Musica-Magica and the Rose Cross

Ezra Sandzer-Bell | August 13, 2013 The secret power of music lies in its capacity to express what cannot be communicated through ordinary language. Yet music is itself a language whose grammar can be understood and harnessed by songwriters to produce tangible effects in the world around us. In the Secret Teachings of All Ages, Manly P. Hall makes reference to an anonymous European essay called The Secret and Swift Messenger, written in 1641. This document detailed the art of musical cryptography, or straightforward communications that substituted alphabet letters with musical notes. Initiates could write a message, translate it into music, and send it to an associate who would decipher the code and understand the original text. The psychological effect of listening to music, even when it contains no cryptogram, remains numinous and full of hidden meaning that we must study closely in order to fully comprehend. Like the heavenly bodies of astrology, musical notes harmonize as they move in relation to one another, expressing an implicit harmonic order at play in the cosmos. According to the teachings of most Western mystery schools, there is an underlying web of interconnected meaning that unites all phenomenal events as perceived through the human mind. Historically, we find a number of musicians and musicologists whose interest in ritual magic led to the development of what I call Musica-Magica. Paul Foster Case, a musical composer of the early 20th century, founded a hermetic order called the B.O.T.A. whose ritual praxis operated on fixed associative chains of musical tones, colors, planets, and star systems. The purpose of this technique was to chant divine names in temple, activating the nervous system, and internalizing relationships between sound, image and psyche. These seemingly different modes of perception were connected by common essence of Vibration, the unifying principle of their belief system. Our effort to restore value and deep psychological meaning to individual tones does not necessarily occlude the scientific knowledge of acoustic and neurological processes. Sound can clearly be measured in terms of period

frequency and volume, while brain activity can be measured in response to aural stimulation. However, the description of musical experience in terms of objective, physical measurements will never lead to a humanistic language of the subjective experience of sound. On the contrary, it potentially strips away our sense of mystery and wonder, reducing music to the bottom line of numbers and ratios. Paul Case drew his correspondence tables from a magical order called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which in turn was affiliated with and inspired by Helena Blavatskys Theosophical society. All of these groups shared the common intention of facilitating transformational temple work for the benefit of individuals. Music and song played a significant role in these magical rites. We look to these occult fraternities and sororities for clues to the deep meaning of tonal harmony, but if this is our only station of learning, we wont find enough information and our understanding will remain incomplete. To really grok the depths of music, we need to familiarize ourselves with the common language of musical structure. This academic language is not taught in the initiatory rites of the Western Mysteries. There is a secular art of music composition propagated through universities everywhere whose syntax allows us to talk dispassionately about harmonic content and structure. This approach includes and transcends the musical notes themselves. One can read sheet music and then have something harmonically logical to say about it. Although spirit appears to be absent in this language, it provides a solid framework through which to understand the expression of spirit in sound. Formally known as Western Tonal Harmony, this musical grammar has existed for a few centuries and remains the dominant academic-theoretical paradigm to date. It emerged out of the deconstruction of J.S. Bachs compositional tendencies and the baroque period at large. Featuring a codification of the laws of voice leading and chord progressions by means of roman numerals and subscript/superscript modifications, this common practice approach to musical structure is the basic starting point for new students of composition. Modern music as we know it both observes and violates the laws of Common Practice theory.

We are hunting for the origin of our cultures music and a reasonable explanation of its design, so that we can find new ways of relating to it. Is it really enough to study the historical record of composers and performers from the last millennia? Can a list of names and dates tell us anything about our philosophical lineage? Even as we pry into the personal lives and stories of these individuals, we find very little information regarding the spiritual source of their creative inspiration and its expression through the 12-tone system. Instead, if we are going to develop a new way of interpreting and discussing music, we should return to the roots of our Western 12-tone system itself and attempt to reverse engineer its genesis. Bachs music was composed for the Church. He was employed to write organ music for their religious services in Germany during the early-mid 18th century. One of his greatest contributions to the concretization of 12-Tone Equal Temperament, which is the basis of Western Tonal Harmony, was his collection of songs under the name Well Tempered Clavier, Book 1 and 2. Each book featured one song in a major key and one song in a minor key, for all twelve tones. This equaled twenty-four songs per book and forty-eight songs in total. These masterful compositions could be viewed as a magical working, resonating with the two tablets of the biblical Ten Commandments and establishing a law of harmony that has not yet disappeared from our culture even after 250 years of steady growth and evolution. As taught in the kabala, whatever we give name to grows in power. The WTC books have become the pillars of our collective Musical Temple-Template. 1 Knowing that the twelve-tone system originate is only some 250 years old, who chose this configuration and for what reason? According to historians and musicologists, it crystallized out of an organic process, in competition with a tuning system called just intonation and a number of others that did not divide the octave into 12 tones at all. What was the secret power the granted 12-Tone Equal Temperament victory over the others?

Tangentially, the acronym WTC remains relevant today as an international symbol of American Liberty and its vulnerability to corruption by outside influences.
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You will not read the answer to our question in most books on music history, yet it strikes us as incredibly obvious once we begin to read between the lines. Remember that Bachs music was funded by the Church, whose self-righteous monotheistic dogma purposefully covered up the large quantity of mystical rites they had coveted from early pagan groups. The priest class studied astrology and alchemy in secret, while publically denouncing the study of these arts as heretical and demonic. We can trace the roots of the Church to the Holy Roman Empire, and prior to this civilization, the mythic landscape of Ancient Greece. Polytheistic and full of admiration for the harmony of the planets and stars, Greek metaphysics attempted to communicate their astronomical observations in terms of music. Pythagoras coined the phrase harmony of the spheres to describe the mirror between astral and musical planes. To this day, our seven note diatonic scale features seven permutations, all of which are named after different sectors of the Greek islands. These musical modes are a hint to the Greek (not Catholic) origins of our musical system. From here we deduce that the division of an octave into 12 parts is a symbol of the 12 signs of the zodiac, and the seven-note scale a representation of the number of planets in the Greek classical system. 2 Furthermore, the eighty-eight keys of the piano represent the 88-day orbit of Mercury, the mythical messenger of the gods. Affiliated with the Magician card in the classical tarot, Mercury represents a conduit for solar energy to reach down into the Earth element and create new life. Music behaves in the same way, channeling energy through the medium of sound vibration and provoking emotional experiences in the listener as if by magic. Now that we have established the Greek philosophical roots of Western Tonal Harmony, we can return to the original contemplation of the hermetic orders who call upon Greek and Hebrew alphabets for the invocation of invisible agencies.

Extensive translations of German and French texts by the modern English author Joscelyn Godwin have proven that music was intended to represent and express the harmony of the spheres.
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The ceremonial rites of Hermes-Mercury were taught by a 20th century Christian mystical society called the Order of the Rosy Cross. They used many of the same attributions found in Cases BOTA system and even encoded these attributions into a symbol, commonly known as the Qabalistic Rosy Cross. Cherished for its wealth of esoteric meaning, this icon is an aesthetically beautiful skeleton key to the Western Mysteries. It is a living example of musical cryptography. When music is named in terms of tone clusters and chord progressions, the inner meaning of these musical notes becomes irrelevant. It is as if we have a macrocosmic model for musical tone but have lost the keys to our microcosmos. This is what we are after in our discovery of the Qabalistic tone-color correspondences. We will make a quick overview of the symbols contents and meaning. To some this may be too much detail to really digest, but I imagine another body of readers who will appreciate this attention to detail and discover its potential applications in their own musical process.

The center of the Qabalistic Cross features a rose of twenty-two petals, comprised of three inner petals, seven middle petals, and twelve outer petals. Each of these petals holds a fixed association with one musical tone and one color, along with a Hebrew letter, astrological body, and tarot card from the major arcana.

The three central petals of the rose are colored with a primary color; Red Yellow and Blue. The seven middle petals are colored with the primary and secondary colors, numbering six, plus a seventh color (blue-violet), corresponding to the seven planets and the seven notes of a musical scale. The outer twelve petals feature the three primary, three secondary, and six tertiary colors of the color wheel, completing the system and corresponding to the twelve signs of the zodiac. The twelve notes of a chromatic musical scale (the combination of both white and black keys of a piano) move stepwise along this color wheel, beginning with C at the 12 position, ascending or descending clockwise until arriving back at the original note in a different octave. The twelve tones and twelve colors overlap on the outer twelve petals, and those same tone-color associations are applied to the middle and inner petals of the rose. In this way, individual notes are imbued with a consistent inner meaning. These attributions can be applied to the ceremonial embodiment of creative energy potentials that follow. Angelic and demonic invocation has been achieved with this system. The letters of an entitys name are vocalized within the magic circle and its spirit is confronted directly. In one magical order, a seven-walled vault of the adepts holds the initiate as they learn to use the four magical weapons and chant the divine names. From the macroscopic intellectual perspective of music as an objective configuration of tones in geometric proportion, to the microscopic tonal perspective of esoteric correspondence and inner significance, we arrive at a holistic understanding of music. At the center of the system is the archetype of the musical note, the proverbial tone and water stone of the wise, the archetypal image of our True Nature. Our soul is like a musical tone emanating from the infinite ground of being called Silence.