Note 192 — Chapter VII · THE ECSTATIC DANCE
Reading edition
Regarding the musical accompaniment to such ecstatic dances, Iamblichus propounds the extraordinary theory that the reason why certain sounds and melodies produce an ecstatic state is because before the soul entered the body it was “an auditor of divine harmony,” and when, being in the body, it hears these, it recollects the divine harmony and participates in it; hence the cause of the ecstatic state and the faculty of divination (De Mysteriis, III. 9 end).