The Nomadic Alternative – Page 191

who settle, whether Sufis or Shakers in North America, need to find other vehicles to supplant that of perpetual pilgrimage. The chanting of stereotyped formulae, the breathing and gymnastic exercises, the fasting, and the whirlings, stampings and pirouettings of the dance replaced the breathless fatigue of the traveller on the road. "All the old tunes of Persia and Khorasan", said Avicenna, "are continuous rhythms which help to regularize and pacify the soul." "He who knows the dance, knows God," proclaimed Rumi.

Whirling dervishes, such as Rumi's Mevlevite Order, understood the full possibilities of the dance as a vehicle to provoke ecstatic communion with the divine. To the booming of kettledrums and the high-pitched wailing of the flute, the votaries pirouetted themselves into giddy drunkenness by disorienting the electric rhythms of the brain. The Master of the Path stood in the middle of the tekke or dance floor, white robed and representing the sun. His pupils, the planets, revolved about him, and the whole performance resembled the astronomical whirling games that Wittgenstein liked to play with his pupils on Cambridge meadows.

Music is, in fact, foreign to the teaching of the prophet. No Koranic equivalent recalls the euphonious clatter of the 150th Psalm. But in themselves the Suras of the Koran offer the verbal gymnast the possibility of creating a weird music of his own, rather like a drum solo in effect. I have seen professional reciters, who know the book by heart, transport their audience into a state of mindless reverie with their soaring rhythms. Abruptly they change tempo to coincide with words of intense significance, which the audience receives as inspirational messages from some non-human source Out-There.

"I will put into your mouth a spraking word", runs a line of the Arthavaveda. The metronomic repetition of stereotyped formulae accompanied by the formalized movements of the body is the vehicle hired by most religions to transport their initiates into 'madness in God', just as intimate contact with an internal combustion engine has the effect of making boys "mad for motor-bikes". Consciously