# Om-gnosis Episode 5: “Om” History and Practice from Vedic Period to Present Day ~ The Whole World is “Om” February 06, 2025 In this special in-person fifth episode of Om-gnosis, we sit down with Finnian M. Moore Gerety, PhD (Oxford University), for an in-depth conversation about the syllable “Om,” including its history and associated ritual practices from the Vedic period to the present day. We begin with discussing Gerety's background and interest in South Asia, and specifically within the context of sound and music, and talk about the topic of his forthcoming book The Whole World is OM. We then discuss the meaning of the syllable Om as a “sonic realization of the divine” and how Gerety's work connects to the idea of the occult as “hidden,” including how this relates to the Sanskrit phonemes that make up the syllable Om itself (A-U-M). Other topics include Gerety's work on the connection between yoga and sound, his current work on the multi-year MANTRAMs project, and the role of Soma in discourses on psychedelics and religion. ## About Finnian M.Moore Gerety Finnian M.M. Gerety is a historian of South Asian religions focusing on ritual, sound, and Sanskrit texts. He earned a PhD. in South Asian Studies from Harvard University, where he studied Vedic traditions, including sacrificial use of the psychoactive sacrament soma; he is now Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. Finn’s forthcoming book for Oxford University Press, *This Whole World is OM: Sound, Silence, and the Sacred Syllable in Early India*, is the first-ever academic monograph on OM, the preeminent mantra of Asian traditions. ## Transcript Keith: So welcome, everyone to Om-gnosis the Occult South Asia podcast. I am Keith Edward Cantu, a postdoctoral fellow here at the center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, and today I'm joined by Finnian Gerety, senior research fellow at the Faculty of Middle Eastern and Asian Studies at Oxford University. And so we're really fortunate to be able to have Finnian here in person today and not have to do a Zoom interview. And so thanks so much for being here. Finnian: Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Keith: Cool. So, you know, I wanted to start by asking you a little more about your background, especially what drew you into the study of sound, religious studies and academia in general? You can tell me a little about that. Finnian: Yes. Well, from talking to you in the past, I know that we share a love of music. And so that's the, that's what I can blame for getting me into academia is my love of music. You know? Yeah. Yeah. I basically played in rock bands all my life. And then I also had this other side of me, a kind of nerdier side of me that was interested in ancient languages Latin, Greek, eventually Sanskrit. And so when I, you know, the first ten years of my, career, as you know, in my 20s, I just played in bands and, barely cracked a book. But then I kind of wanted. I was really missing, learning and scholarship and reading and getting curious about some things having to do with music and sound. So I that's when I kind of made a return to, to academia. And that's that kind of informed my choice, you know, having taken a pretty long gap between, college and grad school. I had a lot of time to reflect on what kind of project, would really get me through, the rigors and, you know, difficulties of doing a PhD. Right. And so when I went back to grad school, it was very important to me to pick, materials and topics that I could just really connect with on a kind of visceral but also creative level. Right. And so that's why I was very keen to study mantras, chanting, to study Vedic traditions. All these things that we'll have a chance to talk about today. Because I really saw them as very important components and the kind of oral and sonic traditions, not just of India and Asia, but of kind of humanity and, and the globe. And, and I'm happy I made that decision because I guess different people have different kind of degrees of distance from the material they study. And obviously, culturally, I haven't taken any initiation. I don't have an initiat...I don't have a mantra practice or or a guru, but, I didn't grow up that way. But at least on the level of just, creativity and listening and making sound and appreciating sound. These are things I get to think about all the time, right? So I don't spend as much time playing music or playing guitar as I used to, but. But every day that I write and think, and teach, those kinds of things are front of mind. Keith: Absolutely. And maybe the sound is initiating you anyway. Finnian: Right. There you go. All the ways in which that happens. Right. It's true. I mean whether I, whether I know it or not, right. At the end of the day, I've spent the last two years thinking about mantras, you know, at least 40, 50 hours a week. So there you go. Keith: Well, you know, the work of your dissertation and forthcoming book, the whole world is Om, traces the history of the Sanskrit syllable. Finnian: Right. One of the most famous of these mantras. Yes. Over the past three millennia. And also its connection to music and sound. Keith: I'm wondering if you could tell our viewers, given the title of the podcast is, Om-gnosis right? Yeah. What is Om, And what are the Vedic contexts in which it first arises? Around what time period? And what sources was it first broken up as well into these syllables, you know, A-U-M, you know, that kind of get known today, right? Finnian: Om discourses. Right? Yeah. Yes. Funny you should ask. I have a lot to say on this topic. Keith: I figured you might. Finnian: So. Yeah. So what is Om, first of all, I mean, it's a lot of different things. It depends on kind of the time period you're looking at. But broadly speaking, as many people who are listening will know, Om is the sacred syllable that's used in ritual, meditation, yoga, worship, various forms of prayer, and, so it has this kind of very important, ritual aspect that people use it to, to do religious things, right, and to do spiritual things. But at the same time, it also has this very rich semiotic profile. Right? It's a symbol of a lot of important aspects of, first, Vedic traditions then Hinduism, then Buddhism, Asian religions, more broadly, and now global spirituality. Right. And so, the I think you can think of Om as the foremost of this category of ritual speech that, that we call mantras, right? Various kinds of syllables, formulas, used again in, ritual and meditation. But then it goes beyond that, right? Because it has more than a ritual profile. It comes to stand, as the essence of all knowledge, right? Not just necessarily religious knowledge at the beginning there, but, but also as this kind of all-encompassing divine vibration, sound of the universe, name of God right? there, the whole world. Yeah. The whole world. Right. So. So what basically what we can talk more about this. But it basically has this kind of, ritual profile that then becomes extremely generative for its kind of symbolic profile and the many meanings that proliferate in relation to it as it travels the world basically. And, and in that respect, I think it it's worth dwelling on the fact that it is people call it a sacred syllable. Right. It's just a single, you know, sound basically, right? Or a kind of a that's it. And so, and some people, I'm thinking here of the, in and historian Frits Staal, who wrote a lot about mantras, but also about Om, and talked about it as kind of one of the most elemental utterances from a linguistic or phonological point of view. Right. Because what is it really? It's the opening of the mouth. Oh, followed by closure. Right. And if and if speech is basically making this sound that's kind of in breath–that's what we get in vowels and consonants– it's kind of chopping that flow of sound up. Om, when you, when you chant it, really does, kind of exemplify that kind of very elemental aspect of, of speech, right? Starting sound and then helping it to contract, and so the fact that it's a single syllable, I think is important because that that kind of bridges its use in ritual and meditation the way people might experience it and helps to kind of navigate this almost contradiction. How can something so small be so kind of grand and transcendent and all-encompassing? Right. And so that's the fact that it's a single syllable and is so, in some ways plays into this idea of its, of it as an essence, right? A totality of, you know, that can be, reduced into this very small shape that you can then, pronounce and, that kind of embody, right? But that, that in itself becomes a kind of a door or an opening to all kinds of much, you know, broader and heavier domains. Sure. And sort of various divisions of the Om... Keith: Yeah, the, particles or the fragmented energy of Om I've come across. Yeah, in some of Sabhapati Swami's works. You know, he's no stranger to this podcast. Finnian: Yes. But yeah, that's that's really interesting. Yeah. The idea of having something as a small sort of micro essence that then can expand, right. Keith: Yeah, could you speak a little more about the visual aspects of that? Finnian: Yeah. You know, there's the sonic but then, you know, it's depicted in visual forms. Yeah. I mean, if I may, it might make sense to start a little bit more at the sonic because it informs the, the visual of that if that's okay. Because, you know, you asked me a question broadly about the history of Om and where it first pops up. And so thinking in terms of aesthetics and senses and various media like sound and writing is important here because it helps us distinguish different periods and phases in this rich history, right? So the oldest Oms that are, that are preserved and in texts that we still have today are texts that are dated from around a thousand BCE. So Vedic texts from a historical point of view, right? And at that time there is no clear evidence for writing in Vedic India and no indication that any mantras were written or that the Vedas were written when they were first composed. And so, one of the things I try to kind of dig into in the book and emphasize is that even if, readers or, and practitioners might come to Om with the visual in mind, if you're thinking historically, in some ways it's helpful to put that aside and start with the sonic, almost like rediscover the sonic–you know, the sound is always part of Om if people are, even if they're silently thinking about it. Definitely. But at the same time, I think we can—being so habituated to writing and to the primacy of the visual—it's easy to kind of be like, oh yeah, the sound I get that I like, you know, and so and so in the history of Om the sonic is primary, right? And this plays into the writing and the visual and lots of interesting ways. For me personally, if I'm tracing Om’s career as I do in my work from its earliest historical manifestations and Vedic texts, up through, Brahmanas and and early yoga texts, into the epics and the Puranas and then eventually to, medieval tantra, right? Like Śaivism, various forms of esoteric tantric traditions, even gazing at Om in esoteric Buddhism, what I register is this very clear change in ritual technologies available to mediate Om, right? So you go from this period where all the discourse is sonic and everything about it—we can talk about the division—is all about, is dividing into sounds, right? And then you reach this point where we know, more broadly speaking from colleagues working in other disciplines in history of Asia, or whether it's history of science and technology and media that writing comes into much wider currency and practice, right? Buddhism has a big part, part to play with this. But it's eventually adopted widely in early India and used in religion and spirituality, right? Not just in bookkeeping and lawmaking. And so looking at this arc, you can very clearly see in the text in the sources, when the pivot starts to change from the sonic to the visual, alright? Yeah. And that starts to happen basically in the in the middle of the first millennium of the common era. So the Gupta period of, in early India, which is about 1500 years later. Right? Yeah. Exactly. That's a long time. So you can see why I might before of even touching the visual and thinking about it, you kind of want to make sure you emphasize the sonic background, right? So then, I should have brought little, cue cards, but maybe you guys can have them later. But if people can keep in mind that very iconic symbol of Om that's in Devanagari, right? It's usually used to print Sanskrit and Hindi text globally although you can write Om in a lot of different ways, other regional Indian scripts as well. But if you keep in mind that iconic Devanagari Om, there's kind of proto-versions of that that start to emerge around in the period I referred to, so 5-600, 700, C.E., they would be recognizable. You could if if I showed you a picture of some of the earliest “Om”-s in manuscripts, you could say, oh, yeah, I can—it might not it might not jump out immediately to you—but but you'd see it. So the question then becomes, what is that visual symbol? Does the visual symbol itself symbolize things? And if and the answer is yes, it does. If you just look online or various publications, you can find all kinds of ingenious explanations. You know why it's shaped this way? You know, sometimes people compare it to like, think of the simile of Om and shooting an arrow, right? And they think of it as a bow and an arrow. You hear a lot of different visual references, right? And that's all good. But there's a kind of more mundane aspect to this history, which has to do with the technology of writing, and writing in India and particularly Sanskrit, as you know, is all about representing the aural in visual form, right? Sanskrit is not so much a ... technically it has syllabaries, right, more than alphabets. Phonemes ... Exactly the sound, the actual visual sound. Sorry, the visual symbol has a 1-to-1 representation to a sound, right? A little different, similar to English and alphabets people might be used to, but slightly different because all these, each symbol has a 1-to-1 reference. And so the reason I'm kind of getting nerdy on that point and emphasizing it is because when you look at Om and you look at the, the various conventions for writing Sanskrit, when it first starts to get written, the fancy word for that is orthography, right? And then, and then you trace, give another fancy word, the paleography, right? The way these signs for Om or other letters change over time in different handwritten scripts and so on. Exactly. Different scripts. Exactly. What you can see very clearly is that Om is no different than writing any other sound in Sanskrit, right? So early on, the earliest evidence you write Om the way you do, because that's how you represent an “o” sound when you combine it with a “ma” sound. Right. And then so the other interpretations that get layered on afterwards, are perfectly valid in their time and place, but don't necessarily tell us about the kind of historical origins of that as a, as a written symbol. Right. So, but I've been talking a lot. Please feel free to interject or direct me. Keith: Yeah, it’s extremely rich! If you could tell me when does the the bindu arise? That sometimes you see the Om and then it's sort of nasalized at the end. Is that a pretty late innovation? Finnian: Yeah. Yeah. Yes and no. So “bindu” can mean, drop, it can mean dot, it can mean point. Right. And again if you just envision that Devanagari symbol, usually it's represented with the “chandrabindu” \[candrabindu, moon-dot\] right? So like a little half-moon and a dot over it, like, you can, probably many people who are watching this might even be able to visualize that, right? And yeah, as you say, Keith, that represents, a kind of a, a nasal sound, in Indic scripts and in Sanskrit in particular. But then it has this extra charge at least, I guess we could say from kind of Tantric texts forward, where a single syllable with a bindu can be a “bīja-mantra”, right, or a seed syllable, and Om can serve that purpose. You know, there are others: yam lam krīm, right? Yeah. And one one characteristic they share is they all have this bindu right? So it's an interesting question to ponder is when does where does the bindu fit into Om’s history. And again, this sounds I think in some ways very pedantic like, but like when did you have Om with an “m” but what about “Ong” with the nasal. But it actually has a lot of consequences, at least visually speaking, right? Because the way you ... that bindu and the “chandrabindu” have become such a part of the kind of iconic, recognizable quality and great teachers like all across the centuries have like speculated on the bindu in particular and, and seeing it as kind of side of, you know, potency, an important place to focus for meditation. So, so it's actually quite a consequential little dot for us. Speaking of that. Keith Nice pun. Finnian: There you go. And, and so this is a question I've pondered a lot, and I guess I'll say it this way. And maybe this caveat is important for our conversation as a whole. As a person who's approaching this as an academic, as a historian of religion, I'm trying to kind of historicize Om, right? And say, well, the oldest Om I can find in this text is here, yeah, it's an oral tradition. And then we get evidence for it in a written tradition later. But I do want to acknowledge that this is a syllable for many people that is regarded as just like a divine sound. Right? It transcended even maybe the impetus for all creation. So from that point of view, it might seem a little bit almost preposterous to be like, well, when did it first show up? Right? That it's this kind of, you know, you know, eternal, eternal thing maybe in human writing. Exactly. In human consciousness. Yeah. So we could, we could put that little kind of frame on it, because it's an important acknowledgment to make, I think. But so within that frame, it's very clear that the oldest Om is Om with a “ma.” Right? So the question then is why the bindu? And students of first year Sanskrit will actually know the answer to this question, right? When you, have a word in Sanskrit that ends in a “m” right, a “ma” and then is followed by another consonant, the preceding “ma” goes to “anusvara” which is a nasal “m” sound, right? Assimilation. Exactly, right? So it's just a purely phonetic process right? Now why would you have a situation where Om is leading up to another word? Well, for the, the ritual reason I talked about before, which is that one of the earliest uses of Om is to introduce other mantras. So in fact Om gets juxtaposed with other mantras constantly. And this is actually really convenient from a historical point of view, because you can look at Om when it's juxtaposed with a consonant mantra, like think of Om Nama Shivaya, for example, to have a breath, right? Or “Om Bhur Bhuva Svaha.” Keith: Gayatri. Finnian: Right. Yeah. And then you can all and most mantras are like that because I'd say the preponderance of mantras begin with a consonant, especially. But you do get examples, and I'm not really thinking of anything right this moment, but where we can have a counter-example where it's Om and then a mantra that begins with a vowel. Right? And there it's very clear—here I'm speaking of Vedic texts, which are the oldest evidence for Om—that, that the “ma” stays a “ma,” right? So what that tells us and sorry, for getting again, so, so, so deep in the weeds here. But what that tells us is that, at least historically speaking, the, the oldest Om is simply that, Om, right? And what happens is that when, the idea of using Om to introduce other mantras spreads and especially once writing becomes an important technology for mediating mantras, people become accustomed to seeing Om with a “bindu,” right? And so if you disconnect Om with the bindu from the mantra it introduces and just think of it as a seed, right, as an essence? Yeah. You might just leave that bindu there, right, you might leave the “chandrabindu” or you might say, you know what, I know historically the “ma” is primary, but really that's kind of concealing this kind of deeper resonance, right? And so there are a lot of kind of different rhetorical and hermeneutic pathways you can take. So that's a little story of the bindu. But I really think that more work needs to be done, especially on “bīja”-s and seed syllables. Because as widespread as they are, as much as people might recognize them, you know, academics, haven't focused on them that much on their own terms and especially across traditions, right? Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, you know, the seed syllables, you know, mantras don't really respect these boundaries now between religions that we like to impose, you know. So, yeah. They travel. Yes for sure. Keith: Indeed they do. Finnian: Yeah. Keith: Well, I think this gets into a next question that I had thought about asking, which is, you know, your abstract for the dissertation and I think your work as a whole addresses this question that “Om serves as a sonic realization of the divine.” And I'm wondering sort of through this sonic realization, you know, what does that mean? And how does Om facilitate, you know, a kind of religious or spiritual understanding, realization, rather than just being, you know, a sound, a sound representing something, right? Finnian: Yeah. Right. I mean, such a rich question. Yeah. Because you're quoting me and I wrote that, but now I have to kind of—now on the spot—unpack it and explicate it. I think on the most basic level what it does, and here I'm, I'm going to kind of set aside theology and doctrine and just talk about it, as a kind of element of ritual, an element of performance. And maybe my own background as a musician, kind of predisposes me to think in those terms as primary. But I think it allows you to, embody this extremely resonant sound and a kind of phonetic and phonological way. And it allows you to experience what we were talking about, the most elemental form of something we all do. Pretty much constantly, right, which is speak. Okay. Yeah. Vocalize. Sing. Right? And then simply the fact of saying Om, for the reasons that we already touched on, I think helps to isolate the faculty of speech and the way your body itself can serve as a kind of resonant instrument. Right. So imagine, sitar or a veena or a guitar or any kind of resonating stringed instrument. Keith: Ektara. Finnian: Yeah. There you go. Ektara! Yeah. The string vibrates, but then that resonator is so crucial, right? And so our bodies in that, using that as kind of a metaphor, have a lot in common with that, right? Your vocal chords vibrate. You can get the impetus going, with, with breath, right? And breath is really important over time in the history of Om. But then what also really matters is the resonance of your chest, of your throat, and especially of your mouth, nasal cavity, and cranium, right? So I guess what I'm trying to say to get back to your question is just the simple act of saying Om, simple as it is, makes kind of present, and accessible, these, these kind of very deep, and almost kind of eternal features of being human and vocalizing and resonating, right? And where does the divine come into that? That's a tough question in a way, because I guess one could take an experience like that and just say it brings you very much in the moment in your body, right? So how do you make that, that leap? And I don't think there's any one answer, precisely because the divine tends to be constructed and explained in different ways, in different traditions, so even if you have this common aesthetic experience that I'm just trying to allude to, people might interpret it in different ways. Right? But one thing they have in common is that aesthetic experience definitely takes you out of your everyday mode of speaking and vocalizing, right? And because it engages the breath, as we talked about and because it engages the head and kind of fills you with this kind of resonant feeling—just saying it—it at least opens up the space to ask why? Where does this come from? Where do I come from? Where am I going? You know? And I think those are the kind of questions that the divine is often invoked as a way of, you know, answering, right? So I think that that's one, that's one way that by kind of being this elemental practice that permeates your body with sound, it, opens up a kind of special pathway, you might say, in the just the normal humdrum of life, to kind of think, yeah, beyond, beyond the mundane. And then once you take that as a given, if we refer to it in maybe one tradition, or another, you can explain different ways that it very specifically and concretely is giving access to the divine, you know. So maybe I can give an example from Vedic texts, because those are the ones that were, are so formative in the history of Om. So in Vedic ritual, Om is used on the kind of culminating final day of a five day sacrifice. And it's chanted in a tradition called Sama Veda, which is a set of melodic mantras that are just purely vocal, not accompanied by instruments. And the explanation of these mantras by practitioners of these rituals in the Vedic period, so early in the first millennium BC, is that by chanting Om, and the mantras that it's part of, the practitioner is able to ascend to Brahmaloka, the world of Brahman, the world of the absolute, we could call it heaven, right, or the heavenly world or so as a shorthand. That's where the gods live, alright? And, so maybe we can refer to the physical again when we think about sound and an ascent? I mean, many religious traditions talk about accessing the divine as, as climbing, right? And the sun is up there so much that, that kind of watches over us and determines our day is up. A kind of firmamental world. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But then there's something that happens in your body. I mean, when you, when you speak and especially when you slow down and chant, the sound begins low and comes high, right? Like the breath gathers and is forced up through your, vocal cords, as I said, resonates in your mouth and comes our, right? So there's a built in ascent that just has to do with chanting, alright? And so in Vedic texts the idea is that chanting Om helps the practitioner ascend. And then here there's a much, just a wonderful detail, I think, that really gets to your question of, okay, well, but what does that really mean to like manifest the divine? So at least in the Vedic context, what that means, is that you use Om and repetitions of Om to ascend during a sacrifice. And this is preparation for one day when you’ll give up your body and die, right? And on that day this ritual preparation will come in handy. Why? Because you will have already kind of ascended through this ritual practice. And there will be a final test where in order to kind of enter into the heavenly world, right, you have to pass through the sun. Okay? And you, you hear this even in the history of yoga. I mean, David White has written about this. Other people have, piercing the sun, entering through the sun. Keith: A kind of apotheosis. Exactly. You know, and so on. Finnian: Exactly. And so this Vedic stuff is in the background of some of those reflections. So what does it mean to enter into the sun, right, and to join the company of the immortals, to basically become divine? Well, it has a very specific meaning in the Vedic ideas of the cosmos. So in Vedic cosmology, the sun is not just a mass of fire and heat and lava and whatever else cosmologists might tell us it is. Right? In fact, it is sometimes conceived as an absence, as an aperture, an opening. Wow. So what does it mean to enter into the sun? And why is it brilliantly shining? Because the world of Brahman, heaven, is filled with light, and the atmosphere is the solid barrier that's separating the world below it. Earth, atmosphere and sky from Brahmaloka above it. Right? So it's almost like, I mean, if you could imagine like a, like a colander with one hole in it. That's our atmosphere and we're under it, right? And so Om helps you ascend. And then when you get to that aperture that is the sun, it's the password to help you get through it. Keith: Through. Finnian: Right? And so one maybe final thing I'll note about that will bring us back to the body and bring us back to vocalization is that, what do you do when you make the sound Om? Keith: You round your mouth? Finnian: Yeah. So you are putting your body into the position of this aperture that you want to enter into it, right? You're using a sound generated through this kind of opening, sure to affect a divine opening as it were. So at least the Vedic answer to your question is that Om helps you ascend and then Om allows you to enter into the door of the sun and to join the company of the gods. Keith: Wow. Well, lots of food for thought in my question. Finnian: Yeah. For sure. Yeah, and lots to reflect on our own path to the sun and so on. Right. Keith: So I've been asking every guest who comes on the show something related to this question, right? Which is that Om-gnosis is the first Occult South Asia podcast and builds on the broader associations of the word occult as “hidden.” And you might know that Theosophists back in the nineteenth century even translated this derived word occultism as Gupta Vidyā, this hidden science. And so I'm wondering, I mean, in some ways with the previous question it’s fairly obvious, but in what ways could your research on Om and related topics connect to this idea of Occult South Asia as the perception of hidden realities in South Asia, and so on, if you think it does. Finnian: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, great question. And the answer is yes. It absolutely does. Right. Because the broad arc of this history that we've been kind of dipping into is a set of esoteric discourses, right? Even the very first kind of Vedic insights that the sound we use in ritual has these soteriological effects, these abilities to set you free, right? To liberate you and to bring you to heaven coalesces in an esoteric textual discourse, right? One practitioner talking to another, right. We use Om in the ritual, but did you know what it really does? Right? Keith: You know, sort of the dialogue of the Upanishads. Finnian: Exactly. Right. Exactly. Yeah, exactly that kind of context, right? So, as you know, one way of looking at the whole, just the entire history of South Asian religion is kind of as a kind of endlessly unfolding succession of esoteric and arcane insights, right, that then become a form of doctrine and theology that then give rise to new esoteric insights, right? And, and I, I'm partial to that, partly because I think of the perspective I take when I'm tracing something like Om which has in some respects been so stable across so many traditions, right? So it kind of often invites me maybe to kind of jump around and to see continuities where other people might see differences. But so another way to think about your question, we've been talking a lot about the deep past, right?— We’ve been kind of in the first millennium BC for a lot of this conversation—would be to go to the other end of this, story, one that's a little closer to us, right? And then in Theosophy, for example. I mean, I have, as you're asking the question, what came to mind, and I think it was you, is we had been discussing some images of Om, and I think you drew my attention to the fact that there's an Om icon, like, in Raja Yoga, by \[Swami\] Vivekananda, for example, right? Keith: And Sabhapati Swami too. Finnian: Yes, Exactly. Right, and you showed me that one as well. And those are just two examples in that kind of, you know, global emerging occult milieu, right, where Om is being very expressly claimed as some kind of essence, kind of a, you know, if it's on the cover of Rāja Yoga, it's got to be a pretty important symbol for the entire doctrine, right? Yeah. So you can see, at least rhetorically, Vivekananda is kind of doing, making a very ancient move, right? The same way that the totality of Vedic knowledge can be summed up in the syllable, he's saying the totality of Raja Yoga can be to some extent summed up. So then the question is how? Well that's, then the esoteric teaching unfolds, right? But if I'm not mistaken, the Theosophists themselves also sometimes used Om alongside other religious symbols in various publications. I'm no expert there, but I it seems to be, something I've encountered, and, so in a very kind of substantive and concrete way, we can just note that Om remains an iconic symbol for the history of occultism and spirituality, you know, in itself, right, from the nineteenth century forward. So whatever other parallels we might find looking backwards or looking forward, we can know that it's very important for the kind of historical traditions and circumstances and conditions that generated occultism to begin with, you know? Keith: Certainly. Finnian: Yeah. Another place where I think that the kind of esoteric aspects of Om really are evident has to do with what you mentioned earlier in the interview that we didn't have a chance to talk about: dividing Om. Right. Yes. The A-U-M syllables. Exactly. So, folks may be aware of that. Maybe you're reading a text that has mantras in it or Om in it, and you might even see it printed “AUM” in Roman script, right? Or maybe you even hear a teacher pronounce it using a kind of English pronunciation of “AUM” right? You sometimes hear that. There's an esoteric impulse in that very idea. What do I mean by that? It basically is saying, okay, you all know about Om. But actually did you know Om really consists of three sounds, right? “a” “u” and “ma”? This too brings us back to the body and to speaking because this is something you can try on your own. If you say Om, and you slow it down, it does begin with an “a” sound at the back of your throat. A-U-M. If you merge those phonemes slowly, “a,” “u,” and “ma,” and increase the pace, you will eventually see that they do blend to form Om. These are again the principles of “sandhi,” of euphonic combination in Sanskrit. And so the reason I'm calling that arcane, on some levels it's very basic, right? It actually is a kind of phonetic fact that the sound “o” can be divided in that way. But it has this arcane aspect when you start to use that as a basis for interpretation and for teaching and for creating new forms of knowledge. And this is what we get if we return again to the deep past, in Vedic texts. So the, the oldest Vedic text, to divide Om in this way is the Aitareya Brahmana. So it's a Vedic prose text of the Rigveda. And it, there's a section on Om and that's where you get the very first division of this integral sound Om into three phonemes, “a,” “u,” and “ma.” That teaching, in its time, esoteric, arcane, right? These are texts by Vedic practitioners for Vedic practitioners, they're not available at the supermarket, you know, like, you can't get them on the internet of the day, right? These are very closely guarded texts. You need to be initiated to even kind of have entrée into these conversations. So it's very arcane. But over time, it is such a successful teaching and such an appealing and attractive set of insights that people, later practitioners, later theologians, later philosophers, claim it and adapt it to new contexts. Okay. Case in point, the Puranas, right? The kind of key narrative lore of early Hinduism is the first place we get this division. They already have the Vedic division of Om into three, but instead of applying “a,” “u,” and “ma” to the three Vedas, let's say, Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, and Sama Veda, or fire, wind, and the sun, or kind of these Vedic categories, in the Puranas you get those three syllables applied to the three great deities Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, and then by association creation, preservation, destruction; past, past, present and future. Right? Yeah. Exactly. Waking, sleeping, dreaming. Any number of triads, you know, and then that in itself, even though it, it kind of emerges as its own kind of esoteric theology, generates, new types of division, right? In Tantric texts, you get divisions, into five parts, right? Keith: Five heads of Śiva... Finnian: There you go. The first three. Right? Yeah. Also in Jain texts there are divisions into five, you get some divisions into seven, into twelve and on and on, right? So I guess returning to the your point about this word occult, right. Which means covered over, right hidden—Om itself is almost intrinsically occult because of its, this characteristic it has and capacity to compress and then in turn inspire insights and knowledge, right? Because it can be divided, teased apart, mined for new teachings, right? New theologies, new ritual practices, new forms of meditation, then can be reassembled, and kind of covered up, you could say, again, right? And so I just think, in a lot of ways, I mean, not to get too Om-centric on Om-gnosis. Keith: That’s the point of this interview is to be Om-centric, so... Finnian: Yeah, but it does offer, you know, quite an important, icon, I guess I would say, of the occult and the and the esoteric, especially in South Asia. Yeah. Keith: Yeah, certainly. Well, thanks for that. And, I think that, you know, I think that also connects, you know, with what you're saying with the nineteenth century to your more contemporary work as well. So I want to get to that and make sure we talk about that a little bit. And you have been and your recent work, which I've followed, been charting the connection between sound and yoga, especially with regard to mantra. Yeah. And I'm wondering sort of how you make this connection in general between mantras, sound, and yoga, right, which is sort of its own bodily, you know, some people would say psychosomatic discipline, you know. Finnian: Right. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this too is a pretty, rich nexus of things, right, between sound and yoga, not least because yoga itself is, as you know as well as anybody, is such a kind of broad, polyvalent category. And to be fair, it's not just contemporary, but stretches way back, so... Yeah, exactly. Good pun. Yeah. You know, without even trying. Yeah. No, but to that point of stretching, I mean, I think because modern, global yoga tends to usually be viewed, at least in the global north, as a kind of physical practice, right, even though it has this long history in meditation and other kinds of practice, that in some ways informs the way academics frame the history of yoga, right? And from that lens, mantras may not seem to be that important because they're less important overall in traditions of Haṭha Yoga, right, these physical traditions of yoga that have been so influential on how folks do physical yoga today, right? So on the one hand, you might say, well, what is mantra? You know, it's not...mantra, maybe it's just an accompaniment to yoga, right? Or it's something that is kind of yoga-adjacent, you know, and people's experience in yoga studios might reinforce that in different ways, right? Many teachers do start a yoga practice with Om, right? And sometimes end it with Om as well. Yeah. That, if I can as an aside, that little structure itself, I think owes something to the history of mantra, right? Because the reason you would start or end anything with Om is because you're chanting a set of mantras that are enclosed by it. Okay. Right? So that the idea of beginning an activity with Om comes from the idea of beginning a mantra with Om. A mantra with Om. Right. So, so you could say even in physical yoga, where you're not necessarily chanting mantras for hours on end, the use of Om—it kind of in some ways is, you can kind of open it up again, right, uncover that, in fact, the kind of history of mantra practice is quite important in framing that. But then I think you can make more direct connections historically, and that it helps to do if you go past Haṭha Yoga, which really gets going in the ninth, tenth, eleventh centuries of the common era, and you go deeper into the history of yoga, to early yoga, as taught and codified by Brahmins, by members of the Hindu priesthood, right, and this has continuity with Vedic mantra chanting, Vedic mantra meditation, and Vedic mantra cultures. And that's where we can see a pretty direct continuity, in fact, between the use of Om and the chanting of Om and other mantras, and the emergence of, Om meditation let's say, as a central practice of early yoga, which it is in the Upanishads, in the Dharma texts, in many Puranas the signal practice of yoga and a lot of those texts which which were composed and transmitted by Brahmins is Om meditation. Okay. So in some ways you could say that the use of Om in yoga is a bit of a giveaway that you're dealing with a certain stream of yoga, a certain tradition of yoga, at least early on. And then gradually, it comes to spread and to be more generalized, right? Now that's oversimplified because there are other inputs, you know, Mahayana Buddhism, Vajrayana Buddhism, early kind of proto-Śaivism, right, where, Brahmins had less of a role to play, if any. But mantras are still important in those traditions, right? Keith: “Om maṇi padme hum.” Finnian: Exactly. Yeah. This kind of signal mantra of esoteric Buddhism has an Om in it, right? And so more work needs to be done to kind of untangle the relations between Brahminical early yoga where Om and meditation on sound are so important in the ways we've been talking about and how that was influenced and/or, influenced by and/or shaped, traditions of esoteric Buddhism when it comes to mantra and Om, traditions of Śaivism when it comes to Om, I don't think they were separate. I think there was a lot of kind of cross-pollination going on. But the point I try to make in my publications on sound and yoga is that we shouldn't be so quick to kind of set mantras outside of the frame of yoga’s history. And we should ask, how have mantras and sound contributed to yoga in kind of deeply organic and generative ways alongside various, contemplative practices, embodied practices, ascetic practices that tend to get more attention when people talk about the traditions of physical yoga. Especially this interplay between sound and silence, right? Yeah. This seems to be hugely salient to yoga, meditation in general, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, I mean, it's, it never ceases to amaze me that from the Vedic period forward and then carrying into Brahminical traditions and to Puranic traditions, even into Śaivism and other forms of Tantric tradition that are in conversation with Brahminical thinking, the most potent forms of sound are silent, you know, and Om encapsulates that, right? Because chanting Om out loud, that kind of “japa” or repetition or meditation is looked at as a kind of a lower form of yoga practice than chanting Om silently. I see. Right? Mentally. And so practices that somehow engage sound, but not audibly, right, this kind of silent form of sound are often looked at as more potent spiritually than sounds that you can hear. Keith: As Blavatsky would say, “The voice in the silence,” right? Finnian: There you go. Exactly. Yeah, she knew her Om. Yeah there you go. Keith: So, you know, just to close, I really wanted to take some time to have you talk about your current work especially around the MANTRAMs project. Yeah. And in discourses on psychedelics and religion as well, and sort of, you know, give our viewers a chance to sort of, you know, see what you're up to in your current projects and so on. Finnian: Yes, sure. Yeah. Thanks for asking. Yeah. So so MANTRAMs is a new project that I'm part of. And that's an acronym for Mantras in Religion, Media and Society in Global Southern Asia. And as the title of the project suggests, it's quite broad, quite ambitious, and it touches on mantras in a lot of different manifestations and contexts. I'm one of the principal investigators, “PI”-s, kind of the main researchers on the project, along with two other colleagues, Carola Lorea at the University of Tübingen and Borayin Larios at the University of Vienna, and then supported by a number of other excellent researchers like Andrea Acri at the École Pratique, folks who work on mantra in a lot of different contexts, Gudrun Bühnemann at the University of Wisconsin who works on mantras in Nepal. And so our goal as a team, and the reason we conceived this project in the first place was to try to kind of launch mantra studies, in a way, taking a inspiration from the success of yoga studies as a kind of interdisciplinary subfield, right, where you actually need input from a lot of different types of thinker and expert and specialist to even approach the thing you want to study and understand. And because I'm trained as a Sanskritist, I work mostly on on texts. I'm very interested in sound and performance, but a lot of time I'm just reading texts right? But mantras are, as we've said already, writing is not necessarily primary in the use of mantra. The way they're practiced matters. You want to hear about how people use mantras now, right? And you don't want to just hear about mantras in these lofty spiritual discourses like, how do I attain liberation or enter the through the sun? You also want to hear about how people use mantras as billions of people do, frankly, every day for various kinds of protection, for healing, for auspiciousness. Keith: Magic. Finnian: Magic. I mean, the list goes on and on, right? And so the project cannot possibly cover all of that. Right? But our thought is that at least by kind of assembling a team and building a template for collaboration maybe we can kind of get the ball rolling and make it possible to kind of build on this work so that going forward there can be more attention to mantras on their own terms, right? Yeah. And so it can be as simple as the insight you made today, which is, hold on a second, Om is not just in Vedism, then Brahminism, Hinduism. It's in “Om maṇi padme hum.” In Buddhism, right? But if you're talking to just kind of an expert in Hinduism, you might only focus on the Hindu stuff in ... A single silo. Exactly. And as you said, mantras travel, right? They absolutely ignore those kinds of boundaries. And so this project is exciting. It's a multi-year project. I started a new gig at Oxford to do it. I'm going to set up the project there. We're going to kind of build a team of postdocs and other researchers, because we all have a lot more ideas than we could possibly fulfill in this lifetime. Right. So a project like this one, and this kind of team approach, gives us a chance to hopefully launch a lot of different, kind of, mini projects. Right. But that can still unfold in parallel. Sounds fantastic. Yeah. It's going to be a really exciting time. And it's great to be right at the cusp of it. I mean, maybe I can mention too the tie-in to psychedelic traditions, which has always been an interest of mine. The MANTRAMs project has nothing to do with psychedelics at all, except in so far as my interest in my mantras sometimes intersects with that, right? And it intersects with that in some pretty important ways as far as the text and ritual traditions I look at, right? Vedic sacrifice has a central sacrament called Soma, right? It's pretty well known in psychedelic circles as this kind of ancient psychedelic, it's sometimes claimed, or at least a psychoactive substance of great antiquity. Experts still argue about what Soma is or is not, right? Is it, was it a magic mushroom? Was it cannabis? Was it a ephedra, kind of a stimulant? Was it some kind of ayahuasca or DMT analogue, there are all kinds of theories? These days they just use sugar cane, right? Or something? Different kinds of creepers, yeah, that vary. So different kinds of milky vines, that will vary in different parts of India. Yeah. So as a substitute for whatever it would have been. Exactly. As far as we can tell, it's a substitute. But so this means that. the question of how psychedelics have shaped human experience and religion in some ways is like central to the, to my engagement with Vedic texts. Right? Because a big question for Vedic scholars remains what was Soma in different time periods? Did it have effects that we can call psychoactive? If so, what kind? If we call them psychoactive, could we also describe them as psychedelic, right, which is a neologism from the 1950s? Does it make sense to use that word in relation to this substance that we don't know what it is 3,000 years ago? Maybe not, you know, but I still think it's useful for getting a conversation going. And so, yeah. So I, I'm more and more these days and especially as there's finally a lot more attention and credence being given to psychedelic substances and the study of them. I've seen that as an opportunity to kind of bring Soma into the conversation and to think about how sound and mantras might have played in to the construction of an ancient psychedelic experience, right? And maybe I'll just, I can sum up by saying that one thing I have noticed is that the liturgies of Vedic sacrifice are full of non-lexical, non-semantic sound and ritual speech; mantras that don't necessarily have linguistic meaning, that aren’t words, right? Instead they're other kinds of speech that maybe have a different kind of meaning, a kind of symbolic meaning, right? I mean Om is a good example. You know, there are contexts where Om can mean something like “yes,” but generally it doesn't have a semantic meaning like other words. It has this kind of more layered symbolic meanings, right? Keith: What was it by Frits Staal, ‘Rules Without Meaning’? Yes, exactly. Yeah. His whole idea that the ritual itself is a set of behaviors that can't really be reduced to semantic meaning or symbolic meaning, right? It kind of plays on this. And so what I've noticed as I've paid more attention to work on psychedelics that's being done here at Harvard or other places is that this preference for, or the incidence of, non-semantic sound is found in a lot of psychedelic traditions, including most notably in Amazonian shamanism of various kinds, right, where the sounds that people might make in the midst of a psychedelic experience, the way they might hear language, the language in which supernatural entities might speak to them, doesn't always map onto just kind of everyday English, right? Or speech or Spanish or whatever, right. Instead it's coming through on, in a different frequency, a different vibration. Sometimes from the point of view of conventional language in ways that are kind of deformed, right. Like “What? What is that word,” you know? And so one thing I'm exploring right now that I'm very excited about is the way that the evidence of mantras and the soundscapes that we reconstruct from Vedic sacrifice might actually give us some information and insights about what Soma was as a substance. Did it change...in what ways did it alter your consciousness right? Does it change hearing and speech? Is that a clue that could, that could help us get closer to understanding what Soma might have been. Right? So instead of just thinking about botany or ethnobotany or what the plant or the fungus might have been to think instead about the kind of holistic experience it engenders. Keith: It sounds very poetic indeed. Finnian: Yeah, yeah. So. Right. Keith Well, thank you so much, Finnian, for agreeing to be on the videocast, and we look forward to seeing where all of your projects and fruitful research takes you, and thanks so much for being here. Finnian: Thanks, Keith. It was my pleasure. Thank you. Keith: And thanks, Ashley, for filming! See also:- [ Video ](/news-classification/video) - [ Pop Apocalypse Podcast ](/programming-threads/pop-apocalypse-podcast)