The Sleepwalkers Read Online Free PDF

apparent later. The first is Dryden's well-known:
    From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:
When nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay
And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice we heard from high:
Arise, ye more than dead.
    The second is from Milton's Arcades :
    But els in deep of night when drowsiness
Hath lockt up mortal sense, then listen I
To the celestial Sirens harmony ...
Such sweet compulsion doth in music ly,
To lull the daughters of Necessity,
    And keep unsteddy Nature to her law,
And the low world in measur'd motion draw
After the heavenly tune, which none can hear
Of human mould with grosse unpurged ear.
    But, one might ask, was the "Harmony of the Spheres" a poetic conceit or a scientific concept? A working hypothesis or a dream dreamt through a mystic's ear? In the light of the data which astronomers collected in the centuries that followed, it certainly appeared as a dream; and even Aristotle laughed "harmony, heavenly harmony" out of the courts of earnest, exact science. Yet we shall see how, after an immense detour, at the turn of the sixteenth century, one Johannes Kepler became enamoured with the Pythagorean dream, and on this foundation of fantasy, by methods of reasoning equally unsound, built the solid edifice of modern astronomy. It is one of the most astonishing episodes in the history of thought, and an antidote to the pious belief that the Progress of Science is governed by logic.

4.
Religion and Science Meet
    If Anaximander's universe reminds one of a Picasso painting, the Pythagorean world resembles a cosmic musical box playing the same Bach prelude from eternity to eternity. It is not surprising, then, that the religious beliefs of the Pythagorean Brotherhood are closely related to the figure of Orpheus, the divine fiddler, whose music held not only the Prince of Darkness, but also beasts, trees and rivers under its spell.
    Orpheus is a late arrival on the Greek stage, overcrowded with gods and demigods. The little we know about his cult is clouded in conjecture and controversy; but we know, at least in broad outlines, its background. At an unknown date, but probably not much before the sixth century, the cult of Dionysus-Bacchus, the "raging" goat-god of fertility and wine, spread from barbaric Thracia into Greece. The initial success of Bacchism was probably due to that general sense of frustration which Xenophanes so eloquently expressed. The Olympian Pantheon had come to resemble an assembly of wax-works, whose formalized worship could no more satisfy truly religious needs than the pantheism – this "polite atheism" as it has been called – of the Ionian sages. A spiritual void tends to create emotional outbreaks; the Bacchae of Euripides, frenzied worshippers of the horned god, appear as the forerunners of the mediaeval tarantula dancers, the bright young things of the roaring 'twenties, the maenads of the Hitler youth. The outbreak seems to have been sporadic and shortlived: the Greeks, being Greeks, soon realized that these excesses led neither to mystic union with God, nor back to nature, but merely to mass-hysteria:
    Theban women leaving
Their spinning and their weaving
Stung with the maddening trance
Of Dionysus! ...
Brute with bloody jaws agape
God-defying, gross and grim,
Slander of the human shape. 6
    The authorities seemed to have acted with eminent reasonableness: they promoted Bacchus-Dionysus to the official Pantheon with a rank equal to Apollo's. His frenzy was tamed, his wine watered down, his worship regulated, and used as a harmless safety-valve.
    But the mystic craving must have persisted, at least in a sensitivised minority, and the pendulum now began to swing in the opposite direction: from carnal ecstasy to other-worldliness. In the most telling variant of the legend, Orpheus appears as a victim of Bacchic fury: when, having finally lost his wife, he decides to turn his back on sex, the women of Thrace tear him to pieces, and his