Month: December 2009

My last article on Galdor Without Runes brought to mind a number of magical experiences I have had that have involved singing and, as a further inducement to my reader to explore the magical art form of singing, I have decided to share a few of these experiences.

1) Galdor Made Me Into Road Runner

One day some years ago I was attempting to make my way to a friend’s home. It was a hot summer’s day and the train system had broken down, leaving me in the unenviable position of having to walk from Central Station to Stanmore (Sydney-siders will know what that means; the distance involved is about five kilometres). Oh, and I had something like twenty minutes to get there in time.

Despite the fact that normally I might have just called and cancelled, I felt it important at the time to connect with my friend, who had experienced a recent break up. One of my Odinnic poems came unbidden to my lips as I steeled myself to run the distance, knowing that I certainly was not fit enough to make the distance in the time available, particularly since I had a backpack with me.

As I began to chant the poem over and over, its rhythm taking a hold of me, I began to be filled with a stern vehemence. It was like a kind of berserkergang keyed to movement rather than violence. Swept up in my own roaring chant, I fairly flew the distance.

Strangely, I didn’t actually run, I just walked, albeit at a cracking pace, reciting my poem over and over. I covered the distance in exactly the time available, and not only that, but I was overflowing with energy when I arrived: not in the least bit tired. A totally bizarre display of physical power. I really should try to tap into that trick more often.

Less dramatically, I have found that I can get more energy to walk faster by simply increasing the tempo of my singing when I am out and about. Not exactly a new discovery – music has been used to synchronise rowers and marching soldiers for thousands of years – but I hadn’t realised that I could manipulate my own body into a swifter mode of action just by varying the tempo of my song.

2) Galdor on Stage

Things often get pretty intense when my band Ironwood performs: here is a photo from a gig – you can see the incredible proliferation of spirit orbs attracted by our magical music! Of course, a big part of our mojo is our vocals.

I often get possessed when I am on stage – in fact I think we all do – and my singing tends to take on a life of its own. Prior to our first gig, I had never been able to sing “extreme” vocals – the screeches, bellows, howls, and roars typical of extreme metal music. That was generally fine because mostly I sing “clean” in Ironwood, but sometimes I wished  could add just that extra layer of intensity to our performances.

On our first gig, after a while, I noticed a tremendous roaring voice coming back at me through the monitors. It seemed to sweep up the entire room and certainly drove me into total ecstasy. Then I realised: the voice was me! Presented with the immediacy and risk of performing for an audience had unleashed a wild and powerful new range of vocal expression for me, one that established a positive feedback loop with my trance states.

In recording settings I struggle to replicate these vocals, though my efforts for the next Ironwood album came out quite well in the end.

I think the magic of that first (and subsequent) gigs came from the fact that I didn’t recognise my own voice, and that dissociation sent me into a whirl of trances and altered states. Since then I’ve experimented a lot with exploring unorthodox ways of vocalising, and they can indeed send you into a huge range of worlds. Sometimes this practice will get me shivering spontaneously – classic Jan Fries-style seidh.

3) Galdor Duets

Apart from my time spent chanting within the Illawarra circle of the Jerrahi Sufis, in which I experienced an incredible array of magical states (not least because so many members of the circle were musicians and we’d really explore tonal chaos in our chanting), I’ve also spent a lot of time chanting with Donovan (which inspired this article from a while back). Donovan and I don’t get to do this together as much as we like, but it is always awesome.

I’d particularly like to share a recent, and quite bizarre, experience I had while rehearsing Ironwood vocals with my band mate Matthew. Matt and I were practicing a particularly beautiful but tricky duet passage that will be featured on the next Ironwood album. It is only a short span of music so we’d just sing it over and over again.

Something strange began to happen. I felt an intense sensation of electricity or energy moving up and down my limbs, through my body, my head, etc. It was like a powerful energetic vibration streaming through my body.

Then I had this intense impression that there was a third person in the room, forming the third point of a triangle with Matt and I, watching us as we sang. This presence seemed shadowy, hard to pin down, but benevolent. It was the most uncanny thing to be sitting there, singing with Matt, consumed by strange energetic sensations, watched by some ineffable but intense presence.

We stopped for a minute and I told Matt what I was experiencing.

First, he tells me that he is experiencing exactly the same energy sensation or whatever it was.

Then he tells me that he also can perceive the third person watching us…and that it is him! Matt’s perception, thanks to our singing, somehow has expanded beyond his body, and incredibly, I could sense the presence of his consciousness without any prompting or clue!

Neither of us can make any sense of the experience, but it was very empowering for us both. I chalk it up to the power of shared singing, the beauty of galdor and vocal-induced seidh-like consciousness. I am curious to see if we can replicate the experience: I wonder where it might lead?

Convinced yet that singing should be an essential part of most any magical practice? If not, give it a go and persevere. You’ll thank yourself for the effort.

We tend to think that galdor has something to do with rune magic, in particular due to certain authors who have promulgated this view despite the lack of any historical evidence to that effect. The word’s roots run to the meaning of “magic song”, with the intimation of a birdsong. There is nothing in there about runes. Indeed, we could even refer to the vardlokkur, the magic song used to facilitate seidh working referred to in the Saga of Eirik the Red, as a type of galdor.

Indeed, the “birdy” aspect to the word brings to mind the myth of Sigurd. When Sigurd tastes the heart of the dragon Fafnir he is granted the ability to understand the speech of birds and proceeds to experience some kind of magical initiation or expansion of consciousness. Perhaps hearing the speech of birds is a convoluted way of saying he became conscious of galdor: of the presence of magic suffusing all things.

Once we realise that the term galdor is not nearly as specific as some misinforming writers would have us think, we find ourselves in a position of immense freedom. While presumably there were various specific forms of galdor in days of yore of which no records remain, it also seems likely that there was a proliferation of styles of galdor, just as the old myths, customs, and even the rune alphabets varied from place and culture to place and culture.

Presumably individuals of magical inclination back then were as idiosyncratic as they are today (myth, sagas, and folk tales all seem to imply this conclusion).Consequently it seems reasonable to propose that song-magic innovation, undertaken with sensitivity to the mythic corpus, is perfectly “authentic”, at least in the sense of recapitulating exactly what the old sorcerers were up to.

Given the poetic proclivities of the Heathen folk (and the existence of an Old Norse poetic form called galdralag) it also seems appropriate to include rhythmic speech and poetry set to magical purpose under the category of galdor.

Recently I have been experimenting with singing in public: walking down the street, on the platform at train stations, in shops, you name it. It takes a bit of courage to openly sing in public: we are programmed to suppress ourselves, to package ourselves away from visibility (or audibility, more specifically), in contemporary Western society. At first I found it rather terrifying, and indeed my mind would turn constantly around that impossible question, “are the people around me judging me?” Sometimes I would feel so anxious that I would end up silencing myself.

Then I realised that the opinions of my impromptu audience were completely irrelevant, and that they were almost certainly not going to act on them if in fact they didn’t like the idea of me singing. Occasionally children laugh, or more commonly, stare in bewilderment, when I walk past them, singing happily away. Often I am shocked by the number of people who have no idea that I am singing because they have headphones in their ears, or because the surrounding traffic is so loud. Modern life is definitely not what our ears evolved to handle.

Apart from the fact that my singing technique is improving and I am feeling more creative (since I am now exploring musical ideas every time I go walking in public), I am experiencing deeper changes as a result of my public singing practice, and this leads me to conclude that I am practicing a form of galdor, at least in my own specific sense of psychological reconstruction.

My public singing is having effects that might be deemed magical in two senses. Firstly, it alters my relationship to my environment, including my relationship to other people. It modifies my experience of myself and the world around me, causing various fears to weaken, and correspondingly, causing me to feel more powerful.

Secondly, it is opening up the channel of my spirit. For example, when you sing your throat opens up. The vocal chords and neck muscles get massaged and strengthened, becoming more fluid and more definite. Normal speech becomes clearer, more compelling, and a little musical – all subtle “magical” effects. Even more importantly, this singing provokes feels of great joy and a lightening of life’s burdens. I feel very energised by my regular galdor, and unwittingly break into song in all sorts of moments – even when doing simple things like cooking.

If one of the central purposes of magic is to alter one’s consciousness (we might loosely call this seidh), and another is to bring empowerment (a purpose some see as a specific  purpose of the runes) then I think I have hit on an exceptionally potential-rich form of magical practice with my personal type of galdor.

What do I sing? Mostly improvised, wordless melodies. Sometimes I chant the names of runes or gods. Sometimes, rarely, I will sing songs from my band Ironwood, but mostly I just embrace the art of exploring my voice.You don’t necessarily have to sing to make this work for you – even just to recite poetry in a projective fashion would probably suffice.

Other advantages for this type of magic are that 1) you don’t need any special skills (since you aren’t singing to produce a “quality performance” and will in any case improve your “quality” of singing organically just by doing it a lot); 2) it doesn’t require any special preparation, memorising pages of middling-to-bad poetry, waving of obscure magical artifacts, dressing up in silly costumes, or anything else like that. All you need are a set of lungs and a throat. Magic that works in the here and now of daily reality is always preferable to me.

If you are not brave enough to sing in public straight away then I suggest starting by singing in “safe” contexts: while driving, or at home. Needless to say this will necessitate turning off your television (or better, driving a steam roller over it), and choosing to listen to music less (although I suppose you could always sing along to your favourite CDs).

When first singing in public, start off almost sub-vocalising or humming to yourself; don’t even bother with opening your mouth. There is no need to freak yourself out – just gradually increase the volume and physical obviousness of your singing as your comfort zone expands. It is perfectly alright to moderate your singing as appropriate for specific circumstances – I won’t sing as loud indoors for example.

One particular challenge is to not fall quiet or silent automatically when someone walks towards you. It might be scary, but once you can happily sing despite passers-by and the opinions of strangers you might start to feel a lot more cheerful and powerful. Certainly this is gradually unfolding in my experience.

The more I sing, the easier it feels to take other kinds of action in the world, to assert myself, and so forth. For example I have always had a strong telephone phobia, but recently it seems to have almost completey entered into remissiobn. Singing is very personal, yet also very public, and it enables one to reach a valuable equilibrium between internal and external worlds. If the philosopher’s stone is a thing of thought that can directly transform matter, then singing must surely be some alchemical agent – perhaps mercury – to help facilitate the process of transforming oneself into such a stone.

Of course, as alluded above, the names of the runes do lend themselves very nicely to song, and there is no reason why you shouldn’t apply runes to the art of galdor, even if strictly speaking rune-magic and galdor are two different things.

To my mind this sort of literally empty-handed magic is much more interesting, powerful, useful, healing, and deep than a lot of the more elaborate and effortful approaches. It draws on spontaneity rather than will and creativity rather than intellectual artifice. The old Heathens lived in a tough, often brutal, world, and from necessity I think they tended to prefer the quick and practical over the unwieldy and impractical. Hence my ancestors are reborn from the wordless song on my lips.