Music has been a mythopoetic language of soul ever since human speech evolved in response to the more-than-human world – to the ongoing discourse of birds, wolves, water and wind. To the extent that we know how to listen, we enter an aural stream of sacred music with the power to return the soul to its place in the symphony of life.
Humans, of course, have their own musical language – from the drumming cultures of forest and desert to the orchestral magnificence of the classical era to the liberating rush of rock and roll to the fascinating fusion of forms and genres that informs music today. Each of these expressions has the power to move us to the depths of our being, trigger emotions, memories, a tribal sense of connection to something magical and mysterious that transcends our rational understanding of life.
Music has been used to evoke the divine, and commune with gods in religious and spiritual traditions around the world – in Gregorian chants, hymns and gospel music; classical choral works; Hindu bhajans, kirtans and ragas, African djembe music; Sufi zikrs; and many other forms from many other cultures. Music is the language of the heart, where the gods and goddesses of this world come to listen.
Music has also been used to heal the traumas of psyche and soul unreachable by other methods – by indigenous shamans, Asclepian healers in Ancient Greece, and modern music therapists addressing a wide range of conditions from childhood ADD to schizophrenia to Alzheimers.
At Yggdrasil, all of these functions of music will be relevant as we seek to tend our sacred wounds through immersion in a healing environment of natural and human-made sounds; communicate with each other and the more-than-human world musically; and evoke the deities of the mythopoetic realm with our soulful songs.
