Having been raised in both Cuban culture and in Lukumí (or Santeria), it is impossible for me to underestimate the significance drumming and rhythm in both my cultural expressions and spiritual development. They represent one of the fundamental pillars that create “Cuban-ness.” My godfather used to say “Los tambores de la tierra tienen que oírse en el cielo.” Very loosely translated, this means, “Play the drums so they are heard in Heaven.” The saying speaks to the vigor and ecstasy with which drums must be played during ceremonies because of their deep and raw power. With little exaggeration, their rhythms have changed and sustained cultures as well as brought forth new musical forms to the world.
![[Public Domain / Pixabay]](https://wildhunt.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/drum-2187_640-500x381.jpg)
[Public Domain / Pixabay]
Despite being forced into Catholicism, our African Ancestors were – with great hardship – able to preserve many elements of their culture and secure it for their descendants. Very soon into the era of slavery, the Spanish Colonial power allowed cabildos de nación, small “national” councils of slaves based on their region of origin. They were created for a malignant purpose: so slave owners and other Spanish authorities could maintain control over the ethnic groups. The first recorded cabildo, called Cabildo Shango, was established in Havana in 1568 CE.
Despite authoritarian social and economic control, cabildos also became a mechanism by which West African slaves could maintain their traditions while resisting 16th Century Spanish cultural hegemony. The cabildos allowed slaves to engage in religious ceremonies including consulting with the spirits and the Orisha. And they were also imbued with African cultural traditions. For example, in order to maintain the traditional value that women hold equal status as men, the cabildos would have three men and three women elected as group leaders, and then one man and one woman as co-leaders of the entire council.
At the same time, cabildos allowed for the traditional music of West Africa to be transferred across generations of Africans in Cuba. In doing so, cabildos catalyzed the fusion of musical genres while becoming the vehicle for African Traditional Religions to survive in the West. And during centuries of tragedy and privation, the drums were played to beckon Orisha, to call Egungun (deceased Ancestors) and strengthen the living.
While African drumming traditions have gained prominence in many of our Pagan festivals, Native American and First Nations drumming traditions have also been powerful and integral in building a ritual atmosphere. Those cultures too have navigated hardship, resisted cultural attack and healed with drums.
[Photo Credit: M. Tejeda-Moreno]
In the traditional religions of West Africa, drums, such as the batá, have very specific ritual significance. They are holy objects that are ceremonially prepared for use. Drummers must be carefully and intensively trained. They must memorize complex rhythms, demonstrate their skills, and ultimately undergo special rituals that confer upon them the right and privilege to serve the community as a drummer.
Although the drummers at Pagan festivals may not undergo the ceremonial hurdles of their peers within the traditional religions of West Africa, they are no less skilled or appreciated. Drummers are praised for the magic and atmosphere they help create and are often central to the festival experience. From the ritual use of drums and their ubiquity, it makes me want to deconstruct the importance of drumming and ask if there are complementary benefits to it.
Evolutionary psychologists hypothesize that psychological traits represent adaptive advantages. It is a theoretical lens to understand why certain characteristics are retained while others are slowly lost. Drumming has not been lost. On the contrary, it was retained at great cost. Our Ancestors in the cabildos must have recognized some of the powerful effects of drumming and, therefore, centralized it as an important part of religious experience and cultural celebration.
Indeed, Winkleman (2003) noted the benefits of drumming as a culturally appropriate extension of therapy especially for individuals whose spiritual traditions have drumming as a component of healing. But drumming also represents one of the oldest means for healing. It has been considered medicine for millennia. And, it turns out that drumming has sobering benefits that range from the obvious to the surprising.
One benefit should come as no surprise to anyone who has participated in a drum circle: drumming improves mood. Researchers at the University of Minnesota conducted a small study where student volunteers participated in a 45-minute drumming session (Mungas & Silverman, 2014). Before their drumming, the volunteers completed a short questionnaire to assess drowsiness, relaxation, cheerfulness, friendliness, clarity and coordination. Another volunteer group taking guitar lessons served as the control; and they too completed the same questionnaire.
Before the drumming, there were no between-group differences on the questionnaire. In other words, the groups were statistically identical before the intervention. When the invention was completed, the groups completed the questionnaire once again and the drummers reported changes. When compared to the control (and their pre-test scores), the drummers had statistical improvements in their wakefulness (no surprise there); but they also reported statistically significant improvements in relaxation, cheerfulness, friendliness and clarity as well as their sense of coordination. Though it is a small study, the findings speak to to the idea that drumming has an important role in improving psychological states.
![[Photo Credit: Kleuske / Flickr]](https://wildhunt.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/8936939432_8d9f80a381_z-500x334.jpg)
[Photo Credit: Kleuske / Flickr]
What they did was offer group music therapy to six soldiers surviving with post-traumatic stress disorder. They had significant and horrifying battlefield experiences and were seeking treatment to help cope with the incidents. The researchers gathered data about which musical instruments during sessions were used including their intensity, tempo and amount of time spent on each instrument. They also gathered data on rhythmic patterns of instruments as well as comments from the participants. The group of participants were given a variety of instruments but took to the drums.
What the researchers found is that while drums were used to evoke and discuss difficult trauma, they were also used to strengthen intimacy, promote feelings of openness, fortify sharing and create connectedness. The drums helped expose survivor rage, as well as help them express it in manageable and therapeutic manner. More importantly, the drums appeared to burst through the isolation and loneliness that disconnect survivors of trauma from others in society.
That last point also brought me to the question of whether drumming produces benefits beyond the emotional, psychological or spiritual. It turns out that some researchers have been looking at that question for some time. One experimental study (Dunbar et al. 2012) examined the effects of drumming on pain threshold. They compared dancing, music-making and drumming to determine if there was any effect on self-reported pain threshold. Participants were given a pain test before and after each activity (an over-inflated blood pressure meter, for example, or holding a frozen object.) One of their findings suggests that active music-making (drumming their case) was able to suppress pain better than passive activities like listening to music. And, while they speculate that the pain suppression might be due to the release of naturally-occurring pain-reducing substances (endorphins), they did not directly measure them. Still, the work points to some amazing effects.
But the most surprising bit of research on drumming to me occurred over a decade ago. These researchers went for blood, literally. They wanted to measure the effects of different types of drumming on a variety of physical markers. The researchers assigned participants to either a control group (relaxation in a circle with reading magazines and newspapers) or a participative drumming group. They obtained blood samples from groups prior to the assigned activity and analyzed the results.
What they found is a little tricky and preliminary; but basically, group-drumming seems to improve immune-enhancing activity in the body at the hormonal and cellular levels. The chemicals that we produce naturally to mount and sustain immunity were found to increase after a session of drumming. In addition, certain cell types that regulate immunity, kill off deviant cells (like cancer) and destroy cells infected with viruses were found at higher levels after a drumming session. While I personally approach these last set of findings very cautiously, they are no less stunning and point to how our Ancestors healed on many levels..
Our Ancestors taught us that the drums could speak to our spirits and our bodies. They taught us that drums build community and strengthen bonds within us and between us. They help us break through our challenges, sustain us through change and guide us to embrace our gifts. They taught us that drumming can heal. As we approach Midsummer and, indeed, throughout the Festival Season, there will be much drumming. And our Ancestors are whispering, “Go take your Medicine”.
Citations
Bensimon, M., Amir, D. & Wolf, Y. (2008). “Drumming through trauma: Music therapy with post-traumatic soldiers.” The Arts in Psychotherapy, 35, 34-48.
Bittman B.B., Berk, L.S., Felten, D.L., Westengard, J., Simonton, O.C., Pappas, J., & Ninehouser, M. (2001). “Composite effects of group drumming music therapy on modulation of neuroendocrine-immune parameters in normal subjects.” Alternative Therapies in Health And Medicine, 7, 1078-6791.
Dunbar, R.I.M., Kaskatis, K., MacDonald, I., & Barra, V. (2012). “Performance of Music Elevates Pain Threshold and Positive Affect: Implications for the Evolutionary Function of Music.” Evolutionary Psychology, 10, 688-702.
Mungas, R. & Silverman, M.J. (2014). “Immediate effects of group-based wellness drumming on affective states in university students.” The Arts in Psychotherapy, 41, 287-292.
Winkelman, M. (2003). Complementary therapy for addiction: “Drumming out drugs.” American Journal of Public Health, 93, 647–651.
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Really great article. Thank you. I’m sharing.
For those of us interested ion how African religions and music impacted the US a complimentary piece is Michael Ventura’s “Hear that Long Snake Moan” http://michaelventura.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/HEAR-THAT-LONG-SNAKE-MOAN.pdf
I will never think of “Jelly roll” in the same way again….
Thank you for a superb article. I have been around long enough to remember the days before drums became ubiquitous throughout the pagan movement in this country. The drum served as a bridge between the predominantly Wiccan-based rituals of the sixties and early seventies (which were mostly oriented toward small groups practicing in someone’s living room), toward much larger, community-based rituals in outdoor locations during the late seventies – early eighties. It provided the collective heartbeat for hundreds of people at a time, punctuated the singing of the many sacred chants that also evolved around that period, and stimulated and sustained the wild ecstatic dancing that had been unfeasible in smaller, constricted settings — key elements, all, of a new and more kinetic pagan “liturgy” that quickly spread from coast to coast.
At https://musicandmemory.org, it’s shown that music from an earlier part of a dementia/Alzheimer’s and certain other patients, whose medical condition isolates them, can (and often does) them out of quiescence to quite an amazingly wonderful degree. Apparently, rhythm is one of the first senses we develop in utero, and one of the last ones to leave us nearing death.
I’m thus not terribly surprised that drumming can heal.
As I was reading the thrid paragraph of this column, my mind jumped to how Jews expelled from Iberia or converting during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, and the Scots after Culloden (when much of Scottish culture was outlawed, including the pipes), did things resembling the actions of the African Diaspora religions.
Do you have a source or two to recommend for learning more about what you describe in your final paragraph?
Well, heck-darn and blast. Wikipedia says:
Puirt à beul has sometimes been used for dancing when no instruments were available. Although some people believe that puirt à beul derives from a time when musical instruments—in particular bagpipes—were unavailable because they were banned, there is no evidence that musical instruments were banned by the Disarming Acts or the Act of Proscription 1746. In his book Traditional Gaelic Bagpiping 1745-1945, John Gibson reprints the entire Disarming Act of 1746 (which is the act usually blamed for the proscription of bagpipes), and shows that bagpipes were not banned. This in and of itself does not clarify whether or not musical instruments were taken away from the people.
However, the Jewish conversos, aka Marranos (Spanish: [maˈranos]; Portuguese: [mɐˈʁɐnuʃ], [mɐˈʁɐnus], sing. marrano; Catalan: marrans [məˈrans], [maˈrans], sing. marrà. Means in Spanish : “Christianized Jew”, “pig” or “dirty”.) were originally Jews living in the Iberian Peninsula who converted or were forced to convert to Christianity, some of whom may have continued to practice Judaism in secret. The term came into later use in 1492 with the Castilian Alhambra Decree, reversing protections originally in the Treaty of Granada (1491).
The rest of the Wikipedia article on Marranos, which also leads to other discussion of “secret” or “lost” Jews from that era, is quite interesting to read.
The first I ever heard of secret Jews in the US was on a medical show, wherein a couple getting genetic counselling either prior to marriage, pregnancy, or during pregnancy, find out they are carriers for Tay–Sachs disease (also known as GM2 gangliosidosis or hexosaminidase A deficiency) is a rare autosomal recessive genetic disorder, for which there is no cure or treatment. The affected population is primarily French-Canadian, Cajun, and Ashkenazi Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised if the presumably gentile populations above had secret Jews in their family tree, as France seemed to evict Jews on a regular basis.
Will this do?
Thank you! I appreciate it. I believe there is good evidence that many of the Jews ‘converted’ to Christianity ended up in northern New Mexico hundreds of years ago, but I’m rusty on it now.
I believe that’s in the Wikipedia article–you remember correctly.
I’ve been told (Jewish sources that I’m unable to document), that in recent decades, some of the descendants of formerly Jewish families in the Southwest have learned that they have Jewish ancestry and have sought conversion to Judaism.
The Reconquista was immediately followed by Spanish colonial activities in the Americas, and a fair number of marranos took ship to the Caribbean and various other parts of the New World. In some parts of Latin America, the Inquisitions followed them. I’ve heard (haven’t checked for accuracy) that Christopher Columbus’ pilot was a converso.
A Hispanic coworker of mine told me that first names in his family are Biblical and he attributed that to their having Jewish ancestry.
There is one solid instance of crypto-Jews carrying on the Jewish religion in secret into the middle of the twentieth century, when they revealed themselves and reconnected to the rest of the Jewish world. They live in the Portuguese town of Montebello. I saw the second half of a documentary movie about them.
The changes in the way they practiced Judaism as a result of having their religion driven underground for centuries are very interesting. Judaism is a religion of the book, but it was not safe for their ancestors to possess any Jewish books, so it reverted to a completely oral tradition which the old women were the final authorities on. They lost every word of Hebrew except Adonai (Hebrew for “Lord”). All their secret prayers were in Ladino (a Jewish tongue in the Romance family, as Yiddish is to German). They had a Ladino prayer which they whispered when entering a church, which basically said, “I’m not here to worship the god of this place.” They couldn’t keep track of the Hebrew calendar, so they pegged their festivals to the Roman Catholic calendar, and forgot the reasons for some of them. They remembered Passover, though, baked matzo communally in a cellar under the direction of the old women, and stirred the local creek with branches to commemorate Moses parting the Red Sea.
It seems impossible that several families in a village were able to get away with this for centuries without the neighbors noticing–during the worst times of persecution people were burnt to death for wearing clean clothes on Saturday– so I suspect that at some point these Portuguese secret Jews had a local protector who kept the Inquisitors away from them.
Some time I would like to watch the entire documentary, but the Jewish Film Society wants a lot of money for a copy of it and I don’t think it’s available on DVD.
Some readers are probably wondering what relevance the example of the survival of a crypto-Jewish cult has to the survival of African diaspora religions. The answer is, not much.
However, it does have relevance to the possible survival of organized Paganism in Europe after conversion of areas to Christianity. Some people used to think that Wicca stems from pagan religions that went underground in Christian Europe. Although cultural influences survived the suppression of those religions, there is little historical evidence that any organized pagan cults survived except in places that were converted late (like the Baltic states). The example of Montebello proves that it is possible for a religion to survive not just for generations, but for centuries, after all public practices are forbidden and the adherents of the religion are completely cut off from outside support. The fact that the Montebello is the only known place on the Iberian peninsula where Jews succeeded in passing their religion on after it was outlawed suggests that such survival is very difficult.
Well said. Once the power of tribal drumming is felt, you’re forever changed and as a result, positively influence those around you.