7 - ‘Ancient Harmonies’: Music and the Prisca Theologia

Summary

This chapter concerns the prisca theologia, or ancient theology: the fundamental religious precepts thought to have been transmitted by God to human beings in the earlier stages of the world's history. Terms that closely overlap are prisca sapientia or prisca scientia, emphasising wisdom or knowledge, and, highlighting the continuity of the prisca theologia through all ages, philosophia perennis, the perennial philosophy. The ancient theology has usually been presented as a timeless tradition, common to early human cultures, or more precisely to exceptionally wise individuals (sages) within those cultures. While there is a good deal of evidence from ancient times onward for the awareness of manifestations of such a tradition, and of genealogies of major figures within it, present-day critics such as Kocku von Stuckrad are now drawing attention to its status as an ‘invented tradition’, implying that it serves some purpose specific to any given culture in which it is recognised. Its presence within such a context can be treated as an indicator of continuity (it portrays an image of timelessness) but also change (we can chart its shifting meanings and relationships within the culture at large).

We need to remind ourselves, from time to time, that underlying the concept of the ancient theology is a ‘pre-Darwinian’ worldview in which the Earth has a clearly finite history, having been created approximately four thousand years before the time of Christ, and destined to come to an end – at least in its pres-ent form – at some time in the conceivably near future. Within this worldview, mankind is defined not, of course, in evolutionary terms but as the chosen being to whom God entrusts custodianship of the Earth, and into whom the divine spirit is breathed, but who is also tarnished from the Fall. Human history is built on a cyclical pattern of perfection through revelation, and corruption through sin. The various regenerations of the prisca theologia throughout the ages are brought about through divinely inspired individuals such as Noah, Moses and most notably Jesus – or, more controversially for Christians, Orpheus, Pythag-oras or the Egyptian Hermes. Because mankind was, at the time of the early rev-elations, proportionately very much nearer to the moment of creation than were later ages, this gives the ancient theology an authenticity that extends beyond the content or provenance of its defining texts.