‘MYSTICAL ROCK’ – ‘SAMA’ 2
‘Sama’ is a Persian Sufi word meaning ‘audition’, i.e. to listen and to dance to the ‘Mystical Music’ of Love for the purposes of attaining transcendence and Union with the Beloved
‘Friends of Merlin’ are the Original Mystical Rock Band though we are not the first band to make ‘mystical music’, this being an ageless art much rooted in all mystical traditions globally. For centuries the Romantic movement in the Arts in the West though has been much influenced by the Sufi tradition of universal Love and its ‘Grail’ mysticism; from the Chivalry of the Middle Ages with the Arthurian myths, through the gothic romanticism of Byron, the metaphysical poetry of Keats and Coleridge, in more recent times in the Love, Peace and Psychedelic movements of the 1960’s Hippies, and through the glam rock of Marc Bolan &T Rex, and ‘Spandau Ballet’ of the ‘New Romantics’ of the 1980’s.
FoM are then simply emerging from a long tradition of Romanticism within Western Rock with our own particular brand of mystical music. Essentially ‘mystical music’ is the Music of Love...to quote Shakespeare... ‘If music be the food of love...Play on!’ In the Sufi traditions of the ‘grail mysteries’ the use of music to attain transcendent states of ecstasy and union with the Beloved is all-important, and so with ‘Mystical Rock’ the aim also is to bring about an experience of peace, joy and harmony within the audience that transcends ordinary perceptions, hopefully without the use of illicit substances!
“What is the sama? A message from those hidden within the heart. The Heart – the stranger – finds peace in their missive.
The wine of the spirit kept shooting arrows into the vat (grail) of the body – when the body heard the tambourine, it began to ferment, showing its preparedness.
A marvellous sweetness has appeared in the body, for the flute and the minstrel’s lips give it all the sugar it wants...” [Rumi D18177-82]
It is true to say then that a lot of FoM’s lyrics are influenced by images and symbolisms from Sufism as well as from the Celtic Arthurian myths, but we do also drink in inspiration from a number of other mystical traditions, some of which that do also germinate from the same key sources that are imbibed in Sufism and Western Grail Romances.
So FoM are drawing from a deep well of mystical ideas, with one song in particular from the Western traditions being about the Groves of the Druids, entitled ‘Gaia’s Groves’. In addition this song is an ecological song concerned with how we are destroying the environment as well as being about the ‘Sacred Feminine’ in Western mysticism, symbolized as the Greek Goddess of the Earth - Gaia.
We also use the harmonies of Indian Sufi musical sounds in a number of our songs with the use of the Sitar guitar which was quite popular with rock bands in the 1960’s including the Rolling Stones. And in our song ‘Amnesty’, a protest song for Universal Peace, written for a concert that we did for Amnesty International, we chant the Sanskrit world Ahimsa through the song, Ahimsa meaning to enact Non-Violence in all one’s thoughts, words and deeds, Ahimsa being the essential principle of Gandhi’s political philosophy that brought about the Independence of India from British rule.
We are currently now though in the process of recording our first album and some of the songs on ‘Mystical Rock Cafe’ are directly expressing certain themes that occur within the Islamic Sufi tradition of the ‘Whirling Dervishes’ of Turkey, whose most important Sheik of the 13th century was the great mystical Poet of Love – Rumi...
For example the song that is the single from our album ‘Mystical Rock Cafe’ is called ‘Gentle Rain’ and there is much in Rumi’s poetry concerning this theme...
“Sometimes I compare His Gentleness to wine...” [Rumi, D 27683]
Oh contented and joyful Saki! Bring the wine at once...so that we may drink happily and sleep happily in the shadow of eternal Gentleness...” [Rumi D 28976-77]
God has a wine, a hidden wine, one of whose drop became you and the world...” [Rumi, D6639]
Oh Saki, where is the Gentleness of the day when Thou wert the Sun pouring down light and making dust motes dance...?” [Rumi D 29557]
You will also find some Sufi Persian words in the last song on our album entitled ‘Lay Down’, the ‘Sultan’ being an important symbol for the supreme ‘Beloved’ in mystical themes...
“Others call Thee Love, but I call Thee the Sultan of Love...” [Rumi D23303]
“Your sensuality is copper, and the light of Love is the elixir: Love’s light transmutes the copper of your existence into gold...” [Rumi D9003]
The song ‘Bubble’ also has a very metaphysical sense of being beyond the physical world, of seeking to break the bonds of ordinary existence...
“The lamentation spread to the celestial spheres and the angels, and the Sea of Gentleness bubbled up and then broke the bonds...” [Rumi, D9791]
A song that is not on the album, ‘No Limits’, yet to be recorded, is a song about the limitlessness of Love, or as Rumi says...
“Love is affection beyond bounds...” [M II intro]
For those of you who are interested in exploring more deeply into the meanings of our songs and about the themes of Sufi mysticism in particular, its origins are actually rooted in what is known as Western Neo-Platonic philosophy; which pre-dates Islam and is also known as Hermetic Philosophy in the West, being alchemical mystical texts said to be the works of the Egyptian god Hermes Trismegistus. Hermetic philosophy was introduced into the West by Islamic philosophers from around 1250CE and it was this influx from Islamic Sufism that triggered the Italian Renaissance of the Western Arts.
The esoteric Greek and hermetic traditions particularly have a long history though in western Celtic/Druid music concerning the Greek concept of the ‘Harmony of the Spheres’ even before the influx of such ideas from Islam prior to the Renaissance. There is much to discover about the coded ideas in the lyrics of FoM if you want to explore these mystical themes more deeply in a Da Vinci Code style quest for Hermetic symbols and themes.
It is true to say then that like Islamic Sufism all the classical Western Mystical traditions have their origins in the Greek Orphic Mysteries of Pythagoras, [6th century BCE’, and the later Neo-Platonism of Plotinus in the 3rd and 4th centuries CE. Then by the time we get to the 19th century in the West, Lord Byron appears as the infamous metaphysical poet expressing Sufi Love themes...
“Bright be the place of thy soul!
No lovelier spirit than thine
E’er burst from its mortal control,
In the orbs of the blessed to shine...”
[Byron, ‘Bright be the place of thy soul’, verse 1]
“When the light shines serene but doth not glare,
Then in this magic circle raise the dead:
Heroes have trod this spot – ‘tis on their dust ye tread...”
[Byron, ‘Child Harold’s Pilgrimage’, Canto IV CXLIV]
And from Byron’s middle eastern Sufism two strands of the Hermetic Arts begin to emerge known as ‘Romanticism’ and ‘Gothic’ art movements that still persist today in the arts ‘velvet underground’.
This then explains why FoM are influenced by the rock music of the 1960’s as well as the Gothic themes of the Romantics. Both of which have their cultural roots in the sexual liberation and eroticism of women in Byron’s poems, his ‘Feminism’, coupled with his idea in his poem ‘Manfred’ of Woman as an etheric, mystical muse/goddess or ‘Sylph’. In fact so influential was Byron’s concept of the Muse in the early 1800’s that it triggered the emergence of the Romantic Ballet of Marie Taglioni with the ground-breaking ballet ‘La Sylphide’. Wherein the Sylph of the moon comes to the Scottish poet in a dream to enchant him...
[It is also worth noting that like Byron, in paintings the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of the 1860’s also merged the idea of women’s sexual liberation with the themes of the ‘Grail Romances’ to express the concept of the ‘Sacred Feminine’ in art, well before Dan Brown reawakened the Goddess of Love in his book ‘The Da Vinci Code’...]
We see in Byron’s poetry the emergence of the ‘Vampire’ theme in a very subtle form with the woman usually presented as a beautiful ‘hungry ghost’, a Sylph who takes the poet through the realm of death into transcendence; Byron being influenced by stories he heard on his travels in the Ottoman Empire of Turkey in the 19th century.
“And when into the cavern Haidee stepped
All timidly, yet rapidly, she saw
That like an infant Juan sweetly slept;
And then she stopped, and stood as if in awe
(For sleep is awful), and on tiptoe crept
And wrapt him closer, lest the air, too raw,
Should reach his blood, then o’er him still as death
Bent, with hushed lips, that drank his scarce-drawn breath...
And thus like to an angel o’er the dying
Who die in righteousness, she leaned; and there
All tranquilly the shipwrecked boy was lying,
As o’er him lay the calm and stirless air...”
[Byron, ‘Don Juan’, Canto II, CXLIII & CXLIV]
The same stormy night that Mary Shelley created the horror story of ‘Frankenstein’, Byron told the story of Count Dracula of Transylvania but it was Byron’s doctor, present at the party, who took Byron’s idea and first published it as a vampire story in its masculine form; which was then expanded by Bram Stoker into what has become the classic Vampire myth in Western Art. And so the Gothic themes emerge initially in the West aligned with the Romantic Arts of the Grail in the West through the influences of Lord Byron’s Sufi Mysticism.
‘Mystical Music’ then and its ‘mystical marriage’ with Metaphysical Poetry has a long history in both the West and the Middle East due to the primary influence of Pythagoras; who formulated the Western musical scale in relation to the ‘Music of the Spheres’ and the Harmonies of the Cosmos, as well as practising the philosophies of the pre-Christian and pre-Islamic Gnostic Mystery Schools. Thus the Sufism of Islam, its mystical traditions of Pythagorean musical harmonies and Neo-Platonic metaphysics, emerges from the same philosophical sources as the Western Romantic and Gothic Arts, and in particular from the esoteric traditions of Western music in all its forms. Which is why Sufism belongs within the Western ‘mystical music’ traditions and why so many Western mystics as well as Byron, even if they are not consciously attuned to Sufism like Byron, always seem to express its themes within their own Western cultural arts; as in the song of German Romanticism below before Wagner...
“Whose is the finger that plays on creation’s musical glasses?
Whose is the soul that breathes over the strings of the world?
To this harper sublime the hymn of the cosmos is singing,
Life-giving breath, to thee rises and kindles the heart.
Let my heart be a song that joins in the heavenly paean;
Let it dissolve therein, a pure and melodious chord.”
[Ludwig Theobald Kosegarten, 1758-1818, ‘The Harmony of the Spheres’]
For more information about the history of ‘mystical music’ from all traditions read ‘Music, Mysticism and Magic’ – A Sourcebook, by Joscelyn Godwin, Akana, [Penguin Group], London, 1987.
The abbreviations ‘D’ and ‘M’ above denote the sources for quotations, ‘D’ being the Diwan-i- Shams-i Tabrizi and ‘M’ being the Mathnawi works of Rumi.
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