In the beginning was The Word, and The Word was with God, and The Word was A God.

And now The Word is with Google, it seems. Hm, they should be careful Microsoft © doesn’t sue them.

One of the most devastating demonstrations I ever saw of the primacy of The Word was watching a troupe of master Senegalese drummers rehearsing at a folk dance festival in Quebec in 1993. I was a musician with a South African Xhosa schoolboy dance troupe and I took our guys to watch some real drummers in action. Like Indian percussionists — like good percussionists everywhere — they would not touch their drums until they could vocalise a part. Most of the training of dancers was done without a drum in sight, the dance master (a terrifyingly powerful guy with a fly whisk) walked them through all the rhythms, just using his voice. Before even the drum, comes the voice.

The first sense that develops in the foetus is hearing; the first sounds it hears are the mother’s heartbeat and the overtones of her voice. Researchers have shown that using these harmonics from a recording of your mother’s voice — completely unhearable as a human voice, I’ve listened to these recordings, it’s just a high-pitched scratching — is the single most effective way of triggering a “sonic rebirth” in which you find yourself basically back in the womb, entailing all kinds of emotional releases. You can bet Google knows all about this, infinite capacity for manipulation here, how could they miss it. Especially if they have your mother’s voice on file, in various situations, with various stresses.

If you research the mysterious Dr Rudolf Steiner, the scientist of the invisible, you will run into “the new art of Eurythmy”. And you will also immediately run into people saying, oh, gosh, it’s not new at all, we saw people floating around in those veils decades ago. They’re missing the point. Steiner described the successive incarnations of our planet — this is standard Hindu cosmology by the way, but Steiner claimed to have confirmed every detail through his own clairvoyant observations of the Earth’s history — and also described the art that was appropriate to each. We are presently in the fourth (or middle) epoch of seven. The art of the first epoch was Architecture; the second, Sculpture; the third, Painting; and the fourth, our present, Music. (You can see this partly recapitulated via Greek sculpture being followed by Italian painting).

And in the future will come: Poetry; and only then, Eurythmy. According to Steiner, Eurythmy is actually a completely new art, a form of directly expressing words and music in movement, and it will combine and perfect all the preceding epochs of artistic endeavour. So it truly is an art of the very far distant future, and we can only catch glimpses here as to what it will look like.

Now, in quite scientific terms, Steiner shows how each vowel sound corresponds to a shape in the air, and further, how this shape corresponds to a human gesture; and states that language originated from gesture, as many linguists argue.

Astonishingly, Steiner then claims from his clairvoyant investigations that the main consonants actually represent the sectors of the Zodiac; and the planets, weaving through the Zodiac, represent the vowels, literally voicing out “words” as they go. This is the true cosmic harmony, described in both great scientific and artistic detail in Steiner’s lectures — which, he always stressed, barely even give the most basic outline of the depth of Eurythmy.

So when Google starts speaking The Word; and making The Word your guide through life; and finding the correct Voices to push all your buttons and make you obey and buy what they say; this is more than a small AI issue. This is a true cosmic calamity. I do not care one whit who laughs at me.

I was a student teacher at an incredibly violent school in north London in 1978 — kids from our school had just stabbed a policeman in Tottenham High Street, as well as nearly stabbing a teacher to death, they were very proud of this. The very first thing I was told by my experienced school supervisor, was how to use my voice to control the class; how to have a voice to tell them to sit down, and another one to tell them a story, and another one to wind the lesson down. Everything I was saying was initially at an anxious high pitch. I very soon learned just how important this technique was, to shape and manage the entire experience. There is no possible way you can overestimate the power of the voice.

Go and look at the McGurk Effect. If you watch a video of someone saying “VA” when the soundtrack is actually saying “BA”, the sight of the person’s lips articulating the vowel completely overrides what your ear hears. You see VA, you hear VA, no matter what is on the soundtrack. They say it’s one of the most resilient illusions you can find in psychology, it certainly works every time for me. And to my mind, it is a kind of proof of what Steiner is saying. The word corresponds to a gesture in the air. Reading the lips lets us see the gesture essentially being performed. This is the primal experience of The Word: not a vibration in the air, rather, a human gesture.

Do you see what deep subliminal gateways into the human soul and mind we are opening, when we permit our lives to be guided by these helpful synthesised voices?

What happens when a machine can mimic your voice perfectly? What havoc could be wrought? What happens when an AI routine can find exactly which overtones you respond to, to tailor a voice specially designed for you, that you will find almost impossible to shut out of your brain? This is what they are working towards, you can be certain.

Have you noticed that Hollywood has almost entirely eliminated human actors in kiddies’ movies? All CGI? The only place left for humans is in doing the voices. And how soon will even these artists become redundant, as seductive voices synthesised using fractal software layering ocean waves and the sighing wind are woven into their next superhero’s voice? And do you think Google will miss this opportunity to find out how to manipulate children with almost perfect, God-like control?

Insurance companies routinely use voice software to detect when a caller is stressed and might be lying. Intelligence agencies can identify a person from just a fragment of speech plucked from the ether. The Five Eyes are constantly monitoring all the world’s voice traffic, triggering recorders into action if certain key words are detected. Human speech has become the centre of a major weaponisation exercise at every level.

One of the ultimate dopamine delivery systems is to hear your own name spoken by what you experience as an ultra-sexy voice. Take a look at a recent Dilbert cartoon, which hits the nail precisely on the head:

As someone with a legacy soul, I do everything I can to develop my natural voice, including overtone singing. I can reach very low notes, which allow for a multiplicity of overtones, each one basically corresponding to a vowel — Dr Rudolf Steiner is the only scientist or musician I know who correctly attributed the vowel sounds (and diphthongs) to the overtones, in his lectures Eurythmy as Visible Music. I can actually sing at least 64 distinct overtones or vowel sounds, a few more than AEIOU. This is like doing a Fourier analysis of your own voice. In all of this, I honestly feel I’m clinging to the last shred of humanity we are actually allowed to keep. If you are in solitary confinement, or dying of some ghastly disease, they can’t stop you from humming to yourself.

Or: can they? Okay, Google: do your best.