The human body inscribed in the square (the earth) and in the circle (the sky) expresses one of the highest forms of harmony, that between the gesture of cosmic mediation, which man performs in the course of religious ceremonies, and the whole universe (China, Middle Ages).
If we consider geometry, music, and cosmology exclusively as scientific disciplines, it is difficult to understand the reasons for their possible use as the only discipline available to the ethnoanthropological investigation, i.e. for the understanding of some key aspect of prehistoric symbolism. Pythagoras (575ca.- 490 ca. a.C.) was the first among the ancient philosophers to affirm that “the number governs the forms and the ideas” and he was the first to use the term kósmos for indicating the harmony and symmetry that regulate the Universe. He also wonders about the nature of sounds, whose mutual relation is numerical, just like that of celestial bodies. Even the movement of the planets orbiting the Earth produces a range of sounds, a celestial music that our ears are no longer able to hear because they have always been used to hearing it. The harmony that we perceive in music and we feel in the motion of the planets is based on the magic power of numbers.
Pythagoras came to discover the close relationship between music and number listening to the sound that casually came out from a forge where some smiths were beating with their hammers a piece of iron on the anvil, producing sounds partly fully consonant with each other, partly dissonant. Experiencing the nature of the sounds with his monochord, Pythagoras came to the conclusion that a vibrating string produces a sound whose “height” is inversely proportional to the length of the string itself. In this way, he proceeded to associate each emitted note with a number. For example, he attributed the number 1 to the note produced by a 1 -meter long string, the number 2 to that produced by a half meter long string, etc. With the aid of this method, each note is distinguished by a number that is, in fact, proportional to its frequency.
The first monochord is the musical bow. If the interpretation of the Sorcier scene in the Cave of Trois Frères was true, the hypothesis could be taken that, even before its use as a hunting weapon, the bow was used as a tool for producing sounds.
Cave of Trois Frères France (17000-15000 years ago). Scene “of enchantment”, during which an anthropomorphic, disguised as a bison, plays a musical bow using the mouth as a sound box. The action involves an unknown number of animals (bison, reindeer, horses). A bison is portrayed as it turns its head towards the place from which the sound stimulus comes, indicating the radical neurological effect that music produces on a great variety of living species.
The decoration of the amphora of Milo on one side provides a literal description of the meeting between Apollo and Artemis, an event narrated by the myth known to all Greeks; on the other, those geometric elements are interpreted as a figurative expression of an ancient esoteric language, known only by a small circle of initiates, according to which the meeting of the sun (Apollo) and the moon (Artemis) is the formulation in hermetic terms of a truly cosmic event: an eclipse of the sun.
“Apollo – says Ferrero – does not drive his horses while holding the reins, but through the mediation of the lira to which the reins are tied. If in everyday life playing the harp and driving the horses are two separate acts, in the symbolic life they are united, so that the trajectory and the speed of the chariot that leads the sun into the sky is drawn by the sound of the zither, so that the ratio between the various speeds supported by the cart is identical to that of a musical interval “.