The Power of Singing

      The Song of Power is a very powerful tool of realizing your magic or shamanic will. I have used several ways of attaining an own power song. The ways I know are presented in this chapter.

     The simpliest way of achieving a power song is making a journey to it. If you have a good contact to your spirits they will provide you with instructions, maybe some cryptic ones. Instructions like „roar like a deer", „howl like a wolf" or „sing like the wind in the trees" are among the more understandable ones. Perhaps you learn a melody from your shamanic teachers or they say to you, you have to sing like you want. The songs you are learning in this way are your power songs. They may not sound like any song you have heard before in your life. Often power songs transcend or don´t fit into the common, acquired artistic sense. Strange and unusual melodies or even animalistic sounds are within the reaches of a power song as well as most beautiful tunes.

     If you are not versed in the technic of the shamanic journey you can choose other paths of achieving your own powersong. Take yourself a little time at the evening, when your neighbours are sitting in front of the T.V., and ignore their protesting callings and knockings for a while during you are singing whatever is springing in your mouth. Experiment with your vocal chords and make some noises which are rather uncomfortable or sounds like animal voices. Don´t overdo this exercises to avoid problems with your vocal chords. At the first signs of stress or fatigue stop and allow your voice to rest for the rest of the day. Some day you will find sounds or tunes fitting to your intuition and your being. You can easily learn about the virtuality of your current musical taste by listening to traditional, classic music from korea or from the inuit or other cultures. To offer the song of power a way of becoming more organic, you can implant sigills, symbolizing your sentence of will, too.

     Power songs emanate something natural. They are extremely individualistic and cannot be copied by other practitioners, although you can sing them to feel their unique powers. Within powersongs semantic elements do occur on occasion. Sometimes these can lead to complete stanzas in rhymes. Powersongs are changing with the practitioner, reflecting the development and personality of its owner.

     The powersong is a useful tool, I mentioned this above. It is a kind of fingerprint or identity card of the shaman. Shamanic practitioners can read the powersongs and know about the powers and point of development of the singer. Of course the same can be said about the spirits in the spirit world. It can be used to call spirits in general and it can be used as a kind of carrier wave for the intentions of the shamanic practitioner singing it. The intention of the singer is carried in the physical universe to find organic manifestation there.

     Traditional power songs are being used to induce trance states. A nice example is being handed down from the ghost dance movement around the native american prophet Wovoka. This powersong was sung for hours during the ghost dance. Melody and text are very easy and after short time do their work on the minds of the singers in a vision dance. I learned this one in the Foundation for Shamanic Studies.

     Of course your own power song has the same trance inducing effects, if not much better than the traditional ones. To enter trance the singing of your power song is an excellent way of achieving this. By the way it is much fun to sing powersongs and any other song, anyway. A really advantage to the drum is obvious: you can never forget your voice. You always have it with you.

      It is not uncommon to possess more than one power song. Some specialized songs may count to them, too. During the years of shamanizing the practitioner continues to follow his own path and the power song changes, too. The old power songs are still powerful and may possess some unique features, perhaps they are evocative or especially trance-inducing ones. I myself use more than one power song, three at least.

     The technic of singing with two voices - called Choomey or Overtone-Singing in shamanic context is being described in a separate writing: "Choomey".

© 1998 by Aufsteigender Adler