Brain Magick: Exercises in Meta-Magick and Invocation

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Rock
and Roll

o what kinds of songs did our primordial savannah-wandering ancestors sing while munching shrooms during the orgy at the dawn of time? Until the advent of computers, making music was a skill that required the brain’s motor functions. Singing uses movements of the chest, lungs, diaphragm, vocal chords, lips, jaw, and tongue. Drumming requires coordinated hand or foot movements. Guitars, pianos, oboes, kazoos, saxophones, cellos, pennywhistles, and pretty much every other musical instrument similarly use motor functions to communicate experience. That is, our brains control muscles that make sounds which convey, to ourselves and others, emotions and states. Emotions and states are deeply tied to motor neurons associated with posture, gesture, facial expression, and breathing, so we can easily say that music can change our state by influencing our physiology. Are you thinking that we’re now well into mirror neuron territory? Recent brain scan studies concur—both playing and listening to music are mediated by the mirror neuron system.¹

Our lives are filled with rhythms. Hearts beat, lungs expand and contract, we wake and sleep, the planet we live on gives us days and nights, tides, and seasons. Each model within a model, mind within a mind, plays along, catching the tempo, playing counter-rhythms, polyrhythms, in an ongoing gamelan orchestra of life. Music joins in, drums catch the beat, strings and winds vibrate in rhythms so fast they flow into shapes, reflecting the dance of our world and our bodies. Our mirror neurons start to party, and the motor neurons zap along with the rhythms, inducing ideomotor movements: a nodding head, a tapping toe, increased heart rate, changes in posture, or full-tilt boogie-down dancing.

The musicians bathe the audience in vibrations, synchronizing mirror neurons, body movements, and encouraging the formation of a group mind. If the band is wild, rebellious, happy, exuberant, angry, sad, mysterious, or in love, then the audience rides along on waves of wildness, rebelliousness, happiness, exuberance, mystery, or love. If the emotion or state that the song conveys is something the audience already feels or longs for, it resonates, fires off more mirror neurons, and fills the people with woohoo.

And if that’s not enough woohoo, people begin to dance with each other, observing and matching each other’s movements, further transmitting and intensifying emotions and states. Some of the audience members take drugs that further intensify mirror neuron activation. People meet, dance together, and everyone becomes more and more like each others’ Inner Babe. We are reflected in each others’ eyes. We find commonality in the movement and the music and the moment. We are all together in a single system and the states and information flow freely.

And suddenly we’re back dancing around the fire at the dawn of time. It’s the primal human ritual, a means of bonding and sharing information that is built into the very structure of our brains. From a modern perspective, it seems as if the primordial orgy was simply about sex, about reproduction for the survival of the tribe. Perhaps it began that way, and perhaps, as with rock concerts and raves, participants rarely thought beyond the hedonic experience, at least consciously. But the ritual—and raves and rock concerts—was at its best a celebration of the individual among his or her tribe, and an expression of the role of the tribe—and humans—in the greater world. The rituals marked the phases of the moon or the cycles throughout the year and thus synchronized the tribal group mind with the rhythms and music of the Earth, Moon, Sun, and stars.

It’s a ritual that we’re still wired for, that still has meaning in our neurology and physiology. While these ecstatic tendencies are more often co-opted for commercial purposes, even in the case of an overhyped pop concert sponsored by beverage or junk food manufacturers, the experience still takes participants toward a level of woohoo not found in their daily lives. When we start to deliberately return these tendencies to their mystic roots, we find more and more woohoo, and the means to direct it toward specific ends. Lyrics, lights, images, costumes, and stage craft can support the message of the music, that we are all one, that woohoo is something found in our perception of the world, when we can shut off the nattering neurosis of modern life and simply join with other humans in the most fundamental of human behaviors.

While exploring the exercises in this book, you may have noticed that some of your energy flows and entities were naturally rhythmic in some way. Maybe it was in the way they communicated with you, in fluctuations of light or color, in changes of shape or size, in cycling or pulsing. The Rhythm Wave is, in effect, a way for you dance with your own mind-states.

Exercise A3.1 Rhythm Wave

Create an energy flow for a powerful, pleasurable experience.

Notice how the energy flow pulses or cycles, or any other way in which it exhibits rhythm.

Begin to sway or move to the rhythm of the energy flow.

Express the energy flow as a gesture or dance move and incorporate it into the movement.

Clap your hands, sing, or play an instrument to the rhythm.

If others are present, have them clap, play, or dance to the same rhythm.

When exhausted or when the feelings seem to have peaked, return to rest and silence.

Notice any thoughts, epiphanies, states, or other experiences that result from this exercise, either immediately or later.

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Of course, some of your friends may have a sense of rhythm, too, and dancing with a group takes the ritual much closer to its primal origins. The presence of others, again, helps activate the mirror neuron system, which can reflect the woohoo back and forth between you and your partners. The Group Rhythm Wave is a nice piece to build intensity in many different ritual structures and situations.

Exercise A3.2 Group Rhythm Wave

In a ritual setting, create a partner or group energy flow. This can be created by any of the means previously described, including elements from sex magick, the Group Mind ritual, Group Vortex ritual, or any similar technique.

Clap together, play together, move
together, dance together to the rhythm
of the energy flow.

When exhausted or when the experience seems to have peaked, return to rest and
silence.

The group takes a few minutes to discuss the experience.

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The Intense Group Rhythm Wave suggests a few ways to add even more woohoo to the experience.

Exercise A3.3 Intense Group Rhythm Wave

There are many ways to add intensity to the Group Rhythm Wave. A few examples include:

Adding intoxicants or psychedelics.

Adding erotic components, including nudity, physical contact, and foreplay.

Additional musicians—drummers or even a full band can participate on the periphery, matching and carrying the rhythm into full-blown music.

Additional invocation—participants can step into deities who are congruent with the energy flow and ritual. They all may adopt the same entity, or some may take on a male deity and some a female deity, or all may participate as elemental characters, as long as every entity can dance to the same rhythm and energy flow.

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Again, the more of these elements we add in, the closer we come to that primal ritual. Indeed, as we start to add in intoxicants, erotic components, musicians, and invocation, we are essentially reconstructing classic pagan and Afro-Caribbean styles of ritual. Rituals of this kind can provide intensity of woohoo that can be remembered for a lifetime.

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