Tag Archives: Plato

July-August ’10 AQ: Plato’s musical code

Dear Friends

After 2,400 years a new musical code has been publically brought to light in Plato’s writings.  What he hid and why remains to be answered in the years to come – this great research stands to break new ground and may offer the best insights into Plato since Thomas Taylor.

Why did he use a code? A reason for reticence by Occultists (those of the ‘right-hand path’ at least) not to reveal more than a little is their vow of secrecy and to protect those below their degree from the danger of acquiring too much knowledge before time.  This is common sense… do we allow a learner to drive a car unescorted?  Surely not, at least until they have first passed a ‘test’.   Plato followed this rule by inserting knowledge ‘for those who can read’ in a hidden musical code – read about it on p 1,with a commentary from the Secret Doctrine on p 3.

There is more inside, see especially the account of George Washington’s extraordinary vision of the future of the US, part of which has come about – yet a great battle is to come, on p 4; and on p 13 news of the publication of additional ‘Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge’ by HPB now out in hardback, “The Secret Doctrine Commentaries”, which was announced at the ITC Hague Conference in August, which we also report on.

Monitoring Planet Gaia ……………………………………….. 7
Life Ball 2010 in Vienna ……………………………………….. 10
Dionysus on Battles with Atlanteans in N. Africa ……. 12
The Secret Doctrine Commentaries ……………………… 13
2010 ITC Conference at The Hague …………………….. 13

Yours fraternally,

The AQ editors

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Plato’s musical code revealed after 2,400 years

by a Canadian correspondent
A ground breaking new book has been published on the hidden “Musical Structure of Plato’s Dialogues”, being called “A Quick Guide to the Strongest Evidence”.
As the correspondent said who brought it to the attention of the AQ “it seems that he offers the best understanding since Thomas Taylor.”
It was from the CBS radio show “As it Happens” the discussion was Kennedy’s research on the Music and Math concealed in Plato’s work.  He indicated that it was so concealed as to avoid the Greek church dogma at the time.
“But, friend, when you grasp the number and nature of the intervals of sound, from high to low, and the boundaries of those intervals, and how many scales arise from them, which those who came before handed down to us, their followers, to call ‘harmonies,’ and when you grasp the various qualities inhering in the motions of the body, which they said must be measured with numbers and named ‘rhythm’ and ‘metre,’ and when you apprehend that every One and Many should be so investigated, when you have grasped all of that, then you are wise …”
Plato, ‘Philebus’

Let’s see how it was covered in a recent radio broadcast from CBS and then by Dr Kennedy:
“The writings of the Greek philosopher Plato have been credited with providing the foundations for modern Western culture and science.
“And since he stopped his philosophizing about two thousand, three hundred and fifty years ago – right around the time he died – we’ve had plenty of time to go over what he left us.
“Which scholars have done, thoroughly, for centuries, everywhere in the world. So it’s all the more amazing that, despite all that focused attention, a science historian at the University of Manchester (UK) is now saying a significant part of Plato’s writing has been completely ignored. Although, to be fair, that significant part was a bit tough to find.”

Platos Musical code 1

Research Scholar Dr. Jay Kennedy says: “there are secret coded messages hidden throughout Plato’s work that will completely transform our understanding of early Western thought and the great scholar himself.”
And luckily for us, Dr. Kennedy has cracked the “Plato code”. No one tell Dan Brown.”
from CBS Radio, to listen again:  http://www.cbc.ca/radioshows/AS_IT_HAPPENS/20100707.shtml 

go to Part 1, at approx 11 minutes into the show.

In Dr Kennedy’s words from his blog and book:
In antiquity, many of Plato’s followers said, in various ways, that Plato wrote symbolically or allegorically, and that his true philosophy would be found in the layers of meaning underneath the surface stories he tells. In ancient religions, sects, guilds, and fraternities, it was normal to ‘reserve’ knowledge to initiates and Plato, they contended, had used symbols to hide his philosophy within his writings.…
I am a philosopher who specialises in an area called the History and Philosophy of Science. This field was transformed a generation or so ago when it was widely recognised that the study of primitive pseudo-sciences was necessary to understand the birth of our modern sciences. To understand chemistry, it was necessary to study alchemy; to understand astronomy, it was necessary to study astrology. Unusually among Plato scholars, I was therefore familiar with the numerology and music theory which was at the heart of early Pythagoreanism. This interdisciplinary preparation enabled me to see and decipher Plato’s musical symbolism.…
Even for those who are not specialists, these results should be thrilling. Western culture is sometimes said to rest on the twin pillars of Socrates and Jesus, two poor men who wrote nothing. Plato’s teacher Socrates launched philosophical and scientific research in Athens, but we know of him primarily through Plato’s writings. The philosophy and science of Socrates and Plato combined with the religions of the East in the Roman period to create central strands of what became modern European culture. Now our understanding of the birth of that culture will need to be reworked. Plato is sometimes thought of as a cold fish who banished poets and pushed the West toward logic, mathematics, and science. Now we know he was a hidden romantic. The philosophy contained beneath his stories mixes science and mysticism, mathematics and God. By understanding our roots better, we understand ourselves better.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, Plato’s positive philosophy shows us how to combine science and religion.  Today we hear much of the culture wars between believers and atheists, between those who insist our world is imbued with meaning and value and those who argue for materialism and evolution.
For Plato, music was mathematical and mathematics was musical. In particular, we hear musical notes harmonising with each other when their pitches form simple ratios.
For him, the perception of this beauty in music was at once the perception of a beauty inherent in mathematics. Thus mathematics and the laws governing our universe were imbued with beauty and value: they were divine.
Modern scientists don’t ask where their fundamental laws come from; for Plato, the beauty and order inherent in mathematical law meant its source was divine (a Pythagorean version of modern deism). Plato may light a middle way through today’s culture wars.

Regarding the codes Plato embedded into his writing Dr Kennedy illustrates how this was done:
“… certain patterns of musical symbols are repeated at regular intervals through Plato’s Symposium and mark out the notes of a known musical scale.
“More specifically, the evidence below will show that passages containing subtle constellations of symbols are located at each twelfth of the way through the text of the Symposium. That is, clusters of terms with symbolic meanings are located at one-twelfth, at two-twelfths, and so forth.
“The ancient Pythagoreans reportedly held that the cosmos had an underlying musical or mathematical structure.”
He shows how the analysis of Plato’s dialogues contains these mathematical scales and illustrates them in the texts:

 Plato musical code 2

He makes a well-made case for the hidden esoteric meaning in Plato’s works:

The so-called neo-Pythagoreans, also from about the first century BCE, claimed that Pythagorean doctrines were symbolically embedded in Plato’s dialogues. Tarrant summarises the fragmentary remains of these neo-Pythagoreans:
“All this suggests [their] belief that Pythagorean doctrines are hidden in Plato, who for one reason or another is reluctant to reveal them, and that true Pythagoreanism can be teased out of Platonic texts by in-depth interpretation.
“… So it would seem safe to say that something quite esoteric is regularly being detected beneath Plato’s text, concealing details of the allegedly Pythagorean metaphysic that Pythagoreans, almost as a matter of faith, supposed to exist there.”
Full copy of the text from: http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/jay.kennedy/Symp%20Mus%20Book%20pp1-53.271-8.pdf
website http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/jay.kennedy/

 

“Be kind, for everyone you meet  is fighting a hard battle.”    Plato

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February 09: Plato On His Teachers, Life & Ideas

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plato-raphaelONE night in the year 407 B.C., Socrates had a dream.

He saw a graceful white swan flying toward him with a melodious song trilling from its throat. The next morning Plato came to him and asked to become his pupil.swan

Socrates saw before him a handsome youth of twenty years, with the broad shoulders of an athlete, the noble brow of a philosopher and the limpid eyes of a poet. He knew that Plato belonged to one of the most illustrious families of  Greece, being descended, on his mother’s side, from the house of Solon, and with the blood of the ancient Kings of Attica flowing through his veins.

This was the beginning of a tender and intimate relationship which lasted until the day of Socrates’ death. While other pupils formulated one-sided systems which but partially represented the ideas of Socrates, Plato used those ideas as seeds which he planted, nourished and developed in the rich soil of his own superior mind, making the full-blown blossoms a memorial offering to the simple nobility of his teacher.

After the death of Socrates, Plato went to Megara and joined the Socratic School of Euclid (not the famous geometer, who lived in Alexandria in the time of Ptolemy I, but a disciple of Socrates who excelled in logical disputation).
From there he went to Cyrene, where Theodorus instructed him in mathematics. Thence to southern Italy, where he studied the science of numbers under the three most famous Pythagoreans of the day. Then into Egypt, to
receive the instructions of the learned doctors and priests of that ancient land.

Some say that he visited Persia and Babylonia, where he was initiated into the Chaldean Mysteries. Others say that he went as far as India. [... continued]

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