The Mathemagical Music of Michael Maier
Fugue #14 and Emblem #14 from Maier's Atalanta Fugiens (1618)
If you’ve ever heard a piece of music and thought, “That’s magical!” you probably just meant that the music made you feel a sense of wonder. But what if sound actually had special powers? What if you could use music as a key for learning ancient secrets about the cosmos? From the end of the Middle Ages in the 1400s right through the Scientific Revolution in the 1600s, magicians in European universities and royal courts believed exactly that. One of them, Michael Maier, was an alchemist, which meant that he thought chemistry could reveal the answers to philosophical questions. Maier wrote a book about his experiments and secret ways of understanding the world. The book is called Atalanta Fugiens (1618), and it includes notated music and pictures like the ones reproduced here. Atalanta Fugiens is probably the most elaborate example of Early Modern magical music, but there are many others, including diagrams depicting the solar system as a cosmic musical instrument. Why is music so common in books about magic?
Before we can answer that question, we need to think about what magic meant in Early Modern Europe. It might surprise you to learn that magic was commonly practiced during the Scientific Revolution. That’s partly a trick of how language changes over time: what we now call science—knowledge about the material world—used to be called natural magic. That doesn’t mean that all magicians were scientists, though. Many of them also practiced spiritual magic, which was about understanding supernatural forces. Unlike natural magic, spiritual magic has very little to do with science, but they both share the same goal: knowledge. And knowledge is power, because what you understand you can control.
Early Modern magicians agreed that math is the best way to understand the universe. Today, we don’t think of this as a magical belief because we know that the laws of nature can, in fact, be expressed through signs and equations. Back then, though, many people thought that the forces of nature were unpredictable and influenced by supernatural beings, and that attempts to control such things were inherently dangerous. Magicians were willing to take that risk. For them, math was the key that would unlock hidden knowledge and power.
This is where music comes in. For hundreds of years, music had been classified as one of four mathematical arts (right alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy). If you’ve learned even a little music theory, you know that musicians use numbers to talk about rhythm, scale degrees, intervals, chords, and so much more. In fact, one might even think of music as a way of hearing relationships between numbers. That’s certainly how Early Modern magicians thought about it, and that’s why they included songs and drawings of musical instruments in some of their books. This example shows a dragon, not an instrument, but the picture can help us understand the symbolism of the notated music. The dragon eating its tail represents the element mercury, because (Maier says) dragons are associated with water, and when mercury moves it looks like water–or like a sluggish dragon. Similarly to how the movement of the dragon represents the movement of mercury, the movement of different voice parts in the musical piece evokes the movement of different elements as they interact during alchemical experiments. Michael Maier and others like him were trying to discover the secrets of the universe using numbers. Because they understood music as a kind of math, they used musical notation and diagrams to communicate their hidden, “mathemagical” knowledge.