Why does Ophidism sings?

"Bis orat qui cantat"

said St. Augustine, and whether or not we share his same religious background, this sentence expresses an intuition shared by many other religious traditions: there are spiritual truths that words alone cannot fully convey.

Even in the Ophidian Tradition, singing is not an ornament added to devotion, nor a simple tool to create an atmosphere. Quite the opposite, it is an integral part of the liturgy and of the devotion itself, since through the marriage between the melody, the rhythm and the voice our prayers acquire a form that cannot be associated in any way with the spoken word alone. Yet, the role of sacred music in Ophidism differs from that found in many other traditions. Why?

Beyond Emotions

Historically, music has always been associated with the necessity of creating emotions. Often, we tend to evaluate a certain melody based on the number and type of emotions it can create within ourselves. A melody, therefore, is considered successful if it moves the listener, creates excitement or evokes a particular feeling.

This is true particularly today, when the general opinion about sacred songs has been influenced by the contemporary romantic aesthetic and concert music. Substantially different was the approach, although not always, in the case of many religious traditions which use singing within their practices. In this regard, we could not avoid quoting the dithyramb, a choral song in honour of Dionysus «sung by a group of singers under the leadership of an exarchōn» (1), or the paean, a form of choral prayer originally devoted to Apollo and then extended to other Divine beings. Neither of these types of sacred songs had, as their main function, the transmission of an emotion. This does not mean, however, that the emotional sphere was completely excluded from these practices, but only that we cannot, historically and religiously, believe that this was their main feature. Ancient religions, in fact, did not use the chant simply to transmit or create emotions within the body of devotees. The chant was, in itself, a ritual action: it used to accompany sacrifice, it gave order to processions, it helped remember the sacred texts, and it unified the community of worshippers into a single voice. The emotional effect could totally be acknowledged, but it represented only a consequence of participation in the rite, rather than its main purpose. This type of vision has been attested and highlighted in one of the most interesting philological reconstructions by F. Nietzsche about the birth and death of the Greek tragedy. As F. Nietzsche would have stated, in fact, «In the Dionysian dithyramb man is aroused to the highest intensity of all his symbolic capabilities; something never felt forces itself into expression, the destruction of the veil of Maja, the sense of oneness as the presiding genius of form, in fact, of nature itself.» (2)

This sentence acquires a deeper meaning, within the German philosopher’s framework, only when confronted with the concepts of Dionysian and Apollonian: «To grasp this total unleashing of all symbolic powers, man must already have attained that high level of freedom from the self which desires to express itself symbolically in those forces. Because of this, the dithyrambic servant of Dionysus will be understood only by someone like himself! With what astonishment must the Apollonian Greek have gazed at him!» (3). It is clear that, within this speculation, the dithyramb is used as the true embodiment of a universal spirit, named Dionysian, capable of provoking the eruption of the human symbolic capability through which men can destroy the veil of Maja and unveil the true nature of nature itself.

Nietzsche’s interpretation, therefore, allows us to go beyond the modern understanding of sacred music as a mere vehicle for emotional expression. What truly occurred in the dithyramb was not the simple intensification of an individual feeling, but the access at a completely new symbolic dimension in which the participant could exceed their own emotional state. The role of music was not to express what the worshippers already feel, but to modify, through rhythm, voice and collective participation, the very conditions through which the worshippers were perceiving themselves as isolated subjects. This distinction is fundamental. In fact, if sacred singing were merely intended to produce emotion, its liturgical value could ultimately be measured by its psychological effectiveness: a successful chant would be one capable of moving its participants more intensely. Yet ritual singing belongs to a different order. Its efficacy does not depend upon whether every participant experiences the same emotion, or indeed any particular emotion at all. One may sing without being moved, just as one may be profoundly moved without singing. What constitutes the liturgical act is the participation in singing itself.

We may therefore formulate a first principle of Ophidian sacred music: the chant does not primarily represent an interior state, but it is aimed at establishing a mode of participation.

And nowhere does this become more evident than when the individual voice ceases to stand alone and becomes part of a chorus.

From spectator to chorus

The collective dimension of sacred singing introduces a further question. If chant is not primarily intended to express or produce an individual emotional state, who, precisely, is the subject that sings? The most immediate answer would be the individual worshipper. Yet this answer becomes increasingly inadequate as soon as the voice enters the chorus. The single voice does not disappear, but neither does it remain entirely what it was before. It becomes part of a liturgical subject whose existence depends precisely upon the simultaneous presence of plurality and unity. A useful point of departure for this analysis can be found once again in the philosophical interpretation of Greek tragedy. August Wilhelm Schlegel famously described the tragic chorus as an “ideal spectator” (4), an interpretation that Nietzsche would later explicitly criticise in The Birth of Tragedy (5). Regardless of the crtique moved by Nietzsche, Schlegel’s expression is quite revealing, because of the philosophical and philological problem it creates: to define the chorus as a spectator is still to preserve, however subtly, the distinction between those who witness the dramatic event and the event itself. The chorus may be privileged, idealised, or incorporated into the structure of the tragedy, but it still remains, according to this interpretation, something that looks upon what occurs.

Nietzsche's objection to this thesis opens the possibility of a more radical understanding. The Dionysian chorus cannot adequately be understood as an audience contemplating an action external to itself. The chorus belongs to the very (ritual) reality from which the dramatic event emerges. Its members do not simply observe the Dionysian world represented before them, but, through their collective transformation, they actively participate in it. The distinction between spectator and spectacle consequently becomes unstable. What matters is no longer merely what the chorus sees, but what the chorus becomes through its participation in the tragedy.

Such a distinction is particularly significant for an Ophidian understanding of liturgical chants. The congregation gathered for the Ierá is not an audience before which a sacred action is performed. Nor should its chants be regarded as musical interludes accompanying ritual actions whose true meaning exists independently from them. The congregation is one of the means through which the liturgy becomes present. Singing is therefore not a commentary upon the rite: it is itself a ritual action. This becomes particularly evident in choral singing; when several Ophidians, in fact, pronounce the same prayer together, what emerges cannot simply be reduced to a multiplication of individual prayers. Ten voices singing the same oratio are not merely ten isolated devotional acts occurring simultaneously. Rhythm regulates breathing; melody determines duration; the words establish a common symbolic field; and the voices, while remaining distinguishable, participate in the production of a single liturgical form. No individual voice alone constitutes the chorus, yet neither can the chorus exist independently of the individual voices that compose it.

Here, the structure of Ophidian choral practice reveals a striking correspondence with Ophidian metaphysics itself. Unity is not achieved through the abolition of difference. The voices do not need to become identical in order to become one chorus. Their differences of timbre, intensity and expression remain, but are ordered through their participation in a common movement. The chorus, therefore, presents, on a ritual and acoustic level, the same problem encountered in the relation between Philia and Neikos: how can multiplicity remain multiplicity without collapsing into fragmentation, and how can unity emerge without suppressing distinction?

The answer is found in Polemos. Within Ophidian thought, Polemos should not be reduced to conflict in the ordinary sense of hostility or opposition. It indicates the dynamic relation through which differentiation becomes productive rather than destructive. Applied to sacred singing, this means that the unity of the chorus does not precede the plurality of voices, nor does it replace it; on the opposite, it emerges precisely through their relation. The liturgical voice is therefore neither simply one nor simply many: it is the ordered manifestation of plurality as unity. This is why perfect technical uniformity cannot constitute the ultimate criterion by which Ophidian sacred singing is judged. Certainly, rhythm, melody and discipline remain necessary; without them, plurality may simply become acoustic disorder. Yet the objective is not to erase the particularity of each participant in favour of an impersonal musical perfection. Such an ideal would transform the congregation into something resembling a professional choir and the liturgy into a performance, precisely as it happens in other traditions: «The assembly’s singing belongs to those typical modes of the liturgy and of its languages that allow the participation of all the worshippers within the only celebrating act and, through this, to the mystery. Naturally, not all the assemblies are equal: an ordinary worship of a few people is not a festive liturgy, a trained assembly in choral singing (as religious communities) is not a parish assembly, and a traditional assembly is not a mass gathering. These and other distinctions must be considered concerning the problem of liturgical singing, about the choice of texts and melodies and about the number of chanted interventions.» (6)

The Ophidian liturgical concord is substantially different from the situation described by the Christians concerning their choruses. In Ophidism, the individual voice remains recognisable while consenting to inhabit a form that exceeds it: the singer is, at the same time, individual singer and collective chorus.

The distinction between performance and participation is, at this point in our analysis, essential. A performance presupposes, at least conceptually, someone who performs and someone who receives the performance. Liturgical chant disrupts this structure: even when some participants lead, and others respond, the fundamental subject of the action remains the gathered community. There is no external audience whose aesthetic judgement gives meaning to the chant. Its significance arises from the act of participation itself. This also explains why the value of sacred singing cannot ultimately depend upon musical beauty alone; a beautifully executed chant may liturgically fail if it would reduce the congregation to passive listeners, whereas an imperfect chant may fulfil its ritual function if it succeeds in drawing the community into common participation and a shared spiritual experience. We must be careful, though, in not considering beauty as irrelevant when we sing an Ophidian liturgical chant, since harmony among contraries is one of the most important Ophidian concepts. However, on the other hand, we cannot even consider it as the only and absolute criterion to follow when it comes to a spiritual activity such as ritual singing: within the liturgy, music must remain subordinate to the ontological and communal reality that it helps to disclose.

The chorus, which in Ophidism corresponds to the whole assembly of Ophidians, thus becomes more than a practical method for allowing several worshippers to pray simultaneously. It becomes an embodied expression of an Ophidian principle: communion does not require the dissolution of difference. Each participant breathes separately, each possesses a distinct voice, and each enters the chant from a distinct interior condition; nevertheless, for the duration of the sacred song, these differences become capable of producing a common form. The Ophidian chorus consequently does not sing about unity; for the duration of the chant, the chorus enacts unity. And precisely because this unity does not abolish multiplicity, sacred singing may be understood as one of the clearest liturgical manifestations of Polemos: many voices, irreducible to one another, held together within the same movement without ceasing to be many.

The Rhythm of Serpent

Sacred singing is necessarily corporeal. Before a prayer can become a chant, it must become breath. The body expands, contracts, produces sound, returns to silence, and begins again. Melody, therefore, introduces into prayer a rhythm that the spoken word does not possess in the same manner. This does not mean that the physiological act of singing should simply be identified with what Ophidism considers to be the movement of the Serpent. The relationship is analogical rather than identical, yet the analogy is significant.

Ophidian metaphysics understands manifestation not as a linear passage from immobility to movement (7), but as rhythm: contraction and expansion, concealment and disclosure, silence and appearance. In sacred chant, these relations cease to be merely a theological concept contemplated by the intellect and become a lived and experienced structure of reality. Every element of the liturgical chant has its own role, its own function in the unfolding process that aims at representing. Even silence, consequently, is no less important than the spoken word. A chant composed only of uninterrupted sound would cease to possess a rhythm: it is precisely the alternation between voice and silence that gives liturgical chant its own intelligibility. The silence surrounding the spoken word is not an emptiness to overcome or to fulfil at any cost, but one of the conditions through which the voice can truly manifest itself.

But then, why do we sing?

We do not sing because melody makes prayer more beautiful, although beauty may still emerge from it. We do not sing because music intensifies religious emotion, although emotion may still accompany this experience. We do not sing even sing because singing makes sacred words easier to remember, although it undoubtedly can.

We sing because sacred chant makes participation possible in a manner that speech alone cannot reproduce.

In singing, the word becomes breath; breath becomes rhythm; rhythm orders different voices without abolishing their difference; and those voices, gathered into a common movement, cease for a moment to constitute merely a collection of individuals. And in all this process, the theological content of the prayer has still not disappeared; on the contrary, it has acquired a real and communal body through which it can be expressed. This is, perhaps, the fundamental difference between sacred music and religious music. Religious music may speak about the Divine, evoke the Divine, or even awaken feelings associated with the Divine. Sacred chant, when it becomes liturgical action, does something different: it places the worshipper within a form through which the relationship between unity and multiplicity, silence and manifestation, individuality and communion may be enacted rather than merely described.

The Ophidian chant is therefore neither a performance offered to God nor an aesthetic ornament surrounding prayer. Perhaps, then, St. Augustine's ancient intuition may be approached from an Ophidian perspective in a slightly different way. Bis orat qui cantat not because singing simply adds music to prayer, as melody doubles its devotional intensity, but because in chant, prayer is no longer entrusted to language alone.

The intellect speaks its words, the body gives them breath, and the community gives them a voice that belongs completely to none of its members.

The Ophidian sings because there are Mysteries that cannot merely be said. They must also be breathed, embodied, and shared.

Notes

(1) Oxford Dictionary, Dithyramb

(2) F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, tr. by Ian Johnston, Vancouver Island University, p.15

(3) ibid. p.16

(4) A. W. Schlegel. On Dramatic Art and Literature (1808), any edition

(5) F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, tr. by Ian Johnston, Vancouver Island University, p.27

(6) Con voce di Giubilo, Perché cantare? Il valore del canto nella liturgia, tr. by the author from the Italian text, p.4

(7) Stefano Sannino, Introductory Treatise on Ophidian Doctrine, Amazon 2026