Ficino places music among the Apollonian elements. According to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Apollo learned the art from the child Hermes. Therefore, music, even in Apollonian hands, is a kind of hermeneutic, a mode of interpreting life midway between blind experience and distant explanation. But music does abstract from the concrete content, the individual material of the soul, and is for that reason quite properly within the domain of Apollo, the THE ELEMENTS OF PSYCHE 89 Far-Shooter. Apollonian consciousness, if not in the classic period | at least in modern literature, is high in the sky, removed from the | X action so as to gain a broad perspective. It differs from the | Dionysian in that it keeps a distance from the concrete. But the Apollonian art of music, though interpretive of the dynamic factors of experienced life, is not so abstract as to be noninvolving. Indeed, the image produced by music is remarkable precisely because of its singular capacity to hold the listener's attention within itself. The listener cannot stand back, as from a painting, and analyze. Music professors and students do that as a strategy in pedagogy, but even they, when they truly listen to music, must become absorbed by it. One is in the image, not outside of it. Not all music is Apollo's; indeed, there seems to be an archetypal contest between those who prefer Apollonian music to that of Dionysos or Pan or some other god or goddess. Apollo's | music is by nature subtle and spiritual, but it is nevertheless exciting and moving and offers all the psychological advantages we have seen. Bach wrote a cantata on the theme of the sea between Apollo and Pan, showing in text and music the different character of these two, but finally Apollo wins the agon and the judge declares: "Phoebus, your melody was born of grace itself. And he who understands this art, will lose himself in it."
— Thomas Moore
Moore is tracking something precise here: music arrives as Apollonian, but it carries a Hermetic origin — which means Apollo never fully domesticated it. The god of form, distance, and the far shot learned from the trickster-messenger who stole cattle before he was a day old. That ancestry doesn't disappear when the lyre changes hands. What Moore calls music's "remarkable" image is the consequence: unlike painting or sculpture, which you can step back from and read, music collapses the gap between perceiver and perceived. You do not stand before it. You are already inside it by the time you notice.
This is where the passage earns its weight. The spiritual logic running through much reception of music — especially classical music, especially Bach — is that absorption equals ascent, that losing yourself in it is a kind of elevation. The judge's line at the end of the cantata — *he who understands this art, will lose himself in it* — could easily be read as a tribute to transcendence. Moore knows enough to let it stop there, but the Hermetic genealogy he has just established quietly refuses that reading. Hermes is not an ascending god. He moves laterally, between worlds, along the boundary. If Apollo's music was born of grace itself, that grace arrived sideways, from a thief, before anyone was watching.
Thomas Moore·The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino·1982