The Drum and the World Tree

In world mythology, the World Tree is the axis mundi or central axis of the Cosmos. The World Tree could be considered the core fractal of creation which serves to manifest the Universe. Images of the World Tree exist in virtually all cultures, and represent the world center and/or the connection between heaven and earth. The axis mundi links heaven and earth as well as providing a path between the two. Many ancient cultures incorporate the myth of the World Tree, Tree of Life, or Tree of Knowledge as it is also known.

Shamans believe that this cosmic axis and the Cosmos it unites exist within human consciousness. According to shamanic cosmology, there are three inner planes of consciousness: the Upper, Middle, and Lower Worlds. The roots of the World Tree touch the Lower World. Its trunk is the Middle World and its branches hold up the Upper World. Humans did not invent these inner realms; they discovered them. Far from being a human contrivance, these archetypal worlds are inherent in the collective unconscious, the common psychological inheritance of humanity. They are woven into the matrix of the psyche, for we are a fractal of creation. They are a part of our psyche, a part of us whether we choose to become aware of it or not.  

Through the sound of the drum, which is invariably made of wood from the World Tree, the shaman is transported to the axis within and conveyed from plane to plane. As Tuvan musicologist Valentina Suzukei explains: "There is a bridge on these sound waves so you can go from one world to another. In the sound world, a tunnel opens through which we can pass, or the shaman's spirits come to us. When you stop playing the drum, the bridge disappears."

The inner axis passes through an opening or hole through which the shaman traverses the inner planes in order to mediate between the needs of the spirit world and those of the material world. It is an inward spiritual journey of rapture in which the shaman interacts with the inner spirit world, thereby influencing the outer material world. In the shaman's world, all human experience is self-generated. Experience is shaped from within since the three realms or resonant fields that define our experience of reality exist within each of us.

The cosmology of the drum

In the shaman's world, the drum is a most sacred instrument. The double-headed drum is believed to embody the sacred forces of the Cosmos through its sounds, structural features, contents, and connection to shamanic trance. The various parts of the drum also symbolize the structures of the world. Cosmologically, the drum depicts a microcosm of the Universe with its three zones -- the Upper, Middle and Lower Worlds. The two drumheads symbolize the Upper and Lower Worlds.

The rim of the drum symbolizes the Middle World and is connected to the World Tree through the wood of the frame and its association through all trees back to the First Tree. Like the World Tree, which links the earth and sky, the rim links the two sides of the drum -- the yin and the yang. A double-headed drum unites the sacred feminine and masculine aspects of the Universe within itself. It restores the balance of these polar, yet co-creative elements.

The two drumheads also symbolize the two states of existence -- unmanifest and manifest. When a double-headed drum is vibrated, it produces dissimilar sounds which are fused together by resonance to create one sound. The drumbeat is the tuner sound, the sound that fuses the unmanifest and manifest aspects of vibration into one resonance. The sound thus produced symbolizes Nada, the cosmic sound of AUM, which can be heard during deep meditation.

From a shamanic perspective, caretaking the drum and playing it properly during ritual fulfills the destiny of the human spirit -- to sustain the order of existence. In the rapture of ritual drumming, the shaman brings the World Tree into existence, opening a path of communication with the world above and the world below. Materialized in the drum, the trunk of the tree goes through the Middle World; its roots plunge to the nadir in the Lower World, and its branches soar to the zenith in the highest layer of the Upper World. The drum becomes the axis mundi or central axis through which the shaman maintains the world's equilibrium.

The Shaman's Drum

The drum, sometimes called the shaman's horse, provides the shaman a relatively easy means of controlled transcendence. Researchers have found that if a drum beat frequency of around three to four beats per second is sustained for at least fifteen minutes, it will induce significant trance states in most people, even on their first attempt. During shamanic flight, the sound of the drum serves as a guidance system, indicating where the shaman is at any moment or where they might need to go. The drumbeat also serves as an anchor, or lifeline, that the shaman follows to return to his or her body and/or exit the trance state when the trance work is complete.
 

The sound of the shaman's drum is very important. A shamanic ritual often begins with heating the drum head over a fire to bring it up to the desired pitch. It is the subtle variations in timbre and ever-changing overtones of the drum that allow the shaman to communicate with the spiritual realm. Part of the shaman's training involves learning to hear and interpret a larger range of frequencies than the normal person can. The shaman listens and finds the right tone, the right sound to which the spirits will respond. Through the many tones, pitches, and harmonics of the drum, the shaman communes with the subtle and normally unseen energies of the spirit world. 

Tuvan shamans believe that the spirits of nature create their own sound world, and it is possible for humans to communicate with them through the sound of the drum. According to Tuvan ethnographer and former shaman Mongush Kenin-Lopsan, "We understand the spirits answers mostly from the tangible results of the communication, in terms of benefit or harm. But some people actually hear the spirits singing." Tuvan shamans use the drum to convey to the spirits of a place their greetings, any requests, and thanks. It is a spiritual practice designed to help human beings relate to all of nature. Tuva (southern Siberia) is one of the few places in the world where the shamanic heritage has remained unbroken.
 

Drumming opens the shaman's inner, spiritual ears and eyes and also calls the helping spirits. As Tuvan musicologist Valentina Suzukei explains, "By changing and listening to the frequencies and overtones of the drum, the shaman is able to send messages to, and receive them from, both the spirit world and the patient. For example, the shaman might use the overtones to send signals to the sky, where they provoke a voice from the cosmos; in turn, the cosmic signals are caught on the drum and reflected to the shaman through the creation of subsequent overtones."

Dark Ecology

Scientists have determined that we are now living in the Anthropocene age: the new epoch of geological time in which human activity is considered such a powerful influence on the environment, climate and ecology of the planet that it will leave its legacy for millennia. The Anthropocene is notable as being human-influenced, or anthropogenic, based on overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric, and other Earth system processes are now altered by humans. In the Anthropocene, humans move from a biological to a geological agent. The Anthropocene is distinguished as a new period after or within the Holocene, the current epoch, which began approximately 10,000 years ago with the end of the last glacial period.
 

The awareness we've gained in the Anthropocene is not generally a happy one. Many environmentalists now warn of impending global catastrophe and urge industrial societies to change course. Philosopher Timothy Morton, however, stakes out a more iconoclastic position. He wants humanity to give up some of its core beliefs, from the fantasy that we can control the planet to the notion that we are 'above' other beings. His ideas might sound weird, but they're catching on. Morton, whose most quoted book is called Ecology Without Nature, proposes a perspective that sets him apart from all those scientists and social commentators warning of the impending disaster that is global warming. Instead of raising the ecological alarm of the apocalypse, he advocates what he calls "dark ecology," which holds that the much-feared catastrophe has, in fact, already occurred.
 

Morton means not only that irreversible global warming is under way, but also something more wide-reaching. "We Mesopotamians" -- as he calls the past 400 or so generations of humans living in agricultural and industrial societies -- thought that we were simply manipulating other entities (by farming and engineering, and so on) in a vacuum, as if we were lab technicians and they were in some kind of giant petri dish called "nature" or "the environment." In the Anthropocene, Morton says we must wake up to the fact that we never stood apart from or controlled the non-human things on the planet, but have always been thoroughly bound up with them. We can't even burn, throw or flush things away without them coming back to us in some form, such as harmful pollution. Our most cherished ideas about nature and the environment -- that they are separate from us, and relatively stable -- have been destroyed.
 

Morton likens this realization to detective stories in which the hunter realizes he is hunting himself (his favorite examples are Blade Runner and Oedipus Rex). "Not all of us are prepared to feel sufficiently creeped out by this epiphany," he says. This is a hard pill to swallow, but there's another twist: even though humans have caused the Anthropocene, we cannot control it. That might sound gloomy, but Morton glimpses in it a liberation. If we give up the delusion of controlling everything around us, we might refocus ourselves on the pleasure we take in other beings and life itself. Enjoyment, Morton believes, might be the thing that turns us on to a new kind of politics. "Even if it's true that we really are screwed, let's not spend the rest of our lives on this planet telling ourselves how screwed we are."