Now this, the trumpet species of pipe, we find also used as an auxiliary “spiritual” help to the drum.  We are told by M. Huc, in his “Travels in Thibet,” that the llamas of Thibet have a custom of assembling on the roofs of Lhassa at a stated period and blowing enormous trumpets, making the most hideous midnight din imaginable.  The reason given for this was that in former days the city was terrorized by demons who rose from a deep ravine and crept through all the houses, working evil everywhere.  After the priests had exorcised them by blowing these trumpets, the town was troubled no more.  In Africa the same demonstration of trumpet blowing occurs at an eclipse of the moon; and, to draw the theory out to a thin thread, anyone who has lived in a small German Protestant town will remember the chorals which are so often played before sunrise by a band of trumpets, horns, and trombones from the belfry of some church tower.  Almost up to the end of the last century trombones were intimately connected with the church service; and if we look back to Zoroaster we find the sacerdotal character of this species of instrument very plainly indicated.

Now let us turn back to the Pan’s pipes and its direct descendants, the flute, the clarinet, and the oboe.  We shall find that they had no connection whatever with religious observances.  Even in the nineteenth century novel we are familiar with the kind of hero who played the flute—­a very sentimental gentleman always in love.  If he had played the clarinet he would have been very sorrowful and discouraged; and if it had been the oboe (which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been attempted in fiction) he would have needed to be a very ill man indeed.

Now we never hear of these latter kinds of pipes being considered fit for anything but the dance, love songs, or love charms.  In the beginning of the seventeenth century Garcilaso de la Vega, the historian of Peru, tells of the astonishing power of a love song played on a flute.  We find so-called “courting” flutes in Formosa and Peru, and Catlin tells of the Winnebago courting flute.  The same instrument was known in Java, as the old Dutch settlers have told us.  But we never hear of it as creating awe, or as being thought a fit instrument to use with the drum or trumpet in connection with religious rites.  Leonardo da Vinci had a flute player make music while he painted his picture of Mona Lisa, thinking that it gave her the expression he wished to catch—­that strange smile reproduced in the Louvre painting.  The flute member of the pipe species, therefore, was more or less an emblem of eroticism, and, as I have already said, has never been even remotely identified with religious mysticism, with perhaps the one exception of Indra’s flute, which, however, never seems to have been able to retain a place among religious symbols.  The trumpet, on the other hand, has retained something of a mystical character even to our day.  The most powerful illustration of this known to me is in the “Requiem” by Berlioz.  The effect of those tremendous trumpet calls from the four corners of the orchestra is an overwhelming one, of crushing power and majesty, much of which is due to the rhythm.