Calling all the God(s): Efficacious Ritual Song and the Vocal Body

When we listen to a great song, says Nick Cave, “what we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it.” This audacity is the primary attribute of a comparative religious category I call “efficacious ritual song.” This category emerges from three autoethnographic ritual contexts: the Hindu folk practice of chanting for the dying; Jewish recitations for the dead in the pre-burial rite of tahara; and Shipibo Amazonian singing for healing non-natives in plant medicine ceremonies. In each case, song theurgically invokes a divine non-human agent to restore spiritual wholeness out of (psycho)somatic damage. This paper considers three interrelated aspects of efficacious ritual song: 1) its contextual mythological emergences from non-human materialities; 2) its ethnomusicological attributes, including methods of vocal masking; and 3) its protocols for calling forth divine non-human agents and vocally manifesting them: the human voice becomes acoustic flesh.