Fetishtic beliefs concerning magic songs or sounds were, as we have seen, confirmed by the influence naturally exerted on men and animals in their normal or abnormal state by rhythmic and musical sounds, however rude and unformed they may be.  Theophrastus tells us that blowing a flute over the affected limb was supposed to cure gout; the Romans recited carmina to drive away disease and demons:  the old Slav word for physician, vraci, comes from a root which means to murmur; in Servian, vrac is a physician, and balii, an enchanter or physician.  The use of incantations as a remedy prevailed among the Greeks in Homer’s time.  The Atarva-Veda retains the old formula of imprecation against disease, and the Zendavesta divides physicians into three classes, those which cure with the knife, with herbs, and with magic formulas.  Kuhn believes that the Latin word mederi refers to these proceedings, comparing with it the Sanscrit meth, medh, to oppose or curse.  Pictet traces the meaning of exorciser in another Sanscrit word for a physician:  Bhisag from sag, sang, tojurbo gate.

As the civilization of the historic races advanced, poetry, singing, and musical instruments became more perfect, and were classified as reflex arts.  Among the more intellectual classes the earlier fetishtic ideas connected with them almost disappeared, while in the case of the common people, the fetish was idealized, but not therefore lost; it persisted, and still persists, under other forms.  Polytheism, modified to suit the place, time, and race, and yet essentially the same, offers us a more ideal form of the arts, each of which was personified as a god, and taken together they formed a heavenly company, which generated and presided over the arts.  The greatest poets and philosophers of antiquity retained a sincere belief in the inspiration of every creation of art; and this was only a more noble and intellectual form of the first rude and indefinite conception by which the arts were embodied in a material shape.

Of all the Aryan peoples, Greece represented her Olympus in the most glorious mythical form, set forth by all the arts of description.  From the polytheistic point of view, nothing can be aesthetically more perfect than the myths of Apollo and the Muses, which personify harmony in general, and whatever is peculiar to the arts.  Such conceptions, by which the arts of speech, song, vocal and instrumental music were embodied in myths, did not disappear as time went on, but were perpetuated in another form.  Music, which was always becoming more elaborate, continued to be the highest inspiration, a divine power, an external and harmonious manifestation of celestial beings, of eternal life, and the order of the world.  This conception was shadowed forth in the Pythagorean theory of the mythical harmony of the spheres:  that school regarded the world as a musical system, an harmonious dance of planets.