Music was the first magic
I don't want to dance like Shakira anymore
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Midsummer gratitudes
Last week I was standing under the night sky on a large stone above a creek in an old growth forest in Washington state. I had been invited there to give a talk and workshop on summer songs of northern Europe at a metal and folk festival called Cascadian Midsummer.
I found myself there in the dark because I was asked to participate in a small symbel ritual with a group of heathens, some of which I knew, others I didn’t. I had never heard this name for a ritual before, but I quickly discovered it was a sort I had participated in many times. As have you, probably, being the inheritor of Anglo-Saxon tradition, as an English speaker.
Here’s how it went: we passed a horn full of mead around the circle and toasted our gratitude aloud, first to the landvaettir, the spirits of the land, then to whoever and whatever we felt inspired to: individual gods, the Norns (spinners of human fate in Norse mythology), one another, the forest, on and on until the horn ran empty. It was absolutely lovely.
As the toast made its way around the circle in the dark I heard the voice of a fellow I had met the day before, a rare nyckelharpa player from North Carolina whose name escapes me (if you know, do tell!). He was toasting me, actually, and thanking me for, quote, “reminding us that music was the first magic.”
Earlier that day I had led my workshop on folk songs of summer and the sun from northern Europe. I hadn’t said those words exactly, but the way that he paraphrased them has been ringing in my mind ever since I left that enchanted forest last week.
How was music the first magic?
What I had said to the attendees at this workshop something like this:
I believe that in many ways, folk music, (that is the music of the people, passed down through tradition over time) is ritualistic by nature.
In some cultures, the innate relationship between folk music and spirituality is more obvious than it is in, say, the British Isles, where folklore is largely secularized, since Christian devotional music is often avoided, or sorted with other churchy things, and the claim that folk music is pagan in origin is generally considered naively romantic. To be clear, that’s not just in the UK, but general to folklore studies.
Perhaps in an academic context, it is naively romantic to say that folk music, in general, is ritual. First of all, there are many kinds of folk music. Polka, for example. Bawdy sailor songs. Ballads about unwanted pregnancies. Those don’t necessarily inspire the soul to union with the divine on the surface of things.
But in a lived context, in the experience of animists and pagans and the other dreamy people I roll with and I suspect are reading this, we don’t need to prove to anybody that the music of the people and of the past is holy. Because we know it with our bodies. We feel the hum of life force that comes from raising our voices together in song. We feel the way that sound unites us as a group, enfolding us like the embrace of a great mother. In that embrace we feel ourselves slipping into the ancient dynamic tension between time-bound presence (the song can’t last forever) and ecstatic journeying, as our imaginations light up with the scraps of image, memory, and feeling offered by a song or tune that is both someone else’s, and in this moment, our very own.
Whether you are singing, playing, dancing or listening, traditional music brings you into a dual state of embodied presence and communion with what I would call the otherworld, with dreaming, vision, and with ancestry. The sound both holds us in place and frees us to roam. We are alive, together in that shared experience.
What else is ritual but that rich and beautiful shared aliveness?
Ritual and folk music converse with the unseen
I find the formal definition of religion to be a helpful tool in determining what a ritual experience might be. To be clear, I use the world “religious” to mean spiritual, not specifically belonging to organized religions, as it’s often used colloquially.
I like the definition proposed by the scholars who created the recent academic series of books about historical Scandinavian paganism called Pre-Christian Religions of the North. According to them, a religious worldview is one that sees reality as divided into two categories: this world, the one of human experience and sensory knowing, and one or several otherworlds, populated by beings of beyond-human ability like gods, spirits, jötunns, angels, etc. Those otherworlds may be separate from this one, like the heaven of Christianity, or embedded within it, like the land of Fairy, which is accessible via openings found in the landscape of Ireland, for example.
Since ritual is the primary expression of religion, you could say that a ritual is something that invites a conversation with the beings of these other worlds, or, more simply, the unseen.
You could also say that the unseen operates within folk music as well. Sometimes the unseen is the origin of a song, the invisible minds and mouths that shaped it across time. Sometimes what is unseen is the softer, more vulnerable aspects of our personalities that are held in the sacred space created when we lift our voices all together, as folks so kindly did with me in that Cascadian forest.
Folk song teaches us how to converse with the ancestors, both human and non-human: the folks who sang and passed on the songs of land, of seasons, of migratory birds, of harvesting, of loving and grieving, and the names and knowledge of the plants and animals and times that they knew and loved. Those ancestors are invisible to us, but their voices and knowledge live on.
Folk music invites us into curiosity about that which we may never encounter with our modern eyes and ears:
The 18th century Scots dialect of lyrics collected by Robert Burns.
The sinking sun before electric lights.
The fragrant tryst in the hand-mown autumn hay.
(Some) structure is freedom
In the wake of resetting my life and habits since moving to a new country this spring, I’ve been thinking a lot about structure. I have ADHD, so things like routine and planning are really a life raft for me. It’s much harder to lose the plot when there is a plot in the first place, and you bothered to write it down in your calendar ahead of time.
Of course, structure in excess can be downright oppressive, (see feudalism) but if you’ve ever been asked point blank “what movie do you want to watch?” or “what do you want for dinner” and found yourself overwhelmed by the weight of absolute choice, then maybe you know what I mean when I say some structure is a life saver.
There was a moment in the folk song workshop I led at Cascadian Midsummer that several people later reported was a highlight for them, and which I also found wonderful. I had invited folks to do a simple ring dance to imitate the movement of the sun while singing a song about the sunset. So the sixty-odd folks assembled rose to their feet and stepped all together in a mass around the tree at the centre of the stage area. As we went, the circle became something like a gyre, gathering closer and closer together toward the middle. That was a result of my vague instructions, probably, but it had a bit of magic about it, the mysterious way we were all drawn together in the song and dance like a purse whose string had been pulled taut.
(Thank you to Vaiva Aglinskas for teaching me this song!)
Something about the enthusiastic participation of this large group of mostly metalheads in a ring dance surprised me. Metalheads aren’t exactly known for skipping circles gaily in June. I’m not saying they aren’t enthusiastic participants in life in general, but they aren’t known for their placid conformity, either.
I’ll share something about myself that may shed some light on why I think these folks were so willing to get into this particular circle dance with me (besides maybe the obvious pagan appeal of a sun dance).
Most of us, in this modern, individualistic world, are accustomed to dancing as a solo act. Though we may do it in a group at a show, we are usually kind of wiggling at random, according to our own imagination, or possibly our idea of what’s attractive. Moving your hips in a circle, for example. Maybe fist-pumping. Most people’s experience of dance right now is basically what we see on Tik-Tok; it’s outward-facing, very public, and improvised, or at least designed to appear that way. Personally, I find it nearly impossible to “just dance” in this way in a public context without the assistance of alcohol.
By contrast, folk dance, unlike the butt-shaking of the club, is often communal, inward facing, highly structured, and taught by tradition-bearers. Even though I’m not great at it, I find folk dancing incredibly enjoyable and freeing at the same time. I think this is partly because of my own neurodivergence: I’m basically really bad at improvising under pressure. “Just be yourself” is possibly the worst advice you can give to someone who has been masking since early childhood. Folk dance, like folk music, removes the pressure of improvisation to a degree, so misfits like me can just get on with collaborating and connecting with the world around them and not worry so much about being clever, original, sexy and spontaneous all at once.
I’m not saying all of the attendees at Cascadian Midsummer were neurodivergent, though I did overhear several conversations where people self-identified as such. In any case, I learned in my past life as a schoolteacher that what is good for the neurodivergent tends to be good for everybody else, too.
We live in a world that expects us all to be individuals, self-supporting, and genius in our aloneness. And it’s a lie. It doesn’t work. I, for one, am exhausted with re-inventing the wheel. I don’t want to dance like Shakira. I’m pretty sure it would be a lonely experience, honestly. Sometimes I just want to show up for life not knowing the steps and let the sun’s circle carry me along, as it is gloriously equipped to do. I want to let the wheel reinvent me, for once.
Structure, in balance, is what allows us to soften. To slip between the pillars of established order like a fox through the woods trusting that something bigger than us has our back, or at least will keep off the wind and rain for tonight.
I am grateful for the body of wisdom that is folk music, in particular, which reminds us that we are not alone, that we are held together and renewed by the seasons, and the ancestors, by the generous sun and the silver sailing moon and stars, by circles of gratitude and song and strangers, by humour and tragedy and celebration, all tending towards a togetherness that lives at the centre, like the dance that pulled those folks and myself to the centre of the clearing that midsummer’s day.
Folk song and ritual both hold out an invitation, which I likewise offer you today:
Will you let the world’s magic carry you gently toward connection with the living whole?