Mantas Varnas | Integral Art

Dreams of Toraja

death / dreams / ritual

a psychomagical procession by and of Mantas Varnas

Dreams of Toraja is a psychomagical* process, exploring the trinity of death, dreams, and ritual. Inspired by the lands of Tana Toraja in Sulawesi, Indonesia - a place of intricate rites around life and death, ancestral reverence, and the animist spirit beneath Christian and Muslim layers - the work weaves live instruments with traditional sounds, field recordings of ceremonies, and the raw atmosphere of the land through the prism of a futuristic dreamscape.

My exploration of Torajan culture catalysed a deep journey into my first memories, uncontrollable lucid dreams, and deep visionary experiences with medicine plants tune into a flow of collective ancestral symbolism. The project traces the intimate thresholds of life and death, weaving the memory of Tana Toraja’s rites with personal visions, the serpent as life force, and the ongoing dialogue between the individual and the collective. It is an invitation for listeners to sync with the flow of ancestral currents and the symbolic language of the subconscious through the mix of ancient and futuristic soundscape, alongside a deep dive into my personal mythos.

*Psychomagic, a term & practice created by Alejandro Jodorowsky, is a transformative procession where psychology, magic, art, and ritual merge into a single current of symbolic healing. It speaks in the language of the unconscious — through gesture, image, and metaphor — guiding one through a living journey of integration. Rather than explaining or analyzing, it acts: transforming emotion into expression, memory into offering, and inner conflict into embodied art.

BEGIN THE SONIC JOURNEY

THROUGH DEATH, DREAMS & RITUAL

BEGIN THE SONIC JOURNEY

THROUGH DEATH, DREAMS & RITUAL

Tana Toraja

Sulawesi, Indonesia

In Tana Toraja, the relationship with death is not distant but profoundly intimate, forming the very fabric of social and spiritual life. Death is regarded as an inevitable part of life, a transformation, a passage into the ancestral realm where the departed continue to shape the living. Elaborate funerary rituals, some of the most intricate in the world, unfold over days or weeks, where music, chants, and offerings of animal sacrifice guide the soul through the unseen.

Ritual permeates existence - from the construction of tong’konan ancestral houses to the Ma’nene ceremony, when the dead are exhumed, redressed, and welcomed once more among the living. In Toraja, life and death interlace in a dream continuum, dissolving the duality between the sacred and the mundane. The people live with an awareness that mortality is not an interruption of life, but its deepest expression - a mystical intimacy where the real and surreal are inseparable.

Tong'konan ancestral house fitted with sacrificed buffalo horns

Tong'konan ancestral house fitted with sacrificed buffalo horns

Rambu Solo' - funeral ceremony, a sacred rite that honors the dead and guides their soul to Puya, the afterlife. It unites the community through music, dance, and ritual offerings, transforming grief into a collective expression of respect, gratitude, and continuity of life.

Rambu Solo funeral ceremony. Music plays a vital role in guiding the spirit of the deceased to Puya, the afterlife. The rhythmic sounds of traditional instruments and chants express grief, honor the dead, and maintain balance between the living and ancestral realms.

Ma’nene - ritual of ancestor reverence, where families carefully exhume, clean, and redress the preserved bodies of their deceased relatives. It reflects the Torajan belief in an enduring connection between the living and the dead, celebrating memory, respect, and the continuity of life across generations.

Tomakula (Toma Kula’) marks the transitional period between life and death in Torajan tradition. The person who has passed is not considered dead until the proper funeral rites are completed; until then, they are regarded as being ill and continue to be part of the household. Family members bring them rice and speak to them daily, maintaining the bond between the living and the spirit as it prepares for its journey. This period reflects the Torajan understanding of death as a gradual passage, not a sudden end.

Burial sites are vital cultural and spiritual landmarks. They serve as places of remembrance, honoring those who have passed and preserving their memory for future generations. Beyond their spiritual significance, burial sites offer insight into historical practices, social structures, and beliefs.

Dreams, too, are understood as portals of communication with ancestors and spirits,
where the boundaries of waking and sleeping blur into a shared cosmology.

Dreams, too, are understood as portals of communication with ancestors and spirits, where

the boundaries of waking and sleeping blur

into a shared cosmology.

Alchemy of the Self

psychomagic

Diving into the Memory
The psychomagical procession through this album emerged because I wanted to present it to the public. Instead of filming a short reel, which was the initial idea, I ended up filming over 9 hour of monologues connecting my memories of death, lucid dreams, and psychedelic experiences. The more I worked on this, the more I felt that I am missing quite some pieces of the puzzle. I went back to my parents home and started looking through the archive of my first poetry texts from since I was 12, my first drawing even before that. They were drawings of skeletons with nails hammered into the forehead, texts of uncertain, violent shouts in desperation and confusion why life is as it is. What I found in this early archive is fear of loneliness, fear of abandonment, a feeling of being worthless tempting the ideas of absolute departure. The more I was working on this presentation the deeper I dived into my personal mythos. Abstract symbolisms of my own creations, memories of near-death experiences, mundane and terrifying lucid dreams, rituals, ceremonies & psychedelic experience.

The First Wound
My own journey into the current of facing death began with my earliest memory: a childhood accident at the age of three, smashing my forehead against a metal roadblock. A very bright memory forever embedded with a scar on my forehead. In between blackouts vivid frames emerge. My brother dragging me to my parents through a gravel road in the countryside while blood was heavily pouring down my face. My mother cleaning my wound, my grey shirt colored all red. Laying under a white sheet, a very cold feeling, while doctors where cleaning and stitching the wound.

While completing Dreams of Toraja, I created a myth and drew a comic of this memory. In the drawing, after I hit my forehead, the serpent rushes toward me, transforms into an older version of myself, wearing a human skull, coated with a snake and feathers. While his feather fall behind him, he passes on the snake to the child, gifting life force. Continuity, renewal, and the death of what was before. This comic became a key artifact of my psychomagical process, a visual vessel connecting the first wound, initiation, and creative flow. The vision had long existed in me before the act of drawing; the comic only gave it form.

This comic became a big part of my psychomagical procession. The way I describe it now only came to be after another few years of remembrance and more experiences with present energy of the serpent. This is the first intentionally created mythos of my “accident” where the wound is a gateway, the serpent is continuity, and the art itself is the vessel of remembrance. This vision had already been alive in me long before I drew it. I do not remember anything before that moment; the accident marked the true beginning of my memory in this lifetime.

Fear to Sleep
In my teenage years, the portal widened through lucid dreams. At fifteen, I practiced to control my dreams, creating vivid worlds within sleep. But then something shifted - for over half a year, every night I was conscious in dreams, yet they were uncontrollable. Every night I was dragged into endless scenarios ending with falling into darkness, dying, waking in my bed, yet still dreaming, dragged into darkness, dying again. Every evening, before going to bed, fear came to presents. I was afraid to sleep as I knew that within seconds I will be captured by an uncontrollable, powerful force. Always I knew I was dreaming, yet I couldn’t wake up. Often when I thought I did, it was another continuity of the same endless cycle of control, darkness, and death. I feared I might never return. And yet, I always did - carrying with me the memory that every moment is both a death and a waking, and also a question where does the dream begin, where does it end?

15 years later, when I turned 30, these dreams returned. In the last one, I was lifted from my bed by a shadow figure. This strong vibration levitating me in the middle of my room. I could see the energy rippling the air, dark stripes trying to cover my eyes. Like in my early experiences, hurled violently through space, yet this moment without fear. Through a wider prism of myself, this space seemed too familiar to be afraid. I let it drag me, I give in. One moment the force throws me outside of my home. Standing in the yard, looking into the windows of my flat I start to feel that something is grabbing my wrists - I instantly grab back and push away. I try to run away by flying far from my home, instantly understanding that I cannot run away from this - whatever shadow seeks me, whatever fear is there, it is part of me. So I stop to resist, the shadow takes me and starts to drag me again through the building until it drops me with immense force to my bed. I wake up and say: “it’s ok, you can stay, it is safe, you can lay by my side and sleep here.” From that moment, for now, these dreams did not repeat - a feeling became present that wherever I go my shadow walks side by side with me. Only with absolute understanding and trust we progress and unite in polarity, no more fear, no more ripping myself in contrast.

The Serpent and Sacred Plant Ceremonies
As later in life I delved deeper into ceremonial experiences with sacred plants, especially ayahuasca & mushrooms, the serpent kept returning. Not once in ceremonies of ayahuasca I was prompted a question if I really want to take this path, do I want to continue? For hours I kept wondering and processing - what path? To dive deeper into myself? To work with the plants? To explore the endless opportunities of connection through sacred gathering, music, and psychedelic experiences? Better understand the delicate alchemical works of the elements? Witness different parallels & dimensions? After my answer, which was always yes, a big purge, creating space for the vast amounts of energy to come. The feeling of the serpent curving up my spine, alive and tender. Moving with the rhythms and melodies of the music.

In one of the most powerful embraces with this energy I was taken to the memory of my first wound and the mythos I created, the comic I had drawn. After hours of guidance how to navigate this energy, the plant hinted me that before the accident, I remembered all my spirit lifetimes - past and future - had access to all the memory. The injury was not only a rupture but an initiation: a forgetting so that I could experience this human life, a gift of the serpent for the continuation of creation. The information flowing in my vision connected and showed me clearly how the moment of my first wound, I saved myself by gifting the serpent - receiving my own creative life force as a transmission from the collective stream of memory that is accessible through the procession of embracing and shaping the endless mythos of my spirit life.

Psychomagical Creation

Sound led, meaning revealed itself after; the subconscious brought forth symbols, patterns, and memories, shaping the work as a living ritual. Here it is shown that the personal is inseparable from the collective - we never step outside of the whole, we are its movement. In tuning our inner pulse with its current, the patterns of memory, ritual, and ancestral symbolism start to reveal themselves as living forces - shaping, guiding, and resonating through our expression. Dreams of Toraja is not only to be heard; it is to be experienced, to enter, to move with. It is a portal where death, dreams, and ritual converge; where personal myth becomes collective resonance; the serpent moves through, the shadow walks besides, the currents of ancestral memory pulse. To engage with this work is to synchronize with the flow of life, and to witness the unfolding of symbols that guide creation itself.

Psychomagical Creation

Live Performance

Excerpt from audio visual performance @ Kaunas, Lithuania, 2022

Dreams of Toraja live performance unfolds as a ritual of sound and vision - a psychomagical dialogue between life and death, dream and awakening. Performed in collaboration with Victor Sitära (Mexico), and Ines Deru (Indonesia), the piece immerses the audience in a continuum of ancestral resonance and futuristic sonic atmospheres. Layering live electronics, vocals, percussion, and traditional instruments from Toraja such as the pa’suling bamboo flute and bamboo jaw-harp, the performance bridges distant temporalities - animating the mythic root, and the digital into a single breathing field.

Our trio weaves textures that shift between meditative trance and eruptive catharsis, invoking the serpent as a symbol of transformation and remembrance. Each act unfolds like a ceremony - a process of entering, dissolving, and re-emerging through sound. The visuals, drawn from Mantas’ personal archive of dreams, drawings, and ritual footage, intertwine with the music as living memory - projections of the personal subconscious entering the collective eye.

Dreams of Toraja becomes a living psychomagical rite - an alchemical convergence where sound, vision, and myth meet to reconfigure perception. The audience is invited not merely to witness but to participate in remembrance, to move within the current of ancestral flow, and to sense the continuity between the audible and the invisible.

Mantas Varnas - electronics, vocals, pa’suling flute, jaw-harp, percussion, guitar, visuals
Victor Sitära - electronics, sitar
Ines Deru - electronics, vocals, percussion

Mantas Varnas - electronics, vocals, pa’suling flute,

jaw-harp, percussion, guitar, visuals
Victor Sitära - electronics, sitar
Ines Deru - electronics, vocals, percussion

Artist Statement

Mantas Varnas

I am a multidisciplinary artist delving into alchemical processes whilst creating integral art that bridges the gap between the physical and metaphysical planes. My practice unfolds as psychomagical processions and sonic journeys, blending sound, ritual, and visual expression to open new perceptual spaces.

Rooted in ancient futurism, music as wholeness, and practice of mysticism, I travel the world, engaging with diverse cultures, finding symbolism, tradition, and the underlying resonant threads that harmonize human expression across space memory. Psychedelic exploration, alchemy, and immersive experiences through traditional methods & audiovisual technology are central to my practice, guiding participants to perceive, feel, and co-create in spaces where creative processions remind of the ever-present dance of the personal & collective.

Through my work and travels, I organize interdisciplinary events, festivals, gatherings to build global bridges between creatives and art communities - fostering a shared vision of progressive interconnectedness within an ancient-futurist perspective. Where ancient wisdoms meet futurist vision.

Artist Statement

Mantas Varnas

Artist Statement

Mantas Varnas