How acoustic substance is the substrate for the creation and conservation of matter. And how it manifests, according to archaic mythologies.
My translation from the Italian edition of “La Musica Primitiva” by Marius Schneider, Adelphi Spa publisher, Milano, 1992:
A Chant and a Counter Chant give rise to Humankind
The Vedic, Hindu, and Persian cosmogonies tell us that, already in mythical times, gods and demons, knowing the power of sound sacrifice, fought fiercely to possess that force. On certain occasions, they did not even hesitate to misuse it. They clouded the lie. The Tândya Mahã Brāhmana reports that, due to that unsustainable situation, the Word one day partially escaped the gods and went to settle in the waters and the trees, in the harps and the drums. The Chāndogya Upanişad expounds the same facts more philosophically. It narrates that the world was generated by the syllable OM, which constitutes the essence of sāman (chanting) and breath. He then lists the different stages that mark the progressive materialization of the world: the sāman is the essence of poetic meter, the meter is the essence of language, language is the essence of man, man is the essence of plants, plants are the essence of water and water is the essence of the earth.
According to the treatise The rustle of Gabriel’s wing by Shihâboddin Yahyâ Sohra wardi, God possesses some major words which are part of the luminous words emanating from the brightness of his face. From the radiation of those words, all creation proceeds. The last of these words is manifested in the rustling of Gabriel’s wings: the one on the right is pure and absolute light and is in a relationship only with God; from the left wing, on which a dark imprint extends, comes our world of mirage and illusion. The world is but an echo or a shadow of this wing. According to the Dogon (Africa), the lord of the word took a part of his word and introduced it into stone, the oldest material in the world. This means that at the moment of the creation of the physical world, a part of the force of the sound sacrifice clothed itself with the matter.
At that same moment, the partial decadence of the acoustic world already begins since the material “images” (objects) elaborated during this second phase of creation are no more than reflections of the ancient acoustic images. Although many of those materialized images are now devoid of any voice, all beings and objects clothed in the matter still contain some amount of their original acoustic substance. This substance manifests itself in their voice, in the sound that can be drawn from them, or simply in the name they bear. In this way, between man and the most inanimate and mute object, a whole hierarchy of values is established according to the degree or intensity with which every being, or every object, can realize the acoustic substance of its matter. Following this evolution brought about by the demiurge, men lost their sonorous, luminous, and transparent bodies and ceased to hover in the air. They became heavy and dull, and as they began to eat the earth’s produce, their acoustic nature became so deadened that only their voices were left. Even the Brahmanic tradition reports that, by now, even their language did not contain more than a quarter of the original speech, having inherited the animals what was left.
To implement this materialization of the acoustic world, the collaboration of a whole hierarchy of gods, demiurges, and spirits was necessary, who transmitted their acoustic forces from mouth to mouth and degree by degree to weave the veil of mãyã blurring the sound-substance with the matter. At the beginning of creation, the great Dead announced a god to whom he gave the task of creating (through a shout, wind, or thunder) a world of sound and light. This god, therefore, acted without coming into contact with material objects. To give rise to matter, he associated with the transformer, the lord of matter. According to some North Asian traditions, this demiurge’s hoarse voice formed the mountains, chasms, and valleys. But his help was certainly not disinterested. The demiurge is a greedy and anthropophagous god who seeks to possess men. It is also said that he was the one who educated men about sexual life. Numerous myths relate that the “singing death” wanted to create immortal men. But his rival, the living god who “sings death” (transformer), managed to derail the project.
While the chameleon, very slow and lazy, would give men the divine announcement of their immortality, Coyote had him secretly preceded by a faster beast that said the opposite. When this news, though false, reached the ears of men, their mortality became irrevocable. To sweeten that sad fate, another demigod appeared on earth who brought music to men by order of the creator. Like all those mythical beings, this “civilizing hero” possesses a dual nature. Or he associates with another Transformer to form a pair of twins.
This second transformer is the god of war who seeks to harm men and take their children away to the greedy god, while the culture hero defends peace, life, and human culture and broadcasts the songs and prayers of men to the creator. The transformer feels comfortable in the raw world; He creates the cries of hate and amorphous noise; his rival modifies the earth to make it more habitable and invents music proper using the best musical sonorities of nature. The first brings the disease; the second teaches the art of medicine. These twins generally descend to earth by thread, chain, or tree, often with similar names. The two brothers who “sang out of a tree” on Er Island (Torres Strait) were named Kode Pop.
The cosmogonies of the great civilizations often substitute the idea of marriage for the creator’s chant. In this case, the two transformers are conceived as two women. The conjugal union replaces the concerted action of musical consonances or dissonances between twins. The bride of the creator is then the earth-mother, and that of the cultural hero is the goddess of war. The child of the first pair is the god of fire, who resides in the “navel of the earth.” The second pair begets a god or goddess of vegetation destined for spring sacrifice. The stellar concordances of these gods are as follows:
Very often, in primitive mythologies, figures 1 and 2 or 3 and 6 are found fused, but more complete cosmogonies leave no doubt about the existence of these seven gods. The first pair generally possess thunder. The other pair, who often represent mythical ancestors, seem to have the faculty of imitating and provoking thunder and making it perceptible to human ears. Sometimes symbolized by the two aspects of the planet Venus, she is in charge of administering the songs and instruments of the first couple. According to Pawnee (America) mythology, the creator commanded the evening star to guide the wind, clouds, thunder, and lightning, which sang, shook their rattles, and beat the waters with their clubs until the earth settled, dried up, and vegetation appeared. On the other hand, the morning star preceded the sun’s chant to free the world from the darkness of death.
In this hierarchy of gods, the pairs 2/3, 5/6, 7/8, and the spirits 8/9, who collaborate in creating and maintaining the world, form similar groups. Each group corresponds to a single god of a dual nature (that is, to a force that emanates from the opposition of two virtues) or to a pair of twins who are both friends and enemies simultaneously. Just as the music of the acoustic world is both moist and luminous, these couples or gods of a dual nature expressed in the material world the mingling of water and fire through concerted action, the fruit of mutual sacrifice, or interpenetration of two opposite elements. In the plastic arts, they are depicted as two characters leaning against each other or as a single figure of two completely different materials. Sometimes they appear with one head and two trunks or as a body with two heads.
The Appearance of Man
The land, which the cultural hero and god of war must settle and administer, is usually presented as an island dominated by a large mountain. At this mountain’s top (the navel of the world) is a talking tree – or two intertwined trees (life and death) – whose tip touches the North Star. The branches hold the sun, the moon, and the Milky Way. (Sometimes, instead of a tree, we find mentioned a column of smoke spewed by the luminous chant of a volcano). The dragon revolves around the top of the tree, and the chariots ((Ursa Major and Ursa Minor) of the creator god of thunder) and some demiurges who imitate or repeat the sound of thunder rotate. The tree trunk, which is hollow (dead) like that of a drum tree, passes through a lake in a cave.
This resonance center is located in the heart of the mountain. The lake is formed from a mixture of fire and water, making the cave resonate like a cloud during a storm. It constitutes the source of life and sends its miraculous forces towards a source at the foot of the tree, whose roots touch the pole opposite the North Star. On the inner sea of that cave, the god of thunder meets with the transformer or an earth goddess to call the first men to life. The myths that highlight the great resonance capacity of this cave are very numerous. The Marind-Anim of New Guinea tells that one day, in an underground cave, a great festival was celebrated. A dog heard the noise and dug the hole from which the first men came. The Hopi of America also thinks that early humans originally lived underground. To get out of their cave, they planted two trees and reeds (drums and flutes?), which they enchanted with their music, then used them as a ladder to get out of an opening made in the cave ceiling.
A mockingbird (culture hero), seated by the exit, sang songs by which he determined, for each newcomer, the language and tribe that corresponded to him. When his repertoire of songs was exhausted, no man could ever leave the cave. In Africa (Luba), men visited heaven. They went up a long staircase (symbol of sound), preceded by two flutists, who asked permission to enter. Granted this grace, the whole procession was allowed to pass. When the drummers had crossed the threshold, the door was closed again, thinking they constituted the procession’s rear guard. All the men who walked behind the drums fell back to earth and died. The man who has no personal song has no legal place in society. An American tale has it that initially, the Navajo people lived in a dark cave. There were only two flutists to “animate” that darkness a little. But one day, one of the musicians, touching his flute to the cave ceiling, heard a great echo. The men and the animals then began to dig a tunnel in the direction indicated by the sound and, following it, arrived at the mountain’s surface. Stopped by a boundless sea, they played their favorite songs; the wind began to blow and sweep away the waters. The Navajos then settled on the land, built their sun and moon, and placed them in the care of the two flutists. Even more numerous are the stories in which a god makes men appear, inviting them aloud to come out of a tree. Such a tree is revered by the Uitoto in the form of a drum tree with a longitudinal slit and is considered to be the seat of all the souls of the members of the tribe, dead or ready to incarnate in a human body. The mythology of the peoples of Altai tells of a nine-branched tree from which God brings out nine peoples.
According to an Australian legend, God created women by beating the surface of the waters in the same way, women beat animal skins (i.e., the most primitive membrane drums). According to other traditions, men are born from a reed. The god of the Zulus, who created all objects by pronouncing their names, made men come out of a bamboo flute or a “bed of reeds (panpipe)” in a valley full of water. According to Tonga (Africa), when the first human couple came out of a reed, there was a massive explosion. The god of the Big Stomachs had locked up all beings in his pipe.
Every time he called one of those creatures by name, it began to live. But the flute used by the transformer during the creation of man has baleful effects. In the valleys of Altai, it is said that the “devil” clandestinely entered the hut where God had placed the still inanimate body of a woman. He took his flute and breathed life into her rectum: for this reason, woman is an evil being. The transformer’s hostility to God’s work is manifested even more clearly in a Tungusian tale, according to which this demiurge sought to destroy “the twelve-stringed instrument” used by God to create the world. In California, British Columbia, and the Solomon Islands, God created humans from bamboo (flutes?), which he revived by blowing, singing, salivating, or dancing. According to Kuba (Africa), he vomited men. The Zulu narrates that the first living beings were expectorated from a cow, and according to the Pomos (California), the creator, who came from the north, stopped in the east where he took hair to make a man and feathers to make a woman (symbols of sound).
It remains to mention the thread along which the first men descended to earth. There seems to be no doubt that that thread symbolizes a vibrating string. Sometimes this thread represents the relationship that exists between God and men. In the philosophy of Vedānta and the mythology of the Siberian peoples, the human soul is a bird tied to God by a thread. A Californian shaman, who had seen God in a spectrum of light and had heard him sing, said that “something like a thread” went from his head towards God’s face to repeat the song he had heard. According to the mythology of the Pima, the creator was a pen, i.e., a song. He took the dust” on his breast” and sang; thus, the earth and a large spider formed whose web connected the sky and the earth. A Tibetan tradition combines the different symbols of sound in the following formula: the men of the East were created from a luminous heat; those of the south came from the womb, and those of the west from an egg. Only extraordinary beings are born of an ugly and terrifying voice emitted from a northern tree.
The Sound Essence of Man
Since man was born of sound, his essence will always remain sound. We have seen how the chant of a mockingbird sitting at the exit of the Hopi cave added an appropriate melody to the basic sound of each individual. Employing that melody, the newborn had been assigned a specific language and tribe. The chant that the bird attributes to each individual is a civil status song that legalizes the place occupied by its owner in society. There cannot be more men on earth than there are chants or names available. When the repertoire of the bird (which is the civilizing hero) was exhausted, no man could ever get out of the cave.
Of these three types of chants proper to each, the first is innate and immortal; the second is often a vehicle of virtue therapeutic due to a dead man who appeared in a dream. The ‘personal chant’, generally conferred by the culture hero, corresponds to an individual but, by extension, can also express the marital status of a family or a society. According to Granet, the Chinese term meaning life and destiny (ming) is indistinguishable from the one (ming) used to designate vocal symbols. It matters little if the names or chants of two beings resemble each other to the point that there is the possibility of confusing them. Each of those names fully expresses an individual essence.
The voice is the man; singing is the soul or the vehicle of the soul. A man drawn to heaven while the gods were participating in an anthropophagous banquet (they ate the sound substance of a man) realized that the dead man was his brother-in-law. Frightened, he came down to earth and told what he had seen; but he was taken for crazy because, at that very moment, his brother-in-law was among friends singing a sacrificial melody. The legend then adds that, shortly after those events, a neighboring tribe broke into the town, took possession of the singer, and sacrificed him to the gods (Marquesas Islands).
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