Iamblichus: On the Mysteries · 190 of 218 · tr. Thomas Taylor
Chapter VIII-ad
But Pythagoras, as he was astronomizing, happened to meet with the Phrygian piper at an unseasonable time of night, and persuaded him to change his Phrygian for a spondaic song; through which the fury of the lad being immediately repressed, he returned home in an orderly manner, though a little before this he could not be in the least restrained, nor would, in short, bear any admonition; and even stupidly insulted Pythagoras when he met him.
When a certain youth, also, rushed with a drawn sword on Anchilus, the host of Empedocles, because, being a judge, he had publicly condemned his father to death, and would have slain him as a homicide, Empedocles changed the intention of the youth, by singing to his lyre that verse of Homer, Nepenthe, without gall, o’er every ill Oblivion spreads.
Odyss.
lib.
4.
And thus snatched his host Anchilus from death, and the youth from the crime of homicide.
It is also related, that the youth from that time became the most celebrated of the disciples of Pythagoras.
Farther still, the whole Pythagoric school produced, by certain appropriate songs, what they called exartysis , or adaptation; synarmoga , or elegance of manners; and epaphe , or contact, usefully conducting the dispositions of the soul to passions contrary to those which it before possessed.
For when they went to bed, they purified the reasoning power from the perturbations and noises to which it had been exposed during the day, by certain odes and peculiar songs, and by this means procured for themselves tranquil sleep, and few and good dreams.
But when they rose from bed, they again liberated themselves from the torpor and heaviness of sleep, by songs of another kind.
Sometimes, also, by musical sounds alone, unaccompanied with words, they healed the passions of the soul and certain diseases, enchanting, as they say, in reality.
And it is probable that from hence this name epode , i.
e.
enchantment, came to be generally used.
After this manner, therefore, Pythagoras, through music, produced the most beneficial correction of human manners and lives.” Proclus also, in his MS.
Commentary on the First Alcibiades of Plato, observes, “that of musical instruments some are repressive, and others motive; some are adapted to rest, and others to motion.
The repressive, therefore, are most useful for education, leading our manners into order, repressing the turbulency of youth, and bringing its agitated nature to quietness and temperance.
But the motive instruments are adapted to enthusiastic energy; and hence, in the mysteries and mystic sacrifices, the pipe is useful; for the motive power of it is employed for the purpose of exciting the reasoning power to a divine nature.
For here it is requisite that the irrational part should be laid asleep, and the rational excited.
Hence those that instruct youth use repressive instruments, but initiators such as are motive.
For that which is disciplined is the irrational part; but it is reason which is initiated, and which energizes enthusiastically.” See, likewise, on this subject, Ptolem.
Harmonic, lib.
iii.
cap.
7 and 8, who observes among other things, “that our souls directly sympathize with the energies of melody, recognizing, as it were, their alliance to them—and that at one time the soul is changed to a quiet and repressed condition, but at another to fury and enthusiasm.
The Stoic and Plotinian doctrine that all parts of the cosmos are bound by hidden affinities, so that a movement in one part resonates through the whole; the metaphysical basis for astrology, magic, and divination.
The passage explicitly states that souls sympathize with the energies of melody and are changed to a quiet or furious condition by them.
Eckhart's Abgeschiedenheit/Gelassenheit — radical letting-go of will, image, and grasping that opens the soul to God; distinct from inner_silence (quietness) and from material renunciation, and adjacent to Sufi tark and Buddhist non-grasping as a practice rather than a metaphysical claim.
The text describes liberating the soul from torpor and heaviness through music, implying a letting-go of material states.
Disciplined inward attention — sitting, focused, or open-awareness practice — as a stand-alone term that umbrellas active_contemplation, inner_silence, and dhyana-style sitting.
The practice of singing odes and songs at specific times (bedtime, waking) constitutes a disciplined inward attention.
The doctrine — central to Eastern Orthodox and Maximian theology — that the human person is progressively transformed into a partaker of the divine nature by grace, not merely justified or united in passing ecstasy.
The text describes the soul being energized to a divine nature through music.
Iamblichean ritual practice that engages the gods directly through consecrated material symbols and actions, on the premise that divine power descends into properly prepared matter — distinct from philosophical contemplation alone.
The passage details specific ritual practices (singing, instruments) used to heal passions and diseases by engaging the gods directly.