It is easiest to see Led Zeppelin’s illustration of the message that joy can only come from accepting loss, if we arrange Led Zeppelin’s songs to form seven musical journeys that show us how the pain of loss can lead to joy. These seven musical journeys form Led Zeppelin’s septalogue. Led Zeppelin, of course produced many more than seven musical journeys. (they recorded 72 songs in all, though most of these songs were parts of album sides that were musical journeys, (rather than being musical journeys by themselves.). Each album Led Zeppelin released, though, usually illustrated many different themes in different sections, with songs on each album expressing the recurring themes of loss, pain, and joy, in different musical styles. Putting songs expressing the same theme from different albums next to each other shows the theme they are expressing even more clearly than each song does individually, and often listening to songs that express joy immediately after songs that show great tribulation shows more powerfully the connection between the two which one sees most clearly by viewing Led Zeppelin’s career as one great journey in which early albums focus more on tribulation and later albums focus more on joy. Putting songs from different albums next to each other also allows us to experience individual parts of this journey more powerfully when we hear songs that express the same theme in different musical styles, immediately before and after each other. While a septalogue of seven Led Zeppelin musical journeys often puts these songs together, it also maintains Led Zeppelin’s aim of producing a first album that focuses almost wholly on the suffering harmful desires can lead us to (in which Led Zeppelin restated the theme of traditional blues music) by producing a first logue that is also dedicated to showing this suffering, and also maintains Led Zeppelin’s tendency to focus more on joy and less on tribulation in their later albums by focusing more on joy and less on tribulation in the last two logues of the septalogue. The fact that Led Zeppelin’s music produces the material for seven journeys illustrates Led Zeppelin’s awareness that joy cannot be maintained by rejecting a harmful desire once, but can only be maintained by rejecting harmful desires again and again, throughout one’s life. For this reason Led Zeppelin’s career as a whole evokes the image of a Sisyphus who performs the hard work of rolling a stone up a hill every day, and who then experiences intense joy throughout the rest of each day. Each of the seven logues in Led Zeppelin’s septalogue is named for the image most strongly evoked by that logue. The seven logues correlate to the seven days of the week. The first logue should be listened to on the first day of the week, the second logue on the second day, and so on until the week ends and this cycle starts over again at the beginning of the next week just as Sisyphus starts over again every morning. If you print the septalogue presented below (or if you view a print preview screen) you will notice that the seven logues in order form a near circle that represents the counterclockwise reflection of Jimmy Page’s arm traveling a near circle every time he strikes one of the power chords in the heart of ‘The Song Remains the Same’ This image should be superimposed over each week so we think of each week as one circle of this chord with a pause after that chord as there is a pause after each of these power chords in this song., and then another chord for every week we live, just as the chords in ‘the Song Remains the Same’ follow one another to reproduce the rhythm on which all life rides and is sustained.
I believe that the Led Zeppelin Septalogue start on Tuesday because Tuesday was named for Tiw, the Norse God of war, (and in Romance language was named for Mars, the Roman god of war), and because the first logue in Led Zeppelin’s septalogue shows great suffering as there is great suffering in war, because The second logue of Led Zeppelin’s septalogue, shows a person still ensnared by destructive desire as a fly ensnared in a spiders web, because this man is like a man who is dead and who will soon be brought to life when he cuts himself loose, and because wednesday is named for The Norse god of death Wend, (and in Romance languages this day is named for the Roman god who brought people to the realm of death, Mercury), because the power of the renunciation of the third logue reminds us of the power of Thor’s hammer, and for this reason is best listened to on Thursday (and also reminds us of the power of Jupiter for whom this day is named in Romance languages), because the fourth logue is even more evocative of a violent struggle against death and subsequent return to life, and thus reminds us of the suffering Jesus knew on a friday, because the fifth logue is the logue in which our minds catch up with our emotions in the renunciation we must perform, and because saturday is the day on which our minds must comprehend the meaning of Jesus’ life if we hope to be able to rise with Jesus on Sunday, because the sixth logue is the most celebratory of all logues in the septalogue, and because on the seventh day we must ride the wave of life that has been created throughout the six preceding days, for one day, before we start to recreate this wave with the new week because doing this requires humor and perspective, and remembering the strength of our previous renunciation, because these qualities are the hallmarks of the seventh logue with ‘Black Country Woman’ showing the use of humor and perspective in the place of the more powerful renunciations we experienced on previous days just as the moon is like a memory of the sun that had preceded if, and with ‘In The Light’ reminding us of our earlier renunciations by showing a renunciation that is like our earlier ones but less powerful, and then we end our week with more celebration at the end of this logue, until we feel fully sated after ‘in the evening’, and night flight’ and feel ready to collapse into a deep sleep knowing we will start our journey again when we awake. There is some room for variation in song order in the Ld Zeppelin Septalogue. I indicate this at many points by showing alternative songs that could be used but because I believe these replacements would diminish the septalogue I label these alternatives with the abbreviation vpn for ‘Very Probably Not.’ There is also one alternative presented for the circumstance in which a person is recording each logue on a cassette tape, and one of those tapes has too little space (abbreviated TL space).
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