Joscelyn Godwin's Articles and Minor Writings
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This site contains summaries, commentaries, and links to Godwin's minor writings from 1970 to the present. For the books that he has authored, coauthored, edited, and translated, see his website:
11. “Quest and Protest in Popular Songs.”
The Golden Blade 26 (1974): 96-106.
The Golden Blade was an annual journal of the Rudolf Steiner movement, in which I was involved due to experiments in Bio-Dynamic gardening and attendance at Steinerian workshops. For almost the first and last time, I felt that I should make some effort to appreciate popular music. In the psychedelic 1970s it was the Incredible String Band that most appealed to me, because of Robin Williamson’s Celtic, poetic, and even esoteric lyrics and echoes of oriental musics, to which I was also temporarily drawn. This led to a brief correspondence with him.
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For an index of The Golden Blade, see:
https://cdm16694.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/nyrud/id/1405/
The Golden Blade 27 (1975): 122-36.
The editor of this Anthroposophic journal suggested that I follow up my article on popular music (no. 11) with a broader survey of the musical scene. Having turned my back on the avant-garde and retreated into early music, I tried to think of what could come next. It was a kind of sequel to “Spiritual Currents in Music” (no. 2).
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That the Traditionalists and the Anthroposophists were very distant from one another on the esoteric spectrum did not trouble me. I regarded both Guénon’s and Steiner’s schools as sources to learn from selectively, while staying independent of all groups, movements, and cults.
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For an index of The Golden Blade, see:
https://cdm16694.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/nyrud/id/1405/
13. “Mains divers acors: some instrument collections of the Ars Nova.”
Early Music 5 (1977): 148-59.
Reprinted in Instruments and Their Music in the Middle Ages, ed. Timothy J. McGee (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, reprinted Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 39-52.
The title, meaning “many different concords,” comes from Machaut’s Le Remède de Fortune, which gives a long list of instruments present at a feast. In 1975 I had spent a delightful grant-supported trip around English churches looking for images of medieval instruments, assisted by correspondence with Harriet Nicewonger, a fellow enthusiast and collector of iconography. The other 14th century “collections” are the carvings of angelic and human musicians in Beverley Minster, Yorkshire, and the representations in a monumental brass in Schwerin, the latter only known to me from photographs.
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Like my previous contribution to Early Music (no. 10), this was intended for a mixed readership of amateurs and professionals. Its intention was to dampen the facile conclusions that some were drawing from iconographic sources, which are rarely a reliable guide to instrument construction or ensemble practice. Through successive reprintings it has become my longest-lived article.
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The journal’s website:
14. “Layers of Meaning in the Magic Flute.”
Musical Quarterly 65 (1979): 471-92.
Under the editorship of Joan Peyser, this important journal was temporarily open to contributions outside the musicological norm. In the 1970s I had devised a course on “Wagner, Tolkien, and Jung,” exploiting the Tolkien craze and making use of Robert Donington’s Wagner’s Ring and Its Symbols and Edward Whitmont’s The Symbolic Quest to insinuate Jungian psychology into my students’ minds. Here I applied some of the same principles to Mozart’s opera, along with more esoteric interpretations. Donington in his book The Rise of Opera mentioned its “much unusual insight.”
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The journal’s website:
15. “The Revival of Speculative Music.”
Musical Quarterly 67 (1982): 373-86.
This article began as a paper for the conference of the American Musicological Society on November 8, 1980, which I was unable to attend because of the imminent birth of my son. It introduces some theorists almost totally unknown to the English-speaking musicological world, notably Marius Schneider, Albert von Thimus, Hans Kayser, and the followers of Rudolf Steiner. Since my last contribution to the journal I had published short books on Robert Fludd, Athanasius Kircher, and Mystery Religions in the Ancient World, meanwhile making a comprehensive collection of esoteric writings on music. These later appeared with my commentaries and explanations in the edited collections Music, Mysticism and Magic, Cosmic Music, and Harmony of the Spheres, and were summarized in Harmonies of Heaven and Earth.
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A German translation of the article by Hildemarie Streich was published in Musiktherapeutische Umschau 7 (1986): 25-41; an unattributed Dutch translation in Harmonisch labyrint (Hilversum: Verloren, 2007): 149-66; and a Spanish translation by Carlos Varona Narvion in La cadena aurea de Orfeo. El resurgimiento de la musica especulativa (Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 2009).
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The journal’s website: https://academic.oup.com/mq
16. “Tolkien and the Primordial Tradition.”
Temenos 3 (1983): 27-37.
While teaching a course on “Wagner, Tolkien, and Jung” (see no. 14), I had been struck by the resonances in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion with Theosophical and Traditionalist doctrines. After meeting Kathleen Raine at a Lindisfarne Association conference on Pythagoras, and learning that she was familiar with, and respectful of, both Theosophy and Traditionalism (a rare combination), I wrote this, my first non-musical article, and submitted it to the journal she had founded to promote “the Arts of the Imagination.” It started a connection with Temenos that continues to this day.
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Temenos: a Review of the Arts of the Imagination ceased publication with issue no. 13 (1992). It was succeeded in 1998 by the Temenos Academy Review, website:
17. “The Rosicrucian Event in Perspective.”
Journal of Rosicrucian Studies 1 (1983): 18-22.
In 1982 Adam McLean, founder of the Hermetic Journal, convened a conference in London and published its papers in what was intended to be a parallel journal. As it was, this was the only issue. At the conference I first met my future collaborator Christopher McIntosh, already the author of the standard text on the Rosicrucian movement.
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As in my other treatments of Rosicrucian themes, such as writings on Fludd and Maier, and editions of the documents, I appreciated the event more for its aesthetic and picturesque qualities than its supposed spiritual value. Later, in compiling and translating the Rosicrucian Trilogy, I was keen to include the fanciful illustrations by Hans Wildermann.
Adam McLean’s website:
Homage To Pythagoras: Lindisfarne Letter 14 (1983): 135-42.
The Lindisfarne conference organized in 1981 by William Irwin Thompson brought together Robert Bly, Christopher Bamford, Keith Critchlow, Anne Macaulay, Ernest McClain, John Michell, Kathleen Raine, and Arthur Zajonc. Several of them became lifelong friends. This essay explained why Pythagoras should have been the magnet for such a diverse group.
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Thirteen years later I declined to have it included in the later collection, Homage to Pythagoras: Rediscovering Sacred Science, ed. Christopher Bamford (Hudson: Lindisfarne Press, 1994), because it had been an occasional piece, not pretending to reveal new or technical knowledge like the other contributions.
19. “The Golden Chain of Orpheus: a Survey of Musical Esotericism in the West.”
Temenos 4 (1984): 7-25; 5 (1984): 211-39.
Since the mid-1970s I had been systematically collecting texts on “speculative music” from the classical, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions, translating them when I could and annotating them all. I hoped to publish this as an esoteric counterpart to Oliver Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, but no publisher would take on the whole collection of over 800 printed pages. Eventually the more approachable half was published by Routledge as Music, Mysticism, and Magic and the more technical half by Inner Traditions as Harmony of the Spheres. This two-part article summarizes the material for the benefit of non-specialists, such as the readers of this “Review of the Arts of the Imagination,” founded by Kathleen Raine, Brian Keeble, Keith Critchlow, and Philip Sherrard.
The article was reprinted in Song of the Spirit... the World of Sacred Music, ed. Sudhamahi Regunathan (Delhi: Tibet House, 2000): 71-92. Spanish translation in La cadena aurea de Orfeo. El resurgimiento de la musica especulativa, tr. Carlos Varona Narvion (Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 2009).
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Temenos: a Review of the Arts of the Imagination ceased publication with issue no. 13 (1992). It was succeeded in 1998 by the Temenos Academy Review, website:
20. “Musical Alchemy: the Work of Composer and Listener.”
Temenos 6 (1985): 57-75.
Harmonies of Heaven and Earth was now accepted by Thames & Hudson, and the publisher, together with the editors of Temenos and The American Theosophist, allowed pre-publication of excerpts from the forthcoming book. This one goes back in spirit to my first article (no. 1) in giving credit to the listener as a participant in music and to listening as a potentially spiritual act.
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Temenos: a Review of the Arts of the Imagination ceased publication with issue no. 13 (1992). It was succeeded in 1998 by the Temenos Academy Review, website: