Music since The Dawn of Time
I recently attended a talk where the speaker was exploring music writing versus the concept of receiving music from the Divine. At the basis the idea is that when you get into that creative flow state, whether it’s in music writing or playing, or any of the art forms, or even in business, running, sports, every day activities, whatever action it may be, could it be the Divine working through us? Putting our active and controlling egoic mind to one side and allowing for the creative forces of the universe to flow through us. It’s a fascinating topic and one where the mind can voyage far into a myriad of ideas. One thing I was left with was the contemplation of when humans started “being musical” and also why.
Music holds a special place in all of our hearts in one way or another. I believe there are very few people out there who don’t like music. Whether it is playing music, singing, listening, writing, we all have our connection to it in some way. We only have to look at children and how naturally they respond to rhythm and harmony, to the sung voice and to percussive sounds - any adult who has had to patiently deal with an exuberant child beating the hell out of an upturned saucepan, or any other surface that resonates in some way will agree, I’m sure. The same goes for dancing. As a musician and having done a number of gigs over the years where while the adults are listening from the comfort of their chairs, it’s often the little kids who get right up close to the stage, bobbing away and staring at the instruments with awe and wonder. The joy on their faces and from their little beings is palpable.
Music is entertainment. Music creates an emotional backdrop to films and TV programmes. Music is relaxing and calming. Music is energising and motivating. Music can help us get our frustrations and anger out. Music is romantic and connecting. Music is so many different things. Music is also divine and in ceremonial contexts it is transporting. Every religion and spiritual practice has music, chanting, mantras and rhythm, in some form or fashion. So coming out of this talk my mind started exploring where music came from and whether any sense can be made out of the following musings.
Bear with me. It’s just my mind exploring and my heart stepping in when it gets lost in headiness and manmade constructs to bring it back to an eternal and elemental truth I believe we all hold within when the words stop and we can be in silence. That too is music.
Ethnomusicology is immense and I do not wish to repeat what can be found in many texts written with far more research and understanding than I can offer in this short article. But I do feel it is necessary to at least contemplate a few important findings about the history of music. It seems the earliest recorded data on music we have dates back to 4000 years and is found in the form of India’s Sama Veda, the shortest of the Indian Sanskrit Vedic Texts. There are four in total and this one is of melodies and chants. It holds divine status in the Hindu tradition and in the Bhagavad Gita (considered to be one of the greatest spiritual works the world has ever known), Lord Krishna proclaims it to be the most important of the vedas.
As for the origin of music itself, it is difficult to determine this precisely, also because, in my humble opinion, our understanding of history is only based on findings, piecing together a puzzle of an infinite number of moments and every day there are new discoveries coming to light that perhaps our history is not quite what they teach us at school. Though one can get lost in that idea, I do feel it is important to remain open to this and not just to music but to our world in general. At the end of the day, the only truth we know for sure is what we experience in the here and now.
Having said that, if we look to the world of achaeology as a guide, we learn of various uncoverings of ancient instruments, such as the Divje Babe flute dating back some 43,000 - 60,000 years ago, which was discovered in Slovenia in 1995. It’s one of many examples. Regardless of dates, it is sure that music is ancient, I have no doubt it predates the written word and even thought. There can be no archaeological records of singing, utterings, clapping and hands beating down on surfaces resonating into percussive sound waves. In a world where we rely on the headiness of the mind and thoughts, where if it isn’t written down it isn’t worthy, we would do well to remember that the heart and the body are far wiser than we are encouraged to give them credit for.
And then we come to the part of history which in particular fascinates me. Since seeing an interview with a young lawyer-by-day/author-by-night on Joe Rogan, named Brian Muraresku, I was hooked. He spent twelve years writing his first (and believe still only) book: The Immortality Key: Uncovering the Secret History of the Religion with No Name. In this book, he takes a controversial stance on the role psychedelics have played in the human experience of the Divine throughout Western history. The interview is really worth watching as it shows how much work and research he put into this nominal piece of work. And not just by looking things up on the internet or reading other books, he travelled the world and saw with his own eyes, heard with his own ears, and created a true masterpiece, which is shaking the Church to its foundations, as it casts serious doubt over the veracity of what we’ve been told about the history of Christianity itself.
But again, we can get lost in words and books or we can experience it for ourselves, by at least speaking to people who are well versed in the world of plant medicine and shamanism. Surely, we can’t dismiss thousands of years of spiritual practice so easily. A few examples of these beautiful plant medicines include peyote (Lophophora williamsii), dating back over 5000 years and found predominantly in the Southern States of the USA and Mexico, a key part of the Native American culture. We have also evidence of pre-Mayan cultures working with psilocybin mushrooms, dating back to 1500 BCE, though some believe mushrooms are far older than that and possibly even form a part of the very beginning of life itself.
It’s not just in the Americas either, of course not. If we go over to India, we see that in the Vedic period (1500-500 BCE), soma, a drink derived from an unidentified teacher plant, named after a Hindu deity, was used in spiritual ceremonies.
The list is long, and of course it also includes ayahuasca, used by indigenous groups in Peru, Brazil, among other South American countries, keepers of the Amazonian Rainforest, used for thousands of years, bringing healing through purging and embracing the shadow realm within each of us benefitting from deep healing talk therapy can barely touch on. The scientific evidence for this now is indisputable and the world is slowly but surely opening itself up to the power of teacher plants, micro-dosing and the positive outcomes on issues with depression and addiction, for example, where traditional therapy in the West still fails many.
But it’s not the plants I wish to focus on, it’s more the role of music in all of these practices. The conduit in all of them is music, song, vibration. And if we think about it, it is too in our more “traditional” and accepted religions, from Christianity to Judaism. Music is what unites all of them.
As a musician, as someone who considers music to be that best friend who is always there by my side in good times and in bad, this warms my heart. If in need, we can open our mouths, take a breath and utter the vibrations which pass through us and our voice box creating sound! What a miracle this is! We don’t need to look much further than that. At the end of the day, it’s also perhaps not so much which deities and entities come to visit us in shamanic works, or which scriptures we choose to look to for guidance, we can easily bring it back down to something elemental which we all hold within: our innate ability to create music. Each and every one of us.