Song occupies a remarkably capacious position in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as cosmogonic force, psychological catalyst, neurological phenomenon, and vehicle of the sacred. Clarissa Pinkola Estés argues most forcefully for song’s transformative and creative power, presenting it as a special language capable of calling divine forces into human circles and altering consciousness in ways the spoken voice cannot achieve. For Julian Jaynes, song is neurologically distinct from speech, rooted in the right hemisphere, and historically continuous with prophetic utterance and bicameral divine authority. Nietzsche situates song at the origin of Greek lyric and tragedy, identifying folk song as the living residue of the Apolline-Dionysiac union. David Abram extends this cosmogonic function to Aboriginal Dreaming traditions, where an unsung land is literally a dead land and ancestral song-cycles constitute the ontological maintenance of the world itself. James Hillman connects song to Orphic transmission across religious epochs, from Psalm-tradition to Christ to the countercultural movements of the 1960s. Gregory Nagy aligns song with kleos, the immortalizing fame-speech of the Muses. Jung reads the Song of Songs as the supreme vehicle for the mystical eroticization of the God-human relation. Across these positions a central tension persists: is song primarily a cosmological or a psychological phenomenon, an outward making of the world or an inward transformation of the soul?
Song is a special kind of language that accomplishes this in a way the spoken voice cannot. Since time out of mind, the song, like the drum, has been used to create a non-ordinary consciousness, a trance state, a prayer state.
Estés argues that song is a cosmogonically empowered form of language, uniquely capable of altering consciousness and calling divine forces into human experience.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
an unsung land is a dead land. On certain occasions, traditionally, the elders of a particular clan would decide that it was time to sing their song cycle in all of its intricacies from start to finish.
Abram demonstrates that in Aboriginal Australian cosmology, song is the ontological maintenance of the land itself, and its cessation constitutes the literal death of the world.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis
as Kangaroo Dreaming Man… and innumerable other Ancestors wandered, singing, across its surface, they shaped that surface by their actions, forming plains where they lay down, creeks or waterholes where they urinated, forests where they kicked up dust.
Aboriginal Dreaming song is presented as the primordial creative act through which ancestral beings shaped the physical landscape into its present form.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis
Poetry then was divine knowledge. And after the breakdown of the bicameral mind, poetry was the sound and tenor of authorization.
Jaynes identifies song and metered verse as the original modality of bicameral divine speech, whose authority persisted as a structural nostalgic remnant long after the breakdown of direct divine-human communication.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis
by ‘topic’ and ‘song’ I am meaning their neural substrates… volitional speech is jealous of the right hemisphere and wants you to itself, just as your song is jealous of the left hemisphere and wants you to leave your left hemisphere topic behind.
Jaynes grounds the distinction between ordinary speech and song in a neurological asymmetry between the brain’s hemispheres, with song rooted in the right hemisphere’s domain.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
Christianity came with a New Song, according to Clement’s Exhortation to the Greeks. Christ, the second person of the Trinity, brings the word of God, which is a New Song; this trope makes use of the New Song mentioned in the Psalms, but it was more familiar to the populace… as an indirect, and even direct, reference to Orpheus.
Hillman traces the trope of the ‘New Song’ as a recurring motif of cultural-spiritual renewal, linking Orphic, Christian, and twentieth-century countercultural movements through their shared musical impetus.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
what is folk song, as compared with the wholly Apolline epic? Nothing other than the perpetuum vestigium of a union of the Apolline and the Dionysiac; the fact that it is so widely distributed amongst all peoples and grew ever more intense in an unbroken succession of births bears witness to the strength of
Nietzsche identifies folk song as the universal living trace of the primal fusion between Apolline form and Dionysiac ecstasy, making it the generative root of Greek lyric and ultimately tragedy.
, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872thesis
The Song of Songs, as we know, was originally a love poem, perhaps a wedding song, which was denied canonical recognition even by Jewish scholars until very late. Mystical interpretation, however, has always loved to conceive the bride as Israel and the bridegroom as Jehovah.
Jung reads the Song of Songs as a primary instance of erotic language conscripted into mystical theology, charting the projection of human longing onto the God-soul relationship.
, Psychological Types, 1921supporting
Grant an entrancing song. Make into kleos the sacred genos of the immortals, who always are.
Nagy demonstrates that in Hesiodic tradition the Muses’ song is the precise vehicle of kleos, transforming divine genealogy into immortalizing, grief-remedying fame.
, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting
A realm of eight sings with us. Amen. The twelfth number dances above. Amen. The whole universe joins in dancing. Amen. If you do not dance you do not know what is.
The Gnostic Round Dance of Jesus presents cosmic song and dance as the initiate’s epistemological pathway into reality, making musical participation the condition of gnosis.
, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005supporting
‘What is more wondrous than divine beauty, or more lovely than the sense of God’s magnificence? What longing is so keen and unbearable as that engendered by God in a soul purified of every vice and truly able to say: “I am wounded with love”?’ (Song of Songs 2:5. LXX).
The Philokalia uses the erotic imagery of the Song of Songs as the authoritative scriptural language for the soul’s contemplative wounding by divine beauty.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
The Dithyramb, like the Hymn of the Kouretes, is not only a song of human rebirth, it is the song of the rebirth of all nature, all living things; it is a Spring Song ‘for the Year-Feast.’
Harrison identifies the Dithyramb as a ritual song of universal renewal, linking it to the cyclical rebirth of both human and natural vitality in the Year-Feast tradition.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
The Dionysiac-musical enchantment of the sleeper now pours forth sparks of imagery, as it were, lyric poems which, unfolded to their fullest extent, are called tragedies and dramatic dithyrambs.
Nietzsche locates song at the threshold between Dionysiac unconscious enchantment and Apolline image-making, making it the embryonic form from which lyric and tragic poetry unfold.
, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872supporting
Come lovely and soothing death… I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly. Whitman’s model here is the King James Bible’s Song of Songs but with the mother replacing the young woman of that erotic paean.
Bloom shows Whitman redeploying the erotic language of the Song of Songs as a death-hymn, transposing the beloved into the dark mother and redirecting desire toward mortality.
, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015supporting
The sweet-piping flute mixed with the lyre and the rattling of castagnets; brightly the maidens sang a sacred song, the divine sound reached the aether.
Snell preserves an archaic Greek lyric fragment in which ritual song is depicted as ascending directly to the divine realm, illustrating the cosmological aspiration of early Greek sacred music.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953aside
Music consists entirely of relations, ‘betweenness’. The notes mean nothing in themselves: the tensions between the notes, and between notes and the silence with which they live in reciprocal indebtedness, are everything.
McGilchrist’s analysis of music as relational betweenness, processed by the right hemisphere, provides the neurological substrate for understanding why song functions as a vehicle of holistic, non-analytic knowing.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside