Composing the Cosmic
Composing the Cosmic
Harmonies of the Macrocosm
This chapter completes the Boethian tripartition with a consideration of cosmic music. While the idea of the “music of the spheres” has garnered the most attention, indeed has become a reductive synecdoche of “Pythagoreanism” itself, for the twelfth-century cosmologists, the music of the spheres was the symptom of a more fundamental theory, that of the world soul. Tracing this harmony through both the world’s body (in the form of elemental theory) and the world’s soul (as articulated in Plato’s Timaeus and elaborated by Calcidius and Macrobius, among others), this chapter argues that the “music of the spheres,” along with the aspirational aurality that it entails, is more an epistemic attitude than a cosmic ontology. Hence the attitude it encourages can, and did, survive the gradual eclipse of its materially grounded reality and its absorption into a more generic concept of nature.
Keywords: music of the spheres, elements, atomism, Calcidius, Macrobius, World Soul, epistemology, ontology, aurality
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