“This universal unifying force establishes the power of cosmic Reason. …Its creative force intensifies a multitude of beginnings. …We call it the “ray of the Cosmos”. Every wave of the spirit thus amplifies the vibrations in space.”*
- UNISON
Unison is sound repeating itself, which vibrates with itself. In reality, it is not an interval, as it has no duality; yet it is the real generator of all the other intervals. It is the One. Its qualities are affirmation, command, power. It is the manifested Origin. It is the first cause. Its energy is creative and destructive. It creates the other intervals and destroys crystallized forms. It is the first impulse, yet it restrains and stops all that opposes it. It is the basis of every movement and it is that which blocks movement. It is the sign of correct orientation, of the path which runs between the opposites. It is the ray of perforating light. It is a sword which divides, cuts off and restores simplicity to life. It is a stimulus, a call, a warning.
It is the Father: it is the Just one, it is the Heaven. It is the centre.
Its action is impetuous and it liberates what is caught among the branches and the nets of manifested order.
It is Will: therefore it aims at a goal with implacable decision. Its purpose is progressive and total order, the Hierarchy of the best, of the beautiful and the good.
It is the First Ray. Its form is the Point.
The hypothesis is put forward that its colour is ruby red.
As it is simple, it is severe, unadorned and bare. But its light shines all the more, because nothing veils it.
***
“Only cosmic tension induces the spirit to change, and only if it comes to know the power of attraction does it generate harmony. …the sensitive spirit then resounds with the currents of the Cosmos. …the centre of the Cup resounds. The creativity of the spirit depends on that of Fire.”
- OCTAVE
In this interval the sound also repeats itself, but at the critical level in which, rising or falling, it is about to penetrate into a different sphere. The two sounds of which it consists are like the two columns of Hercules, placed to mark a universal boundary, which is not insuperable but clearly evident. On this there is a certain world, on that side another, governed by the same laws but different because it is higher or lower. In the Harmonics of H. Kaiser, the various octaves follow each other without important variations in their content: the octave between C and C’ is exactly and in every way identical, in its laws and effects, to any other, for example C”- C”’ or C, – C,,.
Here, on the other hand, it is presumed that the passage from one to the other marks a profound difference in substance, if not in essence. In short, the octaves understood in this way would not be, a series of equal circles placed one above another but successive volutes of a rising or descending spiral; and this is an unequivocal symbol of a different degree of liberty, of more or less light, even if relative and so valid only inside the spiral or the system itself.
The octave, then, is in this sense an interval-boundary, and thus a suitable symbol to define an ambit, a sphere, a world, a system. The idea “all the octaves” thus expresses, in the best possible way, the concept of universal Space, cosmic container of every flame, every level, every substance, all forms.
The Octave, as the container and the loom of all the innumerable intervals, is thus the first appearance of a bipolarity, of a transcendent dualism: it places two limits to define its system, two poles which condition and determine it.
The Octave is the two and is the goal. It is the receptive and it is the Mother. It is the Earth. It is the infinite and transcendent Space. It is the Womb in which the forms grow, which it feeds and protects. It is perfect passivity and therefore includes and contains. It does not intervene except to exalt or lower, but without judging and without innovating.
The Octave is the foundation of creation and embraces it in every part and justifies all the parts. It is the “field” of evolution, of order. It is the diffused light on everything and everywhere. It holds in itself infinite complexities, yet it simplifies them in secret. It is Love and Wisdom.
Its qualities are obedience and comprehension. Its energy is all-pervading and nutritive. It is the correspondence and it enfolds, encircles, includes, surrounds. It is the horizon. It is a Magnet which coordinates, disposes, arranges, supports.
Its symbolic force is the circle or the sphere. It is the Second Ray.
The hypothesis is presented that its colour is blue, from azure to the dark blue of the deep night.
As it is the mother of all forms, in reality it has no form (like the Father, unison: circle and point, in fact, are not real forms and in reality coincide and stand for each other).
***
“The creative activity is guided by a definite rhythm… The ardent spirit is aware of the vibration of the ray…”.
(ViviOvo Sculpture by Jack Storms | Photo by Storms Publishing Inc. | Source: www.jackstorms.com)
–
- FIFTH
This third interval has within it the characteristics of the first two, while being different. It repeats the creative activity of Unison and the generating and comprehensive fertility of the Octave. It is intelligent activity and active intelligence.
The Fifth is the innovator par excellence. Where it appears and acts it never leaves things as they were: its passage is always marked by its works.
The Fifth is an unexpected marvel: it is a new sound. From the original and fundamental vibration, as has been said, first the Octave is born, which marks the limits of the field, but without introducing anything new into it – everything is still primordial. But the Fifth is the first fruit, the first “form” (in a transcendental sense), the first child. It is amazing to see this shoot, unimagined, heralding great processes, presenting itself as a different reality in a prepared field (the octave), which now reveals itself as its true field of action and creation. The octave is the prearranged scene: the fifth is the lord, author and actor of the drama. The rational mind is unable to comprehend this surprising appearance, but it must accept it as an indisputable reality and learn to understand its processes, function and goal.
The Fifth is the three: and all that is three is perfect in its completeness. It is the builder of all the other intervals, to which it gives quality and form, if not life, which they obtain only from Unison (the Father) and from the Octave (the Mother). It is the one which revolutionizes and orders, which undoes and recomposes, which incessantly proposes new themes, without ever repeating itself. It is the one which glorifies the Father and exalts the Mother. It is the Demiurge, it is the great Architect of the universe.
The Fifth is thus the Builder of creation, which populates with innumerable values, different and related to each other. It is the Lord of infinite peace, which continually disturbs every standstill or stagnation. It is perennial youth, it is the great investigator, and it continually seeks and finds, finds and seeks. Always engaged in discovering new horizons and knowing other truths, it is the very impulse of formal evolution and spiritual progress. It produces what is complex but its aim is regaining and understanding simplicity. It is the question, it is the great Interrogator, it is the Weaver (transcendent).
All these phrases intend to describe to some extent the prodigious action of this third interval, or third fire, which constructs without burning, not to veil the forms of ultimate reality, but to express all its aspects infinitely.
As the Octave is a closed interval (since it encloses, though without limiting), so the Fifth is the open interval par excellence, as it unlocks all mysteries and passes through all gates. It is thus the great agent of liberation, gained with active, strenuous, combative and bold commitment.
Its symbolic force is the cross. It is the Third Ray. The hypothesis is put forward that its colour is yellow, which radiates, tends towards white and dazzles.
***
“A cosmic concordance is established only where the Fire of Space enters into resonance with the subtle harmonies.”
OPERATIONS OF THE FIFTH
The elevation or the lowering of a sound by one or more intervals of a fifth are called operations of the fifth. For example:
This activity of the Fifth is distinctly different from that of the Octave in that the values that are obtained are always sounds that are never repeated. For this reason it was stated previously that the Fifth is the constructing interval of all the others, the one which continually innovates, invents and produces. Like the octave, it also acts on the sounds and raises or lowers their level, but it modifies them in their essence and the result is a new interval and not the simple transposition of the same sound to another sphere. In this lies the great difference between these two primary intervals.
***
“The cosmic creative power chooses and brings together the harmonic energies.”
- FOURTH
The unexpected appearance of the Fifth in the ambit of the octave coincides with another innovation: the interval of the Fourth, which is the completion in the Fifth:
This new interval is thus the first product of the constructive action of the fifth. It is thus the first of the minor, or secondary, intervals. This origin places it in a peculiar condition among the group of intervals and clearly illustrates its qualities and functions.
The Fourth is the central element of the group of seven fundamental intervals, which can be drawn in diagrammatic form in this way:
It thus has the great and twofold function of coordinating the lower and balancing and harmonizing the whole. It is the great reflecting level, where the lights of the higher triangle, or of reality, are reflected, upside down, in the lower one, illusory, dual, precarious and unstable. This task, if properly understood, makes clear its immense importance and reveals one of its unusual and elusive characteristics: precisely on account of its position of hinge of the entire system this interval is often hidden, neglected and unnoticed. It is the real “Magister Musicae”, it is the Fourth Ray, and it has the task of harmonizing through conflict. It is the magic mirror, but it is not inactive: it works without assuming prominence: it fights and corrects, but evades, is elusive; it knows reality and models lower things on it and, when its work is completed, it disappears in the glory of the higher three. Just as the Fifth interrogates and investigates, the Fourth replies and concludes, resolves, equalizes and composes in an ordered system. It is the level of the intuition, the real world of the ideas, still unitary, but about to precipitate in duality and multiplicity. All that works for positive and dynamic equilibrium (not for that degenerate form of equilibrium which is a monotonous and passive standstill) is connected with this interval which, like a great conductor, can pass unobserved, although being the real centre of the musical execution.
The interval of the Fourth operates as a crucible of compensation, with the effect of evoking in the lower a state of resonance with the higher. As a result, broadly speaking, it has the quality of a producer of beauty and it reflects in itself (as the first of the minor intervals) something of the creative power of the first, unison. It is a reflected, or second, creativity and so it is characteristic of the artist in general. The beauty obtained with the work of art, that is the painful work of reducing disorder to a sufficiently regular state that it can reflect to some degree the heavenly order, this is the authentic action of the fourth interval. Harmony, beauty and art are the result of its interval. It is a question, if one looks closely, of a real capacity for transmutation. The fourth Ray does nothing but seek continually to realize the model, the original and very pure Idea, and to this end it makes use of any operational technique: it acts in the whole of nature, but especially through man.
In fact, man (fourth kingdom of nature), on account of his position in creation (animal + god) incarnates the interval of the Fourth and his first task is just that of helping actively and with loving intelligence in the execution of the divine enterprise. The divine models (the Ideas) can be known by him and little by little he learns to arrange things in such a way as to express them completely. He “reads” the virtues and the aims of things above and he“writes” them in the manifested world, with every kind of sign.
The Fourth is therefore an interval of activity, of dynamic equilibrium, it is a gorge through which the energies that bathe the low regions, and those that evaporate and rise from these regions to return to the unitary Source, are forced to pass. It ensures that everything is finally arranged according to number and correspondence, that from the whole of the parts a synthesis is composed, that the primordial Sound is translated into a Concert. These great functions that it has (by its intrinsic nature) are carried out not through isolated activities, but in collaboration with all the other intervals, that is, with the other qualities of the primary Energy. The Fourth interval, though it is central, loses itself in the others and this illustrates the reason that it is so elusive. It is the Lord of the Ideas and translates the one into the manifold, and from the manifold extracts the original unity.
The hypothesis is offered that its colour is indigo: this light, in fact, which is one of the seven of the rainbow, is hard to perceive in the glory of the rainbow: painters, in fact, normally do not take it into account and do not know if it is the result of the combination of blue and red, or of the combination of the latter with purple. This corresponds well with the nature of this interval, on which we have tried to throw light.
In Harmonics “operations” of the fourth are unknown. Those of the octave, the fifth and the third are used, but not those of the fourth. This also describes its secret yet indispensable action. It should b added at this point that in its numerical expression – 4, 3/4 or 4/3 – an operation of an octave (2 x 2 = 4) is implicit: which reveals the profound relationship flowing between the Fourth and the Great Mother, Love, Space, comprehension, the magnetic, universal bipolarity.
