ABSTRACT
The development in question was the re-establishment in European thought of an integrated vision of music which embraced both ethos and cosmos. Music could have salutary effects on human beings because of its astrological significance as a mirror of the universe’s ‘deep structure’. The sources of that philosophy are various, but they certainly include Arabic texts, as well as the Jewish numerological mysticism of the Kabbalah. Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim adopted the name Paracelsus, not in qualified homage to the first-century Roman medical authority Celsus, but as a Latinization of his ‘surname’, Hohenheim. This is a music therapy which of course has some affinities with those of medieval Aristotelians and Renaissance Platonists, despite their general refusal to countenance the possibility that music could directly affect demons. Moreover, as later generations of Paracelsians syncretized their master’s medicine with the Galenic mainstream, so the affinities would be magnified.
