Living By Song Magic

        

                                        

 

 

 

Indigenous people, generally poorer and powerless, have played no part in the creation of the current climate crisis.  And yet they are liable to suffer most from it. In two centuries, our modern technological society has created this crisis. Native traditions have lasted thousands of years without wreaking havoc on the planet.  They might then be able to help us with the climate monster we have created.   

 

One fact is key. Modern science is quantitative, mathematical, technological, and soulless.  If you look at a tree, a river, a mountain as no more than material structures, why not uproot and reduce them to saleable items.  In contrast, the indigenous mind honors nature for its sacred value and creative benefits--the exact opposite of the capitalistic vision of nature, treated as raw material for profiteering corporations to exploit.  

 

I’m struck by traditions that use music as a way to live in harmony with nature. In the early 1930s, Ruth Murray Underhill, at the behest of the Humanities Council of Columbia University, spent time with the Papago Indians of Southern Arizona, an unusually dry and inhospitable region of the Southwest.  What she discovered about their ceremonial life is described in her book, Singing for Power: The Song Magic of the Papago Indians (1938).

 

These peaceful descendants of the Aztecs used a type of song magic to facilitate the various tasks of everyday life.  This region of the desert on the border of Mexico was, and no doubt still is, overwhelmingly dry and hot. To extract a living from such a barren desert domain called for some kind of “magic”—something akin to psychokinesis (mind over matter).

 

Papago ceremonies have different names, The Drinking Ritual, Singing Up the Corn, The Peaceful Go to War, Eagle Power, Ocean Power, and so forth. Each of these ceremonial tasks has songs, stories, and narratives passed on in oral traditions.  The magical language had to be memorized, as we say, known by heart. And with heart, I would add.  The song magic is meant to produce real effects, physical as well as mental.  But can our minds do such things?  The Papago Indians thought so.

 

Let’s see how it works with an example, The Drinking Ritual, which is about rain magic.  The only source of water for the Papago was the sky in the rainy seasons.        

In this ritual, a liquor is extracted from the pulp of a giant cactus, and drunk.  The fruits of this liquor ripen at the end of the dry season. Drinking this liquor, which  has mind-altering effects, was thought to mirror and facilitate the rainfall.

It was the duty of everyone to drink to the point of saturation; in short, get seriously drunk, and become like the rain-soaked earth.  Apart from this ceremony, boozing for private pleasure was verboten.  Moreover, all of the ceremonies presupposed widespread participation of the group.  This makes sense in light of what we know about paranormal group dynamics.

 

But now where is the magic in all this?  Underhill provides an exact explanation. “In accordance with the rules of Papago magic,” she writes, “which always imitates the desired event, this act will bring the rain to moisten the earth” (p.20). The drinking and altered state, however, is only the first part of the ceremony meant to bring on the rain. Next is the singing.  A hundred people, old men who know the songs, women and everybody else either dance or sing of rain and clouds, red spiders, frogs, and toads known for their affinity with rain. 

 

In effect, there is a group effort to imagine as vividly as possible the state of affairs they are trying to bring about.  The same method is used for other ceremonies, making the corn grow, preparing for war, or dealing with a troublesome person. And of course, for healing purposes. You have to sing or in some way create compelling images of what you’re aiming for. Rain, a healing, courage in war, whatever.

 

This must appear strange to a culture addicted to materialism. Acquiring song magic implies different kinds of skill and mental attitude. Underhill writes as follows: ““What of a society which puts no premium whatever on aggressiveness and where the practical man is valued only if he is a poet?”

 

The Papago were never at war with whites or other tribes.  In part this was due to the forbidding landscape of this region of the Southwest.  There was nothing there worth fighting for and survival itself was not easily achieved.  You had to learn to sing for power just to survive. And the singing went on for hours. You also had to use your imagination to perform magical operations.

 

Readers will wonder about the ‘magic’ part of this story.  It turns out that the way the Papago magic is supposed to work is consistent with the way psychokinesis (PK) works.  To repeat: the Papago tries through song and gesture to imagine and evoke the desired effect as vividly as possible. Now, the physicist and parapsychologist, Helmut Schmidt, argues that PK is a goal-oriented process.   Schmidt found that subjects in PK experiments succeeded when they focused entirely on the target they were aiming to affect.   Facing a panel of lights the subject wants, say, to turn on the outermost light on the left side of the panel.  He has no idea of the complicated process of how the lights on the panel are turned on and off.  All he has to do focus on the desired outcome to be effective—all attention is on the target, the aim.

 

Schmidt’s subjects were remarkable in producing results.  Lab based evidence for psychokinesis proves that native people may also be effective with their more life-based experiments with PK.

 

The Papago form of PK was based on survival needs, not just to obtain a score in a parapsychological experiment.  The latter, in its sphere of science, is hugely important. It’s part of a research movement that points to our paranormal mental and physical abilities.

 

Papago Indian song magic offers one way to reimagine our relationship to the natural world. What sort of people were these brown-skinned Indians noted for their peaceful nature. “Beneath their modern externals,” writes Ruth Underhill, “a life based on other ideals than ours and aimed toward other goals.” She tells us there are three points notable about these people. 

 

They never raise their voices.  Living in a hardscrabble desert community, you don’t waste your energy, and the barely audible manner of speech suggests low emotional expenditure.  Theirs was a world where you were not free to deploy all kinds energy to do what you want—travel, communicate, consume at will.  Near silence was a way to store one’s inner energy. The white traders said they needed to lip-read the Indians.

 

Secondly, Underhill writes of the Papago: “Their movements are deliberate; our own swift jerkiness can hardly comprehend the rhythm slowed down by the desert heat to the slow swing of a wave under a ship’s bow in a dead calm.”  Clearly, an energy deprived environment will impose a different lifestyle in many subtle ways, more deliberate and more careful and caring.

 

The last item she notes about the Papago folk; they were always purring with laughter. “We who pass days, even weeks, at hard work, with no more than a polite smile now and then, can scarcely accustom ourselves to the gentle laughter which always accompanies Papago talk.”  She ends by noting that she especially missed the murmuring mirth of the Papago when she got back to New York.  

 

Two final observations.  First, the Papago story, as revealed from Underhill’s study of the late 1930s, proves that ingenuity, imagination, and social solidarity can create a culturally rich life, even in an environment minimally endowed with the raw materials needed in ordinary life. 

 

The second point I want to make is to affirm the extraordinary work of Ruth Underhill. Now is the time to renew and revise the relationship between modern science and indigenous beliefs and practices. The song magic practiced by the Papago seems vitally credible in light of what is known about apports, apparitions, poltergeists, shamanic and saintly miracles, and controlled parapsychological experimentation.

 

It is important to state what is possible, in light of modern parapsychological research. Groups of people can indeed create forces that do things such as we learn from the Papago ceremonials.  These are socially integrated activities directed toward benefitting all members of the community.  We have barely begun to learn how to draw on the latent forces within us. There’s a whole new science of creativity waiting to be born—a science that may be of use in the coming battle with the climate monster we have created.