Symbolism Behind The Labyrinth Music Video

Did you know that we conjured this music video for our song, The Labyrinth, using magick?

Sounds spooky, right?!? Not if you take a look behind the curtain to understand what magick is…

It’s all quite simple, really. The only thing we did was took an idea out of the infinity of our imagination and realized it into the finite material world for others to experience. That’s all magick is, an act of manifesting the imaginal into the material using focused intention, will, and action to achieve a desired result. Anything cast from the imaginal into the material by humans that has the effect of transforming or altering mood, consciousness, perception, behaviour, etc. of another could be termed a spell. That applies to a lot, if you think about it. Songs, music videos, books, poems, paintings, plays, tell-a-vision programming, and Hollywood films are all oft overlooked modern acts of magick. Institutions like Hollywood and The Church have intentionally painted magick as something dark, evil and demonic which is ironic, considering they both use magick themselves.

Holly wood was a preferred wood used in the creation of wands by the ancient Druids which J.K Rowling was undoubtedly aware of. But, despite popular opinion, magick isn’t all Harry Potter, Gandalf the Grey, or Merlin the Druid, and it certainly doesn’t need your belief in order to exist. Like Jareth the Goblin King’s endless promises of providing fulfillment and safety to Sarah if only she give in to him, Public Relations (formerly referred to as propaganda) firms specialize in magick, misdirection and illusion, too, as do advertising and marketing firms. You can add NGOs, politicians, lobbyists, news media and salespeople to this list. All are modern day examples of exoteric sorcery that often operates by psychologically manipulating the lowest octave of the material realm: desire.

One of the most obvious magick spells cast upon the populace is the unparalleled price people pay for popcorn at the cinema confectionary stand to subconsciously acquire the full “silver screen” experience.

“Pay attention to my balls, not the preposterous price you paid for GMO popcorn, peasant!”

The ritual we used in our magick spell was traditional for the creative arts. If you’re an artist, this will sound familiar to you. We started with a symbolic blank canvas representing the infinite potential of the sacred feminine where we connected with our creative source. Then we simply used the masculine principle to dream up an idea to create the direction of a narrative. Once we had that down, we needed a space to actualize it, so we looked for, then booked, a studio. We pooled $300 to pay for 8 hours and went to work manifesting our creative vision from our imagination to make the music video. We even dressed in costume as any magician would. All of this ritual action is the masculine principle of nature guided by the feminine aspect of imagination to create coherence between our conscious mind and our subconscious mind so the two are working together to achieve a result.

Load in at The Production Studio (Eric, Tara, Peter)

Our magic tools were not traditional wooden wands, they were guitars and drum sticks, but they were also the cameras on our scrying spiPhones, a single 10 year-old DSLR camera that we bought second hand many moons ago, and finally, a computer with video editing software we’ve had for a decade, too.

The magick spell took 8 days to perform during two rituals: the first, a single day of filming in the studio, and the second, an almost sleepless 100 hour week of editing. We directed and filmed everything ourselves, the latter of which may be obvious to some of the Virgos in the crowd. Take a look to see if you can spot the signs…

The exoteric aspect of our story is quite simply a band performing a song in a warehouse, but did you notice the subtle symbolism throughout the video?

We wanted to tell a similar story as the film, Labyrinth, albeit in the esoteric and abstract ’90s Music Video’ style we grew up with as kids. The symbolism is all hidden in plain sight there for those who have eyes to see, much like the Jim Henson classic, Labyrinth – and all of reality, really.

Here, let us spill some secrets for you to show you what to look for…

This first revelation may seem insignificant to a limited degree, although it’s the symbolic cornerstone of the fundamental principle of our perceived reality: duality.

We filmed in black and white because of its symbolism for the duality of the sacred feminine and masculine aspects of energy, representing the passive and active principles of nature that create our material world. It’s also symbolic for the hemispheres of the brain; the imaginative creativity associated with the right hemisphere and the structured order of the left. Even the guitars present this black and white theme with the room taking on the symbolic role of the skull, or the Temple, hidden in plain sight by staring straight at you. It’s repeated by the placement of the rhythm section that creates the movement of the song on the ‘masculine’ side of the room, and the emotional connection created by the vocals and guitar on the ‘feminine’. Working as a whole, they weave and embody the psychedelic environment of the song.

In the David Bowie film, Labyrinth, these energies are represented over and over again. From the numerous obelisks, symbolic for the phallic energy of the Apollonian Sun echoed in Jareth’s most impressive package and his music, or by the horned fertility masks of the masquerade ball – to the 13 hour clock, symbolic of the moon and its influence over the female reproductive system, reflected in Sarah’s white ball gown, or the owl, a nocturnal symbol for Greek goddess Athena who represents wisdom and virgin purity.

Athena was known for aiding heroes and disciplining mortals alongside her brother, Apollo. This is why the casting of an androgynous musician, like Bowie, was imperative to play the archetypical Apollo/Athena role of Jareth. Jim Henson’s, Labyrinth is a masterful tip of the helmet to Shake-speare.

In our music video, balancing the triangle of Apollonian energy created by the three male musicians, an alchemical symbol for fire and action, is Tara and the necklace she’s wearing of a triangle pointing downward, the alchemical symbol for water, associated with emotions and the sacred feminine. The latter is represented in both the film – Sarah as a vessel or chalice for life under the cycles of the moon – and the underlying ancient walking meditation tool of a labyrinth itself from where the film takes its name and symbolic themes. A walking labyrinth also functions as a lunar calendar, tracking the phases of the 13 lunations through the 4 seasons. It is the embodiment of the sacred feminine.

The number 13 is hidden in this labyrinth design. Can you find it?

How about we take things one step deeper into the realm of the esoteric for a moment, shall we? 13 is also the number we encounter with the sacred geometry of The Flower of Life created from 13 circles. This 2 dimensional matrix is the blueprint for the 3 dimensional material forms of the Platonic solids that we experience as we move through the 4th dimension. We used this symbol on our last EP, Gamma-Wave Rhythm.

This shape explains the creation of matter as a result of masculine and feminine energies combining to create a whole. The pattern this whole creates is identical to the process of embryonic cellular division, the third stage of which reveals the Egg of Life from which we all developed as humans. This Egg of Life of 8 cells created from a single fertilized egg, is represented in the film by Toby, a symbol of Sarah’s childhood innocence. Toby is a result of the union between Sarah’s father and her ‘evil’ step-mother which presented Sarah with a glimpse of her own possible future: adult responsibility, unless she runs away like her mother did to pursue fantasy. Her imaginative childhood world was threatened by the paradox of the alchemical processes her female body was experiencing compounded by the mounting societal pressures and observed patterns of the Super Ego.

An esoteric number that represents the natural reproductive process Sarah is battling with is the number 9, symbolic for the amount of moonths it takes for humans to develop in the womb. The three trimesters echo the three stages of life: maiden, mother, crone.

In the music video, the wide shot of the band shows the knobs on Sködt’s amp to the left of the screen featuring this grouping of nine ‘moons’ from three threes quite prominently.

The amps on both the left and right are each composed of 3 units of 3 round speaker ‘moons’, as is the three piece drum kit. The motif of three threes repeated a second time. As confirmation, you’d almost expect to see it once more, right? For any audio nerds out there, the microphone Tara is singing into, completing the circle allowing her voice to be heard by your ears, is a 414 which we used for the video because of the numerology of 4+1+4=9. TBH, it also looks much more interesting with its dual black and white grills than the other microphones Tara uses to record vocals with. We generally use the 414 for anything other than main vox, although we did the same thing for Phoenix II around 9 years ago, or so.

The final aspect of the music video is the overlaid multiple perspectives, symbolic of the journey into the centre of the labyrinth to confront the core of being. Like the masquerade ball of the film where Sarah throws a chair through the illusory walls of the Goblin King’s world before declaring he has no power over her, Tara employs a simple booted high kick. Looks like she was all out of bubblegum.
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Well, that concludes our symbolic spill session. We hope you found some of this interesting, if not informative in some way. We’d love to hear what you think about our music video, so please share your thoughts with us in the comments on YouTube and hit subscribe to be notified of future videos. We’ve already filmed the next one!

Pick up a limited edition 10″ transparent vinyl copy of our new EP, The Labyrinth and our new book, Ancient Technology: Handbook For The Recently Released, a partner publication for the EP that teaches you how to use the album artwork to alter your consciousness. It’s far out!