There is a question that ethnomusicologists have asked tirelessly for a century: why does music, in cultures as distant from one another as Siberia and Ireland, Mongolia and Wales, Amazonia and Scotland, always occupy the same place at the heart of ritual practice? Why is the drum everywhere the shaman's first instrument, the harp everywhere the instrument of the bard, the flute everywhere the voice of the in-between? This is no coincidence. It is the trace of a universal intuition, shared by peoples who never met: sound is a doorway.

This article explores two traditions that made this intuition into an art — shamanism in its circumpolar and Siberian expressions, and the Celtic tradition in its Irish, Scottish, Breton, and Welsh forms. Two distinct universes, two geographies, two histories. But the same certainty: that certain sounds, produced in certain ways, in certain contexts, do something that ordinary speech cannot.

Shamanism and its instruments: a physics of the journey

The word shaman comes from the Tungusic šaman, an Altaic language spoken in eastern Siberia. It was through this region that Western researchers first encountered the practice, before realising it was present — in varying forms — in dozens of cultures across the world, from the Arctic to the Amazon, from the steppes of Central Asia to the plains of North America.

In 1951, historian of religions Mircea Eliade published Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, a founding work that attempted for the first time a comparative synthesis of these practices. For Eliade, the central characteristic of the shaman is the capacity to enter an altered state of consciousness — which he calls ecstasy or trance — during which the soul is believed to leave the body and travel through invisible realms: the upper world, the lower world, the world of the dead, the world of spirits. And in this effort, one instrument is almost always present: the drum.

The shamanic drum: horse and cosmos

In most shamanic traditions of northern Asia, circumpolar Europe, and North America, the drum is not simply a musical instrument. It is a sacred object, often personalised, sometimes considered to be alive. Its making is ritual, its animation the subject of a ceremony. Mircea Eliade recounts the words of an Altai shaman during such a ceremony: the newly made drum speaks, narrating the history of the tree from which its skin came, the tree whose wood forms its frame, the animal whose hide covers its face.

The shamanic drum is generally a frame drum — a circle of wood stretched with animal skin, struck with a mallet often padded with felt or fur. Its form varies by region: oval among the Sami shamans of Scandinavia, nearly round among the shamans of the North American plains, more elongated in Siberia. But its function is constant: to produce a regular beat — often between 4 and 7 Hz depending on the tradition — that induces in the practitioner an altered state of consciousness enabling the journey.

Research in neuroscience published in PLOS ONE in 2021 demonstrated, through high-density electroencephalography, that experienced shamanic practitioners show measurably altered brain activity during ritual drumming — changes similar, on several parameters, to those observed under the influence of psychedelic substances. What shamans have described for millennia as a "journey" corresponds to documentable brain states.

In shamanic tradition, the drum is often called the shaman's "horse" — it is what is ridden to cross the boundaries between worlds. It is also sometimes described as a "boat", a "bow", or a "cosmic tree". These metaphors are not decorative: they describe the real function of the instrument within the ritual economy. The drum's rhythm structures the journey, holds the practitioner in an intermediate state, and brings them back.

The rattle, the jaw harp, and other voices

If the drum is the central instrument, it is rarely alone. In many shamanic traditions it is accompanied by a rattle — an idiophone whose vibrations are said to attract spirit helpers or drive them away depending on context. Shamanic rattles are often made from symbolically charged materials: bones of totemic animals, seeds, shells, animal claws.

The jaw harp — a small vibrating reed plucked in front of the mouth, whose oral cavity modifies the timbre — is also present in many shamanic traditions of Central Asia, Siberia, and northern Europe. Its deep, buzzing sound, produced inside the player's own mouth, is sometimes described as the inner voice — the one that comes from within rather than without. In Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Siberia, the jaw harp has a long history of ritual and meditative use.

Throat singing — particularly developed among the Tuvan and Mongolian peoples — constitutes another major shamanic sound tool. The singer simultaneously produces two distinct sounds: a deep fundamental and a high harmonic. This technique, which requires years of learning, is used to imitate the voices of nature — wind, rivers, animals — and establish contact with the spirits that inhabit them.

The Celtic tradition: sounds of the in-between

Thousands of miles from the Siberian steppes, in the misty landscapes of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Brittany, another tradition made sound into a tool for crossing between worlds. Celtic music is not a musical genre like others. It is the heir to a worldview in which the boundary between the visible and the invisible is thin, permeable, and crossable — provided you know the right sounds.

The Celts did not form a unified empire but a constellation of peoples sharing related languages, common mythologies, and similar cultural practices. At their height they occupied a large part of western and central Europe, before being progressively pushed towards the Atlantic margins by Roman and then Saxon conquests. It is in these margins — Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, Galicia — that Celtic musical tradition has been preserved and transmitted.

The bards and the magic of sung words

At the heart of Celtic society stood a class of specialists in sound and speech: the bards. Full members of the Druidic caste, they occupied a high social status — below the nobility only, but above most other craftspeople. Their training lasted up to twenty years in specialised bardic schools, where they learned to memorise thousands of verses, master the art of poetic composition, and play the harp.

But bards were not mere entertainers. The poetry and music they practised were invested with a power that the Celts considered real and operative. A well-composed poem could, it was believed, heal a sickness, inspire courage in an army, or effectively curse an enemy. In Irish mythology, almost every musical moment is accompanied by a magical event — something changes in the physical world when a bard plays.

The Dagda's harp, belonging to the Irish father-god, perfectly illustrates this conception. According to the myths, this harp possessed the power to make the seasons come in their proper order, to put enemies to sleep or make them weep, to send warriors to march or to rest. It produced three melodies: the goltrai (lament melody, which caused weeping), the geanntrai (joy melody, which caused laughter), and the suantrai (sleep melody, which sent people to sleep). Three states, three functions, three powers — whoever mastered these melodies mastered emotions and energies.

The Celtic harp: instrument of the sacred

The Irish and Scottish clàrsach, the Welsh telyn, the Breton telenn: these words all name the Celtic harp, and the fact that each Celtic language has its own specific term — distinct from Latin or Germanic equivalents — attests to the antiquity and cultural importance of this instrument among the Celtic peoples.

The earliest certain representation of a Celtic harp appears on a cross at the Church of Ullard, near Kilkenny in Ireland, dating to 830 AD. But the instrument almost certainly existed earlier in more primitive forms. The oldest surviving specimen is the so-called Brian Boru harp, displayed in the library of Trinity College Dublin — a thirteenth-century instrument, 75 cm high, with some thirty strings of sheep gut stretched over a willow soundbox.

During the centuries of English dominance over Ireland, the Celtic harp was literally persecuted. Oliver Cromwell in the seventeenth century had harps burned and harpers hanged, viewing the instrument as a dangerous symbol of national resistance. It was not until the nineteenth century, within the Celtic Revival movement, that the harp was reborn — first in Ireland, then in Scotland and Brittany. It is today the official symbol of Ireland, appearing on its euro coins and the seal of the Irish state.

The bodhrán, the bagpipes, and the people's instruments

Alongside the harp of courts and bards existed a popular music — that of Irish pub sessions, Scottish ceilidhs, and Breton fest-noz. This music rests on a set of instruments that form the backbone of the Celtic sound as we know it today.

The bodhrán is an Irish frame drum whose origins remain debated — some researchers trace it back to the Bronze Age, others consider it a twentieth-century invention popularised in the 1960s. Whatever its exact origin, it plays today the role of the shamanic drum in the popular Celtic tradition: it provides the rhythmic heartbeat on which all the music rests. Played with a wooden tipper, it can produce a wide variety of timbres, from deep, muffled tones to sharp, clacking percussive sounds.

The bagpipes — in their Scottish (Great Highland Bagpipe), Irish (uilleann pipes), Breton (biniou), or Galician forms — are the most immediately recognisable instruments of the Celtic tradition. Their continuous drone, sounding without interruption while the player breathes, acoustically evokes the meditative drones of Eastern traditions. In Scottish military tradition, the bagpipe had a precise function: to accompany warriors into battle, maintain their cohesion, and carry them into a state of exaltation close to trance.

The tin whistle and wooden Irish flute are the most widespread melodic voices of the tradition. The hurdy-gurdy and the Welsh crwth represent bowed strings. The Irish bouzouki, of Greek origin but adopted in the 1960s, provides harmonic depth. Together, these instruments form a sound palette of remarkable richness — capable of moving in seconds from frenzied dance to melancholic stillness.

Two traditions, one language

What strikes, when placing the two traditions side by side, is less their differences than their deep convergences.

In both cases, music is not entertainment. It is a practice whose effects are considered real — on the practitioner's inner state, on the community that listens, on the invisible forces it addresses. In both cases, certain instruments are invested with their own presence — the shaman's drum, the bard's harp are not mere tools but entities with which the musician enters into relationship. And in both cases, the transmission of this musical knowledge is inseparable from the transmission of a worldview.

These traditions today

Neither shamanism nor Celtic traditional music are phenomena of the past. Both live, transform, and reinvent themselves.

Shamanism has experienced a remarkable revival in the West since the 1980s, carried first by the work of Michael Harner and the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, then by a broader wave of interest in non-conventional consciousness and healing practices. Shamanic drumming workshops have multiplied across Europe, often led by practitioners who have studied with shamans from Central Asia, North America, or Siberia. This diffusion raises legitimate questions about cultural appropriation and authenticity, which anthropologists such as Alice Kehoe have raised with rigour. But it also speaks to a real need — to rediscover practices in which sound plays an active role in inner experience.

Celtic traditional music, for its part, experienced its own renaissance from the 1960s onward, with artists like Alan Stivell in Brittany, who rediscovered and popularised the Celtic harp, or groups like Planxty and The Chieftains in Ireland. Today, musicians such as Loreena McKennitt, Heilung, and Lisa O'Neill continue to explore the boundaries between tradition and contemporary expression, between folklore and innovation, between inheritance and invention.

What persists in both cases is the conviction that certain sounds do something — that they do not merely decorate the world but transform it, that they do not comment on experience but provoke it. This is perhaps the oldest and most universal definition of music.