Solidarity Hymns

Solidarity Hymns are the sung core of the Solidarity Service: repeated, formulaic verses that lead its participants from individual identity toward the imagined unity of a “Greater Being.” Accompanied by synthetic music and shared soma, they make collective belonging a bodily and emotional performance. Yet Bernard remains unable to merge fully with the group, so the hymns’ promise of unity also reveals the distance between social conformity and genuine inward participation.

Place in the Solidarity Service

The service begins only after twelve participants have formed a complete circle around the table. Its arrangement—alternating men and women—presents the group as a deliberately ordered whole, ready to be fused into a larger being. The President makes the sign of the T and switches on synthetic music: drums and instrumental harmonies repeat a short melody whose rhythm is described as affecting the body rather than merely reaching the ear. The hymns are thus introduced not as private compositions for contemplation but as components of a coordinated communal rite.

Soma reinforces that coordination. Dedicated tablets are placed in the table’s centre, and a loving cup of strawberry ice-cream soma passes from hand to hand. With each circuit, participants speak a shared formula before drinking. The first is “I drink to my annihilation”; after the first hymn, the formula becomes “I drink to the Greater Being.” The changing words give the ceremony a progression: the individual is first symbolically relinquished, then incorporated into an imagined collective existence.

Repetition and the promise of oneness

The first Solidarity Hymn asks Ford to make the twelve participants one, comparing them to drops running together in a social river. Its image turns the group’s physical arrangement into a larger ideal: separate people are to flow into a common course. Twelve yearning stanzas and the repeated melody make this aspiration collective and sustained, rather than a momentary declaration by one speaker.

The second hymn intensifies the same movement. It calls for an “Annihilating Twelve-in-One,” and frames the end of separate identity as the beginning of a larger life. The ceremony’s repeated singing, cup-passing, and shared words enact that claim as well as state it. The promise is not simply that the participants will cooperate; it is that they will cease, for the duration of the service, to experience themselves as distinct individuals.

A third hymn continues the ascent toward the Greater Being. Its verses tell the singers to feel that being’s approach and to melt into the music of the drums. The line “For I am you and you are I” states the ritual’s central ideal as an exchange of identities. As the singing grows more excited, the President stops the music at the hymn’s final note. The sudden silence suspends the participants in expectation, setting the stage for the voice that the service presents as the Greater Being’s arrival.

Bernard’s incomplete participation

The hymns’ intended effect is measured against Bernard’s response. Soma begins to make him feel “a little melted,” and he tries to return Morgana Rothschild’s friendly smile. But her eyebrow continues to distract him. While the rest of the group moves toward a common feeling, he remains fixed on an individual feature he cannot overlook; he even wonders whether a different seat, between Fifi and Joanna, might have helped.

When the third cup reaches him, Bernard repeats the prescribed formula, “I drink to the imminence of His Coming,” and sincerely tries to believe that the arrival is near. Yet the eyebrow still haunts him, and the Coming seems remote. He privately expects another failure, even as he continues trying to beam. His response makes the hymns’ collective language double-edged: they voice an ideal of shared identity, but the ritual cannot guarantee that each participant inwardly experiences it.

Manufactured transcendence and contrast

After the third hymn, the service supplies its climax through an apparently supernatural voice. It calls out “Oh, Ford, Ford, Ford,” then urges the listeners to attend to the feet of the Greater Being on the stairs. Participants respond as though the approach were real; Morgana rises, and Sarojini cries that he is coming. The scene shows the hymns working in conjunction with music, soma, repetition, and expectation to produce a shared experience of sacred presence.

That constructed unity contrasts with the ritual at Malpais, where Lenina and Bernard witness a different communal ceremony involving masked dancers, drums, snakes, and a boy’s ritual ordeal. Lenina initially compares the performance to a lower-caste Community Sing, but its course unsettles that comparison; afterward she is distressed and wishes for soma. Set beside the Solidarity Service, the scene distinguishes two forms of collective ritual without making them equivalent: the hymns create an orderly, technologically mediated vision of fusion, while the Malpais ceremony is presented through unfamiliar images and leaves Lenina unable to accept it. The contrast clarifies how the World State’s songs make social conformity feel like spiritual communion.