Essay:   Chanting and ecstatic voice 

I was listening to a friend and guest (song-writer / performer / recording artist) chanting last night for a small circle of friends. The chant was one she wrote called Phoenix Rising, and while she chanted I found myself drawn to looking at the faces of some of the people in the room. There was no mistaking what I saw in these faces was an ecstatic look, but I don’t mean by this that I was observing some trance-like expression that masked the individual’s personality. . .On the contrary, there was a look of excitement and anticipation in the eyes, a heightened alertness and a light, yes a kind of light, radiating from the faces as if the skin was opening on the cellular level and every cell, as it opened, shown an infinitesimal light.

    Lynne Hume notes, “. . .songs function to relate the singer to the Dreaming events in a different way than do songs in the ordinary referential mode of communication. . .Moyle (on the Kukatja, Western Australia) remarks that individual personalities of the (Aborigine singer-) actors appear to change during song performance: faces light up, eyes assume a sharper focus. . .) (Hume, Ancestral Power, 96) I read this for the first time about a week after writing the above description. It would seem that the change in my friends that I witnessed during the chanting in my living room was similar or identical to what Moyle was seeing in the features of the Aborigines who were participating in the song-performance. . .Hume says, “Songs reintegrate the actor with the Dreaming. . .Aborigines move from ‘talking about’ to ‘living through’ Ancestral events”(96).      

    But, as I say, there was no abeyance of personality, rather an enhancement of personal beauty.  One woman couldn’t keep her eyes still. She looked like she wanted to move; her spirit was ecstatically agitated. The man’s expression was steady and sweetly intense like a child watching a movie. He was blissfully present and grounded where he sat.

    Chanting is not poetry. It incorporates poetic elements and language only in the most rudimentary way, as one ingredient of the whole auditory (vibrational) experience. What chanting does is it generates energy and sustains spontaneous interest; it taps into our reserves of all those energies and emotions mentioned above: wonder, excitement, anticipation, alertness, bliss. . .etc. and it does this by-passing all the critical faculties. There is nothing to “understand”, nothing to misinterpret, nothing to short-circuit one’s deepening involvement. The only thing that can short-circuit the effect of the chant is one’s refusal to participate or receive. 

    As in the example of the chant that we were treated to, the rhythmic drumming, the repetitive intensity of the language or sounds (which don’t have to be linguistically familiar), the modulations of tonality in the voice -- all of this together --  moves, massages and channels the energy of the (receptive) listener, into a building energetic context that has less and less to do with the chant than with the effect of the chant -- which I might describe as a cascade of switches in each listener that is funneling more and more energy into a main circuit. Then what happens depends on how the energy is utilized or directed, i.e., for séance, spirit-conjuring, ritual or ceremony or entertainment.

    Holger Kalweit has this to say about chanting in séance (spirit-conjuring) “The background chanting supports the ecstatic unity of everyone present. The songs are not just entertaining verses – they come from inside and express the power of the human psyche. They are utterances of an archaic unity with the world.” We find the shamanic power chant. . .”in many accounts of initiation. The rhythm of the song is an expression of inner relaxation, of evenly flowing energy currents, pulsing life. . .All the power songs (of the shaman) are characterized by great simplicity and emotion”(Kalweit, Shamans, Healers and Medicine Men, 1992, 57).

    Chanting is not poetry but ecstatic poetry has a lot to learn from chanting. With ecstatic poetry you may or may not be affected but with chanting one has to work hard at resisting its effect to not be affected because it comes from a deep place and one responds from a deep place.