Ritual drumming

Ritual drumming is the use of the drum and rhythmic percussion in religious and ceremonial contexts, one of the most ancient and widespread of sacred practices, in which sustained, driving rhythm serves to focus attention, summon the divine, accompany dance and song, and induce the trance and ecstatic states central to many traditions of worship and healing. The drum's steady, repetitive beat has a recognised power to entrain the attention and to carry participants toward altered states of consciousness, and across a great range of cultures it has been the engine of collective religious experience, calling deities and spirits, marking the stages of ritual, and driving the possession and ecstatic dance through which the sacred is encountered directly in the body.

Drumming holds this central place in many traditions. In numerous African religions and their diasporic descendants in the Americas, the sacred drums and their rhythms are essential to worship, each deity associated with particular rhythms that summon its presence, and the drums themselves often consecrated and treated as holy. In the shamanic traditions of Siberia and Central Asia, from whose peoples the word "shaman" itself derives, the drum is the shaman's principal instrument, its beat carrying the practitioner into the trance journey to the spirit worlds. Many other cultures accord the drum a comparable ceremonial and spiritual role. Because a number of these traditions are living and, in some cases, closed or sacred to particular peoples, their specific drums, rhythms and ceremonies are not free for outside appropriation, and they are best understood with respect for the communities to whom they belong. In the modern West, generalised "shamanic" and therapeutic drumming practices have also developed, drawing broadly on these traditions, and rhythmic drumming has been studied for its capacity to affect mood and states of consciousness through the entraining power of sustained rhythm.

Yoruba bata drumming, carried into Cuba and Brazil through the transatlantic slave trade and preserved there within Santeria and Candomble alongside its continuation in Nigeria, is the clearest case of ritual drumming functioning as an actual language rather than a generalised technique for producing a state. The bata is a set of three double-headed, hourglass-shaped drums of graduated size, and skilled players use the two heads of each drum, along with the interaction between the three instruments, to reproduce the tonal patterns of spoken Yoruba, since Yoruba is itself a tonal language in which pitch changes meaning, so that a trained listener can follow proverbs, praise names and specific messages encoded in the drumming rather than experiencing it only as rhythm. Each orisha, the deities of the tradition, has particular rhythms associated with them, and a batalero, a trained bata drummer, must learn an extensive repertoire tied to specific deities and specific points in a ceremony, since playing the wrong rhythm at the wrong moment is considered a real error rather than a stylistic variation, and the drummers themselves undergo initiation and years of apprenticeship before being trusted to play in ceremonial context at all.

The arrival of a possessing orisha during a ceremony is understood by practitioners as bound up with the correct rhythm being played and recognised, which is the opposite of the generic modern account of drumming as a universal trance technique: here the content of what is played, not merely the act of drumming, is what the tradition holds actually matters.