On Revelry, Revelation & Intrinsic Goods
The first of our original “instructions seem so simple: to be grateful…and enjoy life.”(OI, Ausubel, 2007, xxii) These “two things were told to us: to be thankful… And the other thing they said was enjoy life. That’s a rule, a law – enjoy life – you’re supposed to.”(OI, Lyons, 25)
Like the traditional thanksgiving, we should start with “what every one who is sane in the world should agree on”…”that we see one another;” that “we need each other,” “and it’s good to see them here…were grateful and thankful there are other people in the world…it’s a good thing.”(OI, Mohawk, 49) “We do this speech at the beginning and the end of every meeting because people need to be reminded of that.” (OI, Mohawk, 50) “Everybody in the world ought to be able to agree that we depend on those things” and give thanks for all, including the “grasses, waters, trees, plants, winds, the moon, the stars, the sun, the universe, the whole thing.”(OI, Mohawk, 50) Again, “thanks that is beyond the ability of words to express,”(OI, Ausubel, 2007, xxiii)
“Their joy was not in possession or status or power, but in each other, in the warmth and closeness of their hearts, in humor and laughter, the stories of the old ones, and the play and growing of the children, doing the task at hand well and carefully, in the beauty of the earth in all weather and all seasons…living in a circle and guided by the Original Instructions.”(OI, p.8)
“Native food traditions honor food with prayer and story, with song and dance.”(OI, Nelson, 181) “All of the work is done to music. When the work is over they dance around the fields, ending in a party.” (OI, Rivera , 200) “everything points to the healing dance. It’s like the central metaphor. All the stories refer to it…the metaphor of healing and of opening your heart.” (OI, Biesele et.al.,77)
“If there are two people who are not getting along with each other, in the healing dance, they try to put these two people next to each other so that they can come into harmony by dancing together.” (OI, Biesele et.al.,76) “The dance is to cure what we think of as physical illness, but most of all it’s to cure problems between people because those are the worst kinds of illnesses that there are.” (OI, Biesele et.al.,77)
“They are metaphors, they’re moving metaphors of our relationship to place.” (OI, Martinez et.al, 99) In this way, “All of our senses are involved in this essential and blessed act of eating food.” (OI, Nelson, 181) “We Andeans don’t pray. We dance.” (OI, Rivera, 200)
Or, as the I Ching puts it, “One should treasure and enjoy a time of abundance.”(I Ching, 436) Remember that intrinsic goods have their season, and both abundance and scarcity come and go in waves.(I Ching, p. 410) The challenge is to appreciate all such goods as we experience them, “to treasure and use well the plentitude and to sustain the state of abundance as long as possible.”(I Ching, p.440) For “after abundance there is decline,”(I Ching, p.436) as surely as winter will follow summer. So “Such a time of abundance should be treasured and well used,”(I Ching, 433) for “tremendous abundance cannot last very long.”(I Ching, p.433) For “A decline after extreme abundance is the law of Nature, like the waxing and waning of the moon. However, in human affairs we can delay the coming of decline by careful management. When a relationship or a business is in a period of abundance and prosperity, great caution should be taken to prevent disharmony and overdoing. People become used to the easy situation, but they may neglect the law of cause and effect.”(I Ching, p.436)
“The religion of the ancient Greeks too was a ‘danced religion,’(Ehrenreich, p.251) as has been true of folk religions from many times and places.
What are sometimes called sacred mystery cults, these primal spiritual traditions were characterized by wine, music, and dance, employed to remove inhibitions, to liberate the individual from social constraints, and thus return them to a natural state. Seen to be secretive, from outside looking in, this was not the sense of the word secret as we typically think of it, as if some are keeping secrets from others, but in the sense that the experience could not be understood in linguistic form, but is an understanding reserved only for those who experience it, and then only for the worthy. Such traditions understood the revelation of truth to be purely experiential, an inner phenomena or “rushing progression of understanding” that is beyond words altogether, as is for instance, love. Far from a mere spectacle to be read or watched from outside-looking-in, music, dance, and poetry were understood only from within the experience.
The Bagavad Gita puts it this way:
“what we read are only words. We cannot know the taste of a fruit or of a wine by reading words about them; we must eat the fruit and drink the wine.”
For this reason, participants were required to go through a process of moral initiation to make right the wrongs in their lives before they could take part in the ceremonies and processions.
Like “The seers of the Upanishads [who] did not establish a Church, or found a definite religion…the seers of the Spirit in all religions agree that communion with the Highest is not a problem of words but of life.”(Bagavad Gita, p.17)
One of the most widely practiced of these mystery traditions was called the Dionysian mysteries, practiced from 1500 BCE by Mycenean, Minoan and Thracian Greeks, but were still popular in the golden age of Athens, in 5th century BCE. Dionysus was said to be the god of the grape harvest, of wine, and of epiphany. “Dionysus…did not ask his followers for their belief or faith; he called on them to apprehend him directly.”(Ehrenreich, p.256) Greek mythology tells Dionysus to have been an androgynous male who came from the east and/or the south to free his followers from self-conscious fear and care and to protect those who do not belong to conventional society. For this reason, mystery religions were thought to subvert the oppressive restraints of the powerful.
“Women, above all, responded to Dionysus’ call”… and (like Jesus) “Dionysus had a special appeal to the women of the Greek city-state, who were ordinarily excluded from much of public life.”(p.34) Both represented “A feminine, or androgynous, spirit of playfulness versus the cold principle of patriarchal authority.”(p.55) “The most notorious feminine form of Dionysian worship, the oreibaia, or winter dance,” “looks to modern eyes like a crude pantomime of feminist revolt.”(p.35) But this practice is better understood as an attempt to “achieve a state of mind the Greeks called euthousiansmos – literally, having the god within oneself.”(p.35)
Emile Durkheim claims it is the ecstasy of dance that “defines the sacred and sets it apart from daily life…”(p.39, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p.250) “…something we might call meaning or transcendent insight. In ancient Dionysian forms of worship the moment of maximum ‘madness’ and revelry was also the sacred climax of the rite, at which the individual achieved communion with the divinity and a glimpse of personal immortality.”(p.95)
Whereas many of us have learned to pray for what we want, primal and indigenous peoples would pray to express appreciation for all they have. For all the struggles and suffering that the body endures, it can also taste the most delicious fruits, smell that scents of flowers, hear the sounds of music, touch and be touched by a lover, and see the beauty of both the physical and the metaphysical world. If life is an opportunity for humans to touch the divine, it is ironically through our mortal bodies that we experience and best appreciate this paradise or heaven. (Indeed, as Brad Pitt’s Achilles suggests in the film Troy, “the gods envy us!”)
Music was understood by the ancients in its broadest possible sense, as any of the arts or sciences that came under the power of the muses (mythical maidens who were the daughters of the heavenly Zeus, who represent the creative urge, and the earthly Mnemosyne, who represent human memory). The muses had the power to inspire humans to remember their divine origins. In its literal sense, music meant 'remembered inspiration', or epiphany.
Music was considered synonymous with order and proportion, and an understanding of it seemed to be the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe. Discovery of the musical intervals by Pythagoras in 582-507 BCE affirmed this view, as his discoveries revealed the mathematical ratios of the melodic intervals that gave rise to an understanding of the rational basis for musical theory. This understanding of the order underlying music allowed ancient seers to perceive the order underlying so much seeming chaos – what Pythagoras called the music of the spheres.
“Interestingly, the Greek word nomos, meaning ‘law’, also had the musical meaning of ‘melody’.”(Ehrenreich, p.24)
And while music consists of three things, words, harmony, and rhythm, Plato was careful to emphasize that harmony and rhythm must follow the words; they pick up where words leave off. The inarticulate sound and gestures of singing and dancing are what people resort to when so overcome with feelings that words cannot capture. Hence the reason that music was primarily considered in relation to literature, drama, and dance (an Athenian dramatist was responsible for writing the music and training the chorus, for instance, as well as for writing and staging the play).
The Greeks had an elaborate theory that drew out the relationship between various major or minor modes or scales and the moods and emotions that are associated with them. In the highest sense of the term music idealized the state of being in tune with the cosmic forces, having harmony between the physical and the metaphysical, and, thus being able to hear ‘the music of the spheres,’ which was integrally interconnected with immortality.
It's true that this sometimes had sexual overtones for the Greeks - for discourse is to the mind what intercourse is to the body, the means by which humans might reach the heights of human ecstasy, the moment when the humans meet the divine, where the material meets the spiritual, where the visible meets the invisible. This is the moment when human beings can, if properly purified in preparation for the experience, communicate with the divine, and fully participate in the ‘music of the spheres’. Call this orgasm, if you like, but the Greeks would like us to remember that what we these days think of as a purely physical experience, not only has psychological/spiritual components, but that there is an orgasmic state possible in a simple meeting of the minds, without any physical interaction at all. So to call these rites sexual, in the sense of the words as we typically understand it, is to underestimate its meaning. Platonic friendship is not a step back from intimacy, after all, but a step toward it.
True to their conviction that all living things have higher and lower potentials, and therefore healthier and unhealthier states of being, these primal Greeks aimed to understand the proper – i.e. healthy – function of music. Following Plato’s conviction that there is a right and wrong way to use words, so there is a right and wrong way to use music. It was understood to have a fundamental influence on both personal and social health and well being. And we are only now beginning to appreciate this medicinal value of the intrinsic goods of music and dance. *
This understanding of the role of music in health gave rise to certain linguistic images that are still familiar to us today. For instance, when a person is healthy and happy, they are thought to be like a well-tuned instrument. When they are tense, they are said to be high strung, and when they come apart they are said to be unstrung.
And so this state of proper attunement was understood to be the purpose of the dialectic method, the ultimate stage in the progressive refinement of the means by which ecstasy is ultimately reached, but it’s important to remember that wine, dancing, laughter, and even sex are all part of the whole of the art. But far from a mere spectacle to be watched from outside looking in, music, dance, poetry and even philosophy, were, like sexual intercourse, meant to be experienced intrinsically, from the inside looking out.
This conception of health as harmonious relations between the parts, whether that be physical, social, or ecological, is far better understood in many ancient cultures than it is in ours today, which perhaps accounts for the sad state of our educational methods. Plato held that the best education consisted of a balanced curriculum of music for the soul and gymnastics for the body. Music, in this sense, included everything we might consider to fall under the umbrella of a liberal education (although, curiously, while there were muses for lyric poetry, drama, dancing, and song, and even astronomy and history…but there were no muses for the visual arts, such as architecture, sculpture, and painting…although this didn’t seem to hold them back, as the Greeks excelled at all of these, as they did in most every form of creativity).
This is how our ancient betters would recommend we daily celebrate our great fortune in being alive – by way of these intrinsic goods that are means by which we grow from our lesser to our better selves, and are able to share in this magical experience in this heavenly place.
As Aeschylus (who was the lyric poet nearly jailed for revealing the mysteries) put it in his play, The Bacchae:
For his kingdom, it is there,
In the dancing and the prayer,
In the music and the laughter,
In the vanishing of care.
“Dionysus, whom the Romans called Bacchus – was a democratic god, accessible to the humble and mighty alike, and had jurisdiction over wine and vineyard…more spiritual responsibility was to preside over the orgeia…where his devotes danced themselves into a state of trance…”(p.34)
Many of our own cultures of origin (such as Christianity) have taught us to be suspicious of this kind of revelry as pagan, which carries the connotation for many that it somehow has the devil’s handprint on it. But in the Gospel of Thomas, when asked by his disciples, “When will the kingdom come?" – Jesus says, ‘the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, but some do not yet see it.’(Gospel of Thomas)
Far from an ‘immoral’ activity, the ancients pushed the limits of this ecstasy with a long an grueling process of moral purification prior to celebration, including talk, food, wine, music and dancing as a means of spiritual uplift, which became refined in time into poetry, drama, and philosophy. It was a multifaceted process that might include fasting and resolution of interpersonal conflict as the means by which the ultimate ecstasy of one’s highest potentials might be reached.
Indeed, these were the original pagans, and can teach us, if anyone can, that it is not depravity and decadence that motivates the love of such joyous celebration, as we have supposed, but rather full appreciation and gratitude for all that is heavenly here on this earth – where mind and body meet.
Socrates ultimately puts it this way:
“The purpose [of dialectic education] is to bring the two elements [mind and body] into tune with one another by adjusting the tension of each to the right pitch. So one who can apply to the soul both kinds of education blended in perfect proportion will be master of a nobler sort of musical harmony than was ever made by tuning the strings of the lyre."(Republic, p. 102)
And this ineffable nature of truth does not diminish the role of words in the dialectic process, but only emphasizes that words alone are not enough. Understanding resides in the soul, prior to words, and it is the soul that improves the body.
This is why, Socrates says, we need a better understanding of human nature if we hope for a better form of education. For "education is not in reality what some people proclaim it to be in their professions...they aver...that they can put true knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, as if they were inserting vision into blind eyes." Good education needs to balance mind and body, music and gymnastics, but it doesn't get this, which is where our mistake begins. For the power of improving the whole person comes of harmony, the harmony between soul and body, and this from the work of a true musician, who knows the essential forms of virtue and vice. It is by improving body and mind that virtue develops. The true aim of music, like the aim of gymnastics, is balance - not excess of either, but the mean between them. So as the mind grows, so grows its power over the body, and in this way, the good soul improves. Every person would be their own best doctor and lawyer, had they this better form of education, the kind that harmonizes the body and soul.
“Only when he has linked these parts together in well-tempered harmony and has made himself one man instead of many, will he be ready to go about whatever else he may have to do... Any action which tends to break down this habit will be for him unjust; and the notions governing it he will call ignorance and folly..."[RepC p.142]
Hunnington Cairns, editor or Plato’s Dialogues, notes that "the word 'soul,' with its accretions of meanings over the centuries, is an unfortunate translation of the Greek word psyche. It is more properly translated, according to the various contexts, as Reason, Mind, Intelligence, Life, the vital principle in things as well as in man; it is the constant that causes change but itself does not change. “
Here again then, “one explanation of [Plato’s] use of different words to describe” this inner mind, or what he called ‘the invisible world,’ “suggests that he hoped to make us realize that meaning lies not in words but only in that for which words stand."[1]
In her book, Dancing in the Streets, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that, “Ancient Dionysian revelers and Christian glossolaliacs believed that their moments of ecstasy were the gifts of a deity.”(p.94)
As Aldous Huxley once observed, ‘It is with their muscles that humans most easily obtain knowledge of the divine.”(*)
Ehrenreich discovered in her research “the almost ubiquitous practice” of dance and what she calls “ecstatic ritual”…which has “an extraordinary uniformity, in spite of much local variation, in ritual and mythology.”(p.1) “Ritual dances provide a religious experience that seems more satisfying and convincing than any other.’”(p.33, Quoted from Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 271)
“[I]ngredients of ecstatic rituals & festivities – music, dancing, eating, drinking, or indulging in other mind-altering drugs…-- seem to be universal,” she says.(Roger D. Abraham, in Turner, 1982, pp.167-168 ] Indeed, “[A]nthropologist Erika Bourguiguon found that 92 percent of small-scale societies encouraged some sort of religious trance….most cases through ecstatic ritual.”(Goodman, p.36)
Apparently, most humans throughout time have spoken “the language of extreme experience…with the idea of over extending the self…stretching life to the fullest…”(Roger D. Abraham, in Turner, 1982, pp.167-168)
Apparently, dancing also “did not seem like a waste of energy to prehistoric peoples.”(p.22) “At one recently discovered site in England, drawings on the ceiling of a cave show ‘conga lines’ of female dancers, along with drawings of animals like bison and ibex, which are known to have become extinct in England 10,000 years ago” (Pickrell, National Geographic News, August 18, 2004) “So well before people had a written language, and possibly before they took up a settled life style, they danced and understood dancing as an activity important enough to record on stone.”(p.21)
But “[D]ance cannot work to bind people unless…it is intrinsically pleasurable…whatever the ritual dancers of prehistoric times thought they were doing--…-- they were also doing something they liked to do and liked enough to invest considerable energy in.”(p.25) As all intrinsic evidence suggests, “dancing is contagious.”(p.25) Which is perhaps why dance is “the hallmark of so many ancient and indigenous religions.”(p.87)
“Dance, whether of the ecstatic or more stately variety, was [also] a central and defining activity of the ancient Greek community…dances at regularly scheduled festivities or what appear to have been spontaneous outbreaks, dances for victory, for the gods, or for the sheer fun of it.” (p.32, Lawler, pp. 238-39)
And so primal peoples understood the intrinsic goods of our existence much better than we tend to today. As we will see, it wasn’t long before the “Church began to crack down on religious dancing, especially by women,”(p.73) and with a high price we may still be paying today, in terms of both physical and mental health. Partly for this reason, we moderns can hardly conceive that “These occasions were, in an important sense, what men and women lived for.”(p.92, E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common, p.51) Nor that “Festivity – like bread or freedom – can be a social good worth fighting for.”(p.94) Something “we need much more of on this crowded planet, to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration.”(p.261)
After having been taught to think of all things pagan as more demonic than divine, many of us have a bit of a surprise coming when we see the deep moral code that guided these ancients, who knew better than we do today the wisdom of seeking pleasure with moral intelligence, according to nature’s inexorable law of karma.
This the law of nature will set into their hearts a guardian, Plato says, which is true music [RepJ BookIX 591], It will put honor in their soul, will give them pure pleasure, and will also teach them to take good care of children. [RepJ BookIX 591]
[1]
(Plato, "Introduction"in Collected Dialogues, p. xx-xxi.)
The first of our original “instructions seem so simple: to be grateful…and enjoy life.”(OI, Ausubel, 2007, xxii) These “two things were told to us: to be thankful… And the other thing they said was enjoy life. That’s a rule, a law – enjoy life – you’re supposed to.”(OI, Lyons, 25)
Like the traditional thanksgiving, we should start with “what every one who is sane in the world should agree on”…”that we see one another;” that “we need each other,” “and it’s good to see them here…were grateful and thankful there are other people in the world…it’s a good thing.”(OI, Mohawk, 49) “We do this speech at the beginning and the end of every meeting because people need to be reminded of that.” (OI, Mohawk, 50) “Everybody in the world ought to be able to agree that we depend on those things” and give thanks for all, including the “grasses, waters, trees, plants, winds, the moon, the stars, the sun, the universe, the whole thing.”(OI, Mohawk, 50) Again, “thanks that is beyond the ability of words to express,”(OI, Ausubel, 2007, xxiii)
“Their joy was not in possession or status or power, but in each other, in the warmth and closeness of their hearts, in humor and laughter, the stories of the old ones, and the play and growing of the children, doing the task at hand well and carefully, in the beauty of the earth in all weather and all seasons…living in a circle and guided by the Original Instructions.”(OI, p.8)
“Native food traditions honor food with prayer and story, with song and dance.”(OI, Nelson, 181) “All of the work is done to music. When the work is over they dance around the fields, ending in a party.” (OI, Rivera , 200) “everything points to the healing dance. It’s like the central metaphor. All the stories refer to it…the metaphor of healing and of opening your heart.” (OI, Biesele et.al.,77)
“If there are two people who are not getting along with each other, in the healing dance, they try to put these two people next to each other so that they can come into harmony by dancing together.” (OI, Biesele et.al.,76) “The dance is to cure what we think of as physical illness, but most of all it’s to cure problems between people because those are the worst kinds of illnesses that there are.” (OI, Biesele et.al.,77)
“They are metaphors, they’re moving metaphors of our relationship to place.” (OI, Martinez et.al, 99) In this way, “All of our senses are involved in this essential and blessed act of eating food.” (OI, Nelson, 181) “We Andeans don’t pray. We dance.” (OI, Rivera, 200)
Or, as the I Ching puts it, “One should treasure and enjoy a time of abundance.”(I Ching, 436) Remember that intrinsic goods have their season, and both abundance and scarcity come and go in waves.(I Ching, p. 410) The challenge is to appreciate all such goods as we experience them, “to treasure and use well the plentitude and to sustain the state of abundance as long as possible.”(I Ching, p.440) For “after abundance there is decline,”(I Ching, p.436) as surely as winter will follow summer. So “Such a time of abundance should be treasured and well used,”(I Ching, 433) for “tremendous abundance cannot last very long.”(I Ching, p.433) For “A decline after extreme abundance is the law of Nature, like the waxing and waning of the moon. However, in human affairs we can delay the coming of decline by careful management. When a relationship or a business is in a period of abundance and prosperity, great caution should be taken to prevent disharmony and overdoing. People become used to the easy situation, but they may neglect the law of cause and effect.”(I Ching, p.436)
“The religion of the ancient Greeks too was a ‘danced religion,’(Ehrenreich, p.251) as has been true of folk religions from many times and places.
What are sometimes called sacred mystery cults, these primal spiritual traditions were characterized by wine, music, and dance, employed to remove inhibitions, to liberate the individual from social constraints, and thus return them to a natural state. Seen to be secretive, from outside looking in, this was not the sense of the word secret as we typically think of it, as if some are keeping secrets from others, but in the sense that the experience could not be understood in linguistic form, but is an understanding reserved only for those who experience it, and then only for the worthy. Such traditions understood the revelation of truth to be purely experiential, an inner phenomena or “rushing progression of understanding” that is beyond words altogether, as is for instance, love. Far from a mere spectacle to be read or watched from outside-looking-in, music, dance, and poetry were understood only from within the experience.
The Bagavad Gita puts it this way:
“what we read are only words. We cannot know the taste of a fruit or of a wine by reading words about them; we must eat the fruit and drink the wine.”
For this reason, participants were required to go through a process of moral initiation to make right the wrongs in their lives before they could take part in the ceremonies and processions.
Like “The seers of the Upanishads [who] did not establish a Church, or found a definite religion…the seers of the Spirit in all religions agree that communion with the Highest is not a problem of words but of life.”(Bagavad Gita, p.17)
One of the most widely practiced of these mystery traditions was called the Dionysian mysteries, practiced from 1500 BCE by Mycenean, Minoan and Thracian Greeks, but were still popular in the golden age of Athens, in 5th century BCE. Dionysus was said to be the god of the grape harvest, of wine, and of epiphany. “Dionysus…did not ask his followers for their belief or faith; he called on them to apprehend him directly.”(Ehrenreich, p.256) Greek mythology tells Dionysus to have been an androgynous male who came from the east and/or the south to free his followers from self-conscious fear and care and to protect those who do not belong to conventional society. For this reason, mystery religions were thought to subvert the oppressive restraints of the powerful.
“Women, above all, responded to Dionysus’ call”… and (like Jesus) “Dionysus had a special appeal to the women of the Greek city-state, who were ordinarily excluded from much of public life.”(p.34) Both represented “A feminine, or androgynous, spirit of playfulness versus the cold principle of patriarchal authority.”(p.55) “The most notorious feminine form of Dionysian worship, the oreibaia, or winter dance,” “looks to modern eyes like a crude pantomime of feminist revolt.”(p.35) But this practice is better understood as an attempt to “achieve a state of mind the Greeks called euthousiansmos – literally, having the god within oneself.”(p.35)
Emile Durkheim claims it is the ecstasy of dance that “defines the sacred and sets it apart from daily life…”(p.39, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p.250) “…something we might call meaning or transcendent insight. In ancient Dionysian forms of worship the moment of maximum ‘madness’ and revelry was also the sacred climax of the rite, at which the individual achieved communion with the divinity and a glimpse of personal immortality.”(p.95)
Whereas many of us have learned to pray for what we want, primal and indigenous peoples would pray to express appreciation for all they have. For all the struggles and suffering that the body endures, it can also taste the most delicious fruits, smell that scents of flowers, hear the sounds of music, touch and be touched by a lover, and see the beauty of both the physical and the metaphysical world. If life is an opportunity for humans to touch the divine, it is ironically through our mortal bodies that we experience and best appreciate this paradise or heaven. (Indeed, as Brad Pitt’s Achilles suggests in the film Troy, “the gods envy us!”)
Music was understood by the ancients in its broadest possible sense, as any of the arts or sciences that came under the power of the muses (mythical maidens who were the daughters of the heavenly Zeus, who represent the creative urge, and the earthly Mnemosyne, who represent human memory). The muses had the power to inspire humans to remember their divine origins. In its literal sense, music meant 'remembered inspiration', or epiphany.
Music was considered synonymous with order and proportion, and an understanding of it seemed to be the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe. Discovery of the musical intervals by Pythagoras in 582-507 BCE affirmed this view, as his discoveries revealed the mathematical ratios of the melodic intervals that gave rise to an understanding of the rational basis for musical theory. This understanding of the order underlying music allowed ancient seers to perceive the order underlying so much seeming chaos – what Pythagoras called the music of the spheres.
“Interestingly, the Greek word nomos, meaning ‘law’, also had the musical meaning of ‘melody’.”(Ehrenreich, p.24)
And while music consists of three things, words, harmony, and rhythm, Plato was careful to emphasize that harmony and rhythm must follow the words; they pick up where words leave off. The inarticulate sound and gestures of singing and dancing are what people resort to when so overcome with feelings that words cannot capture. Hence the reason that music was primarily considered in relation to literature, drama, and dance (an Athenian dramatist was responsible for writing the music and training the chorus, for instance, as well as for writing and staging the play).
The Greeks had an elaborate theory that drew out the relationship between various major or minor modes or scales and the moods and emotions that are associated with them. In the highest sense of the term music idealized the state of being in tune with the cosmic forces, having harmony between the physical and the metaphysical, and, thus being able to hear ‘the music of the spheres,’ which was integrally interconnected with immortality.
It's true that this sometimes had sexual overtones for the Greeks - for discourse is to the mind what intercourse is to the body, the means by which humans might reach the heights of human ecstasy, the moment when the humans meet the divine, where the material meets the spiritual, where the visible meets the invisible. This is the moment when human beings can, if properly purified in preparation for the experience, communicate with the divine, and fully participate in the ‘music of the spheres’. Call this orgasm, if you like, but the Greeks would like us to remember that what we these days think of as a purely physical experience, not only has psychological/spiritual components, but that there is an orgasmic state possible in a simple meeting of the minds, without any physical interaction at all. So to call these rites sexual, in the sense of the words as we typically understand it, is to underestimate its meaning. Platonic friendship is not a step back from intimacy, after all, but a step toward it.
True to their conviction that all living things have higher and lower potentials, and therefore healthier and unhealthier states of being, these primal Greeks aimed to understand the proper – i.e. healthy – function of music. Following Plato’s conviction that there is a right and wrong way to use words, so there is a right and wrong way to use music. It was understood to have a fundamental influence on both personal and social health and well being. And we are only now beginning to appreciate this medicinal value of the intrinsic goods of music and dance. *
This understanding of the role of music in health gave rise to certain linguistic images that are still familiar to us today. For instance, when a person is healthy and happy, they are thought to be like a well-tuned instrument. When they are tense, they are said to be high strung, and when they come apart they are said to be unstrung.
And so this state of proper attunement was understood to be the purpose of the dialectic method, the ultimate stage in the progressive refinement of the means by which ecstasy is ultimately reached, but it’s important to remember that wine, dancing, laughter, and even sex are all part of the whole of the art. But far from a mere spectacle to be watched from outside looking in, music, dance, poetry and even philosophy, were, like sexual intercourse, meant to be experienced intrinsically, from the inside looking out.
This conception of health as harmonious relations between the parts, whether that be physical, social, or ecological, is far better understood in many ancient cultures than it is in ours today, which perhaps accounts for the sad state of our educational methods. Plato held that the best education consisted of a balanced curriculum of music for the soul and gymnastics for the body. Music, in this sense, included everything we might consider to fall under the umbrella of a liberal education (although, curiously, while there were muses for lyric poetry, drama, dancing, and song, and even astronomy and history…but there were no muses for the visual arts, such as architecture, sculpture, and painting…although this didn’t seem to hold them back, as the Greeks excelled at all of these, as they did in most every form of creativity).
This is how our ancient betters would recommend we daily celebrate our great fortune in being alive – by way of these intrinsic goods that are means by which we grow from our lesser to our better selves, and are able to share in this magical experience in this heavenly place.
As Aeschylus (who was the lyric poet nearly jailed for revealing the mysteries) put it in his play, The Bacchae:
For his kingdom, it is there,
In the dancing and the prayer,
In the music and the laughter,
In the vanishing of care.
“Dionysus, whom the Romans called Bacchus – was a democratic god, accessible to the humble and mighty alike, and had jurisdiction over wine and vineyard…more spiritual responsibility was to preside over the orgeia…where his devotes danced themselves into a state of trance…”(p.34)
Many of our own cultures of origin (such as Christianity) have taught us to be suspicious of this kind of revelry as pagan, which carries the connotation for many that it somehow has the devil’s handprint on it. But in the Gospel of Thomas, when asked by his disciples, “When will the kingdom come?" – Jesus says, ‘the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, but some do not yet see it.’(Gospel of Thomas)
Far from an ‘immoral’ activity, the ancients pushed the limits of this ecstasy with a long an grueling process of moral purification prior to celebration, including talk, food, wine, music and dancing as a means of spiritual uplift, which became refined in time into poetry, drama, and philosophy. It was a multifaceted process that might include fasting and resolution of interpersonal conflict as the means by which the ultimate ecstasy of one’s highest potentials might be reached.
Indeed, these were the original pagans, and can teach us, if anyone can, that it is not depravity and decadence that motivates the love of such joyous celebration, as we have supposed, but rather full appreciation and gratitude for all that is heavenly here on this earth – where mind and body meet.
Socrates ultimately puts it this way:
“The purpose [of dialectic education] is to bring the two elements [mind and body] into tune with one another by adjusting the tension of each to the right pitch. So one who can apply to the soul both kinds of education blended in perfect proportion will be master of a nobler sort of musical harmony than was ever made by tuning the strings of the lyre."(Republic, p. 102)
And this ineffable nature of truth does not diminish the role of words in the dialectic process, but only emphasizes that words alone are not enough. Understanding resides in the soul, prior to words, and it is the soul that improves the body.
This is why, Socrates says, we need a better understanding of human nature if we hope for a better form of education. For "education is not in reality what some people proclaim it to be in their professions...they aver...that they can put true knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, as if they were inserting vision into blind eyes." Good education needs to balance mind and body, music and gymnastics, but it doesn't get this, which is where our mistake begins. For the power of improving the whole person comes of harmony, the harmony between soul and body, and this from the work of a true musician, who knows the essential forms of virtue and vice. It is by improving body and mind that virtue develops. The true aim of music, like the aim of gymnastics, is balance - not excess of either, but the mean between them. So as the mind grows, so grows its power over the body, and in this way, the good soul improves. Every person would be their own best doctor and lawyer, had they this better form of education, the kind that harmonizes the body and soul.
“Only when he has linked these parts together in well-tempered harmony and has made himself one man instead of many, will he be ready to go about whatever else he may have to do... Any action which tends to break down this habit will be for him unjust; and the notions governing it he will call ignorance and folly..."[RepC p.142]
Hunnington Cairns, editor or Plato’s Dialogues, notes that "the word 'soul,' with its accretions of meanings over the centuries, is an unfortunate translation of the Greek word psyche. It is more properly translated, according to the various contexts, as Reason, Mind, Intelligence, Life, the vital principle in things as well as in man; it is the constant that causes change but itself does not change. “
Here again then, “one explanation of [Plato’s] use of different words to describe” this inner mind, or what he called ‘the invisible world,’ “suggests that he hoped to make us realize that meaning lies not in words but only in that for which words stand."[1]
In her book, Dancing in the Streets, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that, “Ancient Dionysian revelers and Christian glossolaliacs believed that their moments of ecstasy were the gifts of a deity.”(p.94)
As Aldous Huxley once observed, ‘It is with their muscles that humans most easily obtain knowledge of the divine.”(*)
Ehrenreich discovered in her research “the almost ubiquitous practice” of dance and what she calls “ecstatic ritual”…which has “an extraordinary uniformity, in spite of much local variation, in ritual and mythology.”(p.1) “Ritual dances provide a religious experience that seems more satisfying and convincing than any other.’”(p.33, Quoted from Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 271)
“[I]ngredients of ecstatic rituals & festivities – music, dancing, eating, drinking, or indulging in other mind-altering drugs…-- seem to be universal,” she says.(Roger D. Abraham, in Turner, 1982, pp.167-168 ] Indeed, “[A]nthropologist Erika Bourguiguon found that 92 percent of small-scale societies encouraged some sort of religious trance….most cases through ecstatic ritual.”(Goodman, p.36)
Apparently, most humans throughout time have spoken “the language of extreme experience…with the idea of over extending the self…stretching life to the fullest…”(Roger D. Abraham, in Turner, 1982, pp.167-168)
Apparently, dancing also “did not seem like a waste of energy to prehistoric peoples.”(p.22) “At one recently discovered site in England, drawings on the ceiling of a cave show ‘conga lines’ of female dancers, along with drawings of animals like bison and ibex, which are known to have become extinct in England 10,000 years ago” (Pickrell, National Geographic News, August 18, 2004) “So well before people had a written language, and possibly before they took up a settled life style, they danced and understood dancing as an activity important enough to record on stone.”(p.21)
But “[D]ance cannot work to bind people unless…it is intrinsically pleasurable…whatever the ritual dancers of prehistoric times thought they were doing--…-- they were also doing something they liked to do and liked enough to invest considerable energy in.”(p.25) As all intrinsic evidence suggests, “dancing is contagious.”(p.25) Which is perhaps why dance is “the hallmark of so many ancient and indigenous religions.”(p.87)
“Dance, whether of the ecstatic or more stately variety, was [also] a central and defining activity of the ancient Greek community…dances at regularly scheduled festivities or what appear to have been spontaneous outbreaks, dances for victory, for the gods, or for the sheer fun of it.” (p.32, Lawler, pp. 238-39)
And so primal peoples understood the intrinsic goods of our existence much better than we tend to today. As we will see, it wasn’t long before the “Church began to crack down on religious dancing, especially by women,”(p.73) and with a high price we may still be paying today, in terms of both physical and mental health. Partly for this reason, we moderns can hardly conceive that “These occasions were, in an important sense, what men and women lived for.”(p.92, E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common, p.51) Nor that “Festivity – like bread or freedom – can be a social good worth fighting for.”(p.94) Something “we need much more of on this crowded planet, to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration.”(p.261)
After having been taught to think of all things pagan as more demonic than divine, many of us have a bit of a surprise coming when we see the deep moral code that guided these ancients, who knew better than we do today the wisdom of seeking pleasure with moral intelligence, according to nature’s inexorable law of karma.
This the law of nature will set into their hearts a guardian, Plato says, which is true music [RepJ BookIX 591], It will put honor in their soul, will give them pure pleasure, and will also teach them to take good care of children. [RepJ BookIX 591]
[1]
(Plato, "Introduction"in Collected Dialogues, p. xx-xxi.)