Aché, Music, and Spiritual Experience

This thesis explores the ways that practitioners in orisha worshipping traditions conceptualize aché in relation to the function of music and performance in spirit possession ceremonies. Aché is a concept generally defined as divine force, power, or energy. I investigate the ways that practitioners experience, conceptualize, and perform the physical and spiritual functions of ceremonial music in order to understand the dynamics, interactions, and communicative exchanges between performers and participants. This discussion explores the multiple manifestations of aché throughout the ritual and the ways that the roles of drummers, dancers, singers, and other musicians interact to harness and manipulate physical and spiritual energies (aché) during the process of facilitating spirit possession. I argue that music and performance are used as complex, highly specialized technologies for harnessing and manipulating the energy of aché throughout a process of interactions between musicians and participants, leading to the ultimate goal of the ceremony- orisha spirit possession. I conclude that this process is as much methodical as it is spiritual, and I deliberate over the significance of faith and experience in religious and scientific matters in order to discuss my understanding of the concept of aché as a phenomenon. Based on practitioners' conceptualizations of aché, I argue that this force functions along the principles of physics, is an expression of religious philosophies and cosmologies, and is a variable, unpredictable energy that exists within and through human activity.