Musical Cosmos Maps - beta 0001a
Updated 3.18.22
Introduction to a Musical Cosmos
There are many ways to use these maps but mainly they are for getting a feel of the deepest, subtlest and most powerful forces around us–the planets and the Sun. These maps were constructed to place science in the same arena again as mysticism and magic, so that a real sense of measure can be found for things we commonly know very little about.
The Tree of Life is traditionally regarded as a map not of the material world, but of the underlying forces and processes which shape the physical world. The only place in a traditional Hermetic or Hebrew Tree of Life that is about the physical world is the Earth. Traditionally this sphere of Earth is called Malkuth or Kingdom, which makes sense because it is indeed a realm of many kingdoms of life and substance.
The trees of life that you see here are quite different than that traditional tree though they are also very similar. The old diagram comes from a time where we thought we were the only lifeforms in an otherwise dead cosmos. Humanity was thought to be the most favored and godlike of all beings, and Earth was at the center of that Cosmic scheme.
When we learned in the 16th century that the Sun was likely the central power that kept the planets in their orbits in our cosmic neighborhood, the map stayed the same.
When we learned unequivocally in the early 20th century with the work of Hubble and others that there were other galaxies than our own and that there might not be a center to the Cosmos, the map still stayed the same.
We have used the tree of life for a long time to describe how a God created the Cosmos. In some ways the Tree of Life is the deeper explanation of Genesis. Some even say that the Big Bang Theory was first conceived in the Hermetic and Hebrew Trees of Life.
Yet 9 of the spheres are still thought of as nonphysical.
In this Tree of Life, all 12 spheres are physical entities, though the adage of their being mainly energetic influences from our perspective on Earth still holds. As well this is an attempt in line with the original basis of Qabalah and the tree of life as a diagram which enables us to reconcile the true shape of our cosmos with our particular experiences of it.
A New Beginning
From the beginnings of modern astronomy in the 16th century, the musical nature of the solar system has been widely noted, both by scientists and mystics. The silent music that dictates the orbits of the planets and their motions is very much at the center of the diagrams you see here.
Yet now we have a much more complex picture not only of music, but of the orbits and composition of these planetary Spheres and also of the very complex nature of energy and matter both. Now we are less ready to say that we can know all things, like the mind of God, with science, as the foundations of science do limit what we can know about the cosmos: the Heisenberg uncertainty principle being one (you can not know 2 aspects of any observable particle at the most minute scales, you kind of have to pick one).
Where the Greeks balked at a theory of music that was based on irrational numbers, today we embrace the set of 11 irrational numbers which make up the 12 notes or intervals of western music as a great solution to a very complex problem of tuning and mutual playability.
The set of 12 numbers which dictate western music are irrational if looked at purely as numbers, and yet if you look at them from the perspective of how they are derived you see a very rational picture begin to emerge. Each of the 12 notes in western music are derived from the number 2. The intervals are arrived at via a simple series of exponential equations. They look like this:
2^(x/12). For 12 intervals we use x = 0-11, though we can find the notes just as well if we simply continue the series through to infinity. This is called a logarithmic scale, and it yields what we call an equal tempered octave, which is the most versatile and flexible way to arrive at 12 notes which sound reasonably good together no matter how you play them, or at least in comparison to the old way of deriving their tunings, called the harmonic series.
In science just as in mysticism, we have neglected music as a real strategy of understanding the physical world. Yet if you wish to understand energy, vibration, and frequency as Tesla once advised, there could be no other better alternative to measure things on a cosmic scale than with music. Especially since now we have a musical scale which is already in the language of the cosmos, the logarithmic or exponential scale, where things are of vastly different size and speed can be placed all together.
Maps of Time
3 Fairly Close to Perpetual Scales of the Sun and Earth
These 3 scales are a great tool for understanding the differences in day length and year length between different planets as a complex form of energy that subtly sets the tone for life here on Earth as well as in each body considered (it should be noted here that errors were found in the original calculations due to term switching as noted in musical cosmos methods diary pt1). Music shows us that each planet or body can be the prime or Root note, the other planets are simply recalculated in relation to the prime.
The top row includes notes which can be played as a scale or chord and still sound quite harmonic, as when they are within 1% of a musical interval according to any root planetary scale they can still be played quite harmonically as a note or chord. The bottom row is for planets which can be played as a chord with the top row, or in the case of very dissonant planets, which are beyond 3% from any nearby musical interval, they pretty much always sound pretty rough or dissonant.
These scales are derived from the differences in Day and Year length between the planets and the Sun itself. They can be used with the 32 fairly close to Average Paths maps, which are maps of average distance, to make a truly interesting music of planets. For each planet, there are at least three ways they are constantly making music:
(1) by their spin each day,
(2) by their orbit each year, and
(3) by their distances as they orbit and change through time.
In terms of wave mechanics, the relative distances are as the frets on a guitar. The daily spin is as a wave in its own right, played on a string of the average or current distance to any planetary root or the sun, while they also play a much lower yearly note. All of these planetary notes are very low frequency vibrations compared to our normal musical range of hearing, even though they can be placed on the same musical scale as our western music.
They are called perpetual scales because they are continually playing simply as a result of the planets each spinning on their own axis, albeit at a very low register, and a very slow pace. They change their speed so slowly through time, if left to spin without interference, that they are to us fairly perpetually playing those very same notes at all times. Whereas musical notes go up to as many as 20,000 vibrations a second, the fastest planetary frequency in question takes 9hrs to vibrate once.
These scales are called fairly close to perpetual because the top row notes are within 1% of a perfect musical interval.
The year length of the Sun is at this point so theoretical that I did not include it. The Galactic Year for the Sun has been estimated to be 250 million years. By that standard the galaxy is only 55, and the Solar system is around 18 galactic years old.
Maps by Distance
32 Fairly Close to Average Paths to the Sun
32 Fairly Close to Average Paths to the Earth
These maps are of music which by and large changes greatly over time, though it is still quite slow in comparison to the speed at which music is commonly played.
One map uses the Sun as the base of the tree, the other uses the Earth as the base. The reason for 2 trees is because the Solar Tree is the one which is closer to the shape of the solar system. Both trees are a compacted version of the reality. In compacted form they can more easily reflect their musical and structural connections in some ways though some others can become more complicated, which is only compounded by the way the solar system is notoriously difficult to clearly convey on a page in any strictly proportional way (see the article on this site for a more in depth discussion).
The other reason for using two trees is that it is a sufficiently clear way to speak a more cosmic language, especially as when looking out into the sky it is far easier in practice to use stars as the guiding light rather than the weaker reflected light of planets, which takes a much more powerful telescope and very crafty technique to even see the planets from the great distances of interstellar space. If we think on the Galactic level, the solar tree is the marker, and the Earth tree is the x marking the spot for life and communication with it.
These particular maps use the average distance that each planetary body has with respect to the Sun (a very simple equation with our current data) and or with respect to the Earth (a very complex equation). This means that with these maps the dissonance (the harmonic tension) or the consonance (harmonic sense of relaxation or unity) is a point of how their orbits mesh on the whole with each other. The average paths are then a measure of what their music is when the entirety of the path is taken down to one number. The notes are arrived at by figuring out what is the closest musical note to the ratio of each body's average distance to one another, and since we are using the average distance it is not much of a worry whether or not the closest notes in either direction do play as an energetic resonance of their orbital path.
For the average distance from Earth I used data from a newer method called the point circle method, which bases the average distance on sampling from the entire orbital path rather than using their average distances from the Sun to determine their relative distances to each other. The newer method is superior I think, and it also holds a key insight about solar systems and what is the closest for each of them when the whole orbit is considered. Always for a system like ours it is the star in the center, followed by the body closest to it, which are the closest bodies to any other planet on average (see Stockman et al, Physics Today, Venus is not Earth’s Closest Neighbor).
Suffice it to say that these notes do occur as a function of planetary distance, even though in most cases it is only at a few points in their orbit that it occurs precisely at that note. But since they are the closest notes that occur on average at all times, they have a certain quality of constantly implied harmony that is very much a part of musical practice and experience and in this case is buttressed by roughly 4 billion years of consistent motion. On top of that, rhythm and harmony both are based partially on what the implied rhythms and notes are: not just what is played by a musician but what is implied when we hear it is quite important to what we experience when we hear music.
The other way that these distance maps can be used quite well to understand the solar system and its nature is in combination with a calculation of the current distances the planets have both from the Sun and from Earth. I plan on releasing daily scales on a somewhat regular basis until a proper application can be made which makes this very complex task as simple as making a natal chart in astrology with the help of a web or smart phone app.
Either way these maps give substance to some very abstract seeming quantities and qualities. And I do hope that using them can help you to get an intuitive feel of how the solar system shapes our world and life in it. These are maps which make the invisible music of fairy tales, myths and legends something we can experience in a very real way. Whereas traditional astrology uses the angles between planets and the sun as perceived from earth as a measure, here we are given directly the music they make in terms of the science of energy and wave mechanics on their own terms, not just from how we see it from our perspective on Earth.
These maps are a first step in creating a tree of life and an inner ecology from a more cosmic perspective, where we are no longer seeing the cosmos from Earth as the most favored and important planet in the cosmos. This is key if we are to truly understand our place not only in our own galaxy, but also with respect to the wider Universe. And since from the earliest times leaps in our understanding of the cosmos has coincided with great leaps in our understanding of the complexity of life on earth, it is certainly not a question of favoring deep space over life on our beautiful home planet called earth. Instead it is a challenge to truly come of age in our unification of spirit and science, such that we no longer feel the need to hide fairy tales in books for children to recapture the strange wonder of our world and its nature. I feel confidant that spirit and science will naturally come together here, where our courage to match nature to nature is no longer a thing to fear as though truth would destroy our comfortable fantasies in favor of a drab looking cosmos. It is precisely the opposite which is the case: these are a portrait of the starry highways which the truly strange and quite natural powers do travel. So I invite you to experience this music in your own creative ways or with the help of a scientist, a qabalist or musician friend for a fun group project.
Here at the end you will see a simple chart which intermingles the zodiac and the degrees of a circle with the major chords of all 12 notes to a common root. It can help in understanding the notes you see in these charts in ways that aren’t always easy without them (unless you already have them memorized).
