The Archaeoacoustics of Palenque

An excerpt from my memoir, Riding Spirit Horse: A Journey into Shamanism.

 

Like a golden, luminous jewel, Palenque perches above the lush tropical rainforest in the foothills of the Chiapas Highlands of Southern Mexico, facing the setting sun. Shrouded in morning jungle mists and echoing to a dawn chorus of howler monkeys and parrots, this archaeological site has a serene, mystical atmosphere. A tranquil stream meanders through the city center and the temple summits offer spectacular views of the ruins and surrounding jungle. Built in the eighth century, Palenque, or Nah Chan (House of the Serpent), is a Maya city of unsurpassed beauty and spiritual force. The city's ruins were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987.

Archaeologist Francisca Zalaquett, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, discovered that the temples and public squares in Palenque could clearly project the sounds of a human speaker and musical instruments of the time across at least a hundred meters, or about the length of a football field. The investigation identified rooms that could have been used by musicians, speakers or priests to amplify the frequency, quality and volume of sound, allowing the music or the message to travel further and reach more people. The findings strongly suggest the design and structures at Palenque involved a great deal of knowledge about acoustics and the behavior of sound.

In his book Healing Sounds, author Jonathan Goldman recounts an incredible experience he had at Palenque in 1987. He described it as one of the more dramatic episodes in his life. Late one night, a guide took Goldman and five traveling companions on a tour of Palenque. The guide said he would show them a Palenque which they would not otherwise experience and took them into one temple that had been closed to the public, leading them down a subterranean level using his flashlight. He pointed to a doorway and said to Goldman, "Make sound here." He had known about Goldman's interest in sound healing, but Goldman could not figure out why the guide wanted him to do this.

Then the guide turned out his flashlight and the group was immersed in total darkness. "Make sound," the guide urged.

"Sure," Goldman replied.

Goldman began to tone harmonics towards the area the guide had indicated before the light went out. As he did so, the room began to become illuminated, but it was not like the light from a flashlight. It was more subtle, but it was definitely lighter in the room. Goldman could see the faint outlines and figures of the people there. Everyone was aware of this and when Goldman stopped toning, the room filled with exclamations. Then the guide turned on the flashlight again and they continued their tour.

The full implications of this experience did not occur to Goldman until he returned to the United States. Somehow, he was able to use sound to create light. This was not the same phenomenon as sound turning into light, a scientific theory in which a sound wave, when speeded up, becomes light. This was different, having to do with creating light through sound, and specifically vocal harmonics or overtones.

Years later, Goldman was talking to a man who had spent years with the Lacandon Maya people of the Chiapas rainforest, who are said to be the descendants of the builders of Palenque. When Goldman told him about his experience in Palenque, he nodded his head and said: "You are very lucky to have experienced this! It is something that the Mayan shamans teach, this creation of light through harmonics. It is the higher harmonics that do this." (1)

1. Jonathan Goldman, Healing Sounds: The Power of Harmonics. (Element Books, 1992), p. 59.

Malidoma Patrice Somé: Nature, Ritual and Community

Malidoma Patrice Somé is an author, teacher and shaman from the Dagara tribe in West Africa. Somé holds three Master's degrees and two Doctorates from the Sorbonne and Brandeis University. Representing his village in Burkina Faso, West Africa, Somé has come to the West to share the ancient wisdom and practices which have supported his people for thousands of years. He travels throughout the world bringing a message of hope, healing and reconciliation through the powerful tools of ritual and community building. Versed in the languages of psychology, comparative literature, as well as ancient mythology, healing, and divination, Somé bridges paths between the ancient tribal world of the West African Dagara culture and modern Western society. Over the years, he has come to understand that, despite their differences, Indigenous and Western peoples are actually children of the same Spirit, living in the same house they call Earth. 

 

Born in a Dagara community in 1956, he was abducted from his people at the age of four by a Jesuit priest and imprisoned in a seminary built for training a new generation of black Catholic priests. In spite of his isolation from his tribe and his village, Somé stubbornly refused to forget where he had come from and who he was. Finally, some 16 years later, Somé fled the seminary and walked 125 miles through the dense jungle back to his own people, the Dagara. Once he was home, however, many there regarded him as a "white black," to be looked on with suspicion because he had been contaminated by the "sickness" of the colonial world. Somé was a man of two worlds, at home in neither.
 

His only hope of reconnection with his people was to undergo the harrowing Dagara month-long initiation in the wilderness. Elders from the village believed that Somé's ancestral spirit had withdrawn from his body and that he had already undergone a type of rite of passage into manhood in the white world. Despite this, they agreed to let him undergo a belated manhood rite with a younger group in the tribe. Having been raised outside of the culture and not speaking the language made the initiation process, believed to unite soul and body, more dangerous for him than for the youths also undergoing the rite. Somé emerged from this ancient ritual a newly integrated individual, rejoined to his ancestral past and his cultural present. Even after initiation, however, Somé remains a man of two worlds, charged by his elders to bridge his culture and the Western world.
 

I had the opportunity to take one of Somé's workshops years ago. In his workshops, Somé tells participants that the Dagara believe each person is born with a destiny, and he or she is given a name that reflects that destiny. "My name is Malidoma," he says. "It means he who makes friends with the stranger. As my name implies, I am here in the West to tell the world about my people in any way I can, and to take back to my people the knowledge I gain about this world. My elders are convinced that the West is as endangered as the Indigenous cultures it has decimated in the name of colonialism. Western civilization is suffering from a great sickness of the soul. The West's progressive turning away from functioning spiritual values; its total disregard for the environment and natural resources; the violence of inner cities with their problems of poverty, drugs and crime; spiraling unemployment and economic disarray; and growing intolerance toward people of color and the values of other cultures—all of these trends, if unchecked, will eventually bring about terrible self-destruction. In the face of all this global chaos, the only possible hope is self-transformation through ritual."
 

Somé leads workshop participants in ritual drumming and singing. He shares ways to create community as well as ritual ways that activate the healing powers of nature. He says that in Dagara society, all healing is accomplished in ritual through nature, and the participation of the village community. Nature is the landscape in which all healing takes place and it's the environment in which we renew ourselves and become whole, experiencing a sense of well-being. From an Indigenous perspective, the individual psyche can only be healed by addressing one's relationships with the visible worlds of nature and community and one's relationship with the invisible forces of the ancestors and spirit allies. That is why the art of ritual is so important, for it's in ritual that nature, community and the spirit world come together in healing.   
 

In modern times, we've lost our natural tendency to function communally by embracing such thinking as "pull one's self up by one's bootstraps" and "every man for himself." Yet only with community is a person's life purpose discovered, nurtured, and most importantly, required to sustain community. Healing through ritual nourishes our spirits and our psyches. It heals the deep wounds in us that are unseen and unspoken. Ritual offers us a deeper healing solution to complex dilemmas that plague modern life, those problems that lie beneath the surface, waiting to erupt. Somé focuses on the need for grief ritual and ways of working with emotion in Western culture. The ritual of grieving, the sacred shedding of tears to heal the wounds of human losses, is a cleansing practice that purifies the psyche. Somé likened the danger of unexpressed grief to a social time bomb.
 

Somé emphasizes that, "for the Dagara, ritual is, above all else, the yardstick by which people measure their state of connection with the hidden ancestral realm, with which the entire community is genetically bound. In a way, the Dagara think of themselves as a projection of the spirit world. The abandonment of ritual can be devastating. From the spiritual viewpoint, ritual is inevitable and necessary if one is to live. Where ritual is absent, the young ones are restless or violent, there are no real elders, and the grownups are bewildered. The future is dim."
 

Somé is optimistic when he says, "At this critical time in history, the Earth's people are awakening to a deep need for global healing. African wisdom, so long held secret, is being called on to provide tools to enable us to move into a more peaceful and empowered way of being, both within ourselves, and within our communities. The Indigenous spirit in each of us is calling for cleansing and reconciliation. The ancestors are responding."