This section of our Sacred Audio Collection includes recordings from aboriginal traditions around the world.
Some of these recordings may be found labelled as “folkloric” in ethnological and other similar literature. That we present them here highlights the fact that in wholesome traditional societies the sacred is not relegated “to a separate and secondary compartment of our understanding, divorced from the practical day-to-day existence,” but rather pervades the fabric of ordinary life, making it symbolic, and thus properly human. Accordingly, taming a horse, lulling a baby to sleep, hunting or husking the corn, can be as ritually significant as the sacramental ingestion of tobacco or the performance of cosmological dances.
For more on this perspective, see our library article “The Symbolist Mind.”
