New Moon: Ecstasy in the rhythm

It's Friday. Hello.

In these very difficult weeks, I have found music more of a sanctuary than ever. I imagine some of you may as well. I don't know why music comforts so much more profoundly than any other art — and this is to speak no ill of those arts — but it often seems to be an utterly primordial remedy. Even when the music itself is melancholy, this offers a cathartic release where no specific narrative need be imposed beyond what any lyrics include, and all the moreso when there are no (intelligible) lyrics at all. So lately I've been listening to music that is less than joyful or uplifting, but aligned honestly with my moods. Sometimes heavy and driving, sometimes bleak and weepy, sometimes tender and peaceful. And any of these choices help me in their own ways.

Today I won't dwell here on what my own recent music use has been for, though. Instead I have some broader thoughts on music's place in ritual life, primarily as an ecstatic motivator. This role of music underlies the monthly curated music selection I've now been sending to Occult-tier subscribers for a little over a year, and now I'd like to elaborate more publicly on the subject. I can think of at least several contexts where I've made ritual music an active presence in my life. Many of those contexts happen to be rather kinky, though not all.

Briefly: a reminder about the ecstatic vs. the fertile

When I wrote "ecstatic motivator," bear in mind I offer this within my dichotomy of ecstasy vs. fertility. That link is worth reading if you are newer to this newsletter. But as a very short version I will say that while the fertile is that which we bring out of ourselves or use various tools to bring out of other beings, the ecstatic is that which is done unto us and shapes us; on the one hand the results are perpetuation and production, on the other hand the results are transformation and destruction. And ideally these properties hold equal relevance in my ritual practices.

Even though in summarizing this balance mangles some of what I could communicate in more words, I think it's the best reduction I can give for today's purposes. So understanding that much, as far as music serving an ecstatic function I mean that in a ritual space when we hear music it works upon us in an ecstatic mode as we are the recipients of those sounds; we are bathed in the auditory sense.

This does not imply music cannot be understood through a fertile lens as well. We can of course make music, and artistic endeavors fall under the heading of fertility. Self-made music will indeed come up near the end of this post. However, even in those cases I am still largely writing about music as we hear it, not as we create it, and the context of said music-making is what I would describe as an ecstatic sensory feedback loop rather than as, say, an invocation for the crops to be healthy. The latter is definitely one example of a major fertility use for music in ritual, but I am less directly experienced in this compared to ecstatic use, hence ecstatic use being my focus today.

Solar & lunar alignment

Where did my ritual music use consciously begin? I know this unequivocally: seasonally-oriented music.

Like most people raised in a Christian-majority culture, I grew up with Christmas-themed music all around me through the month of December. Because my immediate family wasn't Christian, there were limits to how many deeply religious songs I was exposed to, but I still learned a fair number alongside what I would consider more non-denominational songs or winter-themed pop hits. I encountered all kinds of Christmas music through a combination of caroling songbooks at home[1], a few recorded albums the family owned, local radio stations, and studying songs in the school choir or with my private voice teacher. And in fact, I loved a lot of the religious songs — and any old secular counterparts, such as those in the English wassailing tradition:

Wassail, wassail all over the town,
Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown,
Our bowl it is made of the good ashen tree,
With the wassailing bowl we’ll drink unto thee!

I could probably write an entire post just about wassailing, and likely will one day. Needless to say, this interest deepened in my university years when the a cappella group I belonged to took up a habit of wassailing just before every winter break. After graduating, even having gone back to atheism[2] I loved listening to my own collection of Christmas tunes even if I had started to find retail Christmas-pop usage rather tiresome; and once I turned more fully toward what would become my present witchcraft, I embraced listening to my Christmas collection between Jól (Yule, on the solstice) and Gŵyl Fair (Imbolc, February 1st), eventually fashioning a whole playlist[3] of not just anything directly Christmas-linked but also anything I felt carried the spirit of the very heart of winter.

And as soon as I made this playlist, I realized I should be thinking on a larger scale. There is no single most important time of year on the Wheel. My Jól music could help me feel connected to that season very rapidly, but what about the other seven seasons? I thought of traditional songs I had also learned over time like songs for May Day — both actual Maying songs and radical labor movement songs — and I also started paying attention to what kinds of music I seemed to instinctively favor between different months. I realized that even being what one might call a "lifestyle" metalhead or goth, those flavors of music was my go-to during some months more than others, even on a level that could be distinguished by subgenres. And in terms of listening to music that didn't fall into those broad classifications, I was more likely to do so at other times of year, again split by genre or subgenre. Sometimes actual genre didn't make so much of a difference as sheer mood, theme, or a je ne sais quoi.

Everything I considered was of course not perfectly systematized, just intuitive and often some lines would blur. But I decided to the best of my ability that I would go beyond my Jól playlist to making seven more playlists, one for each other holiday/season on the Wheel. This took me quite a bit of time in every playlist's case, some more than others, and in the process I learned that as I ultimately possessed more recorded music that suited some seasons than others, this might point to some energy imbalances I ought to confront down the road; but years later, here I am with my eight playlists and a studious dedication to listening to them several times per applicable season.

This has shaped my experience of the seasons far more than I even anticipated. For one thing, as each holiday approaches, I now look forward to the music that I "put away" a year before, much as I did for throwing on the Christmas music long ago. It's not that I won't listen to any seasonal music outside of its season — except for Jól, whose music can only be heard in that seven week window because old habits die hard — but it is still a special moment to listen to a collection of songs together as a total experience. Likewise, now all times of year feel sanctified in a way that my younger self struggled to, dare I say, manifest. And when I listen to a seasonal playlist, the fact that I know it's seasonally oriented helps me build intentional focus on noticing the world around me and being present for the seasonal conditions at that time.

I'm also keenly aware that this is exactly the sort of thing a wildly autistic person might do, but despite indeed being autistic, I'm not sure this practice only benefits me. If anyone reading this feels inspired to try something similar, I do recommend it. My seasonal music curation truly has allowed me to feel more aligned with the rhythms of the Sun.

Within the last year, too, I have also started experimenting with lunar playlists to mark each of the Moon's four phases. These have similar runtimes to the seasonal (or shall we say solar) playlists but of course they wind up being listened to more frequently, presumably 12-13 times a year. Currently I would have a very hard time describing which criteria earn a song its place on a lunar playlist; but as they say, I know it when I see it. Or hear it. The lunar playlists have become helpful accompaniments to a number of the ritualized activities I do during each phase change; and if I happen to be listening to such a playlist while I write Salt for the Eclipse, this often helps me slip into the right headspace for addressing my chosen topic.

Extensive though my solar and lunar listening practices are, however, they may not seem like the most "obvious" use of music for ritual purposes. I do mostly just have these playlists around as passively-absorbed sound for other things I'm already doing. So what of outright using music as an active component of ritual?

Kink scenes & sex magic

While my first conscious ritual use of music was seasonal, in parallel an unconscious use also developed as post-university I began to experiment with kink in a more serious way than I had managed as a student. Like many people, I discovered at some point that sex was particularly enjoyable if there was good ambient sound, usually music, so — again like people — I made myself a generic sex playlist. Hundreds of songs that felt right for someone with my personality and tastes to have sex to, and no songs that would feel like a bizarre, surprising interruption. And since all of the sex I was having by now was kinky, the sex playlist was implicitly a kink playlist.

That playlist has since undergone many permutations and is now actually split into two separate ones to help delineate between the kinds of kink that my owner and I tend to practice during the dark half of the year vs. the light. But without delving into exactly what music has earned a spot on either list, I think it's enough to say that the more I threw this playlist on before intimate activities[4], the more I came to take it for granted that there will be background music if kink is happening.

Consequently, nowadays if we're undertaking some manner of discrete kink scene at home, it's rare that there isn't an intentionally selected soundtrack. And by extension, I've found that I always like it more when a play party has music[5]. If I'm lucky, sometimes I've been able to directly oversee the party's music or use my own music in a particular room during a scene. Whatever the case, all kink is ritual to me at least in underlying ethos if not also as an intentional act by the participants.

Regarding intentional kink ritual, however, music has served me even more directly therein. My owner and I haven't conducted deliberate[6] sex magic in a few years due to various factors, mostly logistical, but in past experiences the sex magic was always seasonally aligned, and therefore the music was as well.

Whether for sex magic or for overall kink, I've come to find that music isn't merely a pleasant accent; it's a subtle and sometimes even unsubtle participant in what's taking place. The rhythm can literally guide blows for impact, or for hip thrusts — not necessarily in perfect synchronization, as that can sometimes feel distracting in an odd way, but still guiding an approximate tempo. Lyrics and melodic structure can also assist with creating an emotional arc for several minutes, or much longer depending on the genre's typical runtime. The sum total experience of listening to a song can affect our heartbeats, our breathing, and more physiological elements that in turn affect our performance during the scene or rite.

And this brings me to other highly kinetic, somatic immersions.

Concerts, clubs, communal music

A number of times in what I sometimes refer to as the local kinky witch group that I facilitate, we have discussed the altered state of consciousness imposed by music, especially when it's being played live instead of on a recording — or when the recording itself is very loud. I have spoken with various people who have managed to more or less "get high" or entranced at concerts or on a nightclub's dance floor. I would easily count myself among them.

I especially relate to the example of listening to music in an environment where I can also dance to it. Dance is one of the most powerful ecstatic practices our species has ever been capable of, and of course dance largely relies on having a guiding musical rhythm or at least some kind of human-generated sound. Raised in a few folk dance traditions and also with more formally choreographed styles, I remember myriad instances of truly losing my childhood self for mintues at a time to a live drumbeat, in the drone of a hurdy gurdy, in the heartbreaking rasp of a Hardanger fiddle, or in recorded tracks of classical and pop music during even something as simple as basic ballet exercises. More recently, when I became a go-go dancer for about 3-4 years I found that every night I spent at the club I would often reach a point in my dancing where I could barely stop; I was compelled, drowning joyously in the energies of all the bodies moving around me, pushed onward and onward by the pounding bass. It felt like communion — with other human beings and also with the whole universe.

Although I no longer find many opportunities to dance in this way, I've tentatively recommitted to visiting a couple of goth nights in neighboring regions as an ordinary attendee, every now and again. But more than that, I long to think of a way where the energy of communal dance could be brought to a serious group ritual ceremony. I have some loose ideas, but nothing worth elaborating on here at this time.

Related to this, there is another way I've long enjoyed experiencing live music, and that's making the music with other people. Here is where the ritual practice becomes underwritten by a fertility ethos as much as by the ecstatic. I do play several instruments and have occasionally played in very short-lived (read: single performance) bands, but the bulk of my live music-making has centered around singing, just singing. The a cappella group I mentioned earlier obviously did not just special in wassailing or other Christmas music; we studied a number of international folk traditions, particularly those of the Balkans and the Caucasus, and we studied English polyphonic singing from the 17th-18th centuries through to Sacred Harp singing of the deep South, and we studied 20th century pop traditions like barbershop or radio gospel, and we sang very contemporary songs. In all these styles but particularly the older ones, the act of singing in a group always felt primal, an unshakeable way to lift one's spirits, a powerful organizing tool.

This was echoed by the singing I also did in another part of my university life — the campus pagan collective. When we performed rituals together for the holidays on the Wheel, we would always sing at least a few songs for one portion of the ritual sequence. They were often tunes devised by neopagan creators from within the past few decades, and some of them were truly beautiful and others were lyrically a little hokey, so to speak, but I always enjoyed the spirit behind them. They were always one of the most effective methods of slipping me into a ritual mindset for the duration of whatever else we would engage in that night.

I could go on, but I don't know if it's necessary. Let it be enough to say I miss all of this singing even more than I miss the dancing.

Invitation to exchange

My conclusion for today comes not from myself, but from whatever you might have to say. Now that I have outlined the main settings wherein music forms an ecstatic, driving force in my ritual life: if you feel like any of these are ways you would like to incorporate music into your own practices, or if you have already adopted similar approaches, I would love to talk further.

And for readers who live in my own area (give or take an hour's drive) and see me in person on a semi-regular basis, this post may or may not have constituted a subtle ploy for those of you who sing or have any love for traditional music to perhaps speak with me about caroling and wassailing prospects — not necessarily for this upcoming Jól on such relatively short notice, but perhaps a Jól in the future.

[1] It helps that my father is a talented pianist, so the rest of us could always have accompaniment and help reading the sheet music.

[2] There was that two-year stint of Catholicism from freshman through sophomore years.

[3] Note that when I discuss playlists here, I mean playlists of digital media that I do actually own. I'm not subscribed to any music streaming services because although a radio-like experience is enjoyable on its own merits, I prefer to make sure that a) recorded music I consistently want to listen to is always available for me, and b) artists I follow (who with some exceptions are often not famous enough to be well-paid already) get their labor compensated more fairly than streaming platforms allow for.

[4] Assuming I have the chance, insofar as my owner and I do often go about starting something together by mutual agreement but occasionally, given the nature of our power exchange guidelines, he's free to overpower me unless I'm so not-in-the-mood I would use my safeword. More than eight times out of ten, if he's in the mood, so am I.

[5] Unless the music is terrible, but as picky as I can be, typical play party music selections don't often disappoint me.

[6] Accidental may be another matter.

Thank you for reading. I haven't asked for money in a little bit, I think, so I will ask now: although Salt for the Eclipse is no longer a project I'm spending more to produce than what I earn from it, given my pending unemployment in February it would also be extremely helpful if you could upgrade from a free to a paid subscription tier, or move to a higher subscription tier than what you're on, and generally make sure that your payment hasn't lapsed. The hours I spend on this each Friday turn into time I can't spend, say, applying to new day jobs or working on writing that guarantees revenue. I would be very grateful if whatever benefit you receive from reading this could translate into mutual support.

In any case, next week's post concerns the art of candlemaking, and the week after that will be an animism-themed post for paid subscribers in commemoration of Jól.