You Can’t Rely On Harry Potter.

To be fair to Harry his stories did reignite my passion for magic.
Many years ago I had managed to track down a copy of Master Blackbird’s Spells Of Subtlety only to find that I couldn’t get any of the spells to work.
I tried making magic wands to help cast the spells, I tried pronouncing each spell in as many different ways as I could think of - nothing!
Eventually I gave up convinced that magic was simply an invention of fairy tales.

A few years later along came Harry Potter and he inspired me to get the Spell Book out and try again.
I decided to choose one particular spell and to keep repeating it in every possible manner until I succeeded in getting some result.
Weeks of frustration followed.

I had mentioned my frustration to Mystic and he arranged for me to have a chat with a friend (who I later learned was a Buddhi Magician).
Oh what an eye opening conversation that was!

Mystic’s friend explained that one of the prerequisites for being a magician is perfect pitch.
It seems that only the simplest spells can simply be read and all the important spells must be sung.
It is the frequency and duration of each ‘note’ that is fundamentally important.
Of course each Master has his own ‘key’ and unless you know that you have virtually no chance of successfully casting any of his spells.
Which explains why it is usually only the students of the master who attempt to steal his Spell Book.

I learned a lot of things in that short chat with Mystic’s friend that would never have occurred to me in a thousand years. Each master uses a letter to represent a certain sound and the sound can be modified by ‘hats and shoes’ the little marks above and below the letter. Hats are used to signify a slide to the next note, a sustain, or a gap between notes. Shoes are used to signify a change of octave and can be up to three steps up or down.

Although the most powerful magicians are, more often than not, male because the fundamental power lies in the deepest notes, females can ’cast’ spells which include the higher frequencies which allows more power to be safely developed during the casting due to the subtle control of the focus using the higher notes.
Great Mages always have a vocal range of several octaves while lesser mages are often forced to use partners which solves the range problem but increases the inherent danger of a miss-cast spell.

However, nice as it was to have all the new information, especially since I do have perfect pitch, it didn’t really help and after several weeks of inventing ‘tunes’ that seemed to fit the words I gave up once more.

I was sat out in the local park early one sunny Sunday morning and I was thinking that the only magic I really needed was all around me...
The trees, the flowers, the sunshine and the beautiful bird song.

The bird song was particularly beautiful and I noticed it was a blackbird which reminded me of Master Blackbird’s Spell Book. Suddenly the bird’s song seemed to connect with the words of the spell which I had practiced the most during my weeks of frustration after my renewed interest sparked by Harry Potter.

There was no-one around and I couldn’t resist attempting to cast the spell.
I sang the spell using the ’tune’ that the blackbird had inspired and at the instant I finished the world went black!

It was only a cloud passing over the sun but it inspired me to rush home and recheck the spell to see if I had got it right.
When I got home I opened the Book and noticed a couple of mistakes that I had made.
I tried singing the spell again and…

There’s a lot more to Harry Potter than you might think!