Dark Song

Kuńasz, nélkül sívdobbanás, nélkül fesztelen löyly.
You lie as if asleep, without beat of heart, without airy breath.
Ot élidamet andam szabadon élidadért.
I offer freely my life for your life.
O jelä sielam j-rem ot ainamet és soŋe ot élidadet.
My spirit of light forgets my body and enters your body.
O jelä sielam pukta kinn minden szelemeket belső.
My spirit of light sends all the dark spirits within fleeing without.
Pajńak o susu hanyet és o nyelv nyálamet sívadaba.
I press the earth of our homeland and the spit of my tongue into your heart.
Vii, o verim soŋe o verid andam.
At last, I give you my blood for your blood.

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3. THE GREAT HEALING CHANT OF THE CARPATHIANS

The most well-known—and most dramatic—of the Carpathian healing chants is En Sarna Pus (The Great Healing Chant). This chant is reserved for recovering the wounded or unconscious Carpathian’s soul.

Typically a group of men would form a circle around the sick Carpathian (to “encircle him with our care and compassion”) and begin the chant. The shaman or healer or leader is the prime actor in this healing ceremony. It is he who will actually make the spiritual journey into the netherworld, aided by his clanspeople. Their purpose is to ecstatically dance, sing, drum and chant, all the while visualizing (through the words of the chant) the journey itself—every step of it, over and over again—to the point where the shaman, in trance, leaves his body and makes that very journey. (Indeed, the word ecstasy is from the Latin ex statis, which literally means “out of the body.”)

One advantage that the Carpathian healer has over many other shamans is his telepathic link to his lost brother. Most shamans must wander in the dark of the nether realms in search of their lost brother. But the Carpathian healer directly “hears” in his mind the voice of his lost brother calling to him, and can thus “zero in on” his soul like a homing beacon. For this reason, Carpathian healing tends to have a higher success rate than most other traditions of this sort.

Something of the geography of the “other world” is useful for us to examine in order to fully understand the words of the Great Carpathian Healing Chant. A reference is made to the “Great Tree” (in Carpathian: En Puwe). Many ancient traditions, including the Carpathian tradition, understood the worlds—the heaven worlds, our world and the nether realms—to be “hung” upon a great pole, or axis, or tree. Here on earth, we are positioned halfway up this tree, on one of its branches. Hence, many ancient texts referred to the material world as “middle earth”: midway between heaven and hell. Climbing the tree would lead one to the heaven worlds. Descending the tree to its roots would lead to the nether realms. The shaman was necessarily a master of movement up and down the Great Tree, sometimes moving unaided and sometimes assisted by (or even mounted upon the back of) an animal spirit guide. In various traditions, this Great Tree was known variously as the axis mundi (the “axis of the worlds”), Yggdrasil (in Norse mythology), Mount Meru (the sacred world mountain of Tibetan tradition), etc. The Christian cosmos, with its heaven, purgatory/earth and hell, is also worth comparing. It is even given a similar topography in Dante’s Divine Comedy: Dante is led on a journey first to hell, at the center of the earth; then upward to Mount Purgatory, which sits on the earth’s surface directly opposite Jerusalem; then farther upward first to Eden, the earthly paradise, at the summit of Mount Purgatory; and then upward at last to Heaven.

In the shamanistic tradition, it was understood that the small always reflects the large; the personal always reflects the cosmic. A movement in the greater dimensions of the cosmos also coincides with an internal movement. For example, the axis mundi of the cosmos corresponds with the spinal column of the individual. Journeys up and down the axis mundi often coincided with the movements of natural and spiritual energies (sometimes called kundalini or shakti) in the spinal column of the shaman or mystic.

En Sarna Pus (The Great Healing Chant)