How The Drum Came To The People
A drum is not made only of wood and hide. Master drum maker David Craig teaches that a drum is a home for a spirit and a tool of prayer, and that to understand it we have to know a little of where it came from. The making of the drum, he says, is passed from hand to hand, so that everyone who holds one becomes a drum keeper, carrying the story forward.
A Teaching That Came Through A Woman
David shares the story he was given by his own teachers, the old medicine keepers Harlan Downwind and Jake Agoni of Manitoulin Island. In a time of chaos, when the camp was under attack and the people were fleeing, a woman ran into the river and hid beneath the surface, breathing through a hollow reed. All around her she could hear the panic, the running, the fear. And in that dark water, at the edge of drowning, she was given a vision.
When the danger had passed, the people found her alive and drew her out, and she told the elders what she had seen. She had been shown the first drum, a hollow log, and how to wrap the hide of the deer or the elk around it, and how to prepare it. She brought that teaching back to the people. Because the drum came into the world through a woman's vision, David explains, it became the tradition that the men build the drums, and that a young woman makes her own drum only in her later years. It is a way of honoring the one through whom the gift first arrived.
The Sacred Circle
A drum is round, and in that roundness is meaning. Everything, David reminds us, is round, and the circle holds all the powers of the universe within it. When a drum is made, those powers, the spirit of the animal, the tree, the wind, the earth itself, are gathered and held within that sacred circle. This is why a drum is treated as a living, holy thing, a tool used before, during, and within ceremony, a tool of prayer.
The Heartbeat Of Mother Earth
Above all, the drum is a heartbeat. It is the heartbeat of Mother Earth, and when you play it at the pace of your own heart, something in you settles and opens. This is not only poetry. Even physicians now note that steady drumming lowers blood pressure and calms the body, which is something the old people always knew. As you drum at that heartbeat rhythm, you connect to the drum, and through it to the helpers who live within it, spirits who, David says, want us to be happy, to live as freely as a hawk in the sky, unburdened by the weight of the world we have built.
One Heartbeat, Many Nations
This connection is not the possession of any single people. Every drum made in a traditional way, whether a West African djembe, a Celtic frame drum, a Native American hand drum, or a Japanese taiko, carries this link to the ancestors. The forms differ and the rhythms differ, but the heartbeat is shared. In that sense the drum is one of the great reminders that beneath our many traditions we are deeply related, all of us children of the same earth.
To pick up a drum, then, is to pick up a story that came through a woman's courage, a circle that holds the whole universe, and a heartbeat that joins us to the earth and to one another. That is the spirit of the drum, and it is why we treat it with such love.
If you feel called to journey with the drum, the path begins with Fundamentals of Shamanism.