Jonas E. Alexis: Aleist Crowley, The Muses, and Trance in Greece and Modern Times.

I can explain everything better through music. You hypnotize people to where they go right back to their natural state, and when you get people at their weakest point, you can preach into their subconscious what we want to say. Jimi Hendrix. There are three methods for invoking any deity, The Third Method is the dramatic, perhaps the most attractive of all, certainly it is to the artists temperament, for it appeals to his imagination through his aethetic sense. It is very difficult for the ordinary man to lose himself completely in the subject of a play, but for those who can do so, this is unquestionably the best. This is certainly not a scientific principle, but it may have some explanatory power and scope that will help us unravel and understand that posts beneath much of the entertainment industry. According to Crowley, directors, screen writers, but most specifically actors and actresses can be easily possessed by losing themselves completely in the subject of the play. In other words, actors and actresses could directly or indirectly be possessed if they simply let themselves be inhabited by the characters they are trying to portray. One way to test this hypothesis is to see how this has played out in ancient history, most specifically in ancient Greece. Then, we can test it in our modern times. A third way is to let the actors and actresses speak for themselves. It must be emphasized that trance, spirit channeling, shamanism, and possession have always played a key aspect in music and art, from time immemorial, and African tribal music, which has produced many offshoots such as rap and rock and roll, is no exception. The word music comes from the Greek word mousike, which entails a spiritual dimension and power. The muses, in ancient Greek mythology, were the nine daughters of Zeus who were the goddesses of inspiration. Central to this ancient phenomenon was that the actors and dramatists would set the stage in such a way as to consciously or unconsciously invite the spirit of the muse, what we would now call spirit entities, to help them with their performances. This phenomenon is quite ancient and was widespread not only in ancient Greece but also in Rome, and Egypt. In the classic work Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City, we read: Apart from their extra discursive and historical identity, the actors and the choreutai of Attic comedy are involved in the action played on the stage as well as in the ritual performed by Dionysus in his sanctuary which is also the god of the theater. The Roman historian Livy wrote what happened during certain rites in this cult, though some have claimed that he exaggerated.