Today is Jeff Buckley’s birthday, he would have been 56 years old today. This time of year is always a time when I get deep with my remembrance of Jeff, it’s Samhain season a time of death and purging, so it’s apt that Jeff as a Scorpio is always at the forefront of my life during November.
For those who don’t know him, Jeff was a musician who came to some prominence during the 90’s. His first and only studio album Grace was released in 1994 and he sadly died by accidental drowning in 1997 at just 30 years old. I found Jeff in the Summer of 1995 and he has travelled with me ever since. I think of all the ‘famous deaths’ of people I admired, Jeff is the one that lingers and cuts most deeply.
I have a very otherworldly relationship with Jeff and I think he had a very otherworldly relationship with the earth and its inhabitants. Jeff has a place on my death altar, he has become part of the pantheon of ‘other’ that I work with magically. The archetypes he embodies for me (The Lover, The magician, The creative, The artist and The Revolutionary) are extremely powerful and can be used magically to invoke and transform aspects of myself that I’d like to bring forward.
I light my Jeff idol candle and speak to him often. I love how magic can be so flexible, it doesn’t have to involve prescribed Gods and Godessess and fifty million trinkets. If it moves you, use it. With Jeff it’s easy, his music is the ritual. It contains light and darkness, it transcends just being a nice tune with a hook. It is incredibly healing and cathartic. I have released love, rage, frustration and a myriad of other emotion with his music alone. His voice and how he used it, made it a conduit, a wailing banshee of pure feeling, it feels like being baptised by chaos and fire and light.
I truly believe that Jeff was one of those magical beings that transcended mere ‘human-ness’ I see him as an Undine, a water elemental, he just poured that watery emotional energy into the world. As sad as his death was, it was time to go home and the waters reclaimed him.
Today on his birthday, I’m listening to his music (although listening is maybe not the correct word for it) I’m absorbing it in some kind of mystical osmosis and allowing it, like a river, to wash through me. Jeff also reminds me that sometimes humans are magical and beautiful creatures and that we are capable of wonderful things. A useful reminder that fosters hope. A sigh of relief when things feel heavy. He is the lighthouse to which I sometimes need to steer my boat.
I can’t really adequately express what my internal voice is trying to say because I can’t find the words that do it justice, whenever I put words to paper regarding Jeff I always get these half baked water metaphors (as seen throughout this post) but maybe that’s how it needs to be, Undine Jeff infiltrating with his watery medicine.
Happy Birthday Jeff Buckley. You marvellous wizard. You are missed.
The Hermits Grove 