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Were the First Laws Sung?
I make some radical claims in this extract from my new book 'Music to Raise the Dead'
I’ve learned so many surprising things about music during the last three decades. But today I’m sharing one of the most unexpected discoveries of them all.
I believe this is path-breaking stuff. It’s important both in its own right, but also for the new lines of inquiry it opens up to us.
Some brief background: I’ve long felt that music played a more significant role in human development and institutions than is told in the history books. Almost every key discipline or science—from medicine to cosmology to philosophy—originated as a type of song.
These songs possessed extraordinary power. Even more important: These songs still possess that power—although we’ve mostly forgotten how to tap into it.
Today I’m sharing a radical case study in this larger history of music. I will show how our legal codes originated as songs.
Are you skeptical? Do you think it’s impossible for music to create our laws? Read on—and be prepared for the unexpected.
The material below comes from my new book Music to Raise the Dead, which I’m publishing in installments on Substack. Each chapter can be read on its own, although you will benefit from reading it in the context of the larger work.
In this book, I outline a primeval musicology that has been marginalized and neglected. But we need to bring it back into the center of our culture—because it alone allows us to recover the most awe-inspiring capacities of human song.
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Were the First Laws Sung? (Part 1 of 2)
By Ted Gioia
We are not accustomed to viewing songs as a source of empowerment and transformation—either for individuals or communities. Music is a ten billion dollar business, part of the larger entertainment industry, which generates a staggering trillion dollars in annual revenues. These companies don’t run on vision quests—they sell products and services.
They care about you, but only as a consumer.
Music might be a pathway to transcendence, or a change agent in human life, or even a way of accessing another world. But unless these corporations can measure the transaction in dollars and cents, they simply aren’t interested.
Even musicians have been taught to treat their life’s work in this narrow and debased way. But it runs counter to their own multilayered creative experiences which, as we have seen, are often imbued with a sense of mystery and majesty—visionary in the truest sense of the word, given their frequent origin in actual dreams and visions.
But there’s no secure place for magic or metaphysics in a trillion-dollar marketplace, and such fragile connections run counter to the production-on-demand requirements of any global industry. This is the attitude expressed by the CEO of Spotify when he told musicians that they are to blame for their poor earnings on the platform—because they weren’t releasing songs fast enough.
From the perspective of a streaming platform, it would be better (or at least more profitable—which, for them, boils down to the same thing) if AI made the songs. Musicians are just a bloody inconvenience.
But how did we arrive at such a dehumanized attitude to music?
Songs were once communicated by the muses, and came unannounced during moments of heavenly inspiration. But now they need to be manufactured in volume like tubes of toothpaste or auto parts. In this kind of culture, we struggle to find even the terminology we need to describe the creative process.
How can we talk about the muse and quasi-divine inspiration in the 21st century? Or how can we talk about songs coming to us in dreams, which happens very often (as we learned in the previous chapter), although musicians are often embarrassed to talk about it?
I feel the embarrassment myself. What could be goofier than writing about dreams in a serious book like this? I’m reminded of the great novelist Henry James, who allegedly offered a rule for aspiring writers: Tell a dream, lose a reader.
And he wasn’t wrong. Few things are less interesting than the dreaded dream sequence in a book. And those on the screen aren’t much better, despite filmmakers’ obsession with including these in their scripts.
Novelist Martin Amis has amended James’s rule, allowing writers to describe a dream, just so long as it doesn’t take up more than one sentence.
I’ve broken that rule already in this book. And we’re not yet done with dreams here. But there’s a reason for this. For thousands of years, dream-inspired songs formed a joint nexus for the four most powerful vocations.
These magical songs were the provenance of :
the musician, and
If you go back far enough, these vocations begin to overlap, or even coincide. Sometimes the special people who possessed these skills also became political leaders or rulers because of their awe-inspiring abilities, but at a minimum, the authorities had to consult them on all matters of significance.
Can you imagine a politician consulting a musician? But, as you will see below, this happened quite often in the past.
These four professionals were, to put it bluntly, authorities that all other authorities looked up to, even kings and tyrants. Once we understand this, our whole perception not just of music, but of human history (and prehistory) is changed. Many seemingly insolvable mysteries in cultural evolution suddenly become illuminated. We can begin to view things more as they really were.
Musicologists and music historians should play a key role in providing these insights. But for a variety of reasons they have proven incapable of doing so. This book aims to fill that gap.
The full range of this task is enormous, but I want to provide one case study here to show how powerful this methodological tool can be.
As a test case, let’s choose a topic of decisive importance to society—and one that has nothing to do with music, namely legal codes. In fact, few subjects could be more opposed than laws and music.
But, as I’ll show below, music created the law.
A Texas rock band once recorded an amusing song, later popularized by the Clash, entitled: “I Fought the Law”—and if you’ve ever heard it, you will remember at least these lyrics:
I fought the law.
And the law won.
Of course, you remember them, because those words are repeated endlessly in this short song—17 times over the course of two minutes and 43 seconds (yes, I counted). But also because they humorously state the obvious: the law is always more powerful than a singer, even a celebrity musician in a chart-climbing band.
But those memorable lyrics are dead wrong. It would be far more accurate to say:
I sang the laws.
And the song won.
Because that’s what actually happened in ancient history. Without musicians, our legal codes would never have been validated in the first place.
Not many people know this—but I can tell you about one who did. Three hundred years ago, Neapolitan scholar Giambattista Vico offered a few hints, in the course of a seminal but strange book, entitled The New Science (1725), that laws may have been sung before they were written. And not just laws, but almost the entire history of culture and institutional authority had its roots, by Vico’s reckoning, in songs and poems.
What a strange notion!
Vico is nowadays considered the originator of sociology—so this might seem to qualify him as a credible source. But, alas, Vico is almost as famous for his bizarre opinions and untenable theories as for his insights. As far as I can tell, nobody took his claim about musical laws seriously.
That’s because he was a bit of a nutter, a conspiracy theorist from the Age of Enlightenment. Elsewhere, in this same work, Vico announces that the Earth was once populated by giants, descendants of Adam. He claims that they grew to enormous size because they consumed their own excrement. Elsewhere he blames the deforestation of Europe on Hercules—or, rather, a team of people known each as Hercules—who chopped down too many trees.
Hardly a page goes by without some implausible assertion or outright error. Even Vico’s advocates have been forced to admit his unreliability. In a warning placed by his translators at the very start of the most popular edition of his work, the reader is warned that Vico “misremembers, misquotes, distorts, or misrepresents” as a regular practice.
For this reason, my earliest encounters with Vico, as a student at Stanford and Oxford, involved secondary sources, rather than the original text—which professors were reluctant to assign because of its grotesque abandonment of even the most basic standards of academic rigor. When I later decided to read The New Science from cover to cover, I came to understand their hesitancy. Vico may have invented sociology, but he treats it like an occult science. Philosopher José Ortega y Gasset summed it up fittingly: “Anyone who peruses his work,” he once declared in a thumbnail assessment of Vico, “learns by experience what chaos means.”
So, for many years, I never took seriously Vico’s notion that laws started out as songs. Nobody did—certainly no music scholar.
Later, when I researched the history and theory of legal codes, I encountered a prevalent assumption among jurists that written law is the source of all true justice. This is stated or implied as true by definition—and when laws are not preserved on paper (or even earlier on stone, in the case of the Code of Hammurabi, or wooden tables, in ancient Rome) they hardly can be said to exist. An unwritten law is subject to the whims of judges or the abuses of the rulers, and thus defeats the very purpose of a legal code. Even God, let’s recall, had to put the Ten Commandments on “tablets of stone” (Exodus 24:12) to be taken seriously.
Consider the case of Sir Henry Sumner Maine (1822-1888), considered one of the towering intellects of Victorian England, and for many decades the most influential historian of ancient law. He announces at the outset of his magnum opus Ancient Law (1861) that as soon as we advance beyond the most primitive stage of human history, “there is no such thing as unwritten law in the world.”
One might think that a British jurist, raised in a land that venerated common law, would be sensitive to the values of a legal structure not set in stone. But for most legal historians, the superiority of written law is just plain common sense. “Laws must be written,” asserts Andrew White Young in First Lessons in Civil Government, “that it may always be known what they are.”
But neither Vico or Maine or Young, when they wrote their influential texts, would have been aware of Aristotle’s historical study known as the Constitution of the Athenians. This document was discovered on a papyrus found in an ancient rubbish dump in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt in 1879. Debate continues over how much personal involvement Aristotle had in the formation of this text, which may have been compiled by his students, but from the start no one doubted the extraordinary amount of new information on early legal institutions provided by this document.
The most surprising fact here is that the authorities cited by Aristotle are rarely written legal documents. Almost every direct quote in this work comes from a poem or song.
But we know from other sources that ancient Greeks took music very seriously as a source of legal authority. In his biography of Lycurgus, the revered lawgiver of Sparta, Plutarch tells how this jurist learned principles of good government during a visit to Crete, where he encountered Thales, and adds this significant backstory:
“Now Thales passed as a lyric poet, and screened himself behind this art, but in reality he did the work of one of the mightiest lawgivers. For his odes were so many exhortations to obedience and harmony, and their measured rhythms were permeated with ordered tranquility, so that those who listened to them were insensibly softened in their dispositions, insomuch as they renounced the mutual hatreds that were so rife at that time and dwelt together in a common pursuit of what was high and noble.”
In other words, the persuasive power of music empowered the law, and laid the groundwork for it efficacy.
After meeting with Thales in Crete, Lycurgus also spent time with the Ionians, where he studied the epic songs of Homer. He did this, according to Plutarch, in order to learn “the political and disciplinary lessons contained in them.” Here, once again, the celebrated lawgiver turned to music and poetry, not rhetoric, for inspiration.
And if we dig back even deeper, we discover that the oldest written laws in classical antiquity, known as the Locrian Code, were attributed to Zaleucus, a lowly shepherd who was born a slave in a Greek colony in southern Italy. This individual received his guiding precepts from the goddess Athena in a dream—an account that is strikingly congruent with shamanistic and Orphic accounts about how magical songs originate.
This whole story is bizarre. Why would a slave give laws to a community? Don’t the rulers make the rules?
That might seem obvious to us, but in ancient Greek society, the exact opposite happened. I note that slaves ranked among the most prominent and popular musicians in antiquity (and later)—is this mere coincidence?
Even stranger, there is both a Locrian code—the oldest laws of antiquity—and a Locrian mode, mentioned by music theorists going back to the 3rd century BC.
The “Locrian harmonia” shows up even earlier in the poetry of Pindar, where it refers to music composed for the auloi, a Greek reed instrument with dark, magical associations, by a Locrian musician. Pindar treats this music, according to scholar Edward Nowacki, as “a paean fit for Apollo and the Graces, suggesting a noble and dignified style.”
In other words, both the Locrian legal code and mode boasted a connection to divine sources, and demanded respect for that very reason.
Is this, too, total coincidence?
provide one case study: For additional case studies of music as a change agent in human culture, see my three book-length surveys of the songs of everyday life: Ted Gioia, Work Songs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), Ted Gioia, Healing Songs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), Ted Gioia, Love Songs: The Hidden History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Neapolitan scholar Giambattista Vico: See Sections 378 and 418 of the first edition of the work: Giambattista Vico, The First New Science, edited and translated by Leon Pompa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 215, 243. Vico made significant revisions in this book over the years, so you may also want to consult the third revised edition of The New Science from 1744, sections 1036 and 1037: Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 390.
misremembers, misquotes, distorts, or misrepresents: Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. xviii.
Anyone who peruses his work: José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote, translated by Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marín (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 81.
there is no such thing as unwritten law: Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law (New York: Dorset 1986), p 11.
Laws must be written: Andrew W. Young, First Lessons in Civil Government (Auburn, NY: H & J.C. Ivison, 1846) p. 17
Now Thales passed as a lyric poet: Plutarch, Lives, Vol. 1, translated by Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914), pp. 213-215.
the political and disciplinary lessons: Ibid., p. 215.
a paean fit for Apollo and the Graces: Edward Nowacki, “On the Locrian Mode,” Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 41, No. 1, p. 37. Note that harmonia is a vague term in this context, and no specific scale is defined. But the Greeks clearly saw it as inextricably linked to, as Nowacki puts it, an “ethos” and “ethnic roots”—attributes which are also essential characteristics of early law.