Musica e formazione dell’essere umano nelle tradizioni pitagoriche e ippocratiche sino al VI secolo d.C.

From Antiquity to the present the Unborn has a relevant place in the myth, religion, and culture of oral and written traditions all over the world: from Babylon to Israel, from India to Tibet, from the Mediterranean to the islands of the Pacific and to Central and South America. The last fifteen years of interdisciplinary research have focussed on gestation and birth of Hindu, Jain and Buddha deities, but also on nonbirths in Sikh imagery, the embryo in Babylon and in the Bible, in early Christianity, in rabbinical texts, and in the Greek-Arabic narratives of Islam, the earliest creation narratives of Central American peoples and of the mythology and cultural memory of Japan. These narratives don’t include music, but music had a major place in select group of ancient Greek and Latin philosophical and medical texts concerning the development of the embryo. This article discusses the Pythagorean and Hippocratic traditions related to music and the embryo, until their later reception in 6th century CE. A synthesis of extensive research, it contextualises the relations between music and embryology in the religious, medical and philosophical traditions of many cultures from antiquity to the present, highlighting the uniqueness of the Pythagorean and Hippocratic thought and their traditions, over a period of about a millennium. It is only in these currents of thought that the musical element, coming from the Pythagorean tradition, becomes fundamental in the conception of the development of human beings, leading to the statement of Censorino: “procul dubio a natalibus nostris musica non est aliena”.