From ‘The origin of all the cults, or the true religion’, by Charles François  Dupuis. Paris, 1794.

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Today’s sharing from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA, are quotes from Charles François Dupuis, Isaac Newton and Antoine Fabre d’Olivet (not a bad company at all) upon the great god Pan and the symbolism of his attributes. From Charles François Dupuis’s ‘Origin of all the Cults’. Paris 1794. Following by quotes by Isaac Newton & Fabre D’Olivet excerpted from Joscelyn Godwin’s ‘ The Harmony of the Spheres’, a source book of the Pythagorean Tradition in music. Inner Traditions, 1993. Newton: page 307-308. Fabre D’Olivet: page 346.

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The following text is a description and explanation of the above engraving

‘This engraving represents Pan with his flute; Pan is the moderator and harmonizer of the Universe and the Spheres; Pan is the power that drives, with his flute, the harmony of the seven planets; who presides to the celestial concerts, sung by the poets, celebrated by the philosophers, and heard, it is said, in the quietness of the virtuous contemplative nights. The seven planets journey with their chariots around their helmsman and under the signs of the zodiac they have settled their homes. ’

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Here we add some commentaries on the same subject by Isaac Newton & Antoine Fabre d’Olivet

‘These are passive laws and to affirm that there are no others is to speak against experience. For we find in ourselves a power of moving our bodies by our thoughts. Life and will are active principles by which we move our bodies and thence arise other laws of motion unknown to us. And since all matter duly formed is attended with signs of life and all things are framed with perfect art and wisdom and nature does nothing in vain; if there be an universal life and all space by the sensorium of a thinking being who by immediate presence perceive all things in it, as that which thinks in us, perceives their pictures in the brain: Those laws of motion arising from life or will may be of universal extent. To such laws the ancient Philosophers seem to have alluded when they called God Harmony and signified his actuating matter harmonically by the God Pan’s playing upon a Pipe and attributing music to the spheres made the distances and motions of the heavenly bodies to be harmonical, and represented the Planets by the seven strings of Apollo’s Harp.’

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‘The number 12, thus applied to the Universe…’

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‘After the number 12, product of the multiplication of 3 and 4, the most generally revered number was the number 7, formed from the sum of 3 and 4. It was considered in the Sanctuaries of Thebes and Eleusis as the symbol of the Soul of the World unfolding itself in the bosom of the Universe and giving life to it.

Macrobius, who has transmitted many ancient mysteries to us, tells that this soul, distributed among seven spheres of the world which it moves and animates and from which it produces the harmonic tones, was designed emblematically by the number 7, or figuratively by the seven-holed flute placed in the hands of Pan, the God of the Universe.’

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