Tone Color Alchemy

Tone Color Alchemy reached 33 members this evening.

Hand-Illustrated Diagram by Xinyu Hu, TCA Forum Member

I have long suspected that there was a relationship between the principles of Hermetic Alchemy and Western Tonal Harmony of Music. One of the first observations that ever registered in my mind was the potential for a discovery of the relationship between Solar/Lunar symbolism and the principles of Major/Minor key centers in Music Theory. A recent series of breakthrough discoveries have confirmed this suspicion.

To understand this beautiful convergence of mysticism and music, we first need to review some conventional music theory.

You have probably heard musicians talk about the Key of a song. In this context, the word key refers to the tonal center around which a passage of music is centered. A song's key may stay consistent for the duration of the piece or it may change multiple times. The easiest way to figure out the key of a song is to check the sheet music. Strictly speaking, there are only two kinds of Key Signatures: Major and Minor.

Do not confuse the idea of musical keys with musical chords. A key relates to a phrase of music over time, whereas a chord is an assembly of notes that are played at the same time. Chords are played within a key signature.

The primary function of a key is to define which notes are consistently sharp or flat during a phrase of music. There are twelve Major keys and Twelve Minor keys; One major and one minor key for each of the twelve notes in the subdivided octave. See the image at the top of this post for a colorful representation of the twelve notes.

The key of C major is very simple, because it has no sharps and no flats. Therefore, if we begin at the root of the key, the C note, and climb upward through the scale of seven notes, there is no need to modify any of those notes in the process. For this reason, C major is called the natural key.



Every Major Key has a Relative Minor Key. This means that there is a minor key which contains the same number of sharps of flats as its Relative Major Key. Do you see how the words Relative Major and Minor lock into each other?

In the visual example above, you can see that C Major and A Minor are relative major and minor keys. They both contain no sharps or flats. They contain the same notes!

The difference between Relative Major and Minor Keys is the tonal center. The word tonal simply refers to the concept of a musical tone. Therefore, the tonal center of a key defines the central tone upon which the listener's ear should gravitate toward when they hear the piece of music.

Now for the fun stuff...



Cycles of Day and Night are affected by Sun and Moon. The common denominator is our Planet. Depending on where our "tonal center" is on this planet, we receive varying degrees of exposure to the sun and the moon.

The alchemical emblem shown above was extracted from a section of the Ripley Scroll, colored by Adam McLean (http://www.alchemywebsite.com). I have superimposed the note-names of the C major and A minor scales onto the image for clarity during description.

As you can see, there are only seven positions on this floating crucible. Each position is occupied by an Agent, which is actually an anthropomorphic representative of the frequency-node specified by that position in the musical scale. In other words, each note within the scale is simply a vibration (i.e. A=432 hz) which is held constant by the will of a fixed node of consciousness.

This offers us a major clue to the way alchemical symbolism works. Images which seem bizarre only appear so because we have yet to understand the subtler energetic principle being represented. When we translate alchemical imagery into musical terms, these energetic principles are much easier to understand.

We can now shift our attention to a study of how the solar/lunar:major/minor correspondence just described finds direct expression in the B.O.T.A. system of the Tarot. For more information on the tone-color system of the B.O.T.A. please visit our website (http://www.tonecoloralchemy.com)



We can see here that there is a direct correlation between Sun/Moon symbolism and Major/Minor key symbolism. In fact, it is common in occult literature that tarot cards are called tarot keys!

In case you're not seeing the connection, the tarot key of The Sun is associated in the B.O.T.A. system with D-Orange and the moon card is associated with B-Violet Red. If we take the sun key to imply a major key and the moon key to imply a minor key, then we are looking at D-Major and B-Minor. This is a flawless fit with conventional music theory which places D major and B minor as relative major and minor keys, both containing two sharp notes. How beautiful is that!

Synchromystic logic would allow us to take this otherwise textbook accuracy to a slightly higher plane of mystical awareness. Through a study of the Key centers of songs, we may begin to learn about the resonant feel that they are creating. Every musician knows that the Beatles song "Here Comes the Sun" is in the key of D Major!

Wow! Very impressive research And dedication. I will recommend your work to friends of mine interested in exactly this sort of thing.

As a hardline chaote though, I absolutely must insist on using your alchemical glyph as a template for translating sigils into sounds and vice versa. For instance, taking my alphabet of desire and superimposing each sigil over your tonal map, reading counterclockwise where the points fall and creating a little tune intended for evocation. No good for one-shot spells I don't imagine, although maybe with some nonsense barbaric invocation used as lyrics...but possibly effective with my personal alphabet. It might also be a good way to turn my random songs into visual symbols...hmmm...Hope you're not offended that I'm hijacking your research tools for unintended uses! I'll let you know how the experiments turn out!

No offense taken, Ezavan. On the contrary, I wrote an article called Chaos Magick and Songwriting back in April. It's a loose model for how sigils can be derived from fretboards and sheet music:

At the internal TCA Forum, we discuss different methods of abstracting ordered, non-musical signals from the Universe and putting them to use as informants of a discrete musical sequence. Here are some examples of how it works:

Converting 2d line drawings into guitar chords:



Plotting 2d line drawings on a Cartesian coordinate system:



Deriving chords and melodic sequences from license plates:



Musical Thought Experiments challenge our traditional methods of coming up with harmonic and melodic patterns. As you can see in the examples above, I am still operating within a very traditional, tonal framework. We’re looking at different ways to disrespect and mistreat formal approaches to songwriting, while still honoring Tonal Harmony and 12 Tone Equal Temperament as our departure point.

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I also recently whipped up this diagram of the 22-note sequence derived from the linear progression of paths down the tree of life, from Kether to Malkuth. The contour of these melodies, when connected as a single line, demonstrates possibility for sigil derivatives. Basically, if tone and rhythm are quantized and projected onto a box matrix like this, the true angular expression of what we hear will find visual expression. By this method, we can draw upon the laws of functional harmony (traditional music theory) and begin to study the magickal origins of music's affective power. Here's the chart:



Finally, a video of the 22 tone colors with hebrew letters, followed by a live-action film of yours truly singing the 22-note sequence in combination with the tarot meditations as mapped out by Stan Tenen of the Meru foundation:

Key 0 = Aleph (air)
Key 1 = Beth (foundation)
Key 9 = Yod (open hand)

Binary system derived from physiological polarity (open hands).
Aleph = Opposite hands pressing thumbs and forefingers together
Beth = Opposte hands pulling thumbs and forefingers apart

When working on body energy points and meditation on Tarot cards (and the Tree of Life) some four years ago, I dived deeply into the possibilities of resonating sounds with colors, that could be attached to such systems.

As effective as I found my research, I came to the conclusion that sound frequency linked to color, wernt linked universally, but rather subjective to the personal inward subconscious resonates.

I found color to be some what more universal in visualization (my personal research linking widely with others), though with sound, as there is many different scales, and music sytems, I found it was more personalized (I still found c to b normal scales worked best for me).

Fascinating Topic.

Enjoyed your posts. I am bit late it seems.