Sex: Ask some people (advertising agents, botanists, behaviorists, psychiatrists, religious zealots, lyricists and students of Magick just to name a few) and they’ll probably tell you that sex is the motivator for everything in life (maybe some would say the bane of everything in life, but that’s another discussion someone else can pick up someplace else).
Sex? The motivator for life? That isn’t really true. It’s
that is the motivator for life.
Sex is only one way of satisfying desire. There’s a whole lotta desire out there, much more than there is for merely love. Without desire no living thing would do anything at all, not even bother to initiate sex. That’s because desire is required to initiate action of
Desire is wanting something other than what exists: A different situation, a different experience. True desire is kind of like an itch or a sneeze – it starts out little and the next thing you know, it’s irresistible. You gotta have it. Now. And by the time you act on it there’s no question of what it is you’re going to do.
Desire: Deep Down Inside
There is the desire and there is the desired: The want and the thing wanted. The desire to reproduce and the pleasure from it is a primitive, lizard brain thing – but then so is music. It’s no wonder that sex and music are so closely linked.
Like good sex, music begins with wooing, igniting the flame. It can be hard or gentle, depending on what suits the mood. Either way, the heat builds to a climax (when it's good, sometimes more than one climax!) but once you're there, climax is the end of the desire: That's what it is for. Satisfaction is the sating of desire or, put another way, the desired outcome of any act is not the scratching of the itch but the cessation of the itch – the fulfillment of desire is to no longer have desire.
Magick works the same. It begins with a wooing, it builds to a climax that results in the manifestation of the change the Mage desires - and therefore the end of the desire itself.
Sex and Magick come from the same source. Their root is desire. Their end goal is fulfillment: satisfaction and completion. They are parallel in many ways, but they are only parallel, not the same. Most people don't have any
pattern recognition for Magick, so the brain substitutes the nearest explanation. You experience desire of any sort deep down inside, but that doesn't make it about sex. You don’t need sex for Magick, you need desire, but most people can’t really tell the difference.
Hungry for Power
When you recognize Magick in the music, what you are sensing - beyond what your ear captures - is Power, the life energy of the Universe. Power is so very sexy, though it isn’t actually sexual. It is the Real Thing: A link to the Force, to the energy of life and because it is so Big, so Much, because it’s the highest high, the brightest Light, the best of the best, we compare it to things that we can experience that are similar (
pattern recognition again). Good sex that takes us out of ourselves is what we know, and so we compare Power to sex and we believe that sex itself is a property of Magick when it isn’t, really.
So. Music that is not only about sex but also carries Magick is a double whammy. Mage Music doesn’t have to even be sexy to be Sexy. It’s all about desire: We taste a bit of that Power and we want more. We're hungry for it - we desire it.
Mage Music is
sound sex. It is what the essence of the sexual experience is
without the sex. Magick connects desire to Power and culminates in a change in the world. And what a powerful tool desire is for Magick - a good thing since desire is one of the main components of Magick. Imagine what it must feel like for the Mage.
Does it Quack for You?
When the infinite part of you – your soul – is connected to the Infinite that is the Universe and resonates with it during the experience of music, then you’re feeling the Magick. That's the good news. The bad news is that while souls can resonate with the Infinite, ordinary humans can’t
fully participate in the experience of the Infinite and still remain in finite bodies (the result is insanity… or death. We’re just mere humans, we listeners to music – we aren’t Mages, and even Mages court insanity and death as I'm sure you've observed).
The Magick in Mage Music isn’t for us or about us – the Magick is the Mage’s, not ours. The Mage's role is the connection to the Infinite. Our role is that of the witness. Still, we can’t help but notice – and react to – the powerful desire that the Mage uses in the Magickal process. We are pulled to Mage Music, and we especially love sexy Mage Music. Heck, any Mage Music is sexy, when you come down to it. We can't help ourselves.
If it feels like a duck and it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it is a duck. Mage Music feels sexy, so it is sexy. The music in the playlist below is in no way the only sexy music Jimmy Page created. Just because the songs happen to be (mostly) about ordinary sexy stuff isn’t why they are on the list – they’re there in spite of the ordinary sexy stuff. They are there because they are Mage Music, not because they’re sexy music - and these songs are Mage Music because of the Power manifested by the desire of the Mage creating the music.
Obviously a Mage who chooses music to perform publically intends for us to perceive the Magick – we get to be voyeurs in a very personal process but at least we've been invited. A Mage Musician uses the feedback of the audience’s resonation with the Magick as part of the Mage’s Magickal process - but even so, we still are each just witnesses, not the one creating the Magick, and we are not who the Magick is for. The Mage doesn't need us for Magick, he just desires us.
Hot/Cold Desire
You ever play the game of hot/cold or charades where your the others guide you by telling you if you’re aiming in the right direction or the wrong one? That is feedback, and a Mage Musician uses audience feedback just like any ordinary musician or artist does. Music reflects a search - for desire and for climax. In the kids' game, “hot” is getting closer, “cold” is going away from the goal. In Magick and Mage Music – and sex - getting closer feels good, going away from the goal feels bad… or at least neutral (which is actually bad because you aren't getting where you want to be). It’s all about feeling your way to the emotion of desire: You may not know what you want - quite - but you recognize it when you feel it.
Artists in the act of creating are driven by desire. Whatever their medium - paint, words, music, dance, stone or pixels – artists in the act of creating feel the pull of desire. Recognizing it, they act, they feel the hot/cold of results, they adjust and act again, sometime with lightening speed, sometime with a snail's pace of deliberation. They play us for the feedback only to serve their own desire.
The Mage works with the un-physical medium of Magickal process. At once both freer and requiring the highest discipline, desire is still the driving force, and the fulfillment of desire is still the end goal. No matter to the Mage Musician that the audience is witness and feedback mechanism, only tangential to the Magickal outcome - the Mage will do what the Mage will do whether there's an audience or not. But you know, so what?
We hear it, we feel it. We get a whole lotta deep down, too.
♪ Since I’ve Been Loving You (Led Zeppelin, Rochester 1971) YouTube
