Music, mythology, and the making of the social self

Music has functioned as a channel for divine inspiration across virtually every human culture. In Hindu cosmology, all creation flows from Nada Brahman, the cosmic or divine sound. A comparable belief exists in Celtic mythology under the name “Oran Mor,” a Scottish Gaelic phrase signifying “The Great Melody”—the primordial song that both creates and sustains the universe. Similar patterns of music and myth interweave among the Ilonggo, T’boli, and Blaan peoples of the Philippines. Blaan creation narratives describe a supreme creator deity, and their musical practice permeates tabih weaving songs and ceremonial rites. In the modern world, the enormous popularity of fan communities such as the Harry Potter fandom offers sociological evidence of an ongoing, often unconscious spiritual symbolism. Catherine Hall has observed that wizard rock “creatively engages the world of Harry Potter and encourages fans to embrace heroic qualities in the real world.”

Beyond materialism: acknowledging researcher bias

Many college graduates remain unaware of the breadth of scholarly opposition to materialist ideology. Critics of materialism—including Iain McGilChrist, Arran Gare, René Guénon, Joe Holland, Raymond Rappaport, Rupert Sheldrake, Stephen Farra, Paul Wong, Brian Josephson, Claudia Nielson, Imants Baruss, and Julia Mossbridge—have portrayed it as mechanistic, shallow, and ultimately nihilistic. As McGilChrist argues, a “rigid adherence” to quantitative methods ultimately “limits and restricts” analysis. Guénon claimed that materialism amounts to “the denial of everything that is of a supra-individual order,” which has resulted in the marginalization of three vital facets of consciousness: symbolism, spirituality, and social awareness. Scholars such as Harold Koening, Paul Wong, Stephen Farra, and Stefan Schindler have endorsed a refutation of the materialist claim that spirituality is “intangible and beyond the senses” and therefore unreal. This reasoning commits what logicians call a definist fallacy: it smuggles in loaded terms that define spirituality out of existence. By the same logic, death—equally intangible and beyond immediate sensory confirmation—would have to be dismissed as “a figment of your imagination,” an absurd conclusion.

Three fundamental errors in materialist methodology

• Failure to distinguish tangible from intangible forms of spirituality. Several substantive, measurable types of spirituality exist: compassion-based spirituality, musical spirituality and its connection to the social self, and spirituality involved in healing through grief (see Sprecher and Fehr 2005; Saslow 2011; Schulkin and Raglan 2014; Cross 2003; Easterling, Sewell, Gamino, and Stirman 2000; Parker 2005; Kiliánová 2010).
• Failure to distinguish religiosity from spirituality. As one Baptist woman put it, “Religion is of man! Spirit is of God!” Saslow’s research confirmed that spiritual processes operate independently of religious ones.
• Failure to distinguish “divine” from “supernatural.” By definition the supernatural lies beyond empirical investigation; labeling something supernatural renders it scientifically meaningless.

The social functions of music: a fundamental part of our evolution

Jay Schulkin and Greta B. Raglan note that “Music is often functional because it is something that can promote human well-being by facilitating human contact, human meaning, and human imagination of possibilities, tying it to our social instincts. Music is a fundamental part of our evolution—and functional because it facilitates human contact and our social self.” Tianyan Wang echoes this sentiment, observing that since Charles Darwin first raised the possibility, “more and more scientists believe that human music must be a biological adaptation”; the argument holds that “music originated and developed from social activities.”

The deep antiquity of musical practice

The oldest securely dated musical instruments—bone flutes—appear in the archaeological record from around 40,000 years ago. Anton Killin remarks that “Music is a fascinating topic for evolutionary theory, natural philosophy, and narrative construction: music is a highly valued feature of all known living cultures, pervading many aspects of daily life, playing many roles.” He goes further, suggesting that musical capability may have emerged as early as 275,000 years before the present. Spirituality, too, appears as a natural human predisposition, older and broader than any institutional religion, concerned with “a person’s sense of connectedness with self, others, and the world (or cosmos).”

Symbolism and the social-moral order

Elzbieta Halas writes that “Groups exist [as] common symbolization [which creates] social order.” D. Balaganapath notes that “every culture is common symbolic expression.” Leslie White (1995) argued that “the creative faculty of human beings makes them bestow values upon things freely, actively and arbitrarily,” driving humans toward symbolization—an innate tendency. The philosopher Immanuel Kant viewed symbolic knowledge as a pivotal form of understanding, emphasizing that knowledge involves active synthesis, not just passive reception. Myths involving divine figures have historically functioned as symbolic maps for social-moral order: Moses and the Ten Commandments, Ur-Nammu, the Code of Hammurabi paired with the Mesopotamian gods, Zeus, and Indra all illustrate this pattern.

European symbolism in music and literature

Anthi Georgiadou observes that “when writers want to suggest a specific mood or emotion, they use symbols to imply it rather than stating it explicitly.” The European Symbolist movement was especially prominent in French and Russian literature; French Symbolism predominated in poetry from 1886 to 1896 and Russian Symbolism from 1894 to about 1914. As a revolt against naturalist and materialist currents of thought, the movement found much of its inspiration in Parisian gatherings led by Stéphane Mallarmé, and the music of Richard Wagner acted as a particular catalyst. Among the key musical works Hall highlights are Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande—which the composer called “an opera after Wagner, not inspired by Wagner”—and Fauré’s song cycle La chanson d’Ève, Op. 95. Symbolism’s influence carried over into music through the exploration of subjective psychological states, highly expressive harmonies, impressionist aesthetics, poetic subject matter, and a willingness to break with standard narrative structures.

Morality and musical creativity in the Harry Potter fandom

Alfred North Whitehead wrote that “no period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.” The massive following enjoyed by Star Wars, Harry Potter, and similar imaginary worlds offers contemporary sociological proof that unconscious spiritual symbolism still circulates widely. Rhiannon Grant notes in The Sacred in Fantastic Fandom that the 2001 UK census allows a “write‑in” religion question: nearly 0.8 percent of respondents declared themselves “Jedi” or “Jedi knight.” The same result turned up in Australia and New Zealand.

Catherine Hall, writing on morality and musical creativity in Harry Potter fandom, emphasizes that “wizard rock” (often abbreviated as “wrock”) “creatively engages with and augments the content world of Harry Potter through musically and lyrically diverse performances.” While fan scholarship has often explored how fictional heroism translates into real-world activism, Hall points out that there was, for some time, little analysis of how the actual music, lyrics, and performances intersect with the moral vision of the book series. Musicians involved in the genre “imbue their music and their self-images with the series’ morals, historical tropes and archetypes,” making morality concrete by donating profits from albums and subscription series to nonprofit organizations. “I argue that the wizard rock community’s application of fictional heroism through music, lyrics and performance encourages fellow Harry Potter fans to embrace heroic qualities in the real world.”

Music and the social self

Modern music research provides a strong counter-balance to a norm entrenched in much Western academic thinking: “extreme rational individualism.” The theologian David Hay coined the term “extreme individualism”; the psychologist Edward C. P. Stewart noted that “many social scientists endow an individual with an absolute and independent mind”—an unrealistic view for complex, relationship‑bound societies. Research by Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler indicates that “when people stop believing they are free agents, they stop seeing themselves as blameworthy for their actions.” Consequent to that shift, they become less responsible and give in to base impulses. “In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side.” Contemporary neuroscience into music reveals a “social self,” contradicting the old claim that “there is no psychology of groups” (Allport 1927) and pushing back against the materialist assertion that spirituality is somehow intangible and therefore unreal.

Divine inspiration across cultures: myths and music

Greek tradition

Music formed an essential part of daily life in the Greek world; the Greek concept included not just melody but also dance, lyrics, and performed poetry. Instruments ranged widely and were heard at religious services, festivals, symposia, weddings, funerals, athletic events, and military campaigns. Music was also fundamental to education and to the drama performances held in every theatre—plays, recitals, and competitions alike.

Nada Brahman and Hindu cosmology

In Hindu tradition the entire creation begins as Nada Brahman, or divine sound, which then unfolds into the physical universe. Brahma is associated both with the primordial sound Om and with the first element—ether. Shiva, often shown with the drum damaru, is regarded as the origin of both music and dance. This sacred sound suffuses everything in reality, from cosmic structure down to the precise qualities of each musical note.

Ilonggo, T’boli, and Blaan traditions of the Philippines

The Ilonggo people preserve sugilanon, oral tales of ancestral deeds and world origins, and at least since Spanish chronicles wrote about it, song and music have been used across generations to transmit history, culture, and mythology.

T’boli music, termed Utom, anchors the community’s cultural identity in South Cotabato, Philippines. It preserves traditions, expresses emotion, and tells stories using instruments such as the hegelung (a two‑stringed lute), klintang (suspended gongs), kumbing (bamboo jaw harp), s’loli (flute), and tenonggong (deerskin drum). Utom movements mimic sounds of the natural world and appear at community festivities, weddings, and other ceremonies.

The Blaan and T’boli once constituted a single people and both originate from the same region. Blaan creation stories, like the tale of the supreme deity Melu, recount the shaping of the world and everything that lives within it. Music emerges in traditions that range from songs sung during the sacred art of tabih weaving to ritual uses of bells attached to clothing—all of which serves to maintain unity, honor ancestors, and express spiritual connections to nature.

Celtic Oran Mor

The concept of Oran Mor (“The Great Melody”) weaves across the entire body of Celtic narratives like an interlocking knot. As retold by Frank Mills, the primordial myth of an initial breath-like melody—the very utterance of a primal god—sang creation into existence. The melody does not stop after the original act; it continues, “inspiring Creation along its holy pilgrimage of giving and receiving blessing.” The Oran Mor appears as a “sea melody” knitted into tales of sunken lands, magic springs, life‑giving cauldrons, and holy grails. Personified as Wisdom, it fills the head and lends significance to dismembered heads, and as a creative force, it works continually on both singer and hearer. The myth of Uaithne and Boand gives birth to the three typical strains of Celtic music—innocence, sorrow, and joy—while the Song of the Three Cauldrons perpetuates blessing. Mills concludes that the words of that timeless melody are “as diverse as there are people to hear it; always taking their meaning from their divinely breathed sound, never from that design which we impose.”

Music as evolutionary adaptive trait

A convergence of evidence reinforces that music is fundamentally concerned with meaning. Peter Atkins writes that music has “the capacity to communicate profound meaning”; it has been called by one philosopher “to express infinitely that which cannot be explained” (Jankelevitch, 1983), and by one religious aesthetician to bring “order out of chaos, harmony to the soul, and healing to spiritual pain, by bringing about a sense of the beyond.” The American sociologist Robert Wuthnow argued that music and spirituality are aligned because both address “an essential yearning for inspiration” within human beings.

Ian Cross, in work on music and evolution, observes that “it seems likely that proto-musical capacities and their cultural particularizations as musics were crucial factors in precipitating and sustaining the social and cognitive versatility that mark modern humans.” Musicality likely complemented language, “filling in the gaps in language function through its combination of embodiment, entrainment, and transposability of intentionality.” Cross also notes that cross-culturally, musical behaviors include not just sound but visible action; musicality belongs above all to communities rather than to individuals, and the specific meanings that music carries are always mutable. Tianyan Wang traces this thread farther: since Darwin, the leading hypothesis is that music evolved at least partly as a biological adaptation. The social functions—strengthening mother‑infant bonds (Dissanayake 2000; Trehub 2003) and maintaining group cohesion (Brown 2000; Freeman 2000; Mithen 2007)—are so central that many scientists now argue music “originated and developed from social activities.”

A concluding voice: divine inspiration in music

Martin Luther spoke for many traditions when he declared: “Music is the donum Dei, the gift from God, and therefore is only secondarily a human art or science.” The most ancient surviving music—that of India, channeled through the Vedic stream—was fashioned as a direct expression of divine inspiration. As the Gandharva Veda proclaims: “We worship Nada-Brahman,” the world of vibration from which everything springs.

did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself!" Music had opened his inner eyes for God's glory in spite of his blindness. Since 1742, whenever Handel's Messiah is performed, the audiences automatically rise to their feet as they hear the majestic, awe-inspiring “Hallelujah Chorus”.

Spirituality – Music in prehistory: T’boli creation myth

Manolete Mora observes, “An examination and interpretation of the making of Boi Henwu's symbol within the context of the Lake Sebu creation myth is of considerable importance for the study of T'boli instrumental music. This myth alludes to important features of T'boli music making. Firstly, it points to underlying compositional components in instrumental music, and secondly, it indicates an intrinsic relationship between musical sound or pattern and extra-musical aspects. The expression of this relationship in the myth highlights a third important feature; namely, music as imitation or recreation of nature. A large portion of the instrumental repertoire is concerned with the imitation of natural sounds, and with the symbolic meanings ascribed to them. Finally, two additional key features or attributes of music making are indicated in the Lake Sebu myth. These are, firstly, the belief that music, like knowledge in general, is derived from the spirit realm through inspiration, and, secondly, the idea that instrumental music serves important social functions in courting and as a boundary marker in ritual.

Idealism in Music

Protest songs in the United States are a tradition that date back to the early 18th century and have persisted and evolved as an aspect of American culture through the present day. Many American social movements have inspired protest songs spanning a variety of musical genres including but not limited to rap, folk, rock, and pop music. Though early 18th century songs stemmed from the American colonial period as well as in response to the Revolutionary war, protest songs have and continue to cover a wide variety of subjects. Protest songs typically serve to address some social, political, or economic concern through the means of musical composition. In the 19th century, American protest songs focused heavily on topics including slavery, poverty, and the Civil War while the 20th century saw an increased popularity in songs pertaining to women's rights, economic injustice, current politics, and war. In the 21st century, popular protest songs have addressed topics such as police brutality and racism. (Wikipedia)

A number of contemporary musicians sing about ideals such as love, equality, social justice, and resilience, carrying on a long tradition of using music as a form of protest and inspiration:

For social justice and equality:

• Kendrick Lamar: His song "Alright" became an anthem for the Black Lives Matter movement, offering a message of hope and resilience in the face of police brutality and racism.
• Hozier: The song "Take Me to Church" is a powerful critique of the Catholic Church's discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community, advocating for love in the face of religious prejudice.
• Beyoncé: The women's empowerment anthem "Run the World (Girls)" celebrates female strength, independence, and determination.
• Janelle Monáe: Her song "Q.U.E.E.N." is an anthem for marginalized people, celebrating those who are ostracized and promoting personal expression.
• Shervin Hajipour: The 2022 song "Baraye" became an anthem for the "Woman, Life, Liberty" protest movement in Iran, expressing hope for a future free of oppression.

Historically music has conveyed ideals and personal goals, as well as conventional protest music. American protest music has a long history, including songs from the Civil Rights Movement, World War I and II, and more recent years:

The music of the Civil Rights Movement was a mix of blues, jazz, and spirituals. Some examples include:

• "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" by Nina Simone
• "Selma March" by Grant Green
• "A Change is Gonna Come" by Sam Cooke
• "We Shall Overcome"
• “This land is your land” Bob Dylan

In the Philippines, besides music being traditionally associated – and still practiced – with religious festivals, OPM (Original Philippine Music) conveys cultural meanings, significance and identity which appears distinct from the rock and roll in western culture. OPM Historical and Political Expression: “OPM has played a crucial role in documenting the history and political climate of the Philippines. During times of social unrest and political upheaval, artists used their music as a medium to voice their grievances, advocate for change, and uplift the Filipino spirit. For instance, during the Martial Law era under President Marcos, songs emerged that carried subtle or veiled messages of resistance and empowerment.”

Social Consciousness & Social-Moral Order

Point of order: Historically there is a correlation between Divine Myths and Ideals of Social-Moral Order. See Myths as Symbolic Maps of Social-Moral Order: Moses & the 10 Commandments, Ur-Nammu, Hammurabi Code, w/ Gods of Mesopotamia (Shamash, Marduk, Enki, Nabu, Inanna, Enlil, and Anu), + Zeus, Indra & E Halas: “groups exist [as] common symbolization [which] create a social order” vs myths as heroes

“Social and Moral order encompasses the living, the dead, deities, and spirits”: Ramon Reyes emphasizes that early spiritual and religious beliefs in the Philippines were a “social and moral order”: “In sum, one social and moral order encompasses the living, the dead, the deities and the spirits, and the total environment.”

Paloutzian and Park (p. 12) state: “religion and spirituality are more or less coherent, culturally elaborated meaning systems embedded in and acquired through social relationships and institutions situated in complex natural and built environments.”

Arctic Hunter Gatherer beliefs in animal spirits as “Human relationships with the natural world...” embedded in the Arctic Hunter Gatherer Society with social-family roles. Erica Hill emphasizes, “Their thoughts and actions established and maintained relationships with prey animals and may be more productively conceptualized as dynamic social behaviours embedded within the context of daily life than as privileged ritual acts.” Essentially, Erica Hill defines spiritual beliefs in this context as human relationships with the environment. The emphasis is on the “human relationships” which is counterpoint to the “supernatural.”

Conclusion: The impact of music on society is undeniable. It enriches our emotional lives, strengthens cultural ties, fosters community, drives economic growth, and serves as a catalyst for social change. In every note and rhythm, music resonates with the essence of what it means to be human. Music transcends language barriers, allowing people from diverse backgrounds to connect through shared emotions and experiences. Music celebrates the richness of human diversity, showcasing the unique sounds and styles of different cultures. Music provides an outlet for expressing feelings, whether it's joy, sorrow, anger, or love. It can help us process emotions and find solace. Music is a fundamental part of cultural identity, reflecting traditions, beliefs, and values, and often conveys historical significance, preserving stories, folklore, and cultural knowledge. Music is often central to social rituals, such as weddings, funerals, and festivals, marking important life events and strengthening bonds. Music has the power to unite people, fostering a sense of community and shared experiences. Collective Identity: Music can create a sense of collective identity, bringing people together around shared musical tastes and preferences.

Keywords: Hymns, Chants, Mantras, Ritual music, Gospel music, Gregorian chant, Bhajans, Qawwali, Torah/Vedic music, Sufi music, Music in Myths, Music and Ideals, Divine Music: Ancient Greek Music, muses, Nada Brahman, Blaan, Celtic Oran Mor; Music as evolutionary adaptive trait, Schulkin & Raglan, H Potter bands, wrock, music and morals.

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