I Say “Cat”, you Say “Cradle”: Ecstatic Signification and the Kitchen Songs of Avudai Akkal of Sengottai

Eighteenth Century Tamil sage Avudai Akkal artfully combined pedagogical, poetic, and musical elements to create an embodied performance-rhetoric for right-conduct - how to live -  and right-view - proper understanding of who you are - for a demographic otherwise often excluded from such instruction. By necessity, these instructions needed to be concise, effective and easily repeated. In short, they needed to be intersectional, sprouting the Perennial Philosophy in diverse contexts. So concise were Akkal’s recipes for not just conceptualizing or analyzing but experiencing transcendental states, that, on our quest for compression in the infolanche, we would put them in the tradition of “pith instructions.”