Music as Medicine

The Circassians of the north-western Caucasus developed one of the most elaborate and best-documented traditions of healing song in the entire Caucasus region. This article reconstructs that tradition through its central institution, the chapsh (кIапщ / щIапщэ), the all-night healing vigil held at the bedside of the sick and wounded, drawing on the mythosemiotic scholarship of Andzhela Gucheva, the ethnomusicology of Alla Sokolova, and the documentary anthologies produced under Evgeny Gippius and his Kabardian colleagues.

The article examines the two principal varieties of the rite: the smallpox vigil (фэрэкI щIапщэ) and the chapsh for wounds, fractures and bullet extraction. It reconstructs the mythological world surrounding the smallpox cult, including the taboo on naming the disease, the divine figures of Ziuskhan and Khana Guasha, and the four functional varieties of the healing song cycle (фэрэкI уэрэд). The Bzhedug smallpox song «Си кIакIор кIэкIошIу» is analysed as a worked example, with attention to its chain-strophe structure, boundary symbolism and apotropaic musical devices.

A central concern of the article is Sokolova's argument that the therapeutic power of chapsh music resided not in the notes themselves but in their ritual reception, a conclusion explored through the legend of the bullet extracted from the warrior Kozheberduko to the sound of a designated melody. The article also considers the cosmological dimensions of Adyghe sound culture through the kamyl flute and its shepherd rituals, Abkhazian parallels, and the place of song within a broader folk-medical system that included variolation, herbal treatment and dietary practice. It closes by reflecting on what the chapsh intuitively anticipated of modern psychoneuroimmunological thinking, and on the urgency of preserving the recorded corpus before the last bearers of the tradition are lost.