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.
Ecstatic irrational rapture — Plato's mania, Bruno's furore — by which the soul transcends ordinary reason and attains direct contact with divine reality; madness reframed as higher knowledge.
Proclus's account of motive instruments used 'in the mysteries and mystic sacrifices' to excite 'the reasoning power to a divine nature' through 'enthusiastic energy' while the irrational part is 'laid asleep' describes ecstatic irrational rapture as a higher, divinely-oriented state.
The ritual admission of an individual into esoteric knowledge or a sacred order through a formal rite of passage — testing, ordeal, or ceremony — marking a definite before/after threshold in the initiate's status and access. Distinct from hidden_sayings (the doctrine being concealed, not the rite of admission to it) and esoteric_lineage (the historical chain of transmission across generations, not a single individual's admission).
Proclus explicitly distinguishes 'initiators' who use motive instruments from educators who use repressive ones, stating that 'it is reason which is initiated, and which energizes enthusiastically' — a direct reference to the rite of admission into a higher state of being.
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.
The Hermetic doctrine that nothing rests — matter, energy, mind, and spirit are a single continuum differing only in rate of vibration, from the grossest matter to the least material spirit. Distinct from cosmic_sympathy (affinity resonating BETWEEN separate things) in being a claim about what constitutes any one thing in the first place, and from magical_equilibrium (Lévi's operational balancing technique, which presupposes some vibration doctrine rather than stating this general principle).
The passage systematically demonstrates that different rates and qualities of musical vibration (Phrygian vs. spondaic, repressive vs. motive instruments, sounds with and without words) produce different states in the soul and body, treating vibration as the operative principle of psychic transformation.
The doctrine and practice that spoken or sung word carries causal-magical force — that uttering names, formulas, songs, or incantations alters reality directly rather than merely communicating about it. Vainamoinen's runo-songs that move mountains and command iron, Norse galdr, Vedic mantra, Shinto kotodama, the magician's barbarous names in the Greek Magical Papyri, Iamblichean arcane signatures and inexplicable symbols, biblical creation-by-word. Distinct from sacred_names (the ontological power of names themselves) and prayer (address to the divine); word_power_incantation is the magical-causal efficacy of the spoken word as such.
The entire passage is a catalogue of cases where sung or spoken words (a changed musical mode, a Homeric verse, odes, unaccompanied sounds) directly alter the psychological and even physical state of persons, demonstrating the causal-magical efficacy of the spoken/sung word as the passage's central argument.