St. Cecilia, c.1895 William Waterhouse

Saint Cecilia has been depicted by numerous painters, from Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Max Ernst. She is shown on religious postcards and engravings, and in church stained-glass windows, usually at the keyboard of an organ playing for an audience of rapt angels, though in Waterhouse's painting (above), it is the angels who play for her.

Cecilia is the patron saint of musicians, and her name is often invoked before a performance. One performer who says a prayer to St. Cecilia before he sings is the famous tenor, Luciano Pavarotti. Cecilia is associated with music because she was credited with the invention of the keyboard, a claim which is not strictly true, as there were keyboards on much earlier Greek instruments called water organs. St. Cecilia was reputed to have lived around 200AD. Though there may have been an historical Cecilia, the role of a female inspirer of music and musicians predates both her and Christianity...it is one of the roles of the goddess, and one of her titles, Muse, gave us the very word 'music'.

So it appears that St Cecilia is yet another name for the goddess, a Christianised name that permitted a charming tradition to continue after the fall of the temple. As the Nine Muses, the goddess inspired specific kinds of music: as Terpsichore, the muse of dance, she inspired one kind of choral music; as Polyhymnia, muse of sacred poetry, another.

The Nine Muses are not the only connection between the goddess and music. In Homer's Odyssey, the adventurer Ulysses saves his life, ship and crew by stopping his ears with wax so that he could not hear the song of the sirens (who are other representations of the goddess). The song that that the sirens sang had remarkable effects: it was irresistibly seductive, and those who heard it went blissfully to their doom. The hypnotic sirens are also also mentioned by the philosopher Pythagorus, who in describing the 'music of the spheres' implies that this special music is the actual substance of all space-time. He describes this music as being produced by sirens spinning in a ritual dance. We may infer from all this that music, goddess music, was of central importance in the ancient religion and in the rituals of the priestesses. While we may never know the song that the sirens sang, we may be able to re-imagine some part of the musical repertoire of the ancient temple. We know that the music was largely choral, and that the choir was composed of women and castrati, and so would favour the upper register. We can guess that the music had measure and rhythm, because it was for formal dance rituals. We know that woodwinds (reed flutes) were important, because of the myths of the origins of that instrument. Similarly, we know stringed instruments were available, again because we have a description in myth of Hermes creating a lute from the shell of a tortoise. We also know that there were two major modes to the music, because we have myths about contests between representatives of each. The modes were lyrical (which would have been the normal, melodic, music of the temple) and the Phrygian (a wild orgiastic mode, used in the annual rite of the Lupercalia). With this known, we can at least begin to imagine a music which had the magic power of bringing the participants into the presence of the goddess. It may be that this re-imagined music would be more familiar to us than we expect, for in the same way as the written language of the ancient temple has evolved into our writing; and the mathematics of the ancient temple has become our mathematics, the music of the temple has become our music.

In other chapters we have seen that the scholars of the temple were very interested in the numbers three (of the triple goddess) and the number five (of Venus). It is not surprising then that they should produce music based on a pentatonic scale (a scale of five notes). We give the names C; A, D etc to the notes on our modern eight-note scales, but in some voice-training lessons, singers are taught the notes as E O U I A, which are the vowels, and, (according to this writer) essentially female in character and which form most of the secret name of the goddess, a name which while difficult to speak, may be sung as an ululation.