Articles

Sestina and hexachord, hexagram and hexaneme: about ancient forms of globalization

Vostok/Oriens '2018, №4

DOI: 10.31857/S086919080000432-2

 
The article deals with an actual problem of the cultural, historical and anthropological boundaries of globalization. The author examines the theory of the Eastern Renaissance as a precursor of globalization. This theory was popular in the USSR in the 1960–80s, being an alternative to the ideologically and politically mainstream concept of the five formations of historical materialism. The author analyses the history of the complex poetic form—the sestina that unexpectedly appeared in the multicultural environment of the troubadours of Provence at the end of the twelfth century. Sestina’s numerological structure and spiral algorithm disclosed only in the twentieth century do resemble the system of building hexagrams of the “I Ching”. The images of this Chinese bool spread widely in China during the tenth–twelfth centuries and could reach Europe through the Arabs. Since the eleventh century, another similar sixfold structure was established in the theory and practice of music and singing in the West—the hexachord giving rise to musical notes. The connecting link between these sixfold constructions could be a two-dimensional figure—hexaneme, which is universal for Eurasia, a derivative of the ninefold enneagram that was also reconstructed only in the twentieth century.

Keywords: Sestina, hexachord, hexagram, trigram, hexaneme, “I Ching”, “Yijing”, Great Extreme, Tai-ji, Eastern Renaissance, globalization.

Pages: С. 31–54