Friday, April 18

a note springs forth

And here is a magic whose fragrances liberate the initiated hero's soul from all the bonds accumulated by reason. It ransacks reason and inertia, to leave in its place, in his heart, nothing besides Love.

An abyss thousands of years deep engulfs all visible materiality in the impalpable realm of sound; it heaves up the immortal spirit, only to plunge it into a fatality of delight.

Now an invincible element, he approaches the meadows of dream, the ladders of incense, the glades of the Western constellations, the blessed fields of beans in flower, in the dew of the world's first dawnings. He is on the peaks. He is in the empire of ecstasy. All is clear: the Idea is diamantine.

Before the eyes of his spirit, the hieroglyphic alphabet of the Intelligible World scintillates in scattered stars against the crystal horizons. The fragrances of music are columns of magic smoke. A young lake of perfumes, blossoming with water-lilies, rises out of the subterranean night and becomes for him the whole sea.

And here a note springs forth in purity from the invisible sources of the land of life. It is the fountain of the Infinite. It is a new language. Like the light, it is the daughter of the breath which gave it birth.

But leaning close to him appeared the face of the "Beloved": a divine being, having in herself the gifts of expression and of silence—even more expressive by silences than by tones or accents, more lively in rhythms and syncopations than in ornaments and grace-notes, more moving by subtle modes than by sheer power...

And he himself...now holds in his right hand the key of power and of happiness. By the irresistible force, rightly directed, of the harmonies of sound—that is to say, of the electronic rhythm which, as modern science puts it, ensures with a perpetual movement the cohesion of molecules in all bodies, in animal, vegetable, and mineral life—he can flatten the menace of Jericho's impregnable walls, or raise serenely, like Amphion with the sound of his lyre, the walls of Thebes whose stones came and placed themselves in rhythm and in meter, one on top of the other.

-- Joseph-Charles-Victor Mardrus La Toute-Puissance de l'Adepte
Quoted by Joscelyn Godwin in The Mystery of the Seven Vowels