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'. Two currents within theorizing about music, the 'ethical' and the 'astrological', had come together in the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition in antiquity but had never been fully integrated. Correspondences between planets, signs of the zodiac, musical tones, elements, and bodily humours had then been systematically elaborated by Muslim scholars. Marsilio Ficino work provided the starting point for many subsequent discussions -not, Gouk argues, particularly among theorists of music and medicine so much as in the writings of 'occult philosophers'. 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.
