People say that they want an American saint who can give them guidance. I’m not a saint or a monastic elder by any stretch of the imagination. But if people hem and haw at the basic-tier spiritual advice I give them, what will they do if they meet a real saint? Just crucify him?
One of these, that I promise you that any real saint will tell you, is that you will never have an advanced prayer life if you are listening to music or watching video entertainment. Granted, you have to do something to fill the time. We are raised from childhood to need video entertainment, like a crack baby. But even if it’s not a sin strictly, you will never have develop an immersive prayer life if you are filling your head with music and other forms of entertainment, whatever artistic merit it may have.
The Apocalypse talks about sorcery – also possible to translate as drug-using or drug-dealing – four times, and Galatians once. Even as God is destroying the world in 9:21, the people still refuse to repent of their sorcery.
What is sorcery? One definition is that sorcery is using sounds to create an artificial reality. Everything today is sorcery, because everything today is artificial. In a man-made world, reality can be whatever man wants it to be. An artificial world – with artificial cities and artificial food and artificial social morality and artificial economics and artificial global crises – is a world with the artificial delusion that it exists outside of God. And even then, it’s the artificial god of the Freemasons and Donald Trump and Dwight Eisenhower that you see on the dollar bill.
When I was a young man, I called myself a Christian, but what I really worshipped was rock n roll. One of the greatest forms of sorcery is music, and it was one of the first rebellions against God in Genesis 4:21. Music casts a spell over you. If you do not believe me, play “Run Around Sue” by Dion and watch people move involuntarily. Music changes your feelings and emotions. It makes you want things you did not want.
“Lady Gaga’s latest single, Abracadabra, is dominating the charts, and much like her previous single, Disease, marks a powerful return to her dark pop roots. The song blends haunting melodies with evocative lyrics, delving deep into the transformative power of speech. Taking its name from one of history’s most well-known magickal words, Abracadabra isn’t just a catchy hook, it’s an incantation, a ritual, and a call to action. Gaga isn’t merely singing about manifestation; she’s inviting us to co-create, to step into our own power, and to shape reality with the words we choose to speak.” – Mat Auryn, author of Psychic Witch: A Metaphysical Guide to Meditation, Magick & Manifestation – when actual “magick” practitioners champion the intentional use of pop music as mass-participation in occult rituals, we should pay attention.
You listen to 70s Elvis singing about his lost love, and you also want to feel something that powerfully. But it’s a fantasy. It doesn’t exist. You’re living vicariously through the creations of a laboratory in Nashville. It’s manufactured emotions for your consumption.
Obviously the Church uses music, but monophonic chant is very different than radio music. It’s dispassionate and melodic. But even then, with recorded music we listen to Church music like pop music. You make your playlist and repeat your favorites. And so we take the sacred things of the Church outside of the context of the liturgical cycle and use them for our own enjoyment. Is that a sin? I don’t think so. But it’s not really a good thing either.
Sorcery is an act of rebellion of God, which is why the prophet Samuel accused King Saul of reducing the sacred rituals to sorcery. It does not accept the created order as-is. Likewise, music creates a false sense of order. Rock and country music have always idealized rebellion for its own sake. It never had a direction to its rebellion – it was just anarchic. The very first Elvis single, “That’s Alright, Mama,” basically the beginnings of rock n roll, is about rejecting your parents advice to do whatever feels right.
Sorcery is also always feminist, because the feminist rebels against the patriarchy, which is the natural state of mankind. When you sift through it all, feminists are just common whores with better slogans. Many early feminists were into the occult, as Rachel Wilson explains in her fantastic book. Two of the most prominent feminist rock stars were Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart. They have these quotes on the back of the compilation The Essential Heart:
“Music has all the gods swirling around in it, and it’s completely magic to me.” – Nancy Wilson
“Music is my brand of spiritualism, my brand of religion.” – Ann Wilson
Let us take the masters at their testimony and believe them. Music is a form of sorcery. It’s a false religion. I remember thinking in middle school, I hope that God still lets us listen to the Beatles in heaven.
You see this in evangelicalism, where the people are made to have a certain religious feeling through musical tricks. They believe this to be the Holy Spirit – what could be more antichrist? What could be further from an actual experience of God, than to believe that your own conjured inner emotions is God? Therefore, according to Apocalypse 21, all the evangelicals will go to the lake of fire.
And you can see the fruits of the music industry. Almost everyone with a music career leads an unstable and tragic life filled with substance abuse and broken relationships. Very rarely do they get married young and have five kids and lead a normal life in their community. You can’t be a wandering gypsy and a family man. I understand why in the 50s poor southerners like Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley decided that they would rather sing into a can instead of pick cotton, but I don’t see how anyone today could glamorize a music career. It’s almost guaranteed to ruin your life. Ask Karen Carpenter and Dennis Wilson.
I am from Tennessee. The state tourism department is heavily promoting Dolly Parton as a hometown hero. Granted, she has donated a small fortune in children’s books. But Dolly is not a good role model at all. She’s an aged-out bloated whore who brags about her plastic surgery and gay friends on Jimmy Fallon. Recently she published a cookbook with her daughter, and you couldn’t tell who was who. Her songs are about committing adultery in church. “9 to 5” is a uniquely narcissistic feminist anthem that terrible women loved for some reason. In recent years she made up a ridiculous story about Elvis trying to take the rights to “I Will Always Love you.”
“If something is bagging, sagging, or dragging, I’ll tuck it, suck it, or pluck it. I’ve had a little plastic surgery, but I’m not ashamed of it. I’ve made the most of what I’ve got.” – Dolly Parton, age 79, on her relationship to plastic surgery. Is she really a role model we want women and girls to emulate?
But in America, there is no concept of a baseline public morality – Dolly Parton is a famous person from Tennessee, and so the state feels obligated to promote her to Euro-trash tourists. She is promoted as a role model simply because of geography. I am reminded of St Augustine’s words:
The worshipers and devotees of those gods of yours, the men who gaily ape their vices and depravities, are not in the least disturbed to see their country wallow in a dismal swamp of immorality. ‘As long as it endures,’ they say, ‘as long as it prospers amid plenty and can boast of victories and enjoy the security of peace, what do morals matter to us? What concerns us more is that everyone should become richer and richer, so as to be able to bear the costs of his daily excesses, and to lord it over his economically weaker fellows. Let the poor toady to the rich in order to fill their stomachs and enjoy indolent ease under their patronage. Let the rich use the poor to surround themselves with a crowd of satellites and to enhance their prestige. Let the mob applaud, not those who think of what is good for them, but those who minister to their pleasures. Let no one impose toil and trouble, or prohibit impure pleasures. Rulers must not bother whether their people are virtuous, if only they can keep them subject. The people of the provinces must not obey the governors as guardians of their morals, but as managers of their affairs and purveyors of their pleasures. They are not to show them sincere respect, but cower before them in base servility. As for the laws, let them look to wrongs against property without bothering about moral propriety.
No one should be brought to court, except one who has done harm or nuisance to another’s property, home, or limb, or to an unwilling party. As for the rest, each man can do his own sweet will with his goods, with his subjects, or with the goods or subjects of any others who consent. Let there be public harlots in abundance for all who would indulge their lust, and, above all, for those who have no mistresses of their own.
Let houses be built, spacious and exquisitely furnished, and let people come to sumptuous banquets where each one can gamble and drink and vomit and carouse day or night, as much as he pleases or is able. Let the noise of dancing be everywhere. Let the theatres resound with lewd merriment and with every kind of cruel and vicious pleasure. Let the man who dislikes these pleasures be branded as a public enemy, and, should he attempt to interfere with them, let the mob be free to hound him to death. Let those rulers be regarded as true gods who devote themselves to giving the people a good time, and guarantee them its continuance. Let them be worshiped in the manner they desire, and demand the plays they please, in the company, or at the expense, of their devotees. Only let them take care that no foe, no plague, no calamity interfere with this reign of prosperity.
What man in his right senses would place this kind of commonwealth on the same level with, I do not say the Roman Empire, but with the house of Sardanapalus. [The luxurious king of Assyria, usually identified with Ashurbanipal (669–625 b.c.). Cicero, in the Tusculan Disputations (5.35) cites a Latin metrical version of the supposed epitaph.] This king abandoned himself so completely to dissipation that on his tomb he had inscribed that in death he possessed only what in life his lust had enjoyed. If those pleasure seekers had a king of that sort, who indulged them in such things and placed not the slightest restraint on anyone’s whim, they would dedicate to him a temple and a high-priest more readily than did the ancient Romans to Romulus. [City of God II.20, CUA Press translation]
Perhaps we could also find a porn star from Tennessee and put her face in the welcome centers and on the billboards?
Sometimes women in the industry complain about exploitation. The 2021 film Last Night in Soho showed this well. But exploitation has always been part of the entertainment industry. Music and theater have always been closely connected to prostitution, and you do not have to read far into Chrysostom to hear him rage against them. To be a singer is to be used and abused.
Some 99% of all music in the last century is about how the person I’m currently sleeping with is the most magical thing ever. We call these love songs, but really they’re just lust songs. Pop music idealizes youthful, idolatrous love, but there are very few songs about mature love. This is one reason why the baby boomers keep getting divorced and remarried. They keep chasing that Beatles euphoria of the wonder and mystery of middle school infatuation.
One could look at all of these – feminism, false emotions, ruined lives, sexual exploitation, counterfeit love – and conclude that music of any genre truly is the devil’s music. Were the fundamentalists wrong about Elvis and the Beatles?
And so if you fill your soul and mind with the noise of the world, what room is there for prayer? How can there be any kind of hesychia if you crave noise and stimulation and pleasure? You will always be eager to finish with your prayer chores so that you can get back to what you really want to do. St Jerome learned this lesson in the cave. You can have the things of the world, or you can have salvation, but you cannot have both. You must pick one or the other.
But again, we have to do something to fill the time. We’re raised from infancy to need the noise-and-picture machine.
I sent this mass text to my friends. I figured that you fine people may enjoy it.
Reading about the early history of the Beatles. How quickly they grew in popularity, there isn’t really an explanation. It’s like a spirit possessed the masses. Their songs are melodic and energetic, but they really aren’t special compared to many contemporaries. The band was good-looking and charismatic, but so is every boy band. They all had strong, identifiable personalities, but that doesn’t seem like a good explanation. Their manager and producer were very clever and shrewd, but so were a lot of people in the industry.
It’s like in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, possibly an occult regicide ritual, a demonic spirit possessed America and England. Then you immediately had Vietnam, free love, negro riots, drug culture, Eastern mysticism, open secularism, and basically everything possible to rebel against God. The Beatles (and the Rolling Stones) were at the center of most of it. Having Alister Crowley on Sgt Pepper’s and making the Baby Butcher cover would certainly make you think they had cut a deal with Satan. They were probably the first group to openly blaspheme in their songs (“Ballad of John and Yoko”, Lennon’s 1970 “God” — I’m not counting the Beach Boys’s “God Only Knows”.) They wrote about adultery (“Norwegian Wood”) and domestic violence (“Run for your life”, “Getting Better”), and John was probably the first public figure to openly commit adultery with no real public backlash. Listening to them as an adult, they were much more vulgar, dark and occult-adjacent than I realized as a kid. McCartney always seemed like the nice guy, but he wrote something as psychotic as “we can work it out,” which is how he approached all his relationships.
Some small part of me thinks that John and George might have found God anyway by the end of their lives.
John was clearly in deep pain throughout his life, and you could see his story as learning how to be human and live life. “God” is so bleak, bitter and resignatory that you have to empathize with him — completley oppositeof “Imagine”. It’s very much Nietzsche’s unchained sun, and you can hear his mix of spite, disillusion, pain, and ultimately acceptance. His solo songs had a rare honesty and vulnerability for the genre, a sort of inverted humility for someone so completely narcissistic.
While John was a smarmy atheist who thought he was God, George’s songs were a cry out to God in pain. A very distorted concept of God, but it’s a completely different orientation. “Help Me Lord” and “Give me love” are not atheistic at all. These are songs of humility and helplessness before one’s creator. Whether he actually connected with the true Creator in spite of the Hindu demons, who knows?
Paul was a control freak who prided himself on acting like most vegans do. He played all the instruments on his solo albums because he needed to control everything, and the result is a sterile sound without the little imperfections that make music human.
I wish this went more in depth, with a more serious tone and less sarcasm. There are mostly non-Orthodox resources on this topic, and many Orthodox are out there telling people it’s all about the lyrics and any kind of music is fine so long as there’s no overt blasphemy. As a former musician I think that’s far from the truth, but there’s not much out there to point to from actual Orthodox sources.
Greetings Theo – Sounds like a really good opportunity for a follow up article from a former musician!
I appreciate your content & am grateful for access to your information.
Thank you!
Most of the readers hate me because I tell them unwanted truths. They killed Jesus for the same reason.
I don’t do this for applause like the professional internet theologians and internet priests. I’m trying to stimulate discussion and break people out of the stale narratives they’ve been presented with. And much of it, like you said, is just putting information from the tradition out there that has been dusted over. We the Orthodox Church are not nearly as in touch with the ancients as we think.
“Most of the readers hate me…”
Do you really think you are that important to ‘most readers’…?
Comments like that are my point. You’re just brimming with rage at me because I ridiculed the false god you made of the Church. Cultivate some self-awareness.
Do you have a real name, or did your mother name you Photios? Is there a personality underneath all that Orthodox bravado?
St Barsanuphius of Optina (his large work is worth getting from St Hermans Monastery), speaks a lot of music. That its very close to prayer.
On Music, Art, and Theater: From the legacy of the Optina Elders
https://orthochristian.com/63734.html
Elder John Krestiankin:
“Dear in the Lord O.! I will tell you right off-banish the thought of ordination once and for all, even if they should tempt you with such proposals. Experience shows that those who come to the Altar Table from rock music cannot serve unto salvation. I have received so many letters from these unhappy men, but help comes to them only after they strip off their rank. Some cannot even stand before the Altar at all, while others sink tot he depths of hell with such iniquities as they did not even commit before becoming priests. So keep this in mind. (from May God Give You Wisdom!)
Bl Seraphim Rose (from his life):
The music of the Church services was an integral part of Fr. Seraphim’s spiritual life. According to the Holy Fathers, music is the form of communication closest to the soul, and thus the first thing that the soul perceives upon entering Paradise. The most spiritual music, of course, is that of the Church.
“The most refined classical music,” Fr. Herman told the brothers, “leads the soul to prayer. But the music of the Church is the music of prayer itself.” It was for this reason that Fr. Seraphim did not seek to listen to classical music during his years as a monk, even though this music had once had such a profound formative influence in leading him to God. In his first years at the skete he listened to classical music not at all. It was only later, when the children and young monastic aspirants came, that classical music tapes were played in order to refine the souls of the younger generation, many of whom had been corrupted by the carnal rhythms of contemporary cacophony.
Most American converts to Orthodoxy are especially attracted to the exotic melodies of Byzantine chant, which with their minor keys sound so mystical to Western ears. Fr. Seraphim, however, felt most akin to the simple Russian chant. He was never dogmatic about this personal preference, and in fact thought that the arguments over “which is better, the Russian or the Greek chant?” – were stupid and pointless. It was just that the pathos of the Russian chant, including its ancient “Znamenny” and “special” melodies, somehow struck deep chords in his soul. As the melodies combined with the words of liturgical poetry and were repeated over the course of many years, they became a part of his being. His soul literally became attuned to them.
>>>
…during these formative years, music was to be used as a step to spiritual life. “From music,” he said, paraphrasing Confucius, “you can tell what the people are thinking. Listen to their music and you can tell if they are corrupt people or virtuous people.” Although Eugene acknowledged no greater classical composer than Bach, his personal favorite was actually Handel. There is a measured, flowing dignity in Handel’s music that brings one to a state of inward tranquility and order. This was what appealed so highly to Eugene’s soul, what Confucius meant by the music of “virtuous people.”
Hard rock music and Christianity (Fr. Athanasios Mitilinaios) | Orthodox Q&A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcZxWDjLcGA
Satanic Initiation Through Pop Music – Out of This World #33 @BrittPettibone / Jaimye Henshaw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKZTSGqFZVU
Panos comment:
One of the centerpiece of “mystery schools” that the Greeks learned from the Egyptians is the mathematics behind musical equal temperament that was reintroduced into the world around the 1600-1700s.
Prior to that, instruments would have to be retuned if they wanted to modulate between keys as the ancient equivalent of “key changes” could only be done by well trained vocalists.
In the harmonic series that occurs naturally however, the 7th overtone was next to impossible to accurately engineer and play on a grand piano, for example.
After this slight adjustment is made, the intervals between notes in a tetrachord can function as more or less any and every overtone to any and every key.
Why is this important and one of the safely guarded “mysteries”? Well, because of everything laid out here regarding social engineering and the manipulation of various passions and the “magical conjuring” you can affect in the masses. It’s why in the ascstic/hesychastic life, we are taught to not be influenced by any external stimulation or thought. This is especially true of music (or really noise today).
You see this especially in Plato’s recollection of Atlantis and his ideal city where the districts are laid out in the intervals of the diatonic scale (the closest modern equivalent is a major scale with the 3rd and the 7th overtones being a tad bit sharper than what Westerners are used to hearing) and his insistence on channeling Diatonic, Chromatic and Enharmonic (Phyrigian) music throughout to regulate the well-being of the citizens.
The early Church inherited this musical system and Saint John of Damascus standardized the rule set to be used throughout the Liturgical year, which became known as the system of Byzantine Chant that is still practiced today. However, rather than this music conjuring passions, it actually channels them in a way to strengthen, pacify, inspire reverence/repentance AND to physically heal the listener as Jamie said
[…] A warning about modern music, https://orthodoxreflections.com/music-is-a-form-of-sorcery/ […]
Agni Parthene
Christos Anesti
Bach: St Matthew Passion, Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring…etc…
Handel: Messiah
Etc…
“One could … conclude that music of any genre truly is the devil’s music.”
Sturgeon’s Law asserts that “90% of everything is cr*d”.
One visit to any local supermarket should be enough to confirm
that 90% of everything marketed as ‘bread’ is, in fact, ‘cr*d’.
Are we therefore to abstain from all bread?
How will our liturgies ‘rock’ then?
No. We need to learn taste for the bread which nourishes
(both literally and figuratively) and teach that taste to our children.
As for music, no doubt 90% of it “…truly is the devil’s music.”
But not ALL of it is; and the Devil does NOT have ALL the best tunes!
For an excellent example of what I mean, google:
‘Christ the Lord is Ris’n Today! | Hymn | Charles Wesley, Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppkfVTco4-g
There is no other Western hymn known to me which conveys
so clearly and precisely the joy of the Resurrection.
This ain’t no “devil’s music”.
What a lovely video. I have loved Maddy Prior’s singing for decades. She is one of a handful of English women who kept and keep English folk music alive. Nothing Satanic about it. I agree with Mr Austin on the narrow offering he is analyzing, so it would have been better to title this ‘The Music That is a Form Of etc etc which implies a certain category instead of an insinuation that all music falls into this darker form. Timbrel and harp, psaltry and voice. And to calm anyone reading this, I am a practicing, devoted Orthodox Christian, a true son of the seven Ecumenical Councils, Holy Fathers, and all the other treasures the Lord has bequeathed upon us sinners, of whom I am chief.
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