As we can see, Apollo is situated above and, in fact, outside the system comprised of the basic elements (water, earth, fire, air), planets, the sphere of the fixed stars, each corresponding to a certain muse and a certain ancient Greek musical note and mode, and rules the time itself, shown in the form of the three-headed serpent, Chronos.
The number nine is often associated with a divine connotation in the mystical thought and religions across the globe from ancient times. There is both, negativity and positivity in this mysterious nine! Not to talk of the numeral 9, which is often cited as a ‘lucky number' for many these days! The ‘ruit of the pirit' comprises nine graces' love, peace, suffering, gentle, good, faith, meek and temperance.
The ‘gifts of the pirit' are 9 in number' the word of wisdom, the word of knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discerning of spirits, tongues, and interpretation of tongues. # nd if the $nglish saying that a cat has nine lives is to be believed, well the% est is not far behind! &n &slam too, the significance of number nine is underlined which is almost akin to ancient &ndian thought anatana (harma) speaking of nine openings for man as also the nine months gestation period for the birth which is of course common to all human beings! &n the ancient.other +oddess concept, prevalent on this land way before the #ryans adopted it, there runs a popular narrative of the divine female power synonymous with creator of the universe, the embodiment of pristine purity and truth, annihilating the demons representing the evil forces. The mother goddess wages a war for nine days to combat the potent. satanic power) and bestow deliverance to the world in general.
n a more intellectual plane, the nine evil forces that trouble man are none but nine varied aspects of his own negative nature like ego, self-conceit, self depreciation and so on, that constantly divert him from the path o f realisation, which is the ultimate goal. The divine mother is supposed to be our anchor who would steer us clear of succumbing to the evil in us! Nine being a significant part of the &ndian psyche from time immemorial, the creators of our classical arts also found nine emotions or artistic moods that form a part of our epressions in life.
These nine moods or ‘navarasa' came to be associated with artistic epression in ancient &ndian dance, music, drama, sculpture, painting and any mode of epression in art. &f /harata.uni's. Denoting nine bhavas or emotions, similar emotions were also defined and epressed in certain ragas musical notes) or lyrics kritis) as in sculptures or picture paintings. ince our classical arts originated from the 0indu religion, each rasa or mood denoted a particular emotion and was bestowed with a particular colour with a particular deity presidin g over it. Thus t he prominent ‘hringara rasa' den oted an encompassing love1 hence a light green colour and 2ord 3i shnu as the presiding deity.
0e also presided over ‘hanta' or peace with a light blue to denote it. The ‘0asya rasa' or mirth is supposed to be white in colour and 4ramata is the deity1 2ord 5udra presided over ‘5oudra rasa' or fury whose colour was 6ustifiably red!
‘7arunya' or compassion 8mercy had a ma ruling over it with grey as its colour1 2ord hiva was the deity for ‘/hibatsa' or disgust depicted by the colour blue. The emotion of fear ‘/hayanaka' was r uled by the deity 7ala whose colour is black. 2ord &ndra represented ‘3e era rasa' or valour saffron) while ‘#dbhuta' or wonder had creator /rahma as its deity and yellow representing the emotion. There is no denying that later, ‘3 a tsalya' parental love) and ‘/hakti' devotion) also came to be adopted as important emotions in the scheme of artistic epression. The classical treatise in dance also speaks of the mood or bhava evoked in these nine rasa like' rati love), hasya laughter), shoka sorrow), krodha anger), utsaha euberance), bhaya scare), 6ugupsa disgust) and vismaya wonder). The theory of navarasa forms the aesthetic underlining of all forms of &ndian classical dance. &n music, ragas like 7unthalavarali evoke fun and frolic 0asya rasa) while ragas like.ohana emanate 3eera rasa.
The popular.ayamalavagowla is synonymous with 7aarunya 7aruna rasa) while certain ragas like (wi6avanthi, /ehag, 7amas or 7api are innately romantic hringara) not to talk of the lyrical compositions wherein the bhava8mood is eplicit. The so-called artistic epressions owe their source to nature. or instance, the navarasa manifestation can be seen in the moods of the sea which can roar angrily at one time, run still and calm the very net, get into a fren:y at times, play around with its rippling waves steadily as it kisses our feet and so on. The same is true of the other elements of nature. #nd what about us; # re we not the receptacles of nine moods; Number nine 9) is the most intriguing digit of all the numbers. &t is an absolute number which when multiplied by any number always reproduces itself1 the sum of digits in the product will always be nine. &n anskrit 9 days that adds up to nine 9).
5andhra means outlet or opening or aperture. &t is said that a human being has nine eit points called Nava 5andhras through one of which the soul finally leaves the body. They are eyes =)1 nostrils =)1 ears =)1 mouth ?)1 and ecretory organs =).
0uman body is the city of nine gates where the soul dwells. /hagawadgeeta @anto.
By Maria Danova, Independent Scholar “Cultures have long heard wisdom in non-human voices: Apollo, god of music, medicine and knowledge, came to Delphi in the form of a dolphin. But dolphins, which fill the oceans with blipping and chirping, and whales, which mew and caw in ultramarine jazz—a true rhapsody in blue—are hunted to the edge of silence.” –Jay Griffiths, British writer Most of the sources concerning Pythagoras claim that he traveled extensively and was initiated in almost every kind of mystery available at the time: the Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece, the Mysteries of Isis in Egypt, the Babylonian mysteries, and even the Brahmanic Mysteries at Elephanta and Ellora, India, all of which taught one supreme truth—there is only One God. Therefore, the true origin of his infinitely deep knowledge is most likely the ancient esoteric schools, and it is based on this knowledge, gained through initiation and study, that he formed his doctrine and founded his own initiatory school. As an initiate and Master, he always wore a white robe, representing the purity of a ritual and contributing to his reputation as a divine being; the closest circle of his disciple had the same clothes. They started and rounded off each day with music (at the time, there were no chords, i.e., simultaneous striking of several notes, and, for all we know, this music was played as a single melody); they chanted sacred sounds, meditating and bringing their souls into perfect harmony: “at night when his disciples went to sleep, he delivered them from all the noises and troubles of the day, and purified the perturbations of their minds, and rendered their sleeps quiet with good dreams and predictions.
This theory of sound-planetary correspondences is even confirmed by modern science: Exploring the first moments of the Universe, cosmologists then had a startling revelation: the primeval plasma was crossed by waves similar to those produced by sound in the air — ripples propagating in space, a rich choir accompanying cosmic evolution. The disturbance produced in the plasma by perturbations of different size traveled as waves of different frequency. Perturbations of larger extent produced slower oscillations — lower frequencies, deep and low tones.
7 The seven vowels of the Greek alphabet, in their planetary correspondence, are: A (alpha, a) = 1st heaven; E (epsilon, short e) = 2nd heaven; H (eta, long e) = 3rd heaven; I (iota, i) = 4th heaven; O (omicron, short o) = 5th heaven; Y (upsilon, u) = 6th heaven; Ω (omega, long o) = 7th heaven. According to this concept, between the Alpha and Omega lies the whole gamut of phenomenal world, and these 7 vowels represent a perfect circle and perfect harmony 8: “When these seven heavens sing together they produce a perfect harmony which ascends as an everlasting praise to the throne of the Creator. The seven strings were always related both to their correspondences in the human body and to the planets. The names of God were also conceived to be formed from combinations of the seven planetary harmonies.” 9. The number 7 was and still is considered a powerful, beneficial number. When ancient astronomers observed the planets discernible to the naked eye, they discovered that they were seven in number, and many ancient religions were based on the veneration of this number.
In Jewish religion, they were the archangels Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Samael, Uriel, Amiel, Zadkiel. To the Babylonians, the seven planets were the seven gods —Shamash, the Sun; Sin, the Moon; Nebo, Mercury; Ishtar, Venus; Nergal, Mars; Marduk, Jupiter; and Ea, Saturn. 10 It is indeed interesting to imagine how Pythagoras passed the initiations in Babylon, directly corresponding to the number 7. The images become especially vivid when we read the description of the ancient seven-level temples of the Babylonian religion in Higgins’ Beginning of Masonry: Their disposition from the bottom up was that of the planets in their respective order of velocity. Saturn, the slowest, was represented at the bottom by a black chamber; then came an orange-hued Temple for Jupiter, then a red one for Mars.
Above this was the Temple of the Sun covered with plates of gold, then that of Venus, of a pale yellow color, and the last of the initiations took place in the literally Blue Lodge, dedicated to the planet Mercury, of whom the old rituals told us that the three lesser lights were “the Sun, the Moon, and Mercury.” Above this was the silver-covered Temple of the Moon god, where the fully initiated hierophant took his place among the astronomers who studied the heavenly bodies from this elevated Middle Chamber. In view of this magnificent image, we should recall Goethe’s famous words “ architecture is frozen, or crystallized, music”. Being a Freemason, a highly advanced initiate, and “Gesamtwesen” (a kind of universal being), in this phrase he hinted at the ancient concept of correspondences between music and architecture. Hall writes in his survey of the Pythagorean doctrine in The Secret Teachings of All Ages, in Ancient Greece “the elements of architecture were considered as comparable to musical modes and notes, or as having a musical counterpart. This imitation was, as far as we know, one of the aims of the daily musical practice of the Pythagoreans. The heavenly sounds—the music of the spheres—could be only heard by the Master, who then brought this knowledge to his disciples in an accessible form: “he Pythagoras framed some representations of these sounds to exhibit them as much as was possible, imitating (that music) chiefly by instruments or the voice alone.” 12 Later in history, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), following the Pythagorean tradition, claimed that he knew exactly how the spheres sounded: “Planets that moved in circular orbits, like Venus, kept one tone.
Planets that moved in eccentric orbits, like the moon and Mars, created arpeggios. Rapid planets, like the moon, moved in semi-quavers.
Slow movers, like Saturn, moved in breves. Kepler believed that the planets also had specific intervals based on the difference between the maximum and minimum angular speeds of the various planets when measured from the sun. In other words, the closer to a circle around the sun the orbit is, the closer it is to a unison at each end of the orbit. Earth’s interval, whose orbit is very nearly a circle but not quite, in a semitone: mi to fa. (He also glossed the names of these pitches theologically by suggesting that they also stood for the words “misery” and “famine” — our lot on earth). Venus is almost a perfect circle and therefore the interval for Venus is a quarter tone.
Thus do the orbits of the planets eventually build up a cosmic chord.” 13. We may wonder, who, according to the Pythagoreans, “ruled” the system of divine harmony briefly outlined above?
Who tuned the velocity of the heavenly bodies? Who, thus, was the master and player of the world lyre? Naturally it was Apollo, the supreme deity of harmony, order, and the arts.
Diogenes writes that “the only altar at which he Pythagoras worshiped was that of Apollo the Giver of Life,” obviously without any animal sacrifice, since the Pythagoreans were strict vegetarians. Apollo, whose cult was most prominent in Ionia, Pythagoras’ homeland (he was born on the island of Samos, one of the islands of the Ionian League) was associated with the SUN: “the Sun is the leader of the choir of planets, and Apollo’s lyre a symbol of the harmony of the spheres.” 14. All in all, as Jacqueline Behling writes, although his origin remains a mystery, “Apollo is commonly considered as the ‘most Greek’ of all the gods of Greece”.
Still, it is more than possible that this deity was actually of non-Greek origin: it was a common notion that he came from the North; according to another concept, he was the Greek embodiment of the Egyptian god Horus. In her work on Apollo and Pythagoreanism, Behling calls Pythagoras Apollo’s “most prominent non-priestly advocate”: “While earning credit for major early contributions to mathematics and geometry as well as philosophy, he identified himself closely with Apollo, as either a messenger or perhaps an avatar of the god.” 15 According to Pythagoras, who was also considered a son of the god 16, Apollo represented the higher principle setting the orderly framework (net) of the universe, “an impersonal principle ofhigher reality” (Behling). NOTES: 1 Stanley, Thomas. Pythagoras: His Life and Teachings. A Compendium of Classical Sources.
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(From the 1687 edition of The History of Philosophy). Preface by Manly P. Lake Worth, Fl.: Ibis Press, 2010 2 On this subject, see: Idel, Moshe.
Mystical Experience in Abraham Abdulafia; esp. Chapter 2: Music and Ecstatic Kabbalah. SUNY Series in Judaica, State University of New York Press, 1988 3 “Thoth himself was shown on the Temple Wall at Karnak in the act of ‘stretching the cord,’ which is the act of moving from a spiritual center outwards in order to create forms in the physical 3-dimensions of space; the great hermetic Egyptologist Schwaller de Lubicz labeled this Temple illustration ‘Thoth, Master of the Net.” From: Gilbert, Robert J. “The Hidden Energy Science of Sacred Geometry: Ancient Traditions and Recent Breakthroughs”, Spirit of Maat Webzine, March 2008 4 Godwin, Joscelyn. The Mystery of the Seven Vowels in Theory and Practice. Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1991: 22-23 5 Braun, Melanie. “Exploring the Efficacy of Vowel Intonations.” The Rose+Croix Journal, 2005, Vol.
2: 13 6 Godwin, Joscelyn. The Mystery of the Seven Vowels: 23-24 7 Balbi, Amedeo. The Music of the Big Bang: The Cosmic Microwave Background and the New Cosmology.