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.”[1] The audacity to reach beyond humanity is the primary attribute of a comparative religious category I call “efficacious ritual song.” This category emerges from the study of three autoethnographic ritual contexts: the Hindu folk practice of chanting mantra for the dying; Jewish recitations of shir for the dead in the pre-burial rite of tahara; and Shipibo Amazonian singing of mashá to heal non-natives in plant medicine ceremonies. In each case, the 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 its status as a liminal utterance and methods of vocal masking; and 3) its protocols for calling forth divine, non-human agents and vocally manifesting them. The human voice becomes the acoustic flesh of a non-human agent.
Efficacious ritual song is undergirded by contextual mythologies for the emergence of vocal utterances in each tradition. In the Rigveda, the goddess Voice (Vāc) is embodied as a cosmic cow, whose lowing flows forth the oceans of the earth, upon which all else is established: “The Cow has lowed, fashioning seas . . . From her, oceans flow forth . . . From there the Syllable flows, On that everything subsists” (ṚV 1.164.41-42). This milk-song inspires the mantras of poet-seers, vocal “flashlights of eternal truth.”[2] The first vocal utterance of the Hebrew Bible, God speaking light, emerges after ruach elohim, a godly wind, sweeps across the face of deep waters (Genesis 1:2). The first human song praises divine deliverance after God wields wind and water to split the Red Sea and drown the adversary (Exodus 15). In the Shipibo tradition, the primordial anaconda, Ronin, mother of the waters, source of medicinal plants, whose scaly skin shines with the first patterns of the world, sings the world into being through them.[3] Her winding form is replicated in the ayahuasca vine, the rivers, and the star-studded milky way. The material vessels for song are animal and elemental, even when humans seem to be singing.
Efficacious ritual song is thrice liminal: 1) it petitions forces beyond the human; 2) it works on patients in liminal states, transitioning between peak states of being; and 3) it slips between the polarities of speech and song, making it a “liminal utterance.” This is a recent ethnomusicological designation created by Estelle Amy de la Bretèque and Jeffers Engelhardt which includes vocal production that is culturally marginalized, sacred, intimate, and non-human. Efficacious ritual song is all of these. Its attributes include a reduction of vocal styling and aesthetically oriented production values, a reduction or emptying of personal emotion, and a de-emphasis of linguistic meaning. Tones may be elongated, monotonous, drone-like sounds or a nasalized, bright, falsetto, which can be understood as forms of vocal masking. Vocal masking creates the conditions for the singer to transform themselves and open connections to divine non-human beings.
The primary attribute of efficacious ritual song is its capacity to reach beyond the human, and call forth divine non-humans, in order to transform their human patients. The Hindu context calls gods such as Śiva, Viṣṇu, and Gaṅgā; tahara directly and allegorically summons God and angelic intermediaries, and the Shipibo healing songs connect to divinized plant spirits known as masters, doctors, and gods. These forces, channeled through ritual song, link damaged bodies to divinized worlds.
Efficacious ritual singing requires a protocol for inviting divine non-human connection to enter the vocal body: 1) The practitioner establishes an intentional connection with divine agent(s) within the ritual context; 2) The practitioner recognizes the divine agent(s) as the source of healing; agency is ceded to this source; 3)The practitioner’s song calls forth the divine agent(s) to work on the patient, which begins on the physical level of pain, decay, or damage, and moves beyond it. This can be understood through a Shipibo-inspired acoustic ontology. Bernd Brabec describes how plant spirits that “are summoned by the [Shipibo] singing specialist become manifest in his voice… the healer’s voice is the spirit’s body.”[4] Embodied as a song-actor—in the “acoustic flesh” of the healer’s voice—the divine agent heals through auditory (physical) and spiritual (metaphysical) realms. This can be likened to mystical understandings of ritual song: medieval Jewish mystic Abraham Abulafia’s disciple asserted that King David and the ancient Levite priests received their melodies from the angels. Amnon Shiloah compares this to the Talmudic legend of David’s lyre, hung over his bed, that played of its own accord when the north wind blew through it. [5] The vocal body is that lyre, and the north wind is the spirit that sings through. These songs establish an interdependent hierarchy of relational emergence in which 1) a human addresses a divine non-human agent, 2) the divine non-human agent emerges through the human voice in order to 3) transform, heal, ease, or liberate human patients.
[1] Nick Cave, “Considering human imagination the last piece of wilderness,” The Red Hand Files, January 2019, https://www.theredhandfiles.com/considering-human-imagination-the-last-piece-of-wilderness-do-you-think-ai-will-ever-be-able-to-write-a-good-song/
[2] Jan Gonda, “The Indian Mantra,” Oriens 31, no. 16 (1963): 247.
[3] Luisa Elvira Belaunde, “Diseños materiales e inmateriales: la patrimonialización del kené shipibo-konibo y de la ayahuasca en el Perú.” Mundo amazónico 3 (2012):128.
[4] Bernd Brabec de Mori, “Sonic Substances and Silent Sounds: An Auditory Anthropology of Ritual Songs,” Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America: Vol. 13: Iss. 2, Article 3 (2015): 35.
[5]Amnon Shiloah, “The Symbolism of Music in the Kabbalistic Tradition,” World of Music 20, no. 3 (1978): 58-59.
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.