Transcendence Machine

Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0

There’s a section of the middle ages, especially the 10th - 15th centuries AD where the human imagination seems to have explosively penetrated into all realms of the human experience. Art, poetry, religion all expanded with innovations. We’ll focus on the parts that may lead us towards the center of the mystery of music and its meaning.

We can find in the religious imagery of the middle ages amalgams rich with symbolism. We are thinking more specifically about stained glass works, illuminated manuscripts, icon art and ilk. These served as portals for the average church-goer to experience spiritual illumination and voyages to locations where our aspirations and terrors live. Combine this with trance-inducing drone chants in a highly reverberant building whose architecture is designed to induce a sensation of infinite height. Add incense to “activate” the space within which solemn rituals are performed by individuals wearing strange hats and you end up with quite the technology for the generation of altered states (one would be forgiven the crude comparison to the modern movie theatre going experience - sans funny hats for the most part). There is in this religious technique a distinct and erudite emphasis on the ecstatic experience. Contact with the sacred dimension is made a central focus. And as we have proposed previously, this book will use as an operating assumption that the pursuit of the sacred is to the secular mind the pursuit of meaning. In the medieval historical context we see an elevated status of the artistic product such that it occupies a special function within the cultural courtyard. This function being to produce interactive artifacts serving as user interface between the profane and the sacred dimensions of human life. Music in this case served as a support for this apparatus. A gear in the transcendence machine that is a church and its rites. 

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There is a traditional idea that art, especially poetry is a privileged means for communicating metaphysics and theology but is also itself salutary. U of T professor Dr. Jordan B Peterson: 

"The artists are the people who first articulate the unknown. The role of art in a healthy culture is to bring to public awareness elements of Being that have not yet entered the collective consciousness. (...) Artists are expanding the landscape and moving the culture forward into the unknown and they do that by translating what is as of yet unimaginable (...) to what is (...) imaginable." 

Dante wrote the Divine Comedy with the intent to “save mankind” ^[1]. The goal: nothing short of the transformation of the world via fascinating visions of heaven and terrifying visions of hell. This is art as the birthing ordeal of a sensed vision of what is to be or could be. On the subject of music, 13th Century AD Muslim Poet Rumi said: 

“In the musical cadences is a hidden secret; If I were to reveal it, it would overturn the world (...) We have all descended from Adam and we have listened to those melodies in Paradise. We recall a little of them to ourselves, even though the water and the clay have covered us with doubt.”  

Although separated by geography from other characters we’ve discussed, Rumi was also very much a transformationist. 

“Surpass [even] the angelic condition he said, penetrate into this ocean so that your drop of water can become one sea.”[2]

The history of the sacred imagination is overwhelmingly space oriented and leans heavily on the sense of sight^[3]. But the ecstatic mysticism of Rumi (a dancer) beckons us to push through deeper dimensions. "To surpass the angelic condition". That is to say: to continue along the quest of transformation even once transformation has occurred. The goal being to enter an abyss (“this ocean”) so that one’s insignificance (“your drop of water”) can intermingle with its immeasurably vast body of terrifyingly pure potential (the sea is but a drop of water from another perspective). We see again the idea of art as tool for salvation, a shiver of what hidden secrets in music Rumi shuddered to reveal.

I move then that ecstatic techniques and the resultant revelations regarding music should be resurrected into the popular musical landscape. Not this time as an artifact for the amusement of an ephemeral audience but as an integrated set of cultural rites creeping gradually towards universality. This may even be inevitable as we witness the religious character of music follow the trajectory of all previous religious innovations:

1. The germ: revelation via ecstaticism. 
2. It sprouts as mysticism and grows into 
3. the final stage of its cycle: codification and institutionality. 

Where are we in the evolutionary life cycle of music? Can we see ourselves from an external perspective enough to gain wisdom from it? 

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In previous texts we explored the idea of music as a tool for contact with the sacred dimension of human life (the ecstatic state). Hopefully in so doing we gained an expanded understanding of our ancestors’ perspective on the ontology of sacredness and in turn added to our Being toolkit an additional input through which we can plug into the human condition.

The idea of contact with the sacred as a matter of fact condition of life has fallen out of favour in the contemporary North American imagination. We are deficient in this way. Our tendency is to relegate the sacred to a trivial category (generally under the label of entertainment). This has been a clever and successful way of preserving the sacred wisdom from generation to generation while carrying on secularly in other human enterprises such as governance and law. The drawback is that despite our clearly large desire to preserve sacred contact in human life  - as demonstrated, for instance by the billions of dollars spent to generate living myths in movies to cite just one example[4] - we’ve adopted a sort of self denying attitude towards the sacred dimension. Our delusion is that exploration of the imaginal landscape is ultimately a non-essential cultural artifact best suited for the amusement of children. I wonder if this may be an expansion or a distortion of archaic man's tactic regarding sacred experience. Archaic systems of social organization have a much more prominently defined mode of thinking regarding matters that are now strictly the interest of esoteric enthusiasts. Let’s explore some characteristics of that perspective and see how it may be useful to the musician seeking to steward the sacred and the ecstatic.

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We’ll sidestep the semantic controversy of academics and define shamanism simply as a technique of ecstasy. The shaman as a social function is an innovation born of archaic society’s desire for contact with the sacred and its reluctance at contending with the consequences of such contact. In Archaic cultures more precisely but in human societies in general, direct personal experience with the sacred dimension is commonly associated with a number of undesirable side effects (seizures, withdrawnness, erratic behaviour, sickness, propensity for self-harm, incoherence). These effects put an exposed creature like the archaic human to various dangers. To those who live in a social arrangement where the shaman is a casual fact of life, the shaman role is highly valued but not desirable. Hence why it is generally a hereditary vocation^[5]. The result of the period of initiatory ordeals is an individual whose societal function is the renunciation of the common human condition in favour of increased pliancy to non-material agencies. The shaman lives in a world where the barrier separating the sacred and profane dimensions has dramatically thinned. He is an agent of the liminal space.

I choose to draw a parallel here between the shaman as ecstatic and the commonly reported experience of musicians entering a disembodied flow state. This state is experienced as communion with some exterior force operating through the musician. Some might call this “channeling”. It is interesting to note that in archaic Altaian society, when a child is recognized as having the marks of a future shaman he is - among other preparations -  taught the songs of the clan. These songs serve as a vehicle for the transmission of esoteric knowledge (names of spirits and ancestors and the genealogy and mythos of the clan). So with this in mind and adding to it the discoveries made in the first article we can construct a model of what role the musician may play in modern society: A creature making contact with the sacred dimension. A liminal agent allowing the audience to commune with the sacred dimension without risking the danger associated with such contact. 

Such a creature may just have a salutary (healing) effect on a society bent on banishing the sacred dimension of human life to the trivial realm. If we recognize the musician as potentially occupying this societal function and value this role we may do as our archaic ancestors did (see Altaians above) and codify preparatory systems to pass on to musicians exhibiting a certain kind of affinity. This might replace the current cultural norm of flinging individuals forth into a dimension of human experience they are entirely unprepared for and instead grant said individuals the option of acquiring basic skills for navigating the sacred landscape. The hope here is to nudge the vocation of musician in a direction wherein it recognizes the existence of a sacred dimension, values it as a necessary resource for human life, and navigates it in a deliberate, intelligent and holistic manner.

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Footnotes

^[1]As per Mircea Eliade, primary source not found.

^[2] Compare against the previously discussed Robert Fludd and his contemporaries’ vision of a complete alchemical transformation of the world.

^[3]I suspect this will change with the advent of audio recording technology.

[4] See - Our Gods Wear Spandex by Chris Knowles, Supergods by Grant Morrison, Mutants and Mystics by Jeff Kripal

^[5]Self-chosen or spontaneous vocation does exist within the archaic societal framework but is generally viewed as inferior as it does not mandatorily serve the community. The individual embarking on a quest rather than being chosen for one, will develop magico-religious powers via the application of rudimentary and traditional techniques. But such an individual is not bound to the service of the extended family and is free to apply these skills towards self-protection and benefit. It is interesting that the musician as ecstatic in modern times has primarily fit within this archetypal mold. This shall be a topic of further exploration in the future. 

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Further reading for the blog subscriber and/or myself in the future:

The Sacred and the Profane - Mircea Eliade
History of Religious Ideas Vol. 1-3 - Mircea Eliade
Mutants and Mystics - Jeffrey Kripal
Our Gods Wear Spandex - Christopher Nowlan
Supergods - Grant Morrison
Shamanism and Techniques of Ecstasy - Mircea Eliade
A History of Christianity: The First 3000 years - Diarmaid MacCulloch
Maps of Meaning - Jordan B. Peterson
12 Rules for Life - Jordan B. Peterson
The Language of Creation - Matthieu Pageau
Man and His Symbols - Carl Jung
Perfecting Sound Forever - Greg Milner
Why We Need Religion - Stephen T. Asma
Music in Greek and Roman Culture - Comotti and Munson
Ancient Greek Music - M.L. West
Ancient Greek Music - Stephen Hagel
The Story of Music - Howard Goodall
Prehistoric Belief - Mike Williams
History of Western Music - Burkholder and Grout
Music in Primitive - Culture
The Gift - Lewis Hyde
The Varieties of Religious Experience - William James