The Shadow of Music

Last Friday I had the pleasure of performing my absolute favorite shadow magick ritual.  I went to a Nine Inch Nails concert.  Oh yes, when approached with the proper mindset the right concert can absolutely be used to facilitate a deeply transformative magickal experience.

Unlike any other art, music has the ability to penetrate your entire being, particularly live music.  Music touches us not only emotionally and mentally, but physically as well.  There is nothing like the physical feeling of that first bass note thrumming through an arena; feeling your sternum vibrate and resonate with every single person both on stage and in the crowd.  When the musicians hit the stage the outpouring of energy back and forth between the band and the audience is visceral and intense.  Live music creates an energetic resonance between everyone who hears it, creating a circuit of movement and life.  A good concert raises is the finest ritual magick.

In order for a concert to facilitate shadow magick it needs a few things.  First, the music must speak to your shadow.  Second, you must feel safe enough in the venue to be open to your magick taking you somewhere unexpected.  Third, you need to be good enough (or have someone with you who is good enough) to shield what you're doing so it doesn't interfere with the people around you.  Fourth, you need to have a safe space afterwards for decompression and grounding.

The first thing you have to consider is the music itself.  The purpose of shadow magick is to open ourselves to our shadows, get to know them, and to play nice with them.  Happy, shiny, bubble gum pop is not going to help you work with your shadow.  You're going to need to go into the darker stuff: music that expresses pain, anger, sorrow, grief, helplessness, etc. - the emotions of the shadow.  Music is a wonderful way to safely integrate these shadows because it can be an intense emotional and energetic release that doesn't hurt anyone, regardless of how dark those shadows are.  (Yes, you can argue that some music fuels the shadow in a negative way - encouraging bad behavior like violence and misogyny.  It comes down to personal responsibility.  If you don't think you can loose yourself in the music without acting on its suggestions then you are probably not ready for shadow work.)  For me, Nine Inch Nails expresses my shadow just about perfectly; it's dark and intense and resonates with all the scary bits that live inside my head.

You'll need to take the concert venue into account before deciding to use the concert magickally.  Shadow magick, when done correctly, is very intense.  We're talking uncontrollably shaking or sobbing levels of intensity.  It's amazing, but intense.  The venue needs to be such that you're actually comfortable letting things potentially go that far.  If you know that freaking out it going to get you pummeled, perhaps you should just enjoy the show rather than trying to work it.  I only do shadow magick at concerts where I'm comfortable with the venue (and its security staff) and only when I've got a magickally skilled friend to act as a spotter.  I'm quite capable of shielding myself in a way that I can have a magickal meltdown and not get it on other people's shoes, and I can hold myself together through any level of shadow work that I would do in public.  However, I'm not so foolish as to think it impossible that something might happen that would be too much for me.  If you don't have a friend to spot you and you really want to work the concert then you'd better have some energetic backup plans in case something goes wonky.

If your concert's got all that going on, then you just have to make sure you have a place to decompress in afterwards.  This could be sitting in the venue for a little longer as you make your way out, it could be curled up in the back seat of the car on the drive home, a closed room at home, etc.  What you'll need will depend entirely on how intense an experience you let yourself have and how well you've grounded.  Don't leave the venue without grounding.  Concerts in general tend to energize the hell out of people, let alone to those doing magick during them.  If you're the designated driver then ground twice.  I mean it.  Ground, drink a glass of water, ground again, go to the bathroom, ground again, then get in the car.  Crashing your car helps no one.  Then get yourself to safe space and either talk out your experiences with a really understanding friend or write it out in your journal.  Shadow work is intense and you will need a record of what happened in order to look back at it objectively while you stew for the next week or so.  Trust me.

And now for the fun part: shadow magick in public. 

A good ritual warms you up, raises energy, does its work, and then brings you back down again.  A well thought-out concert does exactly the same thing.  The opening bands raise general energy levels and open you to the potential of the headliner.  A good set opens by raising energy, moves through different emotions and energy levels, peaks with songs you can get truly lost in, and then ends with tapering energy and satisfaction.  Really polished bands that work with dark energy (intentionally or not) tend to open with energetic songs, move to darker ones, and then end with cathartic songs - this is absolutely perfect for shadow magick.

The first thing I do when I get to my seat at a concert where I intend to do magick is to cast some very specific filters and shields.  First I put up an inside-out grounding shield: this is a shield designed to keep the energy I put out from getting all over the people around me.  I cast it at skin level and have it ground about 80% of what I output.  Then I put up a filter to dampen any negativity from the people around me - I'll have plenty of my own to deal with.  I also put up an aversion shield to keep drunk people away from me - basically it makes people not want to touch me and is designed to get stronger when I'm approached by folks who aren't sober.  Shadow work takes a lot of concentration and being slobbered on is not conducive to any working.  Once those shields and filters are up I'm ready to go.  I will actually lower a lot of my normal shields during a concert because I do want to allow the music to influence me more heavily than I usually allow any external energy to do.  I also want to benefit from the collective resonance of the crowd; there is nothing like the energy of a crowd of 10,000 people all singing the same song with the same emotions. 

Once the music starts it's just a matter of letting go.  For me that's the hardest part.  Let down your walls, let down your regular shields, stop trying to be cool, stop trying to bury your shadow, remove the stick from your ass and just let go.  Close your eyes and feel.  Feel the resonance of the music shaking your sternum.  Feel the energy of the music penetrating your normal barriers and let yourself resonate with it.  Allow the music to guide your energies.  Let your shadow sing and dance and release. 

Let the music guide your experience.  If you don't want to follow the energy of a certain song, just pull back a little and just listen.  When you're ready to dive back in just do so.  You are the only judge of your experience.  Some songs will resonate more than others.  You might find yourself crying during some songs, raging during others.  That's ok.  Let the energy out by singing or dancing.  You might have visions during your experience (no hallucinogens necessary or desired), that's normal.  You can learn startling things about yourself when you let your shadow out to play.  It may show you things about yourself you never knew or wanted to know, but that knowledge is important.  Just because it's a little dark and misshapen doesn't mean that your shadow isn't an important part of who you are.  Accept what your shadow has to show you, remember it, and then let the emotions attached to it release with the music.  Let your shadow take hold of your voice and let it sing out and let go for you. 

When the concert's over don't be surprised if you're a little shaky, especially if it's your first time doing this.  The combination of excitement and catharsis is a heady mix and it can leave you vibrating with energy or utterly drained.  It all depends on both the intensity of your experience and how well the last song brought down the energy of the crowd.  If you need to, just sit down and put your head between your knees and breathe.  Ground like you've never grounded before.  Eat something. (I like to keep a package of almonds or a granola bar in my bag for just such occasions.)
I tend to be a bit twitchy even after grounding after doing any intense working, so I like to take a walk or do something physical just to calm down and clear my head.  I will often do readings after a working like this to help wrap my head around the things that come up. 

All in all, workings like this are designed to help integrate the shadow by bringing it to the surface and letting it release.  It's amazing how good it feels to let that kind of energy go in a way that is safe and socially acceptable.  We all face huge amounts of pressure to conform in our daily lives, so indulging in the shadow is incredibly cathartic.  It's sort of like having a huge holiday meal after months of dieting: you can't really do it all the time, but damn it's awesome.

If you liked this post you should check out my previous post: Magick of Music

Negative Energy

At the moment I'm in the process of writing up the first of my courses on Magickal Defense and I've been thinking a lot about negative energy: what it is, why it's a problem, and what we can do about it.

It can be difficult to understand just what negative energy actually is.  I often find it easiest to think of negative energy as the residue of negative actions.  It is energy that holds the feelings of sadness, anger, pain, depression, destruction, etc.  You can think of it as being like the smell of burnt popcorn that lingers in your kitchen for hours, subtly making everything just a little bit gross, or the smoke of a forest fire that dims and besmirches everything it touches.  Negative thoughts and actions create negative energy.  In essence negative energy is the distilled power of unpleasantness, like a battery filled with ill feeling.

Magickal practitioners, particularly shadow workers or anyone that works with the dead, also tend to encounter magickal entities like ghosts, faeries, elementals, and the like.  These entities have very strong energetic fields that can be either positive or negative, depending on the entity.  Psychically, being in the presence of a negative entity, like a boggart or imp, feels a lot like being run over by a psychotic two year old on a bicycle - you’ll live, but you sure will be unhappy about it.  Of course, the stronger the negative entity the worse the effects.

One of the fundamental laws of magick is the principle of “like attracts like.”  That means that positive energy attracts more positive energy and conversely negative energy attracts more negative energy.  Think about the last time you had to take a bus or plane and you could tell the person sitting next to you was having a really bad day; how that person’s anger and stress vibrated off of them.  How did it make you feel?  Could you feel yourself getting stressed?  Your patience wearing thin?  That’s magick at work.

While generally uncomfortable to be around, negative energy wouldn’t be such a problem if it didn’t have so many ill effects.  We come into contact with negative energy every day and in limited amounts it’s not really a problem.  However, when we come into to contact with too much negative energy at once or a little bit for far too long it can have negative consequences.  Psychically, contact with negative energy can cause stress, the feeling of being watched, cause you to feel more anger and less patience than usual, make you snap at friends, or even encourage you towards dangerous behavior.  Physically, negative energy can cause muscle tension, headaches, a feeling of heaviness or lethargy, a prickling sensation in the spine or the palms of your hands, etc.  Negative energy is potentially very nasty stuff.

Of course, we also have to deal with our own negative energy.  I don't know about you folks, but on a bad day I can generate negative energy like it's going out of style.  Anyone who's ever suffered from depression knows exactly what I'm talking about.  All the shielding in the world won't help you if the negative energy that's bringing you down is being manufactured by your own brain. 


Coming in contact with negative energy, internal or external, is a lot like being hit by a wave while standing on the beach.  Depending on how prepared you are, it can either splash your feet and then harmlessly flow back out to sea or it can knock you on your ass and try to drag you back out with it.  External negative energy can be shielded against, filter out, transmuted, or grounded.  Internal negative energy can only be transmuted or grounded.

Going in depth on how to deal with negative energy would require a whole book, so for now here's are some links to other entries on shields and protection down below.
 
Previous entries on Shielding:
Nightly Protection Spell
Daily Protection



Anchored Shields

Anchored Shields

Shielding is one of the first techniques new practitioners learn when they study defensive magick.  The basic shield that almost every “magick 101” book teaches is the standard bubble shield (the white glowing egg that blocks negative energy).  It’s a great beginner shield because it’s easy to visualize and doesn’t take a lot of energy to maintain.  Unfortunately, it also has a lot of draw backs.  If done correctly, the basic bubble shield will really dampen your magickal senses – to the point where you might be under psychic attack and you wouldn’t even notice it.  And no, that isn’t a good thing.  If you don’t know you’re under attack you never do anything to stop the attack and as soon as your shield goes down you get hit.  Eventually, all bubble shields have to come down.  Although they don’t take much energy to maintain, they do take some and you will eventually get tired.

I deal with this by using a series special purpose of filters rather than a single large shield for my daily defense.  Now, the more complicated your shields the more energy they take to maintain.  If I had to run all my protections of my own energy I’d be comatose by 9am, so I don’t.  Instead, I anchor my shields.  An anchored shield is centered in an object (crystals, semi-precious stones, jewellery, tattoos, etc.) that you carry on your person and runs of the energy you’ve put into that object.  This allows you to run massive shields without draining yourself dry.  Of course, those anchors need to be recharged regularly (usually 1-2x a month) to maintain potency.

To create an anchored shield I just hold the anchor in my hands and describe the shields I want it to put up.  Now, you have to be very, very specific in your description.  You need to say exactly what you want each part of the shield to do, what you want it to do with the energy it lets pass, the energy it doesn’t let pass, whether it lets you feel what it’s doing, what it does when it runs out of power, etc.  You also need to describe exactly how you want the shields to activate and deactivate - are they automatic whenever you carry the anchor, do you have to will them up or down, do they go up automatically when you run out of energy, etc.  It’s like creating a computer program – it will do exactly what you tell it to and not one iota more or less.  If you want your shields to think then you need an egregore (and that’s a whole different thing). 

Once you’ve created your anchor you need to charge it.  I like to charge my anchors by singing, dancing, or meditating – usually singing.  How you charge your anchor will affect the character of your shields.  If you charge it by burning a candle then you’ll have very firey shields, if you charge it with intense visualization and a drop of your own blood you will get very intense shields that will probably make other people uncomfortable, if you charge it by going dancing you’ll get shields with playful energy.  Be mindful of what kind of energy you use and what its effects might be.

Then all you have to do is carry your anchor and let it work.

Nightly Protection Spell

I am an insomniac.  I do not fall asleep unless I feel safe enough to turn off my brain – I’m paranoid enough that this is not easy.  I started experimenting with sleep safety spells and dream wards as soon as I learned of their existence.  Some of them worked for a while but eventually stopped, others were completely useless (as was the valerian tea I tried).  One night, about eight or years ago I was dead tired and couldn’t sleep and just got completely fed up with myself.  I decided that any job worth doing was worth overdoing and came up with the ultimate in sleep safety spells and I’m going to share it with you.

I’m quite adept at visualization and do this entirely by visualization.  If I say “cut a circle around the room” I mean visualize it in your head, and if I say “say ...” I mean say it in your head.  If you’re not the mental magick type, you can do everything physically and out loud – I only do that when I’m totally freaked out and need as much power as I can get.

Begin by selecting the area you wish to protect – your bed, bedroom, house, entire property, etc.  I typically include my entire house in these wards.

If you feel the need to do so before doing energy work, ground and center.  I’ve been doing this spell every night for the last eight years, so it requires no prep for me.

Build a ball of energy in the center of the space you’re warding.  Charge this ball with the power to drive out any negativity lingering in your space.  Visualize the ball expanding outwards until it encompasses your entire space and creates a sacred circle around it while saying “Safe within the circle round, thrice sealed, thrice bound.  Repeat two more times.

Starting in the north, cut a circle around your space while saying: “Power of earth, ground me and hide me from all that would do me harm.”  As you cut the circle, fill it with dark green earth energy.  Once the circle is cut, visualize it creating a sphere of glowing green earth energy surrounding you.  Envision tree roots growing around the sphere, creating a solid shield of earth.

Starting in the east, cut a circle around your space while saying: “Power of air, alert me to any incoming negativity and give me the wit to deal with it.”  Empower the circle with glowing yellow air energy and let it grow into a sphere.  Envision swirling winds creating a solid shield of air.

Starting in the south, cut a circle around your space while saying: “Power of fire, protect me mind, body, and soul.  Give me the strength and will to do what I must.”  Empower the circle with hot red energy and visualize it growing into a sphere.  Envision flames dancing around the sphere, creating a solid shield of fire.

Starting in the west, cut a circle around your space while saying: “Power of water, heal me mind, body, and soul and strengthen my correct intuition.”  Empower the circle deep blue energy that grows into a sphere.  Envision sheets of rain creating a solid sphere of water around you.

Starting back in the north, cut a vertical circle going up above your head.  When you get to the ceiling pause and say, “Goddess, watch over me and protect me.”  Envision a sphere of silver energy starting above your head and slowly pouring around your space, creating a solid shield of divine energy.  Continue the circle down the opposite wall and pause when you get to the floor.  Say: “God, watch over me and protect me.”  Envision a sphere of gold beginning beneath the floor and growing slowly upwards until it creates a solid shield of divine energy.  Complete the circle.

Starting in the upper northwest corner of the space, envision a bold Chinese dragon flying in a crosswise circle (northwest to southeast and back around the bottom) around the space.  Starting in the upper northeast corner of the space, envision a Phoenix bird flying in a crosswise circle (northeast to southwest and back around the bottom) around the space.  Say; “Dragon and Phoenix, encircle me.”

Starting in the west, cut a vertical circle above your head towards the east.  As you complete the circle say: “By my Lady’s will my circles are sealed.”  As you complete the circle envision the entire space being filled with divine energy.  Give it a few moments to sink in.

Say: “Circles protect me this night.  When I wake you will dissolve into the walls, continuing to lend your protection to me and mine.  Stay in this space as long as it’s mine.”  (After a while you won’t need to add this last bit, it will be firmly in your unspoken intent.)

That is the long version of what I do every night.  I started off doing the long version every night, but after a few years I adopted a shorter version for most nights.  In the short version simply envision all of the circles and empower them appropriately without stopping to say what they’re for.  On a sleepy night I can do this in two minutes flat and it has never failed me. 

If you decide to try this, keep in mind that these are pretty heavy duty shields and you will have to modify them depending on who’s coming and going in your space, what spirits/entities you want to have access to you, and what kind of dreams you want to have.  If you clamp down too tight you might not dream at all, and if the wards are too loose then they’re not worth the time of putting them up.  Experiment and see what works for you.