The Music of the Spheres: Magical Vowels and Altered States of Knowledge
How a sequence of seemingly random vowels takes the singer on a celestial voyage through the outer spheres of the universe
Around this time last summer I cracked open the Corpus Hermeticum for the first time. I tend to revisit things yearly—there’s something about the seasonal nostalgia for whatever it was I read around the same time the year prior, especially if it was something I really enjoyed, that always prompts me to return. And so I’ve opened it back up and taken a closer look at the historical side of Hermeticism and the current research on the syncretic pagan philosophy.
A little bit of background: I’d been reading the work of Philip K. Dick, immersing myself in his fantastically trippy and dreamlike novels. Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Eldritch Palmer, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? all remain personal favorites, and the more I read into these sci-fi classics the more I found references to the gnosticism that informed PKD’s personal spiritual worldview, an outlook that was born of a schizophrenic episode in which the troubled author had a revelation dictated to him by a beam of pink light emanating from somewhere deep in space. PKD’s episodes found expression in his novels by way of allegory and, sometimes, explicit reference, and so it was that I found myself neck deep in the Nag Hammadi library by the end of June.
Gnosticism was fascinating, to be sure, but I always felt there was something lacking. The dualistic vision expounded by the gnostics lacked what I felt was a fullness in the universe, reminding me more of Zoroastrian cosmology than the Christian message it emerged from. Yet one text in the Nag Hammadi collection continued to intrigue me: the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth.
The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth stands out amidst the gnostic texts of the Nag Hammadi library as one of the more fascinating of the three Hermetic texts in the collection. It describes a meeting between the shadowy figure of Hermes Trismegistus and his son Tat. Like the other works that make up the Greco-Egyptian Hermeticum, it follows a teacher-pupil dialogue in which Hermes initiates Tat into the Hermetic mysteries, describing a method of silent prayer and union with the universal Mind. In this particular dialogue, Hermes promises to take Tat into the spheres of the Eighth and Ninth—as discussed in my last blog post, the ancient conception of the universe imagined spheres beyond the seven classical planets that were made up of eternal realms wherein dwelled angelic spirits and God. Much like the apostle Paul’s vision in which he was taken up “whether in the body or out of the body” to the third heaven, Hermes takes Tat on a visionary quest into the outer realms of the universe.
What struck me about this text however is a strange series of seemingly random vowels that Hermes vocalizes, a set of intonations now termed by scholars the magical vowel sequence. Before uttering these vowels, Hermes begins with the Prayer of Thanksgiving: “I call upon you, who rules over the kingdom of power, whose word comes as (a) birth of light. And his words are immortal. They are eternal and unchanging. He is the one whose will begets life for the forms in every place. His nature gives form to substance. By him, the souls of the eighth and the angels are moved...those that exist. His providence extends to everyone [...] begets everyone. He is the one who [...] the aeon among spirits. He created everything. He who is self-contained cares for everything. He is perfect, the invisible God to whom one speaks in silence - his image is moved when it is directed, and it governs - the one mighty power, who is exalted above majesty, who is better than the honored (ones).” Then, Hermes launches into the sequence:
“Zo xa tha zo
A
OO EE OO EEE
oooo ee oooooo
ooooo oooooo
uuuuuu
oooooooooooo
ooo
Zo za zoth.”
What I first took to be glossolalia is in actuality a series of musical notes that, according to some, corresponds to the seven classical planets. Manly P. Hall discusses this in his classic The Secret Teachings of All Ages: “The Greek initiates also recognized a fundamental relationship between the individual heavens or spheres of the seven planets, and the seven sacred vowels. The first heaven uttered the sound of the sacred vowel Α (Alpha); the second heaven, the sacred vowel Ε (Epsilon); the third, Η (Eta); the fourth, Ι (Iota); the fifth, Ο (Omicron); the sixth, Υ (Upsilon); and the seventh heaven, the sacred vowel Ω (Omega). When these seven heavens sing together they produce a perfect harmony which ascends as an everlasting praise to the throne of the Creator.”
This idea of the “music of the spheres” has its supposed origins in the philosophy of Pythagoras, whose mathematical exploration of musical intervals arrived at a system of tuning that sought to harmonize disparate universal elements. This idea pops up all over the Greco-Egyptian world, where Egyptian traditions of magical intonation became synthesized with Pythagorean ideas concerning music. We find another example of this in the Greek Magical Papyri with the “Mithras Liturgy.”
I thought I’d look into this a little further, and so it was that I found Hermetic scholar Wouter Hanegraaff’s lecture on his new book Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity. Regrettably, the book is pretty expensive (last I checked it was around $150 on Amazon), however Hanegraaff’s done the world the wonderful favor of sharing his work on the internet through a variety of podcasts and lectures that you can find on YouTube and Spotify.
In this particular video Hanegraaff touches on the magical vowel sequence. Hanegraaff, like Hall, sides with an ascending order of vowels—that is, the vowels correspond to the seven planets in ascending order from the Moon (alpha) to Saturn (omega), as opposed to the descending order favored by Henry Cornelius Agrippa. Agrippa was influenced primarily by his study of the Judaic mystical tradition of Kabbalah and merkabah literature, which described “ascent” in terms of “descent.”
These vowels correspond to tone and pitch, making for a musical sequence that when sung takes the teacher and the initiate upwards to the highest spheres in ascent through intonation. That the teacher and initiate are taken up together is hinted at, Hanegraaff explains, by the “embrace” between the two. This embrace is not really an embrace, rather they are holding each other’s shoulders and looking into each other’s eyes as they sing in a call and response fashion, creating a sort of “energy circuit” between the two.
I took to Reddit to see if anyone else had done this, and whether any kind of reproductions of it existed online (if I could find anything on a somewhat niche topic like this, it would be on Reddit), and to my surprise I got some great responses with a variety of interpretations on the sequence of the vowels. One of the more fascinating comments described a sequence based on vowel frontedness, with the letter I (iota), corresponding to the Sun, having the highest tone, while A (alpha) and Ω (omega) the lowest, creating for a siren-like effect as the sequence proceeds in an ascent-descent. I also found that apparently the Rosicrucian Order AMORC supposedly practices the vowel sequence, for whatever that’s worth.
There’s something about this whole thing that really just catches the imagination. It’s like a plot-point from an H.P. Lovecraft story brought to life—a magical musical sequence that takes the participant on a celestial journey sounds like ripe pickings for the horror enthusiast. There’s also a reverent, if borderline superstitious, attitude surrounding the vowel sequence. Both Hanegraaff and the Redditors seem reluctant to share any kind of reproductions (in his lecture, Hanegraaff shares that a friend of his created a recording and shared it with him, however he very quickly shuts down any possibility of playing it for the audience) and comments on the Reddit thread seem to indicate that for Hermetic believers, a reproduction isn’t something to be messed with (it would be “playing with the music of the spheres” as one commenter noted). Whether this vowel sequence really can induce an altered state of consciousness, or if it’s simply a sacred practice to be respected, I can’t help but be intrigued. Regardless, I think its best we leave the magical vowel sequence to the Hermeticists.