Dark Song

by Feehan, Christine

  • First chorus: This section is filled with clapping, dancing, ancient horns and other means used to invoke and heighten the energies upon which the ritual is drawing.

  • Second verse

  • Second chorus

  • Closing invocation: In this closing part, two song leaders, in close harmony, take all the energy gathered by the earlier portions of the song/ritual and focus it entirely on the healing purpose.

  What you will be listening to are brief tastes of what would typically be a significantly longer ritual, in which the verse and chorus parts are developed and repeated many times, to be closed by a single rendition of the closing invocation.

  Sarna Pusm O Maγet (Song to Heal the Earth)

  First verse

  Ai, Emä Maγe,

  Oh, Mother Nature,

  Me sívadbin lańaak.

  We are your beloved daughters.

  Me tappadak, me pusmak o maγet.

  We dance to heal the earth.

  Me sarnadak, me pusmak o hanyet.

  We sing to heal the earth.

  Sielanket jutta tedet it,

  We join with you now,

  Sívank és akaratank és sielank juttanak.

  Our hearts and minds and spirits become one.

  Second verse

  Ai, Emä Maγe,

  Oh, Mother Nature,

  Me sívadbin lańaak.

  We are your beloved daughters.

  Me andak arwadet emänked és me kaŋank o

  We pay homage to our mother and call upon the

  Põhi és Lõuna, Ida és Lääs.

  North and South, East and West.

  Pide és aldyn és myös belső.

  Above and below and within as well.

  Gondank o maγenak pusm hän ku olen jama.

  Our love of the land heals that which is in need.

  Juttanak teval it,

  We join with you now,

  Maγe maγeval.

  Earth to earth.

  O pirä elidak weńća.

  The circle of life is complete.

  To hear this chant, visit christinefeehan.com/members/.

  7. CARPATHIAN CHANTING TECHNIQUE

  As with their healing techniques, the actual “chanting technique” of the Carpathians has much in common with the other shamanistic traditions of the Central Asian steppes. The primary mode of chanting was throat chanting using overtones. Modern examples of this manner of singing can still be found in the Mongolian, Tuvan and Tibetan traditions. You can find an audio example of the Gyuto Tibetan Buddhist monks engaged in throat chanting at christinefeehan.com/carpathian_chanting/.

  As with Tuva, note on the map the geographical proximity of Tibet to Kazakhstan and the Southern Urals.

  The beginning part of the Tibetan chant emphasizes synchronizing all the voices around a single tone, aimed at healing a particular “chakra” of the body. This is fairly typical of the Gyuto throat-chanting tradition, but it is not a significant part of the Carpathian tradition. Nonetheless, it serves as an interesting contrast.

  The part of the Gyuto chanting example that is most similar to the Carpathian style of chanting is the midsection, where the men are chanting the words together with great force. The purpose here is not to generate a “healing tone” that will affect a particular “chakra,” but rather to generate as much power as possible for initiating “out-of-body” travel, and for fighting the demonic forces that the healer/traveler must face and overcome.

  The songs of the Carpathian women (illustrated by their “Lullaby” and their “Song to Heal the Earth”) are part of the same ancient musical and healing tradition as the Lesser and Great Healing Chants of the warrior males. You can hear some of the same instruments in both the male warriors’ healing chants and the women’s “Song to Heal the Earth.” Also, they share the common purpose of generating and directing power. However, the women’s songs are distinctively feminine in character. One immediately noticeable difference is that while the men speak their words in the manner of a chant, the women sing songs with melodies and harmonies, softening the overall performance. A feminine, nurturing quality is especially evident in the “Lullaby.”

  APPENDIX 2

  The Carpathian Language

  Like all human languages, the language of the Carpathians contains the richness and nuance that can only come from a long history of use. At best we can only touch on some of the main features of the language in this brief appendix:

  1. The history of the Carpathian language

  2. Carpathian grammar and other characteristics of the language

  3. Examples of the Carpathian language (including the Ritual Words and the Warriors’ Chant)

  4. A much-abridged Carpathian dictionary

  1. THE HISTORY OF THE CARPATHIAN LANGUAGE

  The Carpathian language of today is essentially identical to the Carpathian language of thousands of years ago. A “dead” language like the Latin of two thousand years ago has evolved into a significantly different modern language (Italian) because of countless generations of speakers and great historical fluctuations. In contrast, many of the speakers of Carpathian from thousands of years ago are still alive. Their presence—coupled with the deliberate isolation of the Carpathians from the other major forces of change in the world—has acted (and continues to act) as a stabilizing force that has preserved the integrity of the language over the centuries. Carpathian culture has also acted as a stabilizing force. For instance, the Ritual Words, the various healing chants (see Appendix 1) and other cultural artifacts have been passed down through the centuries with great fidelity.

  One small exception should be noted: the splintering of the Carpathians into separate geographic regions has led to some minor dialectization. However, the telepathic link among all Carpathians (as well as each Carpathian’s regular return to his or her homeland) has ensured that the differences among dialects are relatively superficial (e.g., small numbers of new words, minor differences in pronunciation, etc.), since the deeper internal language of mind-forms has remained the same because of continuous use across space and time.

  The Carpathian language was (and still is) the proto-language for the Uralic (or Finno-Ugric) family of languages. Today, the Uralic languages are spoken in northern, eastern and central Europe and in Siberia. More than twenty-three million people in the world speak languages that can trace their ancestry to Carpathian. Magyar or Hungarian (about fourteen million speakers), Finnish (about five million speakers) and Estonian (about one million speakers) are the three major contemporary descendants of this proto-language. The only factor that unites the more than twenty languages in the Uralic family is that their ancestry can be traced back to a common proto-language—Carpathian—that split (starting some six thousand years ago) into the various languages in the Uralic family. In the same way, European languages such as English and French belong to the better-known Indo-European family and also evolved from a common proto-language ancestor (a different one from Carpathian).

  The following table provides a sense of some of the similarities in the language family.

  Note: The Finnic/Carpathian “k” shows up often as the Hungarian “h.” Similarly, the Finnic/Carpathian “p” often corresponds to the Hungarian “f.”

  Carpathian

  (proto-Uralic)

  Finnish

  (Suomi)

  Hungarian

  (Magyar)

  elä—live

  elä—live

  él—live

  elid—life

  elinikä—life

  élet—life

  pesä—nest

  pesä—nest

  fészek—nest

  kola—die

  kuole—die

  hal—die

  pälä—half, side

  pieltä—tilt, tip to the side

  fél, fele—fellow human, friend (half; one side of two) feleség—wife

  and—give

  anta, antaa—give

  ad—giver />
  koje—husband, man

  koira—dog, the male (of animals)

  here—drone, testicle

  wäke—power

  väki—folks, people, men; force

  vall-vel—with (instrumental suffix)

  väkevä—powerful, strong

  vele—with him/her/it

  wete—water

  vesi—water

  viz—water

  2. CARPATHIAN GRAMMAR AND OTHER CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LANGUAGE

  Idioms. As both an ancient language and a language of an earth people, Carpathian is more inclined toward use of idioms constructed from concrete, “earthy” terms rather than abstractions. For instance, our modern abstraction “to cherish” is expressed more concretely in Carpathian as “to hold in one’s heart”; the “netherworld” is, in Carpathian, “the land of night, fog and ghosts”; etc.

  Word order. The order of words in a sentence is determined not by syntactic roles (like subject, verb and object) but rather by pragmatic, discourse-driven factors. Examples: “Tied vagyok.” (“Yours am I.”); “Sívamet andam.” (“My heart I give you.”)

  Agglutination. The Carpathian language is agglutinative; that is, longer words are constructed from smaller components. An agglutinating language uses suffixes or prefixes whose meanings are generally unique, and which are concatenated one after another without overlap. In Carpathian, words typically consist of a stem that is followed by one or more suffixes. For example, sívambam derives from the stem “sív” (“heart”), followed by “am” (“my,” making it “my heart”), followed by “bam” (“in,” making it “in my heart”). As you might imagine, agglutination in Carpathian can sometimes produce very long words, or words that are very difficult to pronounce. Vowels often get inserted between suffixes to prevent too many consonants from appearing in a row (which can make a word unpronounceable).

  Noun cases. Like all languages, Carpathian has many noun cases; the same noun will be “spelled” differently depending on its role in a sentence. The noun cases include nominative (when the noun is the subject of the sentence), accusative (when the noun is a direct object of the verb), dative (indirect object), genitive (or possessive), instrumental, final, suppressive, inessive, elative, terminative and delative.

  We will use the possessive (or genitive) case as an example to illustrate how all noun cases in Carpathian involve adding standard suffixes to the noun stems. Thus, expressing possession in Carpathian—“my lifemate,” “your lifemate,” “his lifemate,” “her lifemate,” etc.—involves adding a particular suffix (such as “?am”) to the noun stem (“päläfertiil”) to produce the possessive (“päläfertiilam”—“my lifemate”). Which suffix to use depends upon which person (“my,” “your,” “his,” etc.) and whether the noun ends in a consonant or a vowel. The following table shows the suffixes for singular nouns only (not plural), and also shows the similarity to the suffixes used in contemporary Hungarian. (Hungarian is actually a little more complex, in that it also requires “vowel rhyming”: which suffix to use also depends on the last vowel in the noun, hence the multiple choices in the table, where Carpathian only has a single choice.)

  Note: As mentioned earlier, vowels often get inserted between the word and its suffix so as to prevent too many consonants from appearing in a row (which would produce unpronounceable words). For example, in the table on the previous page, all nouns that end in a consonant are followed by suffixes beginning with “a.”

  Verb conjugation. Like its modern descendants (such as Finnish and Hungarian), Carpathian has many verb tenses, far too many to describe here. We will just focus on the conjugation of the present tense. Again, we will place contemporary Hungarian side by side with Carpathian because of the marked similarity between the two.

  As with the possessive case for nouns, the conjugation of verbs is done by adding a suffix onto the verb stem:

  Person

  Carpathian

  (proto-Uralic)

  Contemporary

  Hungarian

  1st singular (I give)

  -am (andam), -ak

  -ok, -ek, -ök

  2nd singular (you give)

  -sz (andsz)

  -sz

  3rd singular (he/she/it gives)

  — (and)

  —

  1st plural (we give)

  -ak (andak)

  -unk, -ünk

  2nd plural (you give)

  -tak (andtak)

  -tok, -tek, -tök

  3rd plural (they give)

  -nak (andnak)

  -nak, -nek

  As with all languages, there are many “irregular verbs” in Carpathian that don’t exactly fit this pattern. But the table is still a useful guide for most verbs.

  3. EXAMPLES OF THE CARPATHIAN LANGUAGE

  Here are some brief examples of conversational Carpathian, used in the Dark books. We include the literal translation in square brackets. It is interestingly different from the most appropriate English translation.

  Susu.

  I am home.

  [“home/birthplace.” “I am” is understood, as is often the case in Carpathian.]

  Möért?

  What for?

  csitri

  little one

  [“little slip of a thing,” “little slip of a girl”]

  ainaak enyém

  forever mine

  ainaak sívamet jutta

  forever mine (another form)

  [“forever to-my-heart connected/fixed”]

  sívamet

  my love

  [“of-my-heart,” “to-my-heart”]

  Tet vigyázam.

  I love you.

  [“you-love-I”]

  Sarna Rituaali (The Ritual Words) is a longer example, and an example of chanted rather than conversational Carpathian. Note the recurring use of “andam” (“I give”), to give the chant musicality and force through repetition.

  Sarna Rituaali (The Ritual Words)

  Te avio päläfertiilam.

  You are my lifemate.

  Éntölam kuulua, avio päläfertiilam.

  I claim you as my lifemate.

  Ted kuuluak, kacad, kojed.

  I belong to you.

  Élidamet andam.

  I offer my life for you.

  Pesämet andam.

  I give you my protection.

  Uskolfertiilamet andam.

  I give you my allegiance.

  Sívamet andam.

  I give you my heart.

  Sielamet andam.

  I give you my soul.

  Ainamet andam.

  I give you my body.

  Sívamet kuuluak kaik että a ted.

  I take into my keeping the same that is yours.

  Ainaak olenszal sívambin.

  Your life will be cherished by me for all my time.

  Te élidet ainaak pide minan.

  Your life will be placed above my own for all time.

  Te avio päläfertiilam.

  You are my lifemate.

  Ainaak sívamet jutta oleny.

  You are bound to me for all eternity.

  Ainaak terád vigyázak.

  You are always in my care.

  To hear these words pronounced (and for more about Carpathian pronunciation altogether), please visit christinefeehan.com/members/.

  Sarna Kontakawk (The Warriors’ Chant) is another longer example of the Carpathian language. The warriors’ council takes place deep beneath the earth in a chamber of crystals with magma far below it, so the steam is natural and the wisdom of their ancestors is clear and focused. This is a sacred place where they bloodswear to their prince and people and affirm their code of honor as warriors and brothers. It is also where battle strategies are born and all dissension is discussed, as well as any concerns the warriors have that they wish to bring to the council and open for discussion.

  Sarna Kontakawk (The Warriors’ Chant)Veri isäakank—veri ekäakank.

  Blood of our fathers—blo
od of our brothers.

  Veri olen elid.

  Blood is life.

  Andak veri-elidet Karpatiiakank, és wäke-sarna ku meke arwa-arvo, irgalom, hän ku agba, és wäke kutni, ku manaak verival.

  We offer that life to our people with a bloodsworn vow of honor, mercy, integrity and endurance.

  Verink sokta; verink kaŋa terád.

  Our blood mingles and calls to you.

  Akasz énak ku kaŋa és juttasz kuntatak it.

  Heed our summons and join with us now.

  To hear these words pronounced (and for more about Carpathian pronunciation altogether), please visit christinefeehan.com/members/.

  See Appendix 1 for Carpathian healing chants, including the Kepä Sarna Pus (The Lesser Healing Chant), the En Sarna Pus (The Great Healing Chant), the Odam-Sarna Kondak (Lullaby) and the Sarna Pusm O Maγet (Song to Heal the Earth).

  4. A MUCH-A BRIDGED CARPATHIAN DICTIONARY

  This very-much-abridged Carpathian dictionary contains most of the Carpathian words used in the Dark books. Of course, a full Carpathian dictionary would be as large as the usual dictionary for an entire language (typically more than a hundred thousand words).

  Note: The Carpathian nouns and verbs that follow are word stems. They generally do not appear in their isolated “stem” form. Instead, they usually appear with suffixes (e.g., andam—I give, rather than just the root, and). a— verb negation (prefix); not (adverb).

  a—verb negation (prefix); not (adverb).

  aćke—pace, step.

  aćke éntölem it—take another step toward me.

  agba—to be seemly; to be proper (verb). True; seemly; proper (adj.).

  ai—oh.

  aina—body (noun).

  ainaak—always; forever.

  o ainaak jelä peje emnimet ŋamaŋ—sun scorch that woman forever (Carpathian swear words).

  ainaakä—never.

  ainaakfél—old friend.

  ak—suffix added after a noun ending in a consonant to make it plural.