Speaking in Frequencies

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey

The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.

The first evening of the retreat in Sedona, the so-called North American capital of alternative spiritualities, begins with candlelight and incense. Ten of us gather in the living room of an Airbnb that has become our temporary sanctuary. Some sit on couches, others cross-legged on the floor. Anna, the Arizona-based metaphysical teacher I follow in my current ethnographic research, arranges her usual constellation of objects before her on a mat: crystals, tarot cards, singing bowls, and flowers. After a long meditation and a circle of sharing, Anna smiles softly and says she feels called to offer something spontaneous—a transmission in light language.

She closes her eyes, breaths deeply, and begins to speak in a rapid flow of high-pitched syllables. The sounds rise and fall like birdsongs. They are musical, urgent, unfamiliar. I keep my eyes open, trying to register what is happening. Julia, sitting nearby me, closes her eyes and breathes, as if drinking in the sounds. When Anna finishes her offering, Julia places a hand over her heart and exhales, her face glowing with gratitude.

Anna explains that light language is not a human tongue but a vibrational form of communication. “It works through frequencies, like a musical score holding many voices at once—each of you will receive what you need: a message, an intuition, a healing, maybe an energetic upgrade.”

Among my interlocutors, light language is described as a spontaneous, channeled expression that carries energy rather than meaning. It may sound like a made-up language, but they believe it is a form of communication inspired by more-than-human beings (including extraterrestrials) that bypasses the mind to speak directly to the soul. It might resemble glossolalia, but in light language the message is multivocal, and its ontological premises go beyond Christian metaphysics. As an anthropologist, I have witnessed many forms of non-ordinary communication, but this moment was different. It was public, but there was no spectacle. What happened felt quiet, embodied, relational. The meaning was not in words, for there were none, but in the atmosphere. Something was transmitted through tone, pitch, rhythm, frequency, and resonance.

What does it mean to communicate in this way that treats vibration as language and feeling as knowledge? Light language is received not through comprehension but through resonance, and my interlocutors describe such experiences as normal parts of spiritual life.  In many ways, these experiences exemplify what anthropologist Susan Greenwood calls “magical consciousness,” a participatory form of knowing.

Listening to Anna’s voice that evening, I thought about how deeply modern culture ties knowledge to words, to arguments, and to stories. We assume that understanding requires explanation and that truth must be narrated. This is a symptom of what political philosopher Davide Panagia calls narratocracy, the rule of narrative. Privileging story and reason neglects sensory and affective dimensions of meaning. We explain the world as if it is always a plot to be deciphered, yet much of what we know comes through perception, rhythm, and embodied attunement.

Anna’s session is a small act of resistance against narratocracy. It invites participants to step outside the linear logic of words into a more plural register of understanding, where truth can vibrate, can shimmer, or be felt in the skin. For those gathered in that Sedona living room, it was not a performance to decode but an event to inhabit.

These practices gesture toward what anthropologists Valentina Napolitano and Carlota McAllister call theopolitics, the ways in which divine or transcendent presences are understood to intervene in political and epistemological dimensions. Theopolitics is not about institutional religion. It is about how the sacred, that which exceeds human control, disrupts existing hierarchies of knowledge and power. 

Theopolitics is sovereignty “from below,” rooted in vulnerability, embodied encounter, and openness to revelation. Anna’s light-language offering is theopolitical by creating space where authority flows not from expertise or textual mastery but from the capacity to feel, to be moved, and to listen differently.

Multiple regimes of truth coexist. Some truths are sanctioned by institutions such as science, religion, and academia. Other truths, like Anna’s, operate through affect, intuition, and sensation. Attending to these truths does not mean suspending critique but expanding what counts as knowledge and following how truths circulate.

Thinking back to that night in Sedona, what lingers for me is not the mystery of the sounds but the attention that the sounds created in the room. For a few minutes, words lost their authority, meaning became something multiple, delicate, and alive. Light language, whether or not someone believes in its power, gestures toward an epistemology of participation and a politics of sensing. Understanding may not begin with explanation but with resonance, with the simple act of letting the world speak in frequencies that we have yet to name.