SLIGHTLY OUT OF TUNE

Melvyn J Willin. Music and the Paranormal; an Encyclopedic Dictionary. McFarland, 2022.

Music probably developed in human culture via the paranormal, with its origins in religious rituals and as a way of entering alternate states of consciousness. From ritual chants and rhythmic drumming, to tuneful hymns or Baroque masses, most religious observation has been accompanied by music.

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ROCK AND ROOTS

Christopher Hill. Into The Mystic: The Visionary and Ecstatic Roots of 1960’s Rock and Roll. Park Street Press (2017)

For those hoping for a scholarly examination of the 'visionary and ecstatic roots of Rock and Roll', this book will prove to be a disappointment. There is very little attempt to delve into the complexities of Eastern or Western mysticism, whether by reference to the origins of Buddhist or Hindu mysticism in the Vedas, or Christian mysticism originating in the writings of St. Dionysus the Aereopagite, and maintained in the monastic meditative tradition to the present day.
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SOUL SEARCHING

Roger Scruton. The Soul of the World. Princeton University Press, 2016.

Roger Scruton’s The Soul of the World is in eight chapters. The first is titled “Believing in God” and the last “Seeking God.” It’s gratifying that he doesn’t end on the certainty of having found God nor propose any speculative evidence for God’s existence! Scruton is a philosopher not a theologian. 
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MAGICK, MUSIC AND ROCK AND ROLL

Peter Berbergal. Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll. Tarcher, 2014.

Music, it has been said, is the only art that engages our entire brain. Whether this is true or not, it can certainly reach into us and touch emotions in a way that other art forms may miss. It is something that can surprise us by reaching into our memories in an abrupt and unexpected fashion to resurrect past times and moods.
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THE BEASTLY LEGACY

Gary Lachman, Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World, Tarcher/Penguin. 

It seems there are an awful lot of people who can forgive Aleister Crowley almost anything. The self-styled Great Beast of the Book of Revelation, and the man the tabloids loved to hate as ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’, who died in 1947, is a largely unreconstructed hero to many groups of modern pagans and ritual magicians.
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