Music and Mysticism in the Kalapalo Culture of Brazil

People in many traditional cultures around the world live intimately close to nature and regard natural objects and processes as having thoughts and wills just like those of humans. Therefore, the sounds of nature are widely interpreted as the voices of spirits and gods.

These spirits and gods are the real forces in the world, not humans, who depend on the goodwill of the spirits and gods to provide humans with a livable environment. Different cultures use different means to summon and propitiate the forces of nature, but one virtually universal component in that communication is sound, often in its heightened form of music.

In many cultures, sonic communication with the spirits and gods leads to mysticism, a spiritual quest for personal union with the divine.

One such culture is found among the Kalapalo, a small group of Carib-dialect-speaking people in the settlement of Aifa in central Brazil.

In the traditional Kalapalo belief system, the universe is ruled by mythic personages known as itseke ("powerful beings"), some representing animals and natural forces, such as Jaguar, Storm, and Thunder.

The powerful beings are essentially musical in nature, creating their effects and achieving their goals by means of "song spells." The Kalapalo, in turn, perform music in an attempt to approximate itseke creativity.

"It is through sound that cosmic entities are rendered into being and represented by the Kalapalo-not as object-types but as beings causing and experiencing action in a veritable musical ecology of spirit" (Basso, 311).

The Kalapalo call up those entities through community music rituals. In their music rituals, the Kalapalo induce a trancelike effect in themselves by singing repetitious melodic and rhythmic phrases accompanied by similarly hypnotic dance patterns. Many performers attach rattles to their bodies, which are themselves regarded as instruments in both musical and mystical senses.

In their trancelike state, the Kalapalo seek communion with the spirit world. "This world is reproduced during ritual performances, in which Kalapalo collectively adopt the powerful mode of communication through which they engender the experience of a unity of cosmic forces, developed through the unity of sound formed by creative motion." (Basso, 243)

Having ritualistically entered the sonic spirit world by collectively performing music, the Kalapalo form a mystical union with it: "they not only model themselves upon their images of powerful beings, but they feel the worth of those models by experiencing the transformative powers inherent in human musicality" (Basso, 243).

In this transformation, a Kalapalo seeker attains an understanding "of the most intense expression of life itself, which is the experience-however transient-that one is indeed a powerful being" (Basso, 311).

This experience of personal union with their concept of the divine is one of the most important religious events in their lives and links the Kalapalo with a wide range of other mystics in nearly all cultures around the world.
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Basso, Ellen B. A Musical View of the Universe: Kalapalo Myth and Ritual Performances. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.

Encyclopaedia Britannica Ready Reference 2004 (CD-ROM).

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 2001.