Publication

The Harmonies of Storms

harmonies-of-storms-cover

Published: January 3, 2011

A PDF eBook on the Music of the spheres; Harmony in climate change.

This eBook explores in great detail the mathematics behind the weather system described in Climate: Soul of the Earth

You will need a PDF reader, like Acrobat to view this ebook.

To Purchase the PDF:

$13.00Add to cart

The idea of the music of the spheres formed the basis for much of the contents of the esoteric schools in the past such as the school of Chartres, the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, and earlier, the Greek academies of Pythagoras. To these researchers the music of the spheres was not only a theoretical idea but a very pragmatic solution to problems of design in architecture, healing concepts in medicine, and the basis for a methodology for studying elemental phenomena in nature. The music of the spheres can be used today to rationally study the pressing issues of climate change.

The thought that the world was sung into existence by the Creator was present in the most ancient of societies.  In this worldview the original singing of the world has created aworld which has manifest as the state of order present in all kingdoms. The earth and water lie below the air and the fire for instance. This is an ordering of the elements. Likewise the planets travel in ordered orbits and do not deviate from them .They are moving in periods and modes like the unfolding of a musical theme.This ordering is not random. In the ancient world it was seen to be full of wisdom and intelligence,an image of the intelligence of the Creator. The visible world got its reliable form and function from the original music-like ordering of the elements. The musical scales which gave birth to the songs and rites of the sacred temple cultures were considere to be a direct image of this original creative ordering of the world.

The harmonies found in the various modes in music created conditions of sound which were seen to be at the root of the forms  and processes in the sense world. This mood of harmony and order in song was the soil from which sacred architecture and even the forms of government arose. The thinking was that the world was created by a harmonious system and so the forms that arise from this system must be in the image of the creation. As a result, in the ancient world the musical harmonics of the motion of the planets were seen as a melody in the fundamental song of creation.

Pythagoras studied the geometry of these ideas by using weights to stretch strings across an instrument known as a monochord. The monochord was an instrument designed to research the lengths of strings in relation to the notes which came from them when they were struck. His initial experiment placed equal weights on strings of equal length and diameter. These strings sounded the same note when plucked. To Pythagoras this revealed the incredible order of the mind of the Creator. He also found that if one of the strings was fretted exactly in half, dividing the string into a ratio of 1:2, that the fretted string when plucked sounded a note that was an octave above the note of the open string.  The open note was designated as the fundamental note or simply the fundamental.The octave note was the same note as the fundamental except that it was higher in frequency. It was the same but it was also different.

To Pythagoras this was one of the greatest mysteries imaginable. The octave was a reflection of the mystery of God. Pythagoras went on to find that if the open string was fretted so that it was in a ratio of 3:4  the note sounded in the fretted string was a fourth above the fundamental. That is if we sang a scale starting with the fundamental the note which the 3 : 4 ratio represented would be the fourth note above the fundamental. Further, when the open string was fretted in a ratio of 2:3 the note sounded was a fifth above the fundamental.  These four notes ,the fundamental, the fourth, the fifth and the octave were the ratios on which  Pythagoras built a whole philosophy and theology. These four notes formed the basis for the idea of the music of the spheres. Pythagorean ideas formed the basis for later alchemical thought. During the time of the building of the cathedrals the most important thing was that the building sang in it’s intervals and ratios. The proportions of harmony determined the forms of governments, the forms of government buildings, the forms of the cities and its streets, and the scientific cosmology that supported the philosophical life during the Middle Ages.

These ideas are present in a hidden way in the sciences of today. From the periodic table of the elements, through the many classes of crystallographic symmetry, to the taxonomies of thousands of plants and the living geometries of thousands of species of animals all classification is based upon the musically inspired principles of interval, ratio and proportion. That is, in the periodic table, one element is seen always in a harmonic relationship to another element. The relationship between carbon and silica in the periodic table is expressed as the relationship of the octave. The forms of crystal matrices are expressed in terms of ratios in crystallographic texts. Even in the organic realm musical relationships can be found. For instance, the skeleton has been described as frozen music. All of these ideas point to the concept of the music of the spheres.

In ancient times there was one most important  physical measurement which was considered to be the fundamental note for all other relationships. This fundamental was the circumference of the earth 24,883.2 mi. Divisions of this number were the basis for much sacred architecture and much more. Numerically the number 248,832 is 12 to the fifth power; 12 the number of the Zodiac multiplied by itself 5 times. Five being the number of the human being in the ancient world. In the circumference of the Earth, the cosmos was united with the human being musically. The Earth itself in the ancient mystery language was known as Adam Kadmon, the cosmic man, the measure of the human being.

By the time of Kepler the sacred use of number was falling into the physical calculus of physics, chemistry and the computational and observational methods of the arabic astronomers to which Tycho Brahe, Kepler’s collaborator, was heir. Kepler needed the observations of Tycho Brahe but he also wanted to keep the sacredness of number in his cosmology. So in his Harmony of the World ,Kepler sought to keep his system of planetary reckoning in line with the sacred sciences which valued the harmony of the spheres. To do this he went back to Pythagoras and the idea that the circumference of the Earth was as a measurement for all things terrestrial. It could be thought of like the string of a celestial monochord. The measurement of the circumference of the Earth was the instrument on which God was playing the world into existence.