialogue, the Phaedrus, and it's not even the central issue, is note that true artists produce their work in a state of "divine frenzy" during which they are communicating intimately with their muses.
Melancholy became crucial to the original neo-Platonists, whose 3rd C. school at Alexandria--founded by Plotinus and serving up Plato with a revisionist spin in passionate defense against Aristotelians and Stoics--had a marked gnostic bent. Melancholy produced the frenzied state that would enable a person to commune with the fundamental divine spirit, the nous, and speak directly with the seraphim. This immanence and power of the nous, and the spheres radiating from the intimate depth of the soul and blending out into this spirit, were described in the Pimander of Hermes Trismegistus, the wisest of all sages, thought then to have been a contemporary of Moses. (It is, incidentally, this Hermes--not the Greek god--to whom the term "hermetic" refers.)
The Alexandrian neo-Platonists saw the cosmos as an intricate nest of spheres, each larger one more diffuse and more sublime. The outermost was God him-or-her-self (and no, that's not PC-speak--they considered God to be hermaphroditic). In the center, at the focus, mirroring the vast universe, was man, each of whose layers reflected the spheres and elements of the macrocosm, each progressively denser, down to the very core of his being. The least dense element was fire, associated with yellow bile and the choleric temperament, denser was air (associated with blood), then water (phlegm), and finally, at the very heart, earth, and the black bile of melancholy. And thus do so many alchemical allegories begin with this cosmic center, immutable and yet the progenitor of all things--rock.
The 15th C. Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino, fluent in Greek, translated the Pimander into Latin in 1471. It was so popular it went through 16 separate editions before Ficino died in 1499 and set off the Renaissance revival of Platonism. Platonism revived at that time, by the way, because it was only then that the great body of Plato's work arrived in the west as Greek scholars fled from Constantinople as it fell to the Turks in 1453. Thus was Ficino's curiosity aroused to learn Greek. But most important to the Platonist revival, Ficino expunged the black spot from melancholy that it had worn throughout the Middle Ages. It was, after all, depression. Which was sickness. Which was bad. Which was, therefore, the Devil's handiwork.
Ficino resolved Problem XXX. He reasoned, essentially, "There is deep bleakness, but there is also pure blinding light. Melancholy therefore has a dual nature." But how could that be? Since melancholy the humor was associated Classically with the element earth, this earth-melancholy object could, like any other earth object, just sit there--and this he considered to be the etiology of your basic garden-variety blues. But it could also catch fire, and the special ash of such spark is what propelled a man to invention, greatness, and cosmic understanding. Through the dark ages of Medieval Aristotelianism melancholy had been painted in severe, condemnatory tones. But now, oh now, it was sexy.
Ficino went further, proposing a taxonomy of melancholy:
| Level | Type | Ruler | Function |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mens imaginatio | Mars | Invention, creativity |
| 2 | Mens ratio | Jupiter | Discursive reasoning |
| 3 | Mens contemplatrix | Saturn | Transcendent intuition |
To Ficino's thinking--and it shows that he had not entirely thrown off the mantle of Medieval determinism--you were stuck with whatever level of melancholy you happened to evidence. But his followers, notably the German soldier-of-fortune Cornelius Agrippa, had a more dynamic conception. In Agrippa's three books on occult philosophy, modeled on Ficino's trilogy, he traced the evolution of the soul, through focus, reverence, and training, from the lowest level of melancholy to the highest. Though the first volume was published in 1531 and the whole thing finally in 1533, early, handwritten drafts of this work were circulating among German humanists in 1510, so it is likely that a copy fell into the hands of a Nuremburg artist who had tried, from the then current theory of art, to define beauty mathematically. A melancholic himself, the artist had given up in considerable despair. Thus was Albrecht Dürer captivated by the taxonomy of melancholy, and his 1514 etching Melencolia I took the Continent by storm. It went through at least two different printings in two years and was imitated in form and even some detail by artists well into the 18th C. Melancholy philosophers all over Europe were awed by the somber, brooding angel in that etching--unkempt, tools strewn about, magical symbols surrounding her--and said to themselves "yep, that's me."
What those depressed neo-Platonist philosophers did, propelled to hear the harmony of the spheres by the frenzy of melancholy, was discover modern science. Copernicus was a Platonist. So were Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. Galileo--OK, Galileo you'd have to call a Euclidean, but he became interested in Euclid in the first place because of the elevation of mathematics, considered the key to universal language, by Platonists. Platonists obsessively sought this harmony--a fundamental order of the universe--and they found it, although it was not as they expected it to be. That the order turned out to be different than their expectations only emboldened them, however. This was the turn of the 17th C. New facts, new worlds, were being discovered every day. Unlike the rigid Aristotelians, and troubling for a hegemonic Church with a revolt on its hands, Platonists were not intimidated by what they could not well categorize or control: to them, the richer the outer world, the richer, by reflection, the inner world. The man behind the English adventures into the Americas, for example, who learned the latest advances in mathematics and navigation while traveling in Bohemia (Europe's alchemical epicenter) and taught them to Sir Francis Drake, who invented the term "Britannia" in conjuring up a foreign policy of empire-building, this was none other than neo-Platonist--alchemist--John Dee, Queen Elizabeth's court magician. It was a magical new world, and truly a new world order.
So where did the magic go? In Music in Renaissance Magic, Gary Tomlinson points out the cleavage of nomos from logos that accompanied the musical and scientific advances of the 17th C., the separation of the names of things--and the verbal and numerical tools to examine them--from the magnificent order of things themselves, and he sees in this the modern episteme supplanting that of the Renaissance. A world of specialization slowly but inexorably separates from a world in which everything is connected. This is not so much an explanation for the disappearance of magic, however, as a description of it. Besides, Platonism did not call it quits with Galileo. Universal harmonies were still sought and theorized by philosophers from Mersenne to Newton, into the 18th C., and they echo in the determinism of the 19th C. and unified field theory of the 20th.
Yes, there was a "disturbance in the force" in the 17th C., but it had been noticed for some time. Music theorists had been wrestling with the mathematical irregularities of musical scales well before Galileo, or even his father Vincenzio, whose experiments with the intonation of strings as a function of their lengths, tension, and thickness (accomplished with strings of various sizes with weights tied on their ends) gave young Galileo the idea of a physics of forces that governed periodic motion. Things were already not coming out even. Yet somewhere soon after Galileo the explicit appeal to and of magic stops. The intimate, spiritually charged reflection of macrocosm and microcosm disappears in the mid-17th C.--and quickly--even though the fundamental postulates of Renaissance magic, spelled out in the opening words of Agrippa's De occulta philosophia are as valid in Newton's cosmology as Ptolemy's:
Which is to say, there is a deep and meaningful order, it is discoverable and expressible, and it works. This is still the passion that drives scientists today.
In Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England, Penelope Gouk contends that the disappearance of magic from philosophical discourse was related to the rise of an experimental idiom in which the magus's quest for personal discovery was supplanted by a goal of disclosure for public good. She also notes how closely scientific discovery was coupled with musical theory and practice--in particular Newton's conception of the inverse-square law of universal gravitation coming to him as an analogy with the mathematics of musical pitch and string tension--and that the importance of music to royalty, the ultimate source of funding for scientific inquiry, declined steadily through the 17th C. These are insightful observations, but they seem to me to beg the question. Why did all these things happen?
I have an hypothesis, which I think often about making the focus of PhD research when I retire, so I would love to find out that this has already been looked into, if anybody happens to know. It would save me considerable effort and expense. I could always go back to that performance degree, which I never did finish.
The horrors of the Thirty Years' War deeply shook the Platonic order, indeed laid waste to the jewel of Bohemia which had so nurtured it, but that only dispersed the frenzied faithful to other lands. What seems to me to have done in the magic is, ironically, the very commerce it inspired. Because commerce is risky business. And so a new industry ultimately came along to manage this risk. It was and still is called--insurance. And it had a new mathematics--the theory of probability. What that industry and that mathematics gave the world was an entirely new epistemology. Why might some voyages bring riches and others ruin? The old answer--the Platonic answer--had been Fate, with a capital F. One's travels through the world might invoke the curiosity of the gods, and thence their favor or their wrath, but if something happened there was at the bottom of it something you did. There was a connection, a reason; there was meaning in every outcome.
The new math--statistics--changed all that, and it conjured the stochastic universe we live in today. A universe in which a person is no longer the intense solitary microcosm reflecting all the glory of the macrocosm. The universe has ceased to be personal. It is a sea in which everything travels in vast schools. Individual events are the product of processes that involve hundreds, thousands, millions of similar situations and classes in which there is statistical fluctuation, randomness. Some airplanes will drop from the sky; some people will make a fortune in the stock market. And after the fact we may attribute a cause. Or not. Doesn't matter. There is no meaning in the individual event, in any individual event. And besides, we understand the rules of the great cosmic game now, we know the odds, so we don't have to cower in awe of the hand and magic of God any longer. We are, after all, insured.
Activity "for the public good" only begins to make philosophical sense in the context of a stochastic universe, that is, in a cosmology that makes the paradigm shift from the individual to the group. It is the population-focused--as opposed to the individual-focused--mindset that makes possible Enlightenment notions like utilitarianism and social contract that form the basis of modern political philosophy. And in such a universe the intimacy of musical ecstasy really isn't so important. Bach witnessed this change, and he lamented what he saw: It's not about ecstasy any more, it's about money.
This paradigm shift is well reflected (reflection being important to us Platonists) in the evolution of one of the commonest of pastimes. In the beginning, philosophically, there was the tarot deck; its purpose was (still is) to understand one's condition and one's choices--the meaning of one's life--and the extent to which it can do so depends on the degree to which you believe that all patterns that arise in nature are reflected in the patterns of the soul. What tarot turned into, of course, is playing cards, whose function is actually the principal reason the great mid-17th C. French mathematicians (Mersenne, Fermat, Pascal) became fascinated with probability in the first place: gambling. But the major arcana, the most potent forces of the tarot deck--the tower, the hierophant, the sun, moon, wheel of fortune, the magician--are all gone. Except for one: the fool. The joker. And it's interesting to note what the modern episteme has made of him. He is portrayed as a mere cartoon, but he's still the most powerful card in the deck.
A probabilistic world is deathly toxic to Platonism and melancholy, because the Platonic system is all about harmonies; it's all about meaning. Platonism seeks the fundamental patterns of the cosmos. There is no place is such a system for "random". There is the entire cosmos, and there is each individual soul; there are no statistical populations. Can we imagine what such a cosmology was like, a world in which a learned person might (and a few did) set out to know everything, because everything was related? We don't think that way now, obviously. We live in a world of abstractions and symbols, which may mean whatever we wish. Names for us are not integral qualities of things, they are simply labels. The most hallowed instruments of our age--computers--perform their wizardry because they can play with the names of the names of the names of things in Byzantinely self-referential ways. We are long removed from that age of complete interconnectedness, but the sensory experience of that cosmology is still there for us, in the magic, because the Hermetics left such a tangible record of it. Music was at the heart of it all, and that earthly reflection of the harmony of the spheres still has the power to transport us into oneness with the universe. The magic is still there now as then--if you open yourself to it.
© Ken Perlow, 11 January 2000