Accessing the Spiritual Through Music
The following is an excerpt from my dissertation entitled Set the Gearshift for the High Gear of Your Soul: Discovering the Sacred Through Music: Pilgrimage, Ritual, and Myth in the Phish Community
Accessing the Spiritual Through Music
There are many ways leading to God; I have chosen that of music and dance. Rumi, Spirit Into Sound: The Magic of Music
You know her life was saved by rock and roll. The Velvet Underground, “Rock and Roll”
The spiritual power of music permeates cultures around the world. Music simply by itself, as well as within the context of religious rituals, provides individuals of all cultural and religious backgrounds a unique and experiential pathway to the sacred. In medieval Java, listening to certain kinds of music was thought to be a stepping stone toward the ultimate goal of enlightenment.1 Music genres used in the Islamic faith in and outside of Indonesia have a rhythmic prominence and intensity which drives the believer to states of ecstasy.2 Traditionally, music in South India has emerged out of religion, centered in and around the temple, and with worship. “An efficacious means for achieving religious goals is through song (kirtana); therefore all music in South India is, or is derived from vocal music, and all vocal music is from religion”3 Traditional stories in Hindu scriptures about gods and goddesses are told in song. According to Oskar Sohngen in his essay Music and Theology: A Systemic Approach, it was though in the Middle Ages that,
If God created the world according to the rules of music, [then] the audible music of humans therefore has only representative significance in the hierarchy of creation, the musician, who is initiated into the mathematical mystery of music, has the task of imitating divine laws…to compose and to make music is, therefore, a work of devotion, for it concerns the reverent reflection on and imitation of God’s ideas of creation. 4
It is easy and familiar for many of us to relate to the power of music in the context of a religious ritual, yet the same opportunities are often disregarded when music reveals its sacred qualities in a secular setting. Music theorist Charles Smith explains,
From primitive times onwards music has always played an important part in religious ritual. As an outcome of this it has been credited with a profusion of holy virtues and transcendental powers…Mythological accounts of the miraculous attributes of music are not taken too seriously nowadays, but the habit of thought which was instilled and encouraged by pagan faith in the divinity of music still endures.5
So even though music’s power is often overlooked or minimized in modern culture, pockets of the population still do employ music’s magical qualities for their personal spiritual enlightenment. Mickey Hart, the long-time Grateful Dead drummer and appointee to the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center Board of Trustees, explains, “Music is a special energy. It is of this world, but it also acts as a bridge to the spiritual world. Music is our connection to the hidden world of the soul, the subconscious that lies beneath waking states. It becomes a universal language, a spirit language, with the power to change consciousness.”6
In the book Deadhead Social Science: You Ain’t Gonna Learn What You Don’t Wanna Know, Shan C. Sutton’s essay called The Deadhead Community: Popular Religion in Contemporary American Culture explores the Grateful Dead as a popular religion. His interdisciplinary exploration of the religious qualities of the Deadhead community unquestionably corresponds to the religious aspects of the Phish community, a group that is not generally recognized as a popular religion. The Deadheads are essentially a religious phenomenon as they fit scholars’ definitions of concepts such as religion, ritual, mysticism, and shamanism, as does the Phish community. These communities offer a vivid example of how opportunities for ritual participation and consciousness exploration can be provided by popular religions.
Sutton uses a model according to Albanese7 to explain that religion consists of four interrelated components: community, cultus (ritual behavior), creed (beliefs about the meaning of human life), and code (rules for everyday behavior that reflect creed). Cultus, creed, and code provide religious communities with the boundaries of ordinary and extraordinary reality. The collective recognition of extraordinary reality is especially crucial because it makes a community religious. In Albanese’s model, individuals belong to many religions simultaneously, and a number of affiliations, creeds, and codes coexist to form a person’s total religious identity. Being a Deadhead or a Phish fan does not preclude members from also being Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, or having any other religious affiliation. Understanding renditions of religion outside the officially recognized ones often requires putting aside one’s personal beliefs and prejudices, a reminder relevant to comprehending the Dead or Phish community. Deadheads or Phish fans are not only a religious community detached from traditional institutions; they also share mystical experiences that nonmembers cannot fully appreciate.
While there is no standard process for becoming a Phishhead, attending concerts, having an interest in the band, and loving the music are usually the processes. However, everyone that attends a Phish concert does not become involved in the Phish community. Those that did choose to join the community seemed to share an openness and welcomed the communal mystical states that coexisted with the concert experience.
Not every concert succeeds in having a mystical quality to them. Any fan will say that the best shows are the ones when everyone there “gets it,” although some concert-goers experience consciousness shifting moments while others were unaffected. This happens in religious contexts as well, such as trance-inducing Sufi ceremonies based on singing and dancing—that some participants became entranced and others do not—even though all of them are participating in the same way.8 Many fans that first saw Phish play, and this is also true of the Grateful Dead, saw shows close to home. The impact of the consciousness shifting moments and the repeated transformations at subsequent shows lured the fans into touring. Touring offered a striking similarity to Islam and other religions to the seasonal pilgrimages common to the followers of these religions.
In Sardiello’s essay Secular Rituals in Popular Culture: A Case for Grateful Dead Concerts and Deadhead Identity,9 he examines Deadhead activities in terms of Turner’s10 ritual process arguing that Deadheads practice “secular rituals,” although he “views both secular and religious ritual in terms of the sacred.” In Shan C. Sutton’s opinion, “any ritual culminating in the attainment of mystical experience is fundamentally a religious ritual because its purpose is exposure to extraordinary reality.”11
During Grateful Dead concerts, fans and band members told of mystical experiences that had three common themes: ineffability, transformation, and union. These qualities are also identified by Rebecca Adams in her own description at Dead shows. The experiences were a “transformation of ordinary consciousness into an extraordinary state that was essentially ineffable or indescribable, beyond a euphoric sense of well-being and connectedness with others.”12 Transformation was the key element of the Deadhead experience because it fostered both the ineffable quality and the achievement of union.13
The use of hallucinogens as a means of transformation of consciousness during a Grateful Dead or a Phish show is commonplace but not a necessary means. The Wharf Rats are a group of sober Deadheads and the Phellowship is a group of sober Phishheads that reported major changes in consciousness without the use of drugs. Music, dance, and hallucinogens have a long history of use in rituals and achieving mystical states. As Mickey Hart said, “There’s a need in our community for what we do, just like there’s a need for shamans in other types of communities. We’re not shamans in the classic sense, but we fulfill some of their function.”14 In addition to the music, dance played a large role as a medium to transformation. Deadheads usually danced in an enthusiastic style that was free-form, limb flailing, sometimes graceful and most times not, but with a movement that came from the soul. To be in an enclosed venue, with thousands of fans dancing and wriggling, steam would be rising to the rafters as the heat escaped from the mass of bodies. Some dancers simply spun around in a circle. These dancers, known as Spinners, the Family, then lastly known as the Church of Unlimited Devotion, were a small group that traveled from show to show with each other. They had renounced worldly possessions and aspirations but shared the few things that they did possess. They purchased land in California and established a monastic community. Their theology combined elements of Catholicism and Krishna Consciousness. The Family members believed in one god, whose message could be found in both scriptural texts and in the music of the Grateful Dead. Contrary to popular belief, none of the members of the band, not even Jerry Garcia, was deified, but were viewed as channels through which god’s energy moved. Shows became religious rituals with spinning used as a meditational vehicle to help spinners focus on the music. The Spinners mirrored the dance of the Whirling Dervishes of Sufism, who looked to attain enlightenment and spiritual experience through rituals based on music and dancing. These Sufi rituals of consciousness shifting were not to be performed in solitude, but rather in a group with the company of other dancers.
Hallucinogenic drugs were used during a Grateful Dead show as a means to facilitate altered states. Drugs such as marijuana and alcohol were common, but the most popular in aiding a spiritual experience were LSD and psychotropic mushrooms. In other religions and rituals around the world, believers ingest hallucinogens to aid in the overall experience. There are indigenous people in Mexico that ingest mushrooms in curing ceremonies and Native Americans in Wisconsin use peyote in rituals that include singing, drumming, and dancing.14 When asked about psychedelics, Jerry Garcia said:
Psychedelics are still the most important thing that ever happened to me. Psychedelics is a lot why I’m here and doing what I’m doing. And a lot of the vision I have, such as it is, I owe to my psychedelic experience. Nothing has opened me up like psychedelics did…Even if I never take psychedelics again, I’ve already experienced hundred of thousands of lifetimes’ worth of experiences that are as valid to me and as real to me as anything. That’s for keeps. That’s mine forever.
1Lawrence E. Sullivan, ed., Enchanting Powers: Music in the World’s Religions, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 15.
2Ibid., 18.
3Robert Leopold Simon, Spiritual Aspects of Indian Music, (Delhi: Sundeep Prakashan, 1984), 3.
4Joyce Irwin, ed., Sacred Sound: Music in Religious Thought and Practice, (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), vol. L, no. 1, Music in Theology: A Systematic Approach, by Oskar Sohngen, 4.
5Charles T. Smith, Music and Reason, (London: C.A. Watts & Co. Limited, 1947).
6Spirit Into Sound, 131.
7C.L. Albanese, America Religions and Religion, (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1981), 9.
8Gilbert Rouget, Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations Between Music and Possession, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 301.
9R. Sardiello, Secular Rituals in Popular Culture: A Case for Grateful Dead Concerts and Deadhead Identity, in J.S. Epstein, ed., Adolescents and Their Music: If It’s Too Loud, You’re Too Old, (New York: Garland, 1994), 130.
10V. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969).
11Shan C. Sutton, The Deadhead Community: Popular Religion in Contemporary American Culture, in Rebecca G. Adams, ed., Deadhead Social Science (Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 2000).
12Ibid., 115.
13Ibid., 115.
14Blair Jackson, Goin’ Down the Road: A Grateful Dead Traveling Companion, (New York: Crown Publishers, 1992), 199.
15M. Dobkin de Rios, Hallucinogens: Cross-cultural Perspectives (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 211.
