Seeing Thro the Musical Eye: Santo Daime, Fuke-shū, 1960s Psychedelia, and the Antipodes of Musical Experience
Abstract
This thesis investigates the relationships between altered states of consciousness and the musical experience in religious tradition and practice. A common accompaniment to religious worship and ceremony, music is often used as a way of attempting to capture something of the ineffable and to help bring about a mystical experience. In this thesis, I make use of three contrasting case studies – the Brazilian syncretic religion Santo Daime, the historical branch of Zen Buddhism Fuke-shū, and the psychedelic rock of 1960s counterculture – to paint a portrait of the variety of ways that music has been used in different musical traditions to evoke mystical experience and how those experiences are expressed and understood in their cultural contexts. In these case studies, I explore the ways that music is used as an aid to other means of consciousness alteration, such as the entheogenic brew ayahuasca or Zen meditation. I also make the sustained argument that the ineffability of the musical experience itself can evoke a kind of “micro-mysticism” and that religious traditions which do not make use of entheogenic compounds or meditative techniques can still use music as a means of producing a milder form of consciousness alteration for the purpose of accessing mystical states.