A frame drum played in your browser for the shamanic journey: five to thirty minutes at the speed you choose, starting slower and settling if you like, ending with a call-back — Harner's rounds, a slowing, or three rolls — with a spoken cue, a buzz on the phone and rain, waves or a drone behind the drum if you want them. Build your question from a purpose, tick the small checklist and say it aloud three times, settle for half a minute, then go; darken the screen, and tap or press space to mark a moment; the screen stays awake. The drum can be a plain frame drum, a drum with jingles like a Siberian drum's pendants, a rattle, or silent with the screen pulsing — or your own painted skin from the Drum Face. Afterwards the moments you marked prompt the write-up, which can also go to your journal; a programme of five first journeys ticks itself off; your journeys are shown at a glance and kept to search, repeat and save, with the words that keep returning; and the drums of the Sámi, Siberia, Mongolia, Korea and Tibet, and what a brain-scanning study of journeyers did and did not find.
mixer13 lessons explain the ideas behind this tool.
Not a hell but another country of spirit, often of landscapes and animals. Most people meet their first helper here.
The way: Down through an opening in the earth you know: a cave, a spring, a hollow among tree roots, a burrow. Go in, and follow the passage down until it opens.
What for
Length
Speed: 240 beats a minute
Sound
The call-back
A pause; four rounds of seven slow, strong beats; fast drumming for up to a minute; four rounds of seven again. The workshop form.
BEFORE YOU GO
You can begin without the checklist; it is there to be ticked, not obeyed.
Use headphones if you can; the screen stays awake while the drum plays. Do not journey in acute distress, with a history of psychosis or dissociation, or under the influence; stop if you feel unwell. Read The Drum Journey first.
0 of 5 made
Five journeys most teachers set first, in order. Set one up and the world and question are filled in; when you keep its write-up, it is ticked.
0 kept
No journeys yet. After your first, write it down here.
Kept in this browser only, unless you also keep an entry in the journal.
The drum journey taught in the West is Harner's synthesis. The drums it echoes belong to living peoples, and each was played in its own way, for its own ends.
Sámi
The noaidi's drum was oval: a bowl drum of hollowed pine burl, goavddis, in the north, a frame drum, gievrie, in the south. Its skin was painted with the owner's world — the Sun, reindeer, boats, gods and the realms above and below — and served for trance, beaten steadily until the spirit left the body, and for divination, where a pointer of brass or bone danced over the figures as the drum was struck. Drumming went with joik, the Sámi chant. Women drummed too: Rijkuo-Maja of Arvidsjaur (1661–1757) and Silbo-gåmmoe of Vapsten (1794–1870) were both known for it. Missionaries burned and seized the drums in the 17th and 18th centuries; some are now coming home.
The lesson →Siberia
Drums of animal skin stretched over a bent wooden hoop, with a handle across the back. Metal pendants and small bells hung inside the drum and on the shaman's cloak and beater make a constantly moving field of sound, heard as one complex sound; shamans also sang into the drum, so that the voice seemed to come from elsewhere. Each shaman had a song of their own, sung near the start of a ritual to the drum, telling of their birth, initiation and spirits. In southern Tuva and Mongolia the jaw harp is played as well. Try the jingles above for something of that sound.
The lesson →Mongolia
The drum's skin was often horsehide, and the drum was the saddle animal the shaman rides, or the mount that carries the invoked spirit to the shaman; in one drum the handle itself was the ancestral spirit. Mirrors of brass or bronze, the toli, hung on the coat in numbers as armour, and one woman shaman said hers held the white horses of the shamans.
The lesson →Korea
In the kut ritual the music is played by musicians, often an hourglass drum with flute and oboe: it calls the god to possess the mudang, the shaman, accompanies the god while it is in the shaman’s body, then sends it back. The mudang sings and dances and directs the band — midway between the Siberian shaman, who plays for themselves, and the possession medium, who is played for.
The lesson →Tibet
Before Buddhism the Bön religion had its own shamans and their drum on a pole; it passed into the ensembles of Tibetan Buddhist ritual music, along with the shang, a bell-cymbal once used only by shamans to clear away harmful influence before a rite.
Core shamanism
Michael Harner, after fieldwork in the Amazon, began experimenting in the early 1970s with monotonous drumming in place of plant medicines, and built his workshops round it. This tool follows his method: a steady beat of several strokes a second, and a call-back. Rattling, dancing and chanting are used too in the wider neo-shamanic world.
The lesson →In 2016 Michael Hove and colleagues scanned fifteen experienced practitioners of shamanic journeying while they listened to eight minutes of drumming, sometimes going into trance and sometimes not (Cerebral Cortex 26:7). In trance, three hubs of the brain's networks grew more central — the posterior cingulate, part of the network active in inward thought, and the dorsal anterior cingulate and left insula, which steer attention — and worked more together, while the auditory pathway grew less connected, as if the repeated beat were being tuned out. The authors read it as a turn inward, amplified, with the drum fading from attention.
What it does not show is that the drum causes the trance. The same drumming was played in both conditions; the practitioners chose to journey or not. Ethnomusicologists make the same point from the field: the link between music and trance depends on culture and training as much as on sound. The popular claim that a beat of four to seven a second pulls the brain into its theta rhythm (4–8 Hz) rests on very little. Treat the drum as a support you learn to ride, not a switch.
Sources: M. J. Hove et al., “Brain Network Reconfiguration and Perceptual Decoupling During an Absorptive State of Consciousness”, Cerebral Cortex 26 (2016); the Wikipedia articles on shamanic music, the noaidi, Siberian shamanism, Mongolian shamanism and neoshamanism, and the works they cite.
A few things to do with this tool, from a first try to a habit. Each one you tick counts as practice for the day, towards your streak and milestones.
Kept in this browser. Notes you send to the journal are kept there as well.