By Satyaraja Das
Robert Gass, author of Chanting: Discovering Spirit in Sound, believes that ritual chanting is among the most universal of human impulses, as well as one of the first: “We have no recordings of the earliest humans,” he writes, “but when we encounter indigenous tribes who’ve had little contact with modern civilization, they all have sacred chants that their oral history traces back to their earliest origins. And if you look into creation myths from different cultures, in almost every case the world is said to come into being through sound, through chant. It’s in Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, and Native American religions. That’s evidence, in a way. The other evidence you can look at is young children: Almost all young children make up repetitive songs — they lose themselves in the rapture of singing.”