Magical designs - Not just a pretty drum

Pick any culture around the world and from any part of history and you'll find that we humans love to imbue our lives with symbols. They decorate our temples, our houses, our bodies and our musical instruments. .These symbols are transformative metaphors designed to move us from the ordinary reality of time and space and paying the bills through to a place of magic, wonder and timelessness where we can glimpse the infinite.


Specific designs also convey a particular belief system. Spirals may speak to a journey to and from the center. Pentacles may show us the map to running energy in a particular way, noting the intersection of certain points. Runes carved by themselves or in combinations can form warnings, spells, and blessings.


I recently bought a new drum that features a "chevron" design and called it "classically African." After reading back my description I wondered what makes this design African and, if indeed it is African, what's the story behind it.


Chevrons appear through Europe as a heraldic sign. You'll also see chevrons used to signify rank - just look at most military insignia and you'll see what I mean. But those hardly seem classically African now do they.

After a little digging, I discovered that the Zulu term for a chevron is amasumpa. It's an ancient design consisting of several inverted stripes. The tip, if you will, points downward toward the womb. Zulu women often adorned themselves by ritual scarification with amasumpa symbols on their lower abdomens.


In many African cultures pots, vessels, and drums are identified with the female form because they carry life within them. Food and water carried in vessels literally meant the difference between life and death. So too the idea that the universe was born of one sound, makes a drum a sacred vessel that creates a life - in fact the sound created is the stuff and matter of the universe itself.


This  drum, with it's amasumpa design, has deepened my experience of drumming yet again. This simple carving, rendered in the base of a drum is a powerful reminder that through it I give birth to sound and add my voice to this incredible multi-verse.


Moves me to tears. Moves me to play with just a little more reverence.


Keep drumming...


Gwion