The Mysteries
photographs on this page: Hanne Tofte Jespersen
The Mystery Traditions on planet Earth have since time memorial focussed upon taking care of
the connection between mankind and our divine origin.
Hand downs bear witness of the traditions and their presence. They are there as ancestors' signs in the landscapes, in mounds and carvings, they sound through songs and tales and emerge in scripts whose source remains hidden.
relief in the temple at Komombo 
In the West there are treads leading from ancient Egypt though the Middle East and further up through the Mediterranian area to Celtic culture in the North and North-West. Like an underlying weaving, traces of a common essence run beneath the history of mankind and the apparent differences between his religions. An essence dealing with the relation between the highest, innermost - God, Spirit - and that realm in which man and woman live their human lives.
Across cultures and different languages, tales and ballads, myths and fairytales tell related stories about connections between this world and another world beyond time. Folklore teems with accounts of meetings between human beings and fairies, little people, elves, dwarfs, winged beings, fabulous monsters, power animals....
Parallel to folkloric wisdom, teachings of wisdom have been carried on through history within closed circles, loges and "secret" societies, "inner circles" both within and outside official exoteric religions and their congregations.
Two ingrediences are general: Magical power and love. Two sides of the same coin.
Concealment is not strange when one considers the many people who throughout millenias have been prosecuted and excommunicated as infidels, heretics, witches and heathens. During the first half part of the 20th century courageous and gifted women and men dared publish scripts and experiences which until then had been carried on in hiding. Midway through the century Tolkien is capable with his gigantic epos to rewrite the knowledge of the folk soul into a contemporary version of the never ending story about the battle between good and evil.
When it comes to knowledge of handed down scripts, coincidence several times lends its helping hand during the 20th century. Some of the scripts which Music for the Mysteries has set in music, have appeared by coincidence - as was the case when a shepherd in 1947 stroke some ancient jars in a cave near The Dead Sea. The findings of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran revealed portions of the traditions which Fathers of the Church had agreed to leave out and forget in the 4th century. Book of Enoch is among these scripts.
Another fortunate coincidence
had some twenty years earlier arranged it so that a number of Essene scrolls came into the hands of a linguist who were skilled in Aramaic by the time he had got access to the archives of the Vatican.
By the transition into the 21st century the worldwide web has paved a way for the ordinary human being to access the treasuries of traditions. One thing, though, is access - another what one uses and is able to use it for. Years and years of inner work and training still forms the necessary basis for acquiring teachings of wisdom, for traditions speak in symbols and hideous languages, and their code can only be made out through deep inner work.
labyrinth in Carnwall
The common essence under the many varieties deals with the relation and bridge between the inner and the outer. Those two depend upon each other. Both are living participants in the ongoing process of creation.
According to the teaching of the Tree of Life - the Holy Qabalah - one of the many corresponding names of the kingdom of Earth is The Gate. It is a paradox in the present that "The Gate" may seem both more open and more closed than ever. Accessible as well as denied.
Music for the Mysteries reaches inward towards the wisdom in the handed down scripts and traditions and outward towards the reality in which humans and other living beings move in the, according to Western chronology, 21st century.
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Texts for Music for the Mysteries' concerts in 2008/09:
Book of the Secrets of Enoch, XXX,11 - scroll text found in caves at Qumran near The Death Sea around 1947.
extracts of Mike Harris: Ritual © 2000 - based on Celtic tradition.
Aurelius Augustinus (355-430): La Morte non è niente ( Death is nothing)
Vision of Enoch from The Essene Gospel of Peace Book 2
scroll text found in the Vatican in the1920'es and translated by Edmond B. Székely (1900-1979).
liturgical texts from Graduale Romanum, 12. century:
Angeli, archangeli og Dum sacrum mysterium