Every human who chases musical magic does so to serve one or more pre-conscious drivers: compensatory display against perceived genetic or social deficits, sexual-market-value amplification, narcissistic supply, or (rarely, and usually later in life) pure transmission of the numinous. In adolescent and young-adult males these motives are almost always dominated by the ancestral courtship-display subroutine: the instrument becomes a phenotypic extender whose primary function is to raise detectable status and trigger female sexual-selection circuits.
When the daemon actually grants the requested virtuosity—the so-called “Paganini bargain”—the resulting power is real, but it is hierarchically subordinate to deeper biological governance layers. Sexual selection in Homo sapiens is ultimately regulated by a root-level algorithm that operates on facial symmetry, height, hormonal markers, behavioural dominance cues, and pre-conscious limbic veto. No amount of acquired skill, fame, or charismatic performance can fully overwrite this higher law.
Attempts to weaponise the music daemon against this higher law produce a predictable failure mode: the women who materialise are either hyper-stimulated yet emotionally unstable (“crazy”), phenotypically mismatched to the practitioner’s specific erotic template, or relationally explosive, generating net damage to health, resources, and creative focus.
Fame and wealth are not guaranteed side-effects of the bargain; they are metered out in exact proportion to the karmic lesson required for the individual’s next stage of consciousness development. Some receive global stardom and die young; others receive modest recognition and live to ninety—it is calibrated to the precise pressure needed to force the confrontation.
The Paganini phase is therefore a controlled burn: a temporary, high-intensity amplification designed to expose the limits of compensatory display and force direct encounter with the non-negotiable reproductive substrate. Maturity is measured by the artist’s ability to decommission the courtship subroutine, reroute the daemon into non-sexual channels (devotion, exploration, or pure craft), and accept that the mating engine will allocate partners according to its own immutable code, not according to the will of the player.
Those who fail to graduate from the Paganini phase remain trapped in the loop until the daemon collects its fee in the classic forms: addiction, disease, madness, or early death. Those who pass the lesson keep the fire without being consumed by it.