Acoustic Sigils for Magickal Music

Here is an excellent system for creating acoustic sigils. The explanation is a little long and may be difficult to understand for the musically uninitiated. Like many things, it's much easier to put into practice than explain, unfortunately.

Before getting into the actual process, let's talk about the importance of instrumentation in "magickal" music.

Magickal Music

Mages are often attracted to the trance-producing capabilities of music and so have gotten interested in 1) the gamelan music of Indonesia - its stated goal is to place the audience in a half-awake half-asleep state - 2) the ecstatic Qawali singing of Persian music and 3) the polyrhythms of Africa and, therefore, Voodoo.

What is interesting to me is that Balinese gamelan instruments are played in pairs, which are tuned roughly a quarter-step apart, and this creates binaural beats that are in the range of the alpha or theta brainwave frequencies. Also, the gamelan is tuned to a scale that is divided into 10 equal parts instead of the normal 12 of western musical practice. The number 10 has magical correspondences, which I will leave up to you to extract. In a related topic, the music of Thailand, with a very similar rhythmic structure and instrumentation to that of Indonesian gamelan, is in 7 equal steps to the octave, which relates to Uranous and 7-headed dragons if you're into that sort of thing.

The scales used in Middle Eastern music are arguably in 24 or 48 equal, but they have most of the notes tuned to normal notes like the music of India where only some are microtonally altered but the Setar (not sitar) has two of its strings tuned to C and C 1/4 sharp, producing the binaural beats again and not just the occasional slightly microtonally flatted note. The setar is the preferred instrument of Sufi mystics.

African music for ritual and worship is always polyrhythmic in a Western-conceived measure of 4/4 played simultaneously with another measure in 12/8. The 12/8 polyrhythm is characteristic of all Voodoo drumming. Another interesting facet is that in Africa, the Amadindas xylophone is tuned to a scale of 5 equal steps. When creating rhythms and melodies on a wheel as I'm about to show you, it makes a pentagram for the witch-ily inclined. This is just a subset of the 10 equal of gamelan music. The 5 equal tones to the octave from Africa are what gave rise to the "blue" notes in blues music when African slaves were deprived of their native instruments and had to adapt to the idiosyncrasies of an instrument like the Western guitar.

Having music in "weird" tunings separates it from the music of mere mortals and adds to its potency in magickal work. So, I have started combining these elements to produce the ritual music I'm looking for.

As a warning I just wanted you to know that the ancient Chinese used their systems of music theory to define the good and bad kinds of people. According to some Chinese authors of the past, Chinese music was obviously created by intelligent and virtuous people while the rest of the world created music which clearly indicated they were intellectually and morally inferior and barbarians. This isn't too far from the stance of many Western Classical music aficionados.

Creating Music for Ritual

The music my system comes up with is not difficult to play but requires at least two people to get increased efficacy out of but preferably four people should be used and ideally eight. However, one person playing in 12/8 is enough to throw something unusual into the music because we're so used to hearing and playing music in 4/4 or 3/4.

When creating a statement of desire, I use the method of first eliminating any repeat letters to create a "mantra" that has no recognizable similarity to the original statement. It's important that it have at least 2-6 consonants because these will end up as rhythmic events. This is what "well-formed rhythms" have every 5 seconds, which roughly equals about the span of one measure. Another interesting aside is that masks of Alaskan shamanism are always distorted to show the "magickal" source of the spirits they're fashioned after, so there is a historical justification for this method of distorting the magickal tool prior to that of often hailed father of chaos magick, Austin Osman Spare.

Anyway, eliminate the vowels as well, but perhaps add your own again later to create the "mantra." If eliminating letters reduces the mantra too much, then it's not necessary to do it and the substitute method of only eliminating the vowels is used. If either method leaves you feeling that the word is still too recognizable, then a method of extrapolating permutations is used. So, if the statement of intent is, "I want to love myself better." This is simplified to "I love myself" and the vowels removed with the result "lvmslf." This has a duplicate letter "l", so eliminate the second one. Re-interject the vowel "a" with the result "lavamasafa." For me, this is satisfactorily unrecognizable but if you didn't think so then you could take lvmsf and rearrange them putting every other letter on a different side such as lmf/vs. This results in lamafavasa. If your mantra is longer than six consonants then you can use both methods and do anything else you have to do to make it come down to six. I'll use the first one that goes lavamasafa because I was happy with it.

Now draw a circle and mark the quarters and cross quarters. This represents both the diatonic melody and also the rhythm in 4/4. For ease of reference this text uses the C major scale but any mode of this scale or Persian scales such as Rast or Indian Ragam could be used instead which have microtonally flat scale degrees, as long as it has 7 notes to the scale and the includes the octave. This will also work for the Thai tuning.

The point at the top is the note C. The next note going clockwise around the circle is D. The one after that is E, etc., all the way around until you get to the 8th position which represents the C an octave above.

Now, write the alphabet around the circle starting at the top with A going clockwise around. Next, look for the correspondences between the consonants from my statement of intent and the notes of the scale. The mantra is lavamasafa so the first LETTER we're looking for is L. When you find it see that it corresponds to the NOTE F. The next letter is V, which corresponds to the note A. Draw a line from the F on the circumference cutting across the circle to the note A. The matrix created by the note/letter correspondences also produces a sigil by drawing a line from note to note. Another side comment is that advertisers for products like Marlboro cigarettes know there are gender differences in logo attractiveness. Designs with sharp points, like this method creates, are likely to appeal more to a male's unconscious and not as well to females, at least the one's living in North America.

After you've plotted the whole thing, you've got the order the notes should be played in and only PART of your sigil because you will have to create the rhythm for the 12/8 cycle to superimpose over this one in order to create a polyrhythm.

You'll be happy to hear that the rhythm for the 4/4 portion is already contained in the design of the sigil. The note C of the scale is also the first beat in the measure if you now treat the circumference of the circle as a rhythmic matrix instead of a melodic one as we have been doing up to now. This sigil shows that its rhythm has NO events on the first and second eighth notes but DOES have events on the next four. We are finished creating the rhythm for the part that is in 4/4.

Before we go on to the 12/8 portion, we can place the notes of the melody in the linear form of the rhythm, i.e. standard music notation. So, not only is the rhythm the first drum part, it is also the rhythm for the melody associated with it.

In this case we have one note left over, which doesn't fit onto the rhythm, so I alternate playing it and not playing it to help create a little variety.

Next we create the melodic and rhythmic patterns in 12/8 the same way we made the ones in 4/4 except we make a new circle marking the quarters, but this time we don't mark the cross quarters and instead ultimately have 12 stations on the circumference of the circle.

Plot the alphabet around the circle and draw the sigil based on the letter associations from the statement of intent.

If you wish to derive a melody from this, the most natural way is from the chromatic scale, which has 12 notes, or you can devise some other scheme.

Again, the station at the top of the circle is the first beat of the "measure." This word is in quotation marks because African musicians don't conceive of their music in measures or of even have a downbeat. The word downbeat may not have any meaning to you if you're not a musician. Anyway, rhythmic events are known because of where the sigil makes tangents with the circle.

Most rhythm around the world is additive and not necessarily divided exactly in half as is Western music. It's easier to play in 12/8 if you think of it as 3+3+3+3. This rhythm has a rhythmic event on the first beat in the first group of three. An event on the last beat in the second group of three, on the first beat in the third group of three, and on the first and last in the second group of three.

The kind of repetitive music which sigilization constructs is very similar to avant garde music and the music of John Cage, who is mentioned on some of the Chaos magick websites I've seen.

Musical Instruments

The melody should be played on gamelan instruments, Thai instruments or Setar. Or, if you're capable, sung, as the voice is the preferred instrument for communicating intent in Shamanism.

A 12-string guitar can also be adapted to play binaural beats by detuning the sets of double strings by a 1/4 step, Persian musicians outside of Turkey usually tune to 1/8 steps and this still corresponds to acceptable brainwave frequencies for magickal use. Or two instrumentalists can play purposefully out of tune a bit on Western instruments of any kind in a pinch.

African music also has a pattern played on bell (cowbell, agogo or otherwise) which I derive by rhythmic diminution of the part I already have. In layman's terms it means to play one part twice as fast as the drum part on an obnoxious bell if you're into traditional African music, or on a shaker or rattle if you're crossing over into shamanism.

The Shaman often holds the rattle close to his head because the random, multiple strikes occurring inside the rattle also affect brainwaves, placing himself into a magickal state, or if you shake it above a patient, putting them into the alpha healing frequency.

Instruments can be acquired or made inexpensively or free. A gamelan metallophone/xylophone can be constructed out of electrical conduit and a pipe cutter or out of discarded wood. Just experiment with the lengths until you get the right pitches providing a whole range of tuning possibilities very cheaply. Five-gallon plastic water bottles make great drums and the small ones also work well as a kind of bongo. Anything can be used, really, such as foot stomping or an upturned garbage can. Salt shakers or toothpick vials make nice shakers. Different lengths of ABS pipe with end caps make stamping tubes, which can function as a drum part producing different pitches. In Cuba, a brake drum taken from a car is often used, which can function as the bell of African music in this context. I use big circular saw blades as gongs since they are prominent in the rhythmic structure of gamelan music, playing on every fourth beat with the lowest pitched gong playing before everyone begins and as the last stroke of a piece of music. A fretless guitar or violin can be made from some wire, a broom handle and a coffee can for a resonator/body. Use two strands of wire and tune them a quarter step apart. Use colored tape to indicate different places where to put your fingers.

Map out the Thai tuning, gamelan tuning and standard scale steps, or whatever is your preference. If you want to play it like a violin or cello, a bow can be made from a dowel and any piece of fabric that you can put dried tree sap on.

In short, it takes effort, but not a lot of money, to make this important, potentially state-altering music.