Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV Read Online Free PDF Page B

of a hawk tucked away in Colby’s mountain. After performing a Lesser Banishing Ritual and meditating with this image for a few hours, however, I believe that this avian totem is actually a penguin.
    How do we account for these creatures that form themselves from random squiggles? Think back to when you were a kid, and elephants and pirate ships formedthemselves on the fly from floating clouds or weathered stone. Those spontaneous cartoons remind us that our brains are not just passive receivers of data but active projectors of meaning, constantly weaving the information they pick up into holistic perceptions. In certain situations, these projections draw heavily from the dream-store of the imagination, especially when the visual data is shadowy or ambiguous, a liminal condition that makes our projections tend toward the fantastic. Leonardo da Vinci famously suggested that novice painters should spend some time staring at stained walls and mottled rocks until “the likeness of divine landscapes” emerged. 17 This phantasmagorical response to visual ambiguity also explains why the slanted shades of twilight can lay a faery glamour across the land. It also explains the alternate name of Colby’s drawing: “View in Half or Varying Light.” The word “View” here, which you might take to be a noun, may actually be a command. By viewing the drawing in half (mirrored) or varying light, the drawing’s capacity to invoke your imagination is enhanced. You get it?
The beast is inside you.
MAGIC RUNES
    Yanking out the inner sleeve from the gatefold, we come across the lyrics to “Stairway to Heaven,” somerecording data, and four peculiar symbols emblazoned on the parchment-colored paper. These notorious symbols, or sigils, concentrate and refract the mystery of the entire record. The first thing that must be said is that there are
four
of them, and that they appear on the fourth record released by a quartet, a record that features four songs on each side. On a talismanic disc like, all these fours suggest the most fundamental of occult quaternities: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, the four elements once believed to make up the whole of material reality. As Crowley suggested in the quote from the
Equinox
cited above, these elements are also spiritual qualities, and were decisively linked to the four suits of the Tarot deck by the French magus Éliphas Lévi. In his influential 1855 book
Dogme et rituel de la haute magie
, which kick-started the modern occult revival. Lévi expanded magic’s network of correspondences by correlating Earth, Air, Fire, and Water to, respectively, Discs, Swords, Wands, and Cups.
    John Bonham’s sigil, later emblazoned on his single bass drum, is made up of three Discs; with only a tad bit more imagination, we can see John Paul Jones’s sign as three stylized Cups knotted together over a central circle. Earth and water are
base
elements; Jones played bass, and Bonzo was base, at least when he was drunk. The wordsmith Plant’s feather clearly belongs to air, the element of speech and thought pictured by the Tarotas the suit of Swords, one of which Plant wields in his fantasy sequence in
The Song Remains the Same
. And to Page, of course, goes the element of fire, of transformative energies and the magical Will. In Lévi’s scheme, fire and will are associated with the suit of Wands (or violin bows); besides including a number of wand-like shapes, the Zorro slash ofrecalls the electrical fire of lightning, the spark of the alchemical process.
    When music critics attempt to describe the synergy that great musical combos can generate, they often fall back, rather loosely, on the notion of alchemy. In alchemy, which differs from chemistry in its sensitivity to psychospiritual dynamics, various base materials are combined, sometimes under great tension, in order to transform those substances into things rare and noble. Alchemy is the metallurgy of the spirit, and so makes a fit analogy for music,