The South by Southwest festival features not only gi-normous helpings of live music, but also a good many panels on topics of interest to academics, activists, industry, artists, and more. I went to the “Blood, Music, Sex, Magick” panel to learn more about the relationship between magic and/or the occult and rock and roll history. The SXSW session description and participant bios are here. This is of particular interest to the intersection of theology and rock culture because secular/popular music has so often been placed on a continuum, from distracting to dangerous to spiritually threatening, by theologically-minded people in religious and academic venues. And concern with music’s alleged involvement in the occult is often only a step or two away from those concerns.

The first speaker on the panel, Joshua Sharp, is a practitioner of the arts of magick (spelled with a “k” as apparently per the medieval spelling). (By the way, this is my layperson’s way of summarizing simply what I don’t want to otherwise misrepresent. Please see his bio at the link above.) With reference to Faust, J.G. Frazer, and Aleister Crowley (the most commonly cited source during the session), Sharp very helpfully laid out a basic theory of magic: it is the study and practice of that which opens the depths of the soul to an influential communication with and influence on the world (my summary). It fights against traditions that encrust the strange mystery of the person when they cloud the ability to know all parts of one’s inner sanctum and have that knowledge set free and set others free, by, as with Faust, “enchanting” the world.

He quoted Crowley on magic as the liberation to “respect, love and trust what you scorn, hate, and fear,” and through the knowledge of one’s “true will,” one sees the value of magic as “the science of understanding oneself, and the art of applying that understanding in action.”

He then suggested that musicians are modern magicians insofar as they use their bodies and instruments to channel their “true will,” and that helps explain the hold that rock and roll has on its listeners. He concluded by summarizing his own extensive personal spiritual search, which has led him to the conclusion that magick gives him entree not to a world of external beings or forces, but a way to “dance with the psyche,” to excavate his unconscious.

As a longtime student of religion, there are many items that interested me in Sharp’s presentation. One was simply the delight in learning a little more about what is, to me, a foreign “religious” (or nonreligious, areligious) landscape, one that has been the object of so much Christian scorn and so little Christian understanding. Another was the seemingly very modern sensibilities Sharp associated with magick: freedom from tradition, entry into the unconscious, a battle to meet and befriend inner forces, an individual quest for singularity. To associate this constellation as modern is not to dismiss it, but to try to locate its way of putting reality together. In Sharp’s rendering, it seems there are a lot of similarities between modern liberal religion, modern psychology, and magick, but clearly I need to read and experience more to understand better what those might be.

I also noticed how much the quest to handle oneself with care and searching consideration in magick parallels the traditions of what are now grouped together as “spiritual exercises” found in the ancient world and taken into so many religious traditions. Coming from a theological background, I found a lot of overlapping sensibilities between the “technologies of self” in the Christian tradition and those desired by magick’s practitioners. This is, clearly, not to fold them into sameness.

Finally, I wondered anew at the spiritual power of musicians and how that gets communicated live and in

recordings. How is that so many of us who are musicians work so hard to manifest “ourselves” in music, and so many of us who are fans feel we have understood something essential about an artist through a lyric, melody, or gesture? What are we really communicating, what are we really recognizing? The question came at me afresh during the panel.

By the way, for those who don’t know, the panel was inspired by the title of this song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers:

I will continue my reflection on the panel in a followup post…

Tommy Beaudoin, San Francisco, California

 

2 Comments »

1. 

   Thanks for the post Tom. This is fascinating. I’ve read about Jimmy Page and his interest in Aleister Crowley. But I’ve never even thought about a theory of magic or how it might relate to music. I’m looking forward to your followup post.

   Comment by Mary McDonough — March 20, 2012 @ 10:28 am

2. 

   I really enjoyed your review and am awaiting your follow up

   Comment by Misty — March 21, 2012 @ 8:18 am

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