Real music, real Magick

A lot of music today … [the] living energy has become sanitized.
~ Jimmy Page, 2009 interview with Neil McCormick

One of the characteristics of stage magic is the use of distraction so you won’t see what’s really going on. While the coin is being retrieved from an ear or a woman is being sawed in half, the magician’s hands are constantly moving, cards are being flipped from a distance to fly through the air, the sexy assistant moves things around the stage. The stage is set in deep shadows and bright lights. Swirling capes and smoke and mirrors mask and distort what you see so that you only see what the magician intends for you to see.

The idea is to misdirect your attention. You aren't supposed to notice that there is engineering used to create the trick that leads to the "magic".

There is nothing Magick about it, of course.

Now consider this: How much of what I have just described would also describe today’s music performances, onstage or video? Spotlights and smoke, explosions and flashing lights. Bizarre hair and makeup, risqué costumes and stage sets that mask and distort. Giant display screens to make sure you are looking at exactly what you should be, so that your attention is directed away from the music itself.

At the very core of this phenomenon is the sorry fact that there's very little Magick to most of the music out there these days. Oh, it's entertaining all right. There might even be some catchy tunes. But is it great music or is it the aural equivalent of junk food?

The full quote from the Jimmy Page interview of 2009 is this: " A lot of music today, they work electronically, tidying everything up, but that living energy has become sanitized. In Led Zeppelin we managed to do some of those major albums in three weeks. People today can't understand that. It's beyond them."

When it comes straight from the soul, creativity can flow from the musician with no need for the help of visual diversion. When you, the audience, eliminate the bells and whistles, the lights and distractions, does the music you listen to have the living energy - the Magick - that will make it worth listening to for the next fifty years?

A steady diet of junk food will eventually kill you. I'm pretty sure a steady diet of sanitized, junk music will eventually shrivel your soul. How's that for food for thought?

Neil McCormick interview of Jimmy Page 2009

Neil McCormick in May 2014:  Do you really need me to tell you how good they are? We’ve been listening to this music for more than 40 years and it never gets old.

It’s Your Life

Why don't you take a good look at yourself and describe what you see,
And Baby, Baby, Baby, do you like it?
~ Led Zeppelin, Misty Mountain Hop 1971

Mage Music 87  

One thing that most teachers are pretty sure of is that it’s their way or the highway. You see that with Magick, of course, though it’s not just the Masters of Magick who expect the students to follow directions in lock step.

It’s true in music, too, and all the arts. It’s true on social media and it’s true in society and basically everywhere you look.

Just about everybody wants to be an expert, an artist, a creator -- yet few dare step out of the herd far enough to show what they can do because they will be challenged. The only way to avoid being challenged -- and derided, which seems to be how challenge works mostly -- would be if everyone was just like everyone else. And what a boring world it would be if we humans really could stand to live that way.

But we can’t. In fact, we are always looking at what we see in ourselves and – more often than not – deciding we don’t like it. We decide to change who we are but then we look outside, to teachers who supposedly know more.

That generally doesn’t work so well.


When the student is ready…

It’s one thing to learn a how to do something from someone who knows how to do whatever it is better than you do. The more expertise an instructor has, the more the student can learn. But learning how to play the guitar doesn’t mean you are learning how to create music. Learning how to read and write doesn’t mean you are learning how to create a novel or a poem. Learning how to do something isn’t the same as learning how to be who you were born to be.

They say you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. Generally that’s understood to mean that you can’t force it to drink, which is true -- but the real meaning is that you can’t force the horse to choose to drink. Only the horse chooses.

Only you can create who you were born to be. If you choose, you can use many tools to do so. One of them is Magick.

But how do you do Magick? Who do you believe? What do you believe?


The uphill battle starts early

Problem is, it’s too easy to take someone else’s opinion on what you should do or how (or who) you should be. There’s a lot of pressure coming from everywhere to bend to authority and to peers. It starts early, with parents who want to protect their children by choosing for them. From the very first day of school kids are taught to follow directions, and teachers don’t have time to allow for kids to learn by seeing where the wrong path will take them. After that it’s teen years with the pressure to fit in, to belong. And after that, well, the habits of conforming are hard to break, and there's little outside encouragement to do so.

Trouble is, all your life probably all who have been your teachers have taught what you should do without ever teaching you how to be the person your born to be.


Magick in your life

They also say that when the student is ready, the teacher will come. The teacher is, of course, you -- but you have to choose to believe that.

Somewhere along the line most people do learn how to start making choices based on their own desires, but for most those choices are limited in scope. Most people live reactive lives most of the time, letting the circumstances they encounter dictate which paths they take. For some, though, the need to create original works – of art or knowledge or discovery, including becoming the self that you choose – overcomes the powerful outside pressures to conform. This means approaching life very differently.

The creative act requires opening from the inside, opening to the inside and then through to the other side to let the energy of the universe flow back up that pipeline to manifest in your personal reality.

If you don’t know who you are, you are creating blindly. If you are creating blindly, you can’t know if you are creating your own work or if you are in fact creating at all.

If you take someone else’s word for who you are, you aren't creating your own work -- you’re simply assembling someone else’s vision.

Creating art or creating a new personal reality – it’s all the same. It requires understanding that if it’s going to be your life, it has to be your choices that create it. That means taking a good look at yourself, acknowledging all that you are – the good and the bad, the attractive and the ugly - and accepting that it is there, that it is you, and that it is, in the end, all perfect. 

This is the first and most important step. You can’t change what you don’t know about. And then you boldly go where you've never been before.  

Know Thyself.  Then Do What Thou Wilt.  Other people's words, but they're true. 

Two for the price of one

“We went in there with such a will....”

     ~ Jimmy Page, BBC interview 2007

Mage Music 40

There are a couple of things I want to talk about very briefly today.  They really should be two separate posts but oh well. This week you get two for the price of one.

Leveraging
There are two ways for a person to move a very heavy object:  Work at it really, really hard or use leverage.  Smart people don’t sweat it if they don’t have to, and Mages don’t get very far without being smart.

A Mage would have to be very, very powerful to generate all the energy required from his own person to manifest most of the monumental works of Magick.  Even if he was very, very powerful, the continued effort to fuel Magick that way sooner or later would consume him. We've seen more than one Mage musician flame out that way.  Thank the gods (or name your deity of choice) that a smart Mage can leverage power by tapping into the energy of the infinite.

Giving up the need to control, giving up specificity of process in favor of letting the Universe provide answers while still using desire and will to focus the energy through ritual is not as easy as it sounds.  It requires a master-level juggling act of Magick to pull it off.  I think we all agree that Jimmy Page is capable of that.

Most musicians would make playing at the highest level possible the primary goal for a one-off performance like the O2 Concert.  It would be a “have to do” thing - yet ironically, having to put forth a best performance makes it harder to reach.  That kind of pressure can lead to performance anxiety, to fatal doubt that undermines Magick by weakening the will.

They - Jimmy Page et al - didn't do that, though. Instead,  they went onstage with the desire to live in the musical moment, using their will to follow their hearts the way they always had.  Rather than attempting to force the manifestation, they felt their way to their desired end by following the sound and letting it lead them to the Magick.  In letting the music be their master, they opened to the infinite and let the energy pour in.  And we heard it as Mage music.

But was it really Magick?

What if Magick was just a fiction, only existing in novels about kids with lightning bolts on their foreheads, or TV shows featuring professional wizards who consult with skulls named Bob?

What if there was no such thing as Mage music?

Nah.

We know Magick exists because we hear it for ourselves when we listen to the music of Jimmy Page. We recognize it personally when the Mage himself creates it right in front of our eyes (or ears). We know Mage music because we experience it.  We live in it and because it becomes part of ourselves we don't need anyone else to tell us when it's there. We know Magick is real because we feel it.

When the music sings in our own souls and we resonate with it and are brought out of ourselves to something more than these physical bodies because of it - that is Magick.

That is Mage music.  Thank you, Mr. Page.

Let There Be Light

“…she held the image…strong within her mind, demanding of the Light that what she saw must become the world's truth. Because she desired it. Because she willed it. Because the world itself must bow to the will of the Lightborn".
~ Mercedes Lackey: Crown of Vengeance

Mage Music 37 

In science fiction/fantasy novels, Mages are always getting involved with battles, conjuring deadly forces to kill enemies with a flick of the fingers, a twitch of a wand, or a circle in chalk on the floor. They blast mountains to gravel, change the courses of rivers, generate blizzards from balmy spring days, bestow Magickal powers on inanimate objects and even take over the minds of the unwary and unshielded. Certainly all good tricks, but such conjuring is truly the stuff of fiction, not real Magick. 

That's not because it is absolutely impossible to do those things, but because the immense power needed to generate those kind of changes of reality is just an impractical - and darned tough - way to use Magick.  Even the most powerful Mage is courting failure when attempting to go against the forces of entropy in the Universe - or even the desires of living things. Which is not to say that a Mage can't do some pretty impressive stuff. It's just that changing the world that way is using the wrong end of a lever to move a rock. There are easier ways to go about Magick that will, in the end, get you where you want to be.

The reality of the reality of Magick

Think about it: Here's an army of orcs, here's the brave, solitary Mage facing that ugly bunch. Fiction would tell you that the Mage will use Magick to force the orcs to stop their advance. The reality is that the most powerful control a Mage (or anyone) has is of himself*- meaning the Mage isn't going to be using Magick against orcs at all.

So - do the orcs get to pound the Mage into mush? Actually, no - in the real world, the Mage changes his own reality to one in which there are no orcs doing damage. Um... if there were actual orcs in this world for a Mage to deal with, of course. Metaphor, okay?

But wait!

I know you are objecting - because what I've described might sound a bit... wimpy - and likely at least one of your objections probably goes something like this: If the Mage's reality is changed to orclessness in a new reality, are there still orcs storming the castle in the old reality?

Probably. Maybe. It depends on whether you subscribe to the infinite Universes theory or not. Still, one soul incarnate in one body experiences one reality at a time in finite existence.  Magick is about purposefully choosing what that reality will be like. Even Mages can't change realities they aren't experiencing (and that means Mages can't experience the reality of another living being without becoming that being, which would mean not being the Mage any more...).  And this means that the best Magickal leverage for a Mage is to simply create a reality where orcs aren't an issue.  For him, the Mage.

Perhaps this version of Magick is not something you'd like to spend time in a movie watching, but it's the way things really work.  Look around you at the reality you live in. If Magick was used like a super-power, things would be a bit different than the reality we are currently sharing.

What are Mages for if not to stop orc armies? 

And why do we think they should be stopping armies of orcs, anyway?  Aren't orcs living beings that have their own desire and will?

Well, no.  Orcs are fictional.  I'm talking about this plane of reality, not theirs.  Faced with the real-world equivalent of orcs, a Mage needs to leverage energy, and that comes about through knowing the true goal, the true desire, and using the true desire with will and ritual to bring about change in the Mage's reality.  And the true desire can only be that of the Mage, not that of the castle or anyone else.

A fine point, but a crucial one.

If the castle is to be safe from the charging orc army (or the Mage's equivalent of orcs) the Mage must exist in a reality where it is already safe and has always been safe and always will be safe.  Orcs are not part of the picture.  To do this, the Mage is the one who must know in his body, mind and soul what existence in a reality of safe castle feels like, must know without a doubt that this is the reality for the past, for the now and for the future, and must bind it with ritual that will make it so.

And then it's the Mage's reality that changes - and how the energy of the Universe brings that about depends on factors beyond any finite Mage's ability.  Orcs?  Who cares.  That army may be just charging the castle to get to the Black Friday sale.  It doesn't matter what the orcs do because in the Mage's reality the castle is safe, if not orc-free.

What Mages are for in this reality

Fantasy is a wonderful thing, though as a friend of mine just said the other day, it can be frustrating reading about those Gifts that none of us have.

Except we do have them.

Not to the same degree, not every gift for every person - but we all have Magick in us and the ability to change our own reality.  We can't help it - it goes with the human package.  The difference between Mages and the bulk of humanity is that Mages choose their reality and the rest of us pretend we have no choice and let reality happen to us.

Thank goodness, then, that real Mages are living breathing conduits to the energy of the Universe.  They may be manifesting their own realities, but in doing so Mages open portals to the Light for us. Even if we don't choose to step through, we can still bask in the Light.  I've said it before and I'll keep saying it here:

Light bringers - that's what Mages are for.

That's no small potatoes, either.

♪

* I use the masculine pronoun but understand it includes the feminine.  I'm a female, and I don't exclude my gender, just am going along with what's easiest.  The he/she, him/her way of writing is kinda kludgy, and I just can't make myself like using "their" when what I really mean is his/her, you know?  Yeah, okay, sometimes I do, but give me a break here.