Dwapara Yuga - The Musical Structure of Plato's Dialogues

J. B. Kennedy argues in a new book (unfortunately a rather expensive one that doesn't allow searching inside) that Plato's dialogues have an unsuspected musical structure and use symbols to encode Pythagorean doctrines. 


"The followers of Pythagoras famously thought that the cosmos had a hidden musical structure and that wise philosophers would be able to hear this harmony of the spheres. Kennedy shows that Plato gave his dialogues a similar, hidden musical structure. He divided each dialogue into twelve parts and inserted symbols at each twelfth to mark a musical note. These passages are relatively harmonious or dissonant, and so traverse the ups and downs of a known musical scale. Many of Plato's ancient followers insisted that Plato used symbols to conceal his own views within the dialogues, but modern scholars have denied this. Kennedy, an expert in Pythagorean mathematics and music theory, now shows that Plato's dialogues do contain a system of symbols. Scholars in the humanities, without knowledge of obsolete Greek mathematics, would not have been able to detect these musical patterns. This book begins with a concise and accessible introduction to Plato's symbolic schemes and the role of allegory in ancient times. The following chapters then annotate the musical symbols in two of Plato's most popular dialogues, the Symposium and Euthyphro, and show that Plato used the musical scale as an outline for structuring his narratives."

The book was announced to great fanfare a year ago but the write ups then and blurb above don't really reveal much other than that the Greeks shared something of the capacity to write at several levels simultaneously with the Old Testament Prophets and India's Rishis.


The text is valuable in setting a context for the ancient mind where little was revealed openly since heretical beliefs then as now could be dangerous and the expectation was that an apt student would have something of a 'mental decoder ring'.    For the kinds of crazy hair scientist one sees on cable TV making wild assertions, smoking guns will continue to remain elusive yet the 'GSR' (gun shot residue) of subtle clues are nevertheless very real.