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Music and Religion

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Since the dawn of time, music has been man’s medium of communication with its divinity/divinities. Views of the origin of both religion and music swing between two poles: the belief in a reality that is essential and independent of an observer and a view that neither music nor religion exists on its own, challenging their independent existence. Both views address the question, did music and religion exist prior to our having discovered them or did they exist all along, whether we knew them or not? In modern psychology, Jung answered this by positing that the world comes into its being when man discovers it.

In monotheism, Music and religion are means of accessing the invisible, unseen, and untouchable, what is beyond what man can comprehend. They both refer to the Almighty God, the Divine, the One which is called in religion and psychology the numinous, holy, and tremendous. Their common ground is archetypal and relates to the experience of loss through rituals of death and rebirth....

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Correspondence to Laurence de Rosen .

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de Rosen, L. (2014). Music and Religion. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_447

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_447

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