Ernest G. McClain

Who is Ernest G. McClain?

Ernest Glenn McClain was professor emeritus of music at Brooklyn College. McClain is known for his efforts to establish the ancient mathematical discipline of music as the means to unlock the deepest meaning of history's great religious and philosophical texts. His writings offer a musical-mathematical explanation of crucial passages in texts of world literature, including the Bible, the Rig Veda, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and Plato. All of these passages deal with numbers that he claimed had either been ignored or misinterpreted throughout the centuries. McClain's explanation is based on the meanings of these numbers within the context of the quadrivium, the four ancient mathematical disciplines of arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. His discovery of identical or similar numbers and parallel mathematical constructs in Sumer, Egypt, Babylon, Palestine and Greece, suggests the historical continuity of a common spiritual tradition linking the microcosm of the soul to the macrocosm of the universe. His work provides much of the missing mathematical detail for what scholars often call the Music of the Spheres.