Shamans Song

Shamanic music

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Recently in Siberia , music groups drawing on a knowledge of shamanic culture have emerged. In the West shamanism has served as an imagined background to musics meant to alter a listener's state of mind.

Korea and Tibet are two cultures where the music of shamanic ritual has interacted closely with other traditions. Although shamans use singing as well as drumming and sometimes other instruments, a shamanic ritual is not a musical performance in the normal sense, and the music is directed more to spirits than to an audience. Several things follow from this. First, a shamanic ritual performance is, above all, a series of actions and not a series of musical sounds.

Fourth, any theatrical elements that are added to impress an audience are of a type to make the contact with the spirits seem more real and not to suggest the performer's musical virtuosity. From a musical perspective shamanic ritual performances have the distinctive feature of discontinuity.

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Breaks may happen because a spirit is proving difficult to communicate with, or the shaman needs to call a different spirit. Typically, phases of the performance are broken off abruptly, perhaps to be restarted after a gap, perhaps not.

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It has been argued [7] that shamanism and spirit possession involve contrasting kinds of special states of mind. The shaman actively enters the spirit world, negotiates with her or his own helper spirit and then with other spirits as necessary, and moves between different territories of the spirit world.

The possessed medium, on the other hand, is the passive recipient of a powerful spirit or god.

This reflects on the different uses of music involved. Possession music [8] is typically long in duration, mesmeric , loud and intense, with climaxes of rhythmic intensity and volume to which the medium has learned to respond by entering a trance state: In shamanism, the music is played by the shaman, confirms the shaman's power in the words of the shaman's song , and is used actively by the shaman to modulate movements and changes of state as part of an active journey within the spirit world.

In both cases the connection between music and an altered state of mind depends on both psychoacoustic and cultural factors, and the music cannot be said to 'cause' trance-states. Sound is tactile; whereas visual information is experienced at the surface, auditory information seems to be both outside and inside the body. In many cases, this holds also for the music in shamanistic practice, including e. The shaman's use of sound is to catalyse an imaginary inner environment which is experienced as a sacred space-time in which the shaman travels and encounters spirits.

Sound, passing constantly between inner and outer, connects this imaginary space with the actual space of the ritual in which the shaman is moving and making ritual actions and gestures. It has been suggested that the sound material used by the shaman constitutes a system of sounds. However, the evidence suggests that any symbolic language elements are understood only by the shaman and perhaps by other shamans initiated by this shaman. In other words, the symbolic language - if there is one - is more likely to be shared with the spirits than with a human community.

A very important element in Siberian shamanism is the use of hanging metallic objects - possibly including small bells - attached to the shaman's ritual cloak and to the inside of the drum and also sometimes to the beater. This sets up a continuously moving sound field, heard as a single complex sound. Different individual shamans and different local traditions may use different sounds. For example, in the south of Tuva and in Mongolia the khomus , or jaw harp is commonly used in shamanising.

Particular sounds, like bells, may be used for purifying the place in which the ritual is to be performed. A bell may also be used for calling or sending back spirits. Within shamanic ritual, sound can also be used as a healing power, conceived as a way of directing spiritual energy from the shaman into an afflicted person.

The shaman's song - or algysh [20] in Tuvan - is personal to the shaman [21] and tells of her or his birthplace, initiation, ancestral pedigree, special gifts and special connections to particular spirits. The melody and words are composed by the shaman and generally remain the same throughout the shaman's professional life. The algysh is often sung near the beginning of the ritual and accompanied by drumming on the dungur drum.

It serves to remind the shaman of their shamanic identity and power. It proclaims the shaman's abilities and announces the shaman to the spirits. In some traditions the shaman's song may be broken up into short sections, varied and recombined in different performances. The single headed frame drum is widely used in shamanic ritual, often with metallic ritual objects dangling inside, held by an interior wooden cross-piece, and played with a special beater that may also itself be a rattle.

It will also have been 'enlivened' usually by a more powerful shaman so as to give it its spiritual properties.

A shamanic ritual often begins with heating the drum head over a fire to bring it up to the desired pitch. A number of theories have been advanced to explain the importance of percussion in ritual music in general. For this reason the drumming is not restricted to regular tempo but may speed up and slow down with irregular accents. From the late s with the loosening up of political restrictions a number of Siberian native cultures underwent a cultural renaissance, shamans began to practice openly again, and musicians formed bands drawing on shamanic traditions.

Nevertheless, the musicians involved, if sometimes unsure of their own exact role, recognized an important difference between artists using shamanic themes and shamans themselves. In the West bands began to apply the label 'shamanic' loosely to any music that might induce a trance state. Synchronous with her unfolding vision, sitting in the darkness across the room from her, an unsuspecting Don Orlando found himself beholding an animal such as he had never seen before: Inspired singers seem to tap into something energetic woven into the fabric of creation.

In an illustration of Caedmon on the cross at St. These are now such familiar symbolic tropes for divine inspiration within the Christian tradition, we can miss the obvious: Caedmon is being played by creation, not the other way around. An account of St. Brendan, from the 10th century, can give us an idea of the power of this song. It tells how the saint, whenever music was played in his monastery, would quietly insert wax plugs in his ears, which he continually wore on a string around his neck. Brendan visibly endured a performance that probably would have left us wonderstruck.

Psycho-Spiritual Integration and Holotropic Breathwork

Perplexed, the student asked,. One day when I was in this church, after Mass I was left here alone, and a great longing for my Lord seized me. As I was there, trembling and terror came upon me; I saw a shining bird at the window, and it sat on the altar. I was unable to look at it because of the rays which surrounded it, like those of the sun.

The bird set the beak on the side of its wing, and I was listening to it from that hour to the same hour the next day; and then it bade me farewell. I give my word before God, that after that music, no music of the world seems any sweeter to me than does this stylus across the neck, and to hear it I take to be but little profit.

Shamanic Song among the Ancient Celts

Brendan not only heard heavenly music, he sailed, as did Odysseus, to islands inhabited by divinities. Here Brendan and his monks arrive at the island of Paradise, a feat that could be accomplished in the sacred topography of ancient and medieval Europeans. Such transporting heavenly songs can still be heard in the shamanic traditions of the Amazon jungle. No desire to eat. Those are the icaros. In this way, the vitality of the origins of a culture continues to flow from its timeless source.

Skip to content Indigenous, shamanic ways of healing and prophecy are not foreign to the West.

Here is an excerpt from the The Shamanic Odyssey: Said this mysterious figure: Is it because you think it bad?

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