Foreword

Summary

The dedication of this volume honors the most influential figure in the establishment of the Western esoteric traditions as an academic discipline. In 1992 Professor Faivre's proposal of six markers of esoteric “forms of thought” served to define a field that had been viewed with mixed fascination and unease. He showed that these traditions should be approached not as a subset of religious studies, nor as primitive forerunners of modern science, but acknowledged as an independent, third current of European culture. The fact that some of Faivre's successors have questioned or reinvented his definition has only served to broaden and enliven the field.

However one defines esotericism, once alerted to it, the historian sees it everywhere. Beside the explicitly occult sciences of astrology, alchemy, and ceremonial magic, it is embedded in religions, both pagan (Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, Gnosticism) and monotheist (Christian theosophy, Kabbalah, Sufism). Esoteric notions inspired the first scientific experiments (Pythagoras), discoveries in astronomy (Kepler, Newton), chemistry (Paracelsus, the alchemists), psychology (astrology, Mesmer, Jung), and philosophy from Plato to Hegel. The same applies to architecture, when based on harmonic proportions (preserved by the Freemasons), and to painters touched by Neoplatonism (Renaissance, some Romantics) or, later, by Theosophy (Symbolism, early modernist abstraction). The literary and poetic canon from Homer onwards is replete with esoteric ideas, recognized by the initiated and absorbed unconsciously by the wider public.

Like the esoteric current itself, music partakes of both science and art. On the one hand it is a quantifiable acoustic phenomenon, on the other, a source of subjective, even spiritual experience. It spans the whole scale of being. In most mythologies, the cosmos emerged from a primordial tone or word; according to the mystics, the angels sing and dance; according to astronomers and astrologers, harmony governs the motions of the heavenly bodies; and as everyone can see, the human soul and body resonate to the same proportions. Esoteric doctrine explains this through the theory of correspondences, the “above” resembling the “below” and the Microcosm mirroring the Macrocosm. How exactly this happens is understood by every age according to its knowledge and limitations. The present age is no exception, complete with the wild theories that have always been a popular residue of the higher speculations.

If the scholarly study of esotericism is still at a comparatively early stage, esoteric musicology is even more so.