Excerpted from:
Octavian Nemescu, Toward a New Initiatic Music

Any trace of skepticism and relativism is counterproductive. Participants must represent the ritual space to themselves as though it were a reality of the world beyond, as though they were officiating a liturgy in the interior of an unseen temple. Only in this way does one have a chance of being drawn into, I would even say seized by, this other world. Similarly, one will need to imagine each note performed in a crescendo or decrescendo as a step up or down on the staircase that leads to a new zone of reality. Other times one may need to descend, via music, into oneself, seeing the sediments of one's life experiences - to descend step by step, floor by floor, into the depths of the soul. Or, to climb a temporal staircase toward the future, guided by the inner vision of the mind while intoning a final cadence (for instance, the end of a place, of an artificial construction, of a civilization, etc.). One's spiritual illumination will be enabled by autosuggestion, a spiritual imagination that Paraclesus considers the magical force par excellence. The visual image of the sign or the icon, or its musical counterpart, will magnetically draw the signified object toward it. With each repetition of a musical measure, the performing participant will intensify the passion and fervor of the music, transforming the act of intonation into prayer. Most important, however, is the continual evocation of the Master of all unseen energies, in order to receive from Him as gift the stairs that one climbs or descends toward other "territories" of existence, toward Awakening. All these rituals will be exercises in Awakening.

The mental-psychical bases had a crucial role in ancient magical rituals both in archaic and non-European culture, enabling a spiritual unleashing in ecstasy or trances. To a Westerner who has lost the freedom necessary to practice, and hence to understand, the "mechanism" of the rituals to which we refer, ritual music seems meaningless.

The practice of magic ritual can be conceived in a collective form or in an individual one, typical of the future phase of evolution and personal development. In these new rituals it is possible to pass from one form to the other: from externalized music performed through instruments or vocals, to imagined and internalized music. Inner spiritual music can be likened to certain sacralized sensations, and imagined music can be utilized as a talisman or arm in the battle of the subject within oneself.

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