CYCLE TWELVE: CRITERIA OF RELIGIOUS MUSIC

1. To the superman is the Kingdom (of Eternal Being), the Power (of God), and the Glory (of Heaven) for ever and ever, Amen!

2. The superman is the highest mode of human life, a supermasculine superhuman mode of life whose metaphysical sensibility stands above the physical sensibility of man and the chemical sensibility of woman, as 're-born' mind above both 're-born' ego and id.

3. This fact would have to be reflected in the triadic Beyond of 'Kingdom Come' to which my work subscribes, since it is of the nature of Social Transcendentalism, the ideology of 'Kingdom Come', to attach paramount importance to metaphysics and thus to that which, centred in being, is properly religious.

4. Air is effectively the element of religion, just as vegetation is the element of economics, water the element of politics, and fire the element of science, which (latter) is the beginning rather than the end of elemental actuality.

5. Things proceed from fire to air via water and vegetation, as from materialism to idealism via realism and naturalism, science to religion via politics and economics or, in more abstract terms, from doing (acting) to being via giving and taking, evil to wisdom via goodness and folly.

6. In such a manner it could be maintained that the Arts proceed from art to music via literature and sculpture, as from appearance to essence via quantity and quality, the Devil/Hell to God/Heaven via woman/purgatory and man/earth or, in elemental terms, from fire to air via water and vegetation, crime to grace via punishment and sin.

7. If air is the religious element par excellence, as I have no doubt it is, then only that religion which is centred in the utilization of air, via the breath, for religious (spiritual) purposes is genuine, all the rest being either vegetative, watery, or fiery shortfalls from the idealistic per se of metaphysics (transcendentalism) in what amount to quasi-idealistic modes of physics (nonconformism), chemistry (humanism), and metachemistry (fundamentalism), as applicable to the hegemony, in other contexts, of either economics, politics, or science.

8. Since music, the art form of air, is the religious mode of cultural endeavour, it follows that only that music which embraces wind, in one form or another, will have a religious correlation, since wind is the instrumental category which corresponds to air, and hence to religion.

9. There are, it seems to me, for main categories of wind instrumentation, viz. brass, organs (including accordions, mouth organs, harmoniums, etc.), woodwind, and pipes, and I contend that the first three are 'bovaryizations' of wind germane to fiery, watery, and vegetative shortfalls, respectively, from an airy per se, viz. pipes.

10. Hence it is my contention that religious music is 'bovaryized' (or twisted away from what is genuinely religious) when it relies upon either brass, organs, or woodwind, since air is then being utilized in quasi-idealistic vein by instruments whose material and stylistic constructions render them closer, overall, to fire, water, and vegetation respectively.

11. Hence we could distinguish the quasi-idealistic materialism of religious music utilizing brass from the idealism of the utilization of pipes for religious purposes, and further distinguish each of these (noumenal) options from the (phenomenal) quasi-idealistic realism of organs and the quasi-idealistic naturalism of woodwind in connection with religious music.

12. Pipes are alone genuinely religious, and hence musical, by dint of their reliance on the lung-like bag-and-bellows apparatus for the supply of air to the pipe(s) as such.

13. Pipes that rely upon a whistle-like connection to the mouth are comparatively less religious, and therefore musical, than pure or uilleann pipes, for the simple reason that such a whistle-like connection connotes with woodwind as something comparatively more economic, and hence sculptural, in its vegetative construction.

14. Nevertheless, even bagpipes are musically superior, by dint of the 'bag', to woodwind instruments as such, and should be capable, in consequence, of producing a more genuinely religious sound, one suited to a preponderantly transcendental bias.