The importance of song, Sacred and Profane Beauty

Discussing myth and different forms of participating in myth makes me think back to Search for Beauty, especially our text Sacred and Profane Beauty. In Van der Leeuw's section on Holy Words in Sacred and Profane Beauty entitled “The Work Song,” van der Leeuw claims that song provides a force and rhythm by which people can labor to. He says that words “generate a certain power which is fixed, controlled and concentrated by the rhythm. Therein lies the religious significance of the work song. The man who discovered that was Bucher. He thought that he must remain unpersuaded of any religious significance, since the content was fully profane, being related either to the work itself or to completely foreign matters. But we are dealing here with art; and art, by its very origin, is connected with power. Thus the work song is a religious and magic instrument”(115). In this, he argues that the journey into the myth strengthens and adds force to the task at hand; this union is almost inevitable in the ease of its existence.