Scottish shamanic practitioners use drums. That is simply true, it is happening now, and it is happening here.

The Centre for Shamanism operates out of Fife, runs retreats on ancestral ground at Glen Clova, and its founder Rhonda McCrimmon has written a book called The Cauldron and the Drum. There are practitioners the length of the country working with frame drums, in Scotland, with Scottish people, on Scottish land.

So when we ask what Scotland's sound tradition is, we are asking two different questions and they need separating. What is happening now, and what is in the historical record. The answers are not the same, and the honest interest of the subject is in the gap between them.

What is in the record

I want to set this out carefully, because it is where the site's own standards apply.

There is no documented unbroken Highland shamanic drum lineage of the kind preserved among the Sámi, whose goavddis survives in museums and in trial records precisely because missionaries confiscated and burned them. Scotland has no equivalent surviving instrument, no equivalent seizure record, and no equivalent named practice.

The bodhrán's antiquity is genuinely disputed, and it is Irish rather than Scottish in any case. Seán Ó Riada declared it the native drum of the ancient Celts, and it was he who brought it into ensemble playing in the 1960s. The sceptical case, argued by Ó Súilleabháin among others, is that it derives from a riddle, the agricultural sieve used for winnowing grain, with the wire removed and a skin fitted. The earliest documentary reference anyone points to is a fifteenth-century medical text using the word for the sound of a bloated belly.

What Scotland does have in the written record is overwhelmingly vocal. Waulking songs, mouth music, psalm precenting, laments, canntaireachd, work songs and metrical charms, in enormous quantity and collected in detail.

Why thin evidence is not absence

Here is where I revise a claim I made too flatly, and where my own arguments should have caught me sooner.

The Silences argues that Scottish folk practice is thin in the record because of the Kirk, the Clearances, the lateness of the collectors, and because it was never written down in the first place. To then say "there is no drum in the record, therefore there was no drum" is exactly the reasoning that article warns against.

Consider what a ritual drum would have been up against:

  • It is perishable. A wooden hoop and a skin head. Nothing survives three hundred years in a Scottish climate, and there is no archaeological signature to find.
  • It is portable and confiscable. The one thing we know about Sámi drums is that they were taken and destroyed, which is why we know they existed. A campaign that thorough in Scotland would leave the same absence, not the same evidence.
  • The Kirk was hostile to instruments in principle. Instrumental music was excluded from Scottish worship for centuries. The pipes were suppressed after Culloden. An instrument associated with charming or second sight would have been an obvious target, and the people holding it had every reason not to advertise.
  • And the collectors arrived at the end. Carmichael was gathering from 1860, explicitly recording what was already dying.

So the honest formulation is: we cannot demonstrate a surviving Scottish ritual drum tradition from the sources, and the sources are not in a state that would let us. That is a much weaker claim than the one I made, and it is the correct one.

What I would not do is fill the gap with confident assertion in the other direction. There is no evidence of an ancient Celtic shamanic drum either. The honest position is that we do not know, and that the record is too damaged to tell us.

The living practice

Modern Celtic shamanism is a reconstruction, and the good practitioners say so.

That is not a criticism. This entire site argues that modern synthesis is legitimate and valuable when it is labelled. Wicca is modern. The eightfold wheel is modern. The sigil method is 1913. Reconstructed practice built by serious people on genuine sources is worth having, and the alternative to reconstruction is nothing at all.

What the contemporary Scottish practice draws on:

  • Saining, which is genuinely and specifically Scottish, well attested, and covered in its own article here.
  • The three cauldrons, from In Coire Érmai, the Cauldron of Poesy. Worth flagging on this site: that is an Old Irish text, not a Scottish one. The same distinction applies as with the Ogham letter names. Its use as an energetic body system is a modern interpretation of a poem about poetic inspiration, and worth naming as such.
  • The frame drum, which entered British practice largely through Michael Harner's core shamanism from the 1980s, drawn from Siberian and Native American sources and honestly labelled by him as a synthesis.
  • And the fire festivals, which are attested for the four Gaelic quarter days and modern in their eightfold form.

That is a real practice with real Scottish components and some imported ones. Knowing which is which does not weaken it. It is the difference between a tradition and a costume.

The drum in Scottish ritual now

This is the part I underweighted, and it is not a small thing.

  • The Beltane Fire Festival on Calton Hill has had drums at its centre since 1988. The Society's own writing puts it plainly: Beltane may be known as a fire festival, but it may as well be considered a drum festival. The drums drive the procession, mark the turning of the season, and build as the crowd moves toward the lighting of the bonfire.

The named drum groups are part of the structure of the rite. The Red Beastie Drummers. The Triskele drummers, who embody the transition of the seasons and hold the balance in their beats. Groups attached to the May Queen's retinue, playing snares, high and low toms, basses and cymbals, with pieces passed down from one year's cohort to the next and new ones written each season.

That is thirty-eight years of continuous transmission of specific rhythms within a Scottish ceremonial context. It is not an ancient lineage and nobody claims it is. It is a living one, and it is the largest festival of its kind in the world.

Its origins are worth knowing too. Founder Angus Farquhar came from Test Dept, the industrial percussion collective, and the first year's drums were provided by Test Dept alongside the London School of Samba. The Society is explicit that the beat carries a political inheritance: Thatcher-era, communal, a racket made against the unjust. Scottish ritual drumming did not arrive through a workshop. It arrived through resistance.

Samhuinn follows the same pattern in Holyrood Park each October, with the Cailleach at its centre.

And then Up Helly Aa, the Stonehaven fireballs, the Burning of the Clavie. Fire ceremony in Scotland is drummed.

And the wider point

There is something in Scottish music that goes to percussion, and it is not imported.

  • The pipe band snare is a genuinely distinctive Scottish tradition and, by common consent among drummers, the most technically demanding rudimental snare style in the world. Extremely high tension, complex ornamentation, tight corps unison. It is a Scottish invention and it is world-leading. It has also travelled. The Center for World Music's account of the bodhrán is candid that the modern Irish playing style was synthesised in part from Scottish pipe band snare drumming, alongside Ulster Lambeg and Indian tabla technique. So where there is a documented line of influence between the two countries on drum technique, it runs from Scotland outward.
  • Contemporary Scottish trad has gone the same way. Clanadonia, Albannach and the tribal drum bands are not a novelty act. They are extremely popular with Scottish audiences, and they are popular because the sound lands somewhere. A wall of bass drums behind pipes does something to a Scottish crowd that no amount of arguing about the historical record will explain away.
  • And the Iron Age evidence is not nothing. The Deskford Carnyx, found in Banffshire and held by National Museums Scotland, is a boar-headed bronze war horn from around the first or second century AD. It is ceremonial, it is Scottish, it is loud, and it is designed to be heard and felt. Scotland had instruments of ritual and martial sound long before anything in the written record. That the surviving one is a horn rather than a drum tells us about what survives in bronze, not about what people were doing.

Put those together and the honest picture is: percussion is deep in Scottish ceremonial and musical life, the written folk record is silent on ritual drums specifically, and the silence is not the same thing as absence.

Why the drum works

Nothing about the historical question affects whether drumming does something, and it plainly does.

  • Sustained rhythmic percussion at roughly four to seven beats per second is the standard journeying tempo, and there is a genuine literature on rhythmic auditory stimulation and altered states. The mechanism is contested; the effect is not controversial among people who have sat with a drum for twenty minutes.
  • It occupies the part of the mind that narrates. A steady beat gives the discursive attention something repetitive to do, and it stops interrupting.
  • It is felt, not just heard. A frame drum held against the body transmits through bone, and a bass drum in a procession transmits through the ground into everyone standing on it. That is a physical intervention, not a symbolic one, and it is why a drum corps on a hill in the dark works on a crowd of five thousand people who came for a night out.
  • And it gathers people. Every Scottish drumming context above is collective. Nobody drums alone at Beltane. That is the same shape as the waulking board and the psalm precenting, and it may be the most Scottish thing about it.

And the voice

None of which displaces the other half of the inheritance: Scotland's vocal tradition is extraordinary and almost nobody in the sound healing world is using it.

  • Òrain luaidh (OH-rin LOO-eye), the waulking songs. Sung by women in a group while pounding wet tweed against a board, call and response, tempo rising as the cloth tightens. The percussion instrument is the cloth and the table, and there are hundreds of them recorded.
  • Puirt-à-beul (PORSHT a BYAL), mouth music. Rhythmic Gaelic vocables carrying a dance tune where no instrument was available, syllables chosen for sound rather than sense.
  • Gaelic psalm singing, the precenting of the line. A precentor sings a line and the congregation returns it, each voice ornamenting freely, producing a vast slow heterophonic sound with no two voices in the same place. Still done in parts of Lewis. It is the most remarkable sound this country has made and hearing it once will change what you think sound practice can be.
  • Canntaireachd (KOWN-tar-uchk), the sung notation by which pipers transmitted pìobaireachd before written music. An entire instrumental repertoire held in syllables.
  • Coronach (KOR-un-uch), the lament, covered in the death article.
  • And the charms themselves, metrical and alliterative and built to be held by rhythm.

The shape of it is: sung, communal, and attached to work. Not solitary, not performed, not done to a passive recipient. That is a genuinely different model from most modern sound healing, and it is available, and it is ours.

A practice with both

  • Drum for the journey. Steady, four to seven beats a second, twenty minutes, with a callback at the end. This is the modern technique and it does what it says.
  • Voice for the daily. Humming on the exhale until you find where it resonates in the chest, then the throat, then behind the face. Five minutes. The sustained exhale is the most reliable route into a settled state there is, and you carry the instrument everywhere.
  • Vocables, not words, when you want to get past being self-conscious about singing.
  • Attach it to a task. The properly Scottish instruction and the one people skip. Sing while you knead, sweep, walk, dig or wash, and let the work set the metre.
  • And sing with other people. Group singing measurably synchronises breathing and heart rate between participants. The waulking board full of women was doing something real to all of them at once, and no amount of solitary work with a bowl replicates it.

One correction that stands

Unrelated to any of the above, and worth keeping. You will see claims that specific frequencies have specific healing effects, most often 432 Hz and the Solfeggio set. There is no good evidence for either. The Solfeggio frequencies were devised in the 1970s by Joseph Puleo and have no historical standing, and 432 Hz has no claim as an ancient tuning. Sound affects the body, mood and nervous system. Breath, rhythm, resonance and singing together are why. The specific numbers are not.

Sources

Contemporary Scottish practice

  • Centre for Shamanism — Rhonda McCrimmon, Fife. Celtic shamanic training, retreats and the ShamanTalk podcast.
  • McCrimmon, R. (2023). The Cauldron and the Drum: A Journey into Celtic Shamanism. Hay House.
  • Harner, M. (1980). The Way of the Shaman. The origin of frame-drum journeying in British practice, and honest about being a synthesis.
  • Beltane Fire Society — Edinburgh. See The Drums of Beltane and The radical roots of Beltane for the Test Dept origin, the named drum groups and the transmission of rhythms between years.
  • Clanadonia, Albannach and the contemporary Scottish tribal drum groups.

The Scottish vocal tradition

  • Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches — thousands of free field recordings. Search òrain luaidh, puirt à beul, coronach, canntaireachd. The primary resource.
  • Campbell, J. L. & Collinson, F. (1969–1981). Hebridean Folksongs, 3 vols. Oxford University Press.
  • Collinson, F. (1966). The Traditional and National Music of Scotland. Routledge.
  • Carmichael, A. (1900). Carmina Gadelica. Full text. See the standing caveat in How to Read an Esoteric Claim.

On the drum question

  • Ó Súilleabháin, M. (1985). The Bodhrán: The Black Sheep in the Family of Traditional Irish Musical Instruments. The Galpin Society Journal, 38, 9–19. The sceptical scholarly case.
  • Bodhrán — Wikipedia, for Ó Riada's claim and the riddle-derivation counter-argument.
  • On Sámi drums and their confiscation, see the collections of the Nordiska museet and the Sámi museum Siida, which show what a documented drum tradition looks like in the record.
  • The Bodhrán — Center for World Music, on the modern playing style being synthesised in part from Scottish pipe band snare drumming.
  • Deskford Carnyx — National Museums Scotland. Iron Age Scottish ceremonial war horn, and the reconstruction project that made it playable again.
  • Royal Scottish Pipe Band Association on the Scottish rudimental snare tradition.

On sound and the body

  • Vickhoff, B. et al. (2013). Music structure determines heart rate variability of singers. Frontiers in Psychology.
  • On rhythmic auditory stimulation and altered states, see the literature following Neher (1962), noting that the mechanism remains contested.

Related: [Naming and Speaking]; [The Silences]; [Saining]; [The Last Threshold]; [How to Read an Esoteric Claim]