M. Macha NightMare, 1999, 2000, reprinted from PanGaia #26,
Winter '00-'01
In all my years of practicing Witchcraft, I have found chanting,
singing and breath and vocal work to be one of the most efficacious
means of changing consciousness, and of 'charging' a working.
It's the easiest, most accessible method I know of. Anyone who
breathes can chant; it's as easy as breathing and vocalizing.
We1
need no tools for chanting. We carry lungs and voices with us
at all times, our 'magical tools' are oxygen, our lungs and
our voices. It's not necessary to be musical, to be able to
carry a tune — though it helps. Yet it's also a sacred
technology that we often don't make the best use of. Regardless
of the setting or what other tangible tools may be at hand for
us to use, we can always be ready to chant when a situation
calls for it; or when circumstances are such that they can be
changed, the energy can be moved by chanting.
This is important because, as Don Frew has suggested,
"in the absence of a single Neo-Pagan liturgy, songs and
chants may act as a unifying factor, establishing a shared set
of beliefs and principles which become a part of Neo-Pagan culture."2;
Furthermore, chants are an important ritual technique "because
of their simple two- or four-line structure, they are easily
learned and transmitted."
Many are the rituals I've attended where the chants were only
casually taught ahead of time, in order that everyone could
participate as much as possible in the working at hand. Then,
when the chants were employed in the ritual itself, they were
repeated only three or four times. Had they been extended, had
they been repeated beyond the point of thinking about them and
what the next line was, beyond the point of 'knowing' the chant,
beyond the point of boredom, they could have been far more powerful.
As with other kinds of magical workings, in using chants we
are better served by striving for the increased power of synergy.
Our magic is stronger when we include everyone in the working,
when we take advantage of the unique contributions of each individual
as well as of the collective energy that can be raised by everyone
in the circle.
The groups I work with begin most rituals with a simple breathing
and grounding tree of life meditation which often involves vocalization.
Many, if not most, other Craft traditions use a similar technique
to harmonize their energies and to ready themselves for the
magical work at hand. With just a bit more emphasis on vocalization
as release of unnecessary concerns and distracting thoughts,
we can begin to warm ourselves up.
During the time when participants are being purified in preparation
for the ritual, with air and fire, with water and earth, we
often begin a very soft chanting of "The
ocean is the beginning of the Earth, the ocean is the beginning
of the Earth. All things come from the sea. All things come
from the sea."3;
We do this very softly, and usually begin to sway like the gentle
action of the waves meeting a beach. This has the effect of
involving those others in the circle who are not at that moment
in the act of purifying or being purified, of bringing our breath
and voices together even more, and of reinforcing the work of
the priest/ess who is doing the purifying. Competing with one
another in volume does not facilitate the work. To increase
the volume of such a chant is to the miss the point of using
it entirely. Consider the two following examples of using pre-taught
chants in large group rituals.
Using Chants in Ritual
One of our early attempts at using chants in ritual prepared
for others (as opposed to using chants within our own
coven working) was when Coven Holy Terrors created a ritual
as our gift to the first Merry Meet festival held by the Covenant
of the Goddess (CoG) in 1981. We were a coven of nine women,
and operated as a 'group priestesshood.' We created a performance
ritual, which was also meant to be experienced by attendees,
based on the Wheel of the Year. One of us began with a tree
of life mediation for everyone, then our drummer (my late husband
Rod) accompanied us as the other eight of us entered the space
(which happened to be a desanctified U.S. Army chapel in the
Golden Gate National Recreation Area in the San Francisco Bay
Area).
Each priestess embodied one of the sabbats (Witches seasonal
holy days) beginning at Samhain. The circle was marked with
eight stations, the foremost being the one where the sabbat
priestess spoke. We moved from one station to the next as we
progressed from sabbat to sabbat. We used different chants,
nearly all of which were familiar to the people attending the
ritual, so they didn't need to be taught ahead of time. People
could just join in. Another factor which made this ritual a
bit different was that all participants were Witches of one
kind of another; no one was a novice at creating and participating
in ritual. It was easy to 'read the energy' of the room and
to diminish the chant when the priestesses had moved to the
next station. At the end, we used a lively chant that had everyone
on their feet celebrating our Wheel. That last chant went on
until it was exhausted and died down, at which point everyone
grounded.
Some years later, I attended a ritual based on the ten Sephiroth
of the Kaballah where a similar technique was used. There was
a priestess and a priest for each Sephiroth. The ritualists
used different chants to move the priest/esses from one point
to another. The cantor attempted to teach the chants ahead of
time, but not enough time was given for us to have actually
learned them. As was the case in our Wheel of the Year ritual,
this Kaballah ritual was performed in a setting of Witches.
However, the chants chosen were less widely known, and in addition,
most Witches know the sabbats but many are unfamiliar with Kaballah.
So when the time came for the celebrants to use the chant, we
fumbled and groped and ended up listening to the cantor (a newer
role in larger public rituals) chant rather than joining her.
In 1984, my friends Sharon Devlin, Bone Blossom and I created
a ritual/workshop entitled "Kali, the Terrible Mother,
and Other Dark Goddesses" for the first Ancient Ways festival
at Harbin Hot Springs, California. This was also a Grand Council
of Covenant of the Goddess. For that, we had one chant in celebration
of Kali Ma at the culmination of the what turned out to be a
long and powerful rite. We didn't teach it ahead of time. It's
an odd chant; it's not in English, for one thing. The words
all mean pretty much the same thing — "Hail, Kali
Ma!" This chant, taught to me by a Palo Alto Witch who
had learned it from an East Indian, went,
"Jai Ma! Kali Durga Ma, Kali Ma!
Jai Ma! Kali Durga Ma. Jai Ma-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!
Kali Ma! Jai Ma-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah! Durga Ma!"
4
When we three priestesses began chanting, the participants
simply picked it up and continued with it. This chant went on
and on and on, accompanied by wonderful drumming by Paul Erdman,
as each participant passed between the legs of the three "Kalis"
— one white, one red and one black. In contrast to chants
used for purposes such as healing, changing mood, raising energy,
this Kali chant was a praise chant, a chant of devotion to the
Dark Mother, pure bhakti.
Using Chants in Rites of Passage
Another effective use of chant and song is in rites of passage.
When my friend Tami was in labor, we chanted: "The
river is flowing, flowing and flowing. The river is flowing
down to the sea. Mother, carry me, a child I will bear for Thee.
Mother, carry me, down to the sea."5
To help bring on her milk and to encourage her newborn to
take the breast, my partner Corby and I sang a traditional Gaelic
Beltane song that we learned from Ruth Barrett and Cyntia Smith,
called "Summer, Summer."6
The chorus is: "Summer, Summer, milk of the heifer/We
have brought the Summer in/Yellow Summer, brilliant daisies/We
have brought the Summer in." We sang is softly and
soothingly as baby Rhiannon lay in her mother's arms. Shortly
afterwards, Tami's milk flowed and Rhiannon suckled. We sang
the Shaker hymn "Through All the Worlds Below,"
7
(reworked by Susan Rothbaum, Holly Tannen and Catherine Madsen)
at Rhiannon's naming ceremony.
When my friend Raven was dying, one devotional chant to Kali
Ma, surfaced over and over again. It goes, "Like
a bee my mind is buzzing round the blue lotus feet of My Divine
Mother, My Divine Mother." 8
Having the others present in the room maintaining this chant
kept me bound to the world of the living as I attempted to go
part way to the other side with him.
During the weeks of sitting vigil with the late John Patrick
McClimans, he responded to my barely audible chanting of the
refrain to the Gaelic song "Weaver, Weaver."
9
The words I used were, "Weaver, Weaver, weave his thread
whole an strong into Your web. Healer, healer, heal his pain.
In love may he return again."
Chants as Contemporary Pagan Folklore
Evidence of the accessibility and usefulness of chant in ritual
abounds. I've had the good fortune to travel and visit Witches
throughout the U.S. I've encountered chants and their variations
everywhere I've shared circle.
In my particular tradition of Witchcraft, Reclaiming, chanting
has been developed to a high degree and spread far and wide.
We are fortunate to have Starhawk as our primary liturgist —
she is supremely gifted in writing chants both as sole author
and in collaboration with others. In addition, many powerful
chants have been inspired by magical work at Reclaiming's Witch
Camps, which have also been disseminated and found their way
into the workings of many other Witches and Pagans. Wonderful
chants and songs come from throughout our fertile Pagan community,
but since Reclaiming (and Starhawk in particular) is widely
known, both in and out of the community, our chants have become
more widely known than some others.
As is common with 'folk' material, chants change. When I visited
Atlanta in April of 1998, the group of Witches I was working
with used a chant written by Starhawk back in the early 1980s.
This chant was remembered differently by people who had learned
it in different places and circumstances. I, who had been part
of the action for which it was written (a nonviolent protest
of nuclear development at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California)
had one memory, while the woman I was with in Atlanta had another.
We were somewhat frustrated in trying to maintain the 'togetherness'
that good chanting requires, since we knew different versions
of the same chant. The woman in Atlanta remembered the chant
as having an additional article, "the" before the
word "Sun," which slightly changed the scanning; she
also remembered the melody slightly differently. That particular
chant, sometimes called "Summer Solstice Power Chant,"
has found its way around the world.
The words go like this:
We are the power in everyone,
We are the dance of the Moon and Sun,
We are the hope that will not hide,
We are the turning of the tide.
I learned this chant by doing, by singing it in ritual.
I don't know that it had even been committed to paper at that
time. Also during that Summer in the early eighties, there was
a woman training with Reclaiming who worked with the deaf and
American sign language. She taught us the gestures that translated
the chant into visuals. The gestures (or I might call them asanas,
since they really are sacred gestures, meant to effect both
internal and external changes by their meanings) were very graceful,
and she taught us all. This woman, T'Brin, and I encountered
one another in New Mexico last September and I thanked her once
again for teaching me the movement to that chant.
More recently my friend Tami, trained at the Golden Gate Interfaith
Institute, was ordained as an interfaith minister. At her ordination
I encountered a version of this same chant again. This time,
the chant had been transformed into a song of sorts, using essentially
the same words, led by a guitar playing folk singer and intended
to be sung by all at the service. The program said that the
song was "Native American."
After the service, I spoke with both the director of the school,
(where I had lectured in the past) , and with the performer
who sang the song. I told them of its origins, and asked the
director to take care in any future use of it to attribute it
to its true author. I asked the same of the singer, who, when
I asked him where he'd picked it up, said that he'd learned
it at Ananda, a Zen Buddhist retreat center in the Mother Lode
country of the Sierra Nevadas, and insisted that he sang it
exactly as he had learned it. I didn't doubt his story, but
my concern, was with correcting his misimpressions and with
preventing further misleading dissemination of the chant. After
all, it was written by an individual and she is due her credit
(if not royalties).
My musicologist friend Steve Rasumussen says,
"It
is axiomatic among musicologists that printing freezes oral
tradition; local and personal variants disappear as singers
conform themselves to the perceived authority of the printed
edition." 10What
happened in the case of the Summer Solstice Power Chant is that
someone committed it to paper, complete with musical annotation,
and that subsequently appeared in the ordination program. It's
more difficult to correct something that has been printed, due
to the authority conveyed by the printed word, than it is to
correct an oral teaching.
One striking instance of chant appropriation occurred when
a Craft chant, written by Starhawk for a Reclaiming Brigit ritual
some years ago (and used every year hereabouts), being adopted
by Irish Catholics. The tune to this chant comes from a South
African freedom song. A Reclaiming Witch named Pomegranate,
was visiting Brigit's shrine at Kildare in the early '90s when
she heard the chanting of, "We
will never, never lose our way to the well of Her Memory, and
the power of Her living flame, it will rise. It will rise again.
Like the grasses, through the dark, through the soil to the
sunlight, we shall rise again. We are thirsty for the Waters
of Life, we are moving. We shall live again."
11
I don't know if they chanted the entire chant, or just the first
few lines, but in any case, here is an example of Craft culture
being picked up and used by those who are not Pagan — a
sign, in my mind, of our coming of age.
Three Easy Rules for Achieving Enchantment
-
Be sensitive to the purpose, and use the chant accordingly.
If your intent is to move into trance, then chant softly.
If it's to raise energy, begin slowly and softly and very
gradually increase in pace and volume.
-
Look into each other's eyes. Hold hands or move your body,
as you might be doing if dancing a spiral. This helps keep
you connected.
-
Chant until you no longer need to think about what the next
words are. Chant for longer than the time it takes for you
to memorize the chant with repetition. Chant beyond the point
of boredom. Chant beyond the point at which you know you can
chant no longer. When you've reached a point where you think
you cannot possibly chant these words one more time, reach
deeper inside yourself and bring up more energy and chant
some more. Chant until your consciousness begins to change,
until you begin to experience enchantment. Finally, when neither
you nor anyone else in your circle can chant any more, allow
the words to become a wordless chant and raise it higher and
louder.
As a Witch and a ritualist, I look forward to an ever-increasing repertoire
of chants — enchantment is a magical technology
we can all learn to use and enjoy.
Footnotes:
1
When
I use the term "we" here, I mean contemporary Pagan
ritualists, not limited to Witches. Return to
article
2
Magliocco, Sabina and Holly Tannen, "The Real Old-Time
Religion," in Ethnologies - Wicca, Vol. 20, 1, 1998, published
by the Folklore Studies Association of Canada (publication formerly
called Canadian Folklore Canadien) Return to article
3
The chant that goes, "The ocean is the beginning of the
Earth" is by Delaney Johnson and Starhawk and can be found
on the tape Chants: Ritual Music by Reclaiming Community.
Return to article
4
The Kali chant "Jai Kali Ma!" is a traditional
Hindu one, its origins obscured by the antiquity and complexity
of Hindu culture. Return to article
5
I ran across "The River is Flowing" in Green Earth
Sprituality Songbook complied by Jess Shoup. He credits
the writing of this song to Diana Hildebrand-Hull. Return
to article
6
"Summer,
Summer" lyrics by Cyntia Smith and Ruth Barrett, traditional
melody with Gaelic translation of the chorus by Jim Duran appears
on The Heart is the Only Nation, Aeolus Music, 1993.
Return to article
7
"Through All the Worlds Below" appears on Between
the Worlds by Holly Tannen, Gold Leaf Records, 1985. Return
to article
8
"Like a bee" is traditional in its imagery, in that
Kali devotees such as the mystic/poet Ramprased use it in their
songs of "god intoxication" Return to
article
9
"Weaver, Weaver" is a traditional Gaelic tune with
lyrics by Starhawk. It appears, with musical notation, in
The
Pagan Book of Living and Dying. It is recorded on Through
the Darkness by Beverly Frederick, 1998. Return
to article
10The
Rasmussen quote is from a personal communication and appears
in Crossing Over: A Pagan Manual on Death and Dying,
self-published in 1996 by the Reclaiming Collective, republished
by HarperSanFrancisco under the name The
Pagan Book of Living and Dying, 1997. Return
to article
11
The chant that begins "We will never lose our way to the
well" is called "Way to the Well." The tune is
a South African freedom song, lyrics by Starhawk and Rose May
Dance; it is traditionally used at Reclaiming Brigit rituals.
It appears on Hand of Desire by Lunacy, (Greg Johnson & Sparky
T. Rabbit), 1992. Return to article
All recorded music cited can be purchased from
Serpentine
Music.
