Peter Mills, an author of Hymns to the Silence, states that musician Van Morrison was seriously interested in the occult side of music. His enthusiasm for music and interest in esoteric spirituality, which appeared later, are "not as far apart as they would at first seem." He has read books like Music and Its Secret Influence by Cyril Scott, The Secret Power of Music by David Tame, and also many books by Alice Bailey. (Mills, 2010) Nevill Drury says about the Morrison's album Beautiful Vision (1982) that its texts were inspired by the Theosophical publications of Bailey and her "Tibetan Master", especially for songs "Dweller on the Threshold" and "Aryan Mist." (Drury, 1985, p. 60)
Criticism of the Theosophical "music-forms"
Prof. Godwin writes about the forms which were "created," according to Besant and Leadbeater, by music of Gounod, Wagner, and Mendelssohn (Fig. 1, 3, and 5 respectively) as follows:
One would like to ask many questions of the authors [of a book Thought-Forms]. First, did Besant and Leadbeater both "see" these apparitions? If so, did they agree in every detail? I suspect that Leadbeater alone was responsible. Then, did he really stand half a mile from the church to witness Wagnerian splendor filling the firmament? He could not have heard the music from there; did he see it emerge the moment the organist struck the ivories? The situation reeks of improbabilities. The only thing of which one can be certain is that at some point, the clairvoyant(s) sat down with the artist and supervised his or her painting. (Godwin, 2016, p. 470)
Prof. Hanegraaff called Leadbeater "self-appointed visionary" who interpreted his own mental imagery as "clairvoyant perception." (Hanegraaff, 2017, p. 36)
Fig. 5. The Theosophical "music-form", composer Felix Mendelssohn. (Besant; Leadbeater, 1905, p. 78)
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