Astronomical Musicality within Mythic Narratives (paper) (original) (raw)

I open this paper with a diagram of its structure (figure 1). This purportedly ancient symbol came to light around 1914 as the (nine fold) Enneagram [BLAKE,1996]: Literary analysis has shown ancient writers using very similar Ring Compositions [DOUGLAS, 2010] as just one of many techniques, often employed within mythic texts to insert hidden structures of meaning. I will be introducing another such technique rediscovered by Ernest McClain [MCCLAIN, 1976, 1978] in which he has “offered a persuasive explanation of crucial passages in texts of world literature—the Bible, the Rig Veda, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and Plato’s dialogues -- that have defied experts in the concerned disciplines.” – Wikipedia. His work finds harmonic parallelism within texts and finds a purpose for the anomalous often “astronomical” numbers, found within mythic narratives whose meaning is explainable by reconstructing a unique array (a matrix) of whole numbers lesser than the number within the text, numbers evoked purely by consequence of limiting the harmonic generative power to that number. McClain finds that a limit’s matrix, naturally shaped like a mountain, explains the plot elements, events and characters of the narrative, which run parallel to the harmonic concerns found within these mountains. The most significant question emerging from such harmonic parallelism within texts is why the harmonic facts implicit within different limiting numbers were ever thought an important substratum for mythic narrative. What could have made harmonic facts relevant to spiritual tales involving divine worlds and heroic dramas?