THE ALCHEMY OF COLOUR-MUSIC-CHAKRA.
1: ORIENTAL ORIGINS
THE ALCHEMY OF COLOUR-MUSIC-CHAKRA.
By the 13th century, the alchemist was a familiar figure in Europe and scholars like Roger Bacon extolled the craft: Albertus Magnus was particularly struck by the key colour changes in the alchemical process, suggesting for the first time that a devotee could envisage the colours as an easy-to-read circle. They might begin at black, pass through white and yellow, to arrived at a final violet (or red) state symbolizing gold. As the craft was Latinized, the yellow stage was de-emphasised, leaving a basic progression from black through white to red, like the coloured costumes of clerics, representing the Trinity. Variations were allowed, beginning with black (the base metal), passing through a variety of hues (often including a spectral effect like the sheen on molten metal), to arrive at a penultimate white (the White or Silver Queen). White, considered by Magnus to encompass all the preceding colours, was precursor to the final red (the Red or Gold King).
Alchemy was driven underground by increasing pressure from the church in the 13th century. So secretive tracts were issued under the names of respected authorities of religion and science - St John the Evangelist, Aquinas, Ovid, Virgil, David, Solomon and Moses were all cited as alchemical authorities. The metaphorical language of Christianity was purloined, to identify the Great Work with Christ's Passion - Christ himself as the Red King, God in the role of prime alchemist. Fanciful occult correspondences - between the seven days, planets, liberal arts, and virtues, and associated metals and colours - became commonplace among the educated. By the Renaissance, alchemy had adherents in very high places indeed: Pope Leo X was a practitioner, while his great rival Martin Luther praised it as the philosophy of the ancients, seeing a parallel to Christian beliefs in the allegories and secret meanings of alchemy.
Adding to the metaphysical soup, certain Greek and Latin texts discovered in the 15th century were wrongly attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (aka the god Thoth, and acknowledged by St Augustine as an Egyptian magus). Written between AD 50 and 300, they represented Graeco-Roman reverence for Egyptian wisdom, and contained tracts both popular - on alchemy and astrology - and learned - on divine revelation and redemption. In common with religion, this Hermetic magic was concerned with spiritual realities beyond normal human experience, as were the theosophies of Plato and Pythagoreans (whose cult beliefs were also being rediscovered). The supernatural might be perceived through revelation, meditation, or by secret paths to knowledge available only to trained initiates.
Making sense of the diverse streams of mystical thought became a pressing concern towards the end of the 16th century. At the court of Rudolph 11 in Prague, scholars attempted to unite differing intellectual currents within a holistic philosophy. Alchemist and geologist Anselm de Boodt, and fellow physician Scarmilionius, attempted to give coherence to the realms of the senses with a colour-music code, Five Pythagorean intervals were given colour equivalents from black to white, a progression superficially akin to that of alchemy or Aristotle's range between dark and light. But the choice of intervening colours - red, blue and yellow - may owe more to newly emergent doctrine of painter's primaries. Later colour-music codes, of Mersenne, Curie de la Chambre and Kircher in the first half of the 17th century, shared the predilection for Pythagorean musical scales. Their more extensive colour sequences, emphasizing gradations between dark (black) and light (white), owed little to theories of painting or to studies of spectral colour.
Illustration 1 : FLUDD'S TONAL PROGRESSION OF COLOURS.
In "Medicina Catholica 1" of 1626, the magus Thomas Fludd arranged colours from the darkest to the lightest, according to Aristotle's precepts. His abstract circle of seven colours anticipated Isaac Newton's later colour music wheel, though it lacked its visual coherence. At first, Newton showed the spectrum as a simple, horizontal format: not until 1694 did he contemplate joining its ends to form a circle.
Natural magic and alchemy proved doggedly resistant to attempts by the church to censor them, and by science to obliterate the occult with reason. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the practice of magic became more covert as witch-hunts swept western Europe. Still the prominent physician, Robert Fludd, continued to practice and publicise the craft, following in the footsteps of the mighty alchemist Paracelsus, reformer of Renaissance medicine. For many, alchemy wore its alternative guise as a panacea for the ills of mankind; its necessary colours were not markers in producing gold, but aids to diagnosis and treatment of illness. Fludd openly scorned detractors like Athanasius Kircher, though their differing beliefs, magical and religious, sometimes seem indistinguishable; both pursued schemes of universal harmony that might include cosmology, music and colour.
Alongside the neoplatonism of Plotinus and the works of Aristotle, magic and alchemy contributed to the intellectual climate of the 17th century, from which modern physics developed. (Chemistry, which evolved to its present form by the 18th century, has many origins in the antique practices of exoteric alchemy.) Other traditions reached their apotheosis at this juncture: colour music, for one, found a definitive form in Isaac Newton's code. His quasi-magical description of the spectrum, might be partly seen as a carefully disguised nostrum.
As an alchemist, Newton conceived his formulations as rediscoveries of secret knowledge, rooted deep in the tilth of western civilization - in the mystical and esoteric learning of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. The exalted pedigree excused a breach of philosophical and theological barriers that traditionally separated the physical laws of the earth from those of the heavens (or indeed, the laws of colour from those of music). The economist John Maynard Keynes, an avid collector of his esoteric writings, has since reminded us that Newton was the last of the great magi, though his science has long been stripped of metaphysical trappings and streamlined for efficient use.
A metaphysical rapprochement between science, philosophy and religion has since been attempted by organisations such as the Theosophical Society. Founded in 1875, it traces its spiritual ancestors back to the ancient sages of both east and west, though more properly it may be envisaged as the heir to the Renaissance tradition of natural magic. Around its spiritualist core, Theosophy gathered some of the mystical detritus the juggernaut of science had left in its wake - including Isaac Newton's colour-music code. The theosophical presence can still be felt in a wide variety of fashionable activities, such as recreational yoga and natural therapies. Fundamental to some of these schemes is a link between colour and music in their pure, elemental states which finds common expression in a variety of colour-music codes.
From April to October in 1995, late at night in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Domenic De Clario presented seven events under the title "Sevenness: Sublunar". On the two evenings I attended, the weather was fine and the moon full. Coloured lights accented features of the garden as well as various banal objects scattered about - an old car, a television aerial, table lamps. Ambient music was broadcast from a concealed keyboard, where De Clario improvised for several hours. The key of the music and colour of the lighting were changed each night, as explained in the copious program notes supplied. By these means, De Clario hoped to progressively affect my consciousness.
The musical key of C was used on the first night, D on the second, and so on up the white notes of the piano. The seventh and final performance used the key of B, almost completing the octave. Likewise, the colours of the lighting progressed through the spectral sequence of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet, ending with white on the seventh night. A colour-music code was formed where sound and light were paralleled, starting at their lower frequencies (with longest wavelengths) and moving each night to higher frequencies (of shorter wavelength). De Clario supposed the combination of their vibrations to have 'portal' effects on the human body. Seven specific points - the chakras - were targeted, starting at the coccyx on the first night, and moving up the spine to the crown of the head. This pathway through the body, familiar from kundalini yoga, is associated with increasing consciousness. Quoting writings that supported a relationship of colour-music-chakra, De Clario presented "Sevenness: Sublunar" as a way to enlightenment.
The literary sources De Clario used in the creation of "Sevenness: Sublunar", are succinctly described in Ruth Prawar Jhabvala's "Shards of Memory":
While browsing in New Age bookshops, I have found that texts extolling music and colour, as aids to well-being, are enjoying special vogue. Evidently, De Clario's work originated in this subculture where different creeds abound. The texts variously invoke Greek philosophy, particle physics, the teachings of gurus or guidance from the spirit world in support of their claims. Many manuals on kundalini yoga - colour-coded chakras included - were on offer. Amongst these were imported texts that put aside the straightforward spectral colours and coded the chakras with more exotic hues: blacks, greys and purples were included, then modified by effects of luminescence, smokiness and clarity.
Australian products on the market often use simple colour-codes, seeming to prefer the traditional rainbow - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet (or ROYGBIV for short). This nomenclature originated with Sir Isaac Newton in the 18th. century, who was the first to describe the artificial rainbow of the spectrum. Cutting it into seven sections to mirror the seven notes of a musical scale, he created the acronym ROYGBIV, that gained wide acceptance as a description of pure colour. As if by stealth, this colour-music code has permeated the cultures of the English-speaking world.
Brought into conjunction with the chakras, the distinctly Western optical and musical sciences have been merged with Eastern religious discipline. One exceptional work is the reprint of the 1927 tract, "The Chakras", by C.W. Leadbeater. The Rev. Leadbeater was one of the first to treat chakras thus, using a most insidious method; by equating prana with white light, he provided a poor parody of Newtonian optics. The vital force, or prana, was defined as globules of seven atoms, coloured rose, dark red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. The globules were broken up at the spleen, whence they were distributed as individual rainbow colours to the appropriate chakras. Leadbeater reversed the positions of red (rose) and orange (orange-red); yellow and green were also transposed. Their torturous paths through the body explained the divergences from a straight spectrum in the outcome, though colours were close enough to the ROYGBIV colour-music code.
The more recent three-way code of De Clario's "Sevenness: Sublunar" simply supplied a more overt statement of this marriage of colour, music and meditation. Though colour differences radically altered the symbolism for individual chakras, the two systems still bore a family resemblance. Both omitted indigo, which Leadbeater made some effort to excuse, as if afraid to traduce the Theosophical practices W. B. Yeats had observed:
Illustration 2 : "THE MAN OF DARKNESS (Infernal State)",
from Georg Gichtel's "Theosophia Practica", c1690.
The Theosophist C. W. Leadbeater used Gichtel's diagram to justify his colour-music-chakra code. Probably he believed, like Madame Blavatsky, in eternal truths, revealed across time and space by wise men in the Himalayas. A more precise source of Gitchel's inspiration may be found in certain Greek and Latin texts, concerning spiritual realities beyond normal experience, that had been pivotal to Renaissance humanism. They represented Graeco-Roman reverence for Egyptian wisdom, and contained tracts both popular - on alchemy and astrology - and learned - on divine revelation and redemption. Cosimo d'Medici mistakenly believed their author to be Hermes Trismegistus (aka the god Thoth, and acknowledged by St Augustine as an Egyptian magus): he ordered Marsilo Ficino to put aside Plato and translate the newly-acquired Hermetic texts instead.
Gichtel shows man in his fallen state, labelled with the sins of pride, envy, self love and so on; his diagram has a physiological flavour, listing bodily organs in relationships to the four elements. The planetary scheme is taken from Ptolemy's "Almagest" of the 2nd century AD - despite the sun's central position, the heavenly bodies are shown in the order they were supposed to orbit the earth. A back view of the same figure reveals no similar arrangement of planets that could coincide to chakras. (Yet another figure - of man before the fall - shows only five, maybe six, circles of varying size located centrally on the trunk.) Moreover, the number of the planets was usually elaborated to nine in India, the moon given three different identities, all with appropriate gods. The Mahashoda Nyasa describes one possible placement on the body, with six of the nine planets located at chakra points. Like Gitchel's scheme, the sun is located at the heart, but so is Venus. Otherwise, none of the heavenly bodies are similarly placed. In general, the principles of kundalini yoga were not suggested by Gichtel's illustrations. They originate in Greek astrology that had survived in the Latin west and from Neoplatonism revived during the Renaissance, and point to a distinctly Western tradition of mysticism.
In "Theosophia Practica", Georg Gichtel provided a succinct illustration of one Hermetic revelation. A creation myth, using the metaphor of a symbolic cosmos, was described to Hermes by his teacher Poimandres. He learned how Man was created by the supreme Mind, or Nous, and received the qualities of the seven planets to govern his destiny on earth. The Fall of Man was accomplished by his descent into the dark, material realm, subject to the powers of nature and governed by a destiny written in the stars. To escape the mortal coil, Man had to "break through the circumference of the spheres". Only by recognizing that part of the divine Nous that each person contained, could fate be changed, suffering avoided and the immortal soul released.
Chakra (literally, 'wheel') was originally an iron discus, used as a weapon in ancient India. Chakra significance is interwove into myth and folklore and depictions of minor deities often show a chakra held in one of their many hands. It is often an attribute of Krishna, an aspect of his divine intelligence; chakra was also incorporated into Tantric Buddhism, where it is usually depicted as a lotus. In yoga, chakras are esoteric structures - psycho-energetic centres in the subtle body - the main ones numbering between four and twelve, or even more, to provide foci for the varying rituals of meditation. Some texts concentrate on non-chakra techniques, such as breathing, chanting or visualizing the body as a Shiva lingam. Interpretation of chakra significance depends on ritual context as much as personal response.
The highly-refined techniques of kundalini meditation borrow from the rich tradition of Hathayoga-pradipika, with its millennia of accumulated significance. Practice of the yoga requires expertise and dedication, and certain understanding of body-control techniques that could stop the lungs breathing and the heart beating. Generally, kundalini yoga is said to have immense benefits for mental and physical health: a best result puts you in a permanent state marked by liberated powers and wonderful visions. Vedic upanishads and Forest Texts describe apparitions of stars, crystals and other beautiful visions, as a sure sign a yogi is on the right path to knowledge of Brahmin. The possibility of such outcomes has attracted millions worldwide to the practice of yoga. Casual users have assigned colours and notes to the chakras as a matter of convenience and an aide-memoire.
To appropriate the chakra for Western use dislocates it from its native soil; joining it to disparate and alien Western science and music is bizarre. After all, the East has its own traditions - the Samaveda had defined a seven-note scale by 800 BC. Some time between the 2nd century BC and AD 200, the "Natya-sastra" had outlined a system uniting music to Tantric metaphysics and physiology. Sound was said to rise through the body to the heart where it became gross enough to detect. Here at the fourth chakra, the vibration of 22 fibres created 22 sruti, the smallest divisions of the octave. First in the chest, then rising through the throat to the head, sound resonated in the main body cavities familiar to singers. The frequencies of sruti could be applied to scales with up to seven notes.
Colours, as well as aesthetic moods and gods, were attributed to notes in the "Natya-sastra" . Other schemes elaborated with stars, days, clothes and so on, until comprehensive visual specifications accompanied specific pieces of music. By the 16th century, ragamala paintings could represent a raga, literally a piece of music to colour the mind with feeling. Figures personified the melodies, in a setting appropriate to the season and hour of a musical work, and all accompanied by descriptive verse.
For performances of ragas, up to 72 musical systems evolved. An additional twelve-sruti octave was devised in the 17th century, and seven intervals could selected for any particular raga. These structures of contemporary Indian music seem akin to the twelve semitones and seven-note scales of Western music. But "The Encyclopaedia of Indian Music" sees the resemblance as superficial, decrying the 12 even divisions of the European tempered scale:
The cavalier borrowing of Indian traditions of music and mysticism, so much in vogue in the West, could be interpreted as further acts of imperialism, squeezing the last drops of booty from the luckless subcontinent. Leadbeater's use of the chakras might be seen as tantamount to spiritual looting and his occult practices as a sacrilegious parody of Hindu beliefs. The irony of his position is seen more fully in comparison with the president of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant, who established the Central Hindu College at Varenasi to protect what remained of local Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, and who campaigned for Indian home rule from 1916 until her death in 1933. But the source of the contradiction lies with the founder of the movement, Madame Blavatsky, who incorporated the purely western ROYGBIV colour sequence within her orientalizing theosophy.
More recent ventures like "Sevenness: Sublunar" could appear in a similar light, as repugnant attempts to modify legitimate religious practice and to replace both mantra and mandala with some meaningless sound-and-light show. Indeed, its procedures appeared impoverished in both structure and detail compared to highly-evolved Eastern rituals, providing instead a simplistic mechanism for enlightenment-made-easy. As a case in point, Tibetan Buddhist practices once available only to initiates have become distorted by illegitimate Western use. The Dali Lama is presently compelled to visit Australia, hoping to salvage the Kalachakra meditation: