Ethnomycologist Brian P. Akers

To date, more than twenty mushroom species, primarily in the genus Psilocybe, have reportedly been recognized as sacred and used in ceremony among various indigenous peoples of Mexico. Cultures in which some form of psychoactive mushroom use has been documented in modern times include the Chatino, Chinantec, Matlatzinca, Mazatec, Mixe, Mixtec, Nahua, and Zapotec. Apart from continuing interest in Mazatec shamanism, inspired in large part by the figure of María Sabina, there has been little general interest in sacred mushroom use by peoples elsewhere in Mexico, and scholarly work in this area has not been easily accessible.

But at least some of that situation has now been remedied. Brian P. Akers, an ethnomycologist, has collected a number of significant readings in his book The Sacred Mushrooms of Mexico: Assorted Texts, which presents classic scholarship, previously unavailable in English, on Matlatzinca, Mixtec, Mixe, and other Mesoamerican sacred mushroom rituals.

In addition to gathering and translating these texts, Akers has provided a lengthy and valuable introduction to the history of ethnomycological scholarship in Mesoamerica. He also discusses issues of translation and transliteration of Mesoamerican indigenous languages. Each individual article in the collection, too, is preceded by a lucid and thorough preface that places the work in its historical and cultural context. Five of these articles are translations of relevant scholarly sources in Spanish, many published in relatively obscure journals and difficult to find even in their original language.

But to call these articles scholarly, I think, does them an injustice. They include rich and detailed accounts — what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called thick description — of the place of psychoactive mushrooms in the lives of the peoples who use them, and of the reverence with which these medicines, these santitos and hombrecitos, curers of sickness and givers of information, are approached by those who use them.

The sixth text in the book is a transcript of The Sacred Mushroom, a celebrated episode of the classic television show One Step Beyond, a series that began in 1959 and dramatized allegedly paranormal events. This episode, however, featured host John Newland, with doctors, scientists, and a camera crew, traveling into the mountains of Mexico in search of a fabled mushroom that “stimulates extrasensory perception, enabling the mind to become telepathic.” This program may have been the only show in network television history — it was broadcast on ABC in 1961 — in which the host ingested psychoactive mushrooms and let the effects be recorded on camera.

To complement the transcript, here is the broadcast in its entirety:

Akers, the editor and translator, has a PhD in mycology from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He specializes in the genus Lepiota which, like the genus Amanita, includes species containing potentially psychoactive amanitins. He has published a number of scientific journal articles on ethnomycology and fungal systematics. A recent interview with Akers on his book is here.

The plant Salvia divinorum has a long and continuing tradition of use by Mazatec shamans, who drink it, sometimes followed by a drink of tequila, to induce visionary states during healing sessions, which are performed at night in a quiet and darkened room. The drink is made by crushing the leaves to extract the juices, which are then mixed with water. It is important to be ritually mindful when collecting the leaves, and there are strict prohibitions — for example, avoiding sexual contact — to be kept for several days after the ceremony. The plant grows primarily in the mountain cloud forest in Oaxaca, Mexico. There is reason to believe that the plant is either a cultigen or hybrid developed specifically for its psychoactive effects.

The primary psychoactive constituent is a diterpenoid known as salvinorin A, a potent and selective κ-opioid receptor agonist. These receptors are widely distributed in the brain, spinal cord, and pain neurons. Other drugs that act at the κ-opioid receptor, such as ketazocine, produce similar effects. Salvinorin A is unique in being the only naturally occurring substance known to induce a visionary state by acting at this site. There is no evidence that Salvia is addictive.

R. Gordon Wasson, A young Mazatec girl grinding Salvia divinorum leaves on a metate to express the juice (1962)

Salvia divinorum can also be chewed, smoked, or taken as a tincture. Different preparations may have different onset times, but the effects and their duration appear similar — perceptions of bright lights, vivid colors and shapes, as well as body movements and body or object distortions. Other effects include dysphoria, uncontrolled laughter, a sense of loss of body, overlapping realities, and hallucinations. Adverse physical effects may include incoordination, dizziness, and slurred speech. The duration of these effects is relatively brief, typically lasting only a few minutes.

The most commonly reported aftereffects include improved mood and sensations of insight, calmness, and connection with nature. There have been rare reports of anxiety or sadness.

The Mazatec believe that Salvia is an incarnation of the Virgin Mary, and they refer to it as ska María Pastora, the leaf of Mary the Shepherdess. The name is usually shortened to ska María or ska Pastora. “The purpose of these sacraments is to purify, and to open the road,” says Mazatec shaman Aurelia Aurora Catarino. “When it opens, it’s as clear as the blue sky, and the stars at night are as bright as suns.”

In the September 2006 issue of New Scientist, writer Gaia Vince says that Salvia “took me on a consciousness-expanding journey unlike any other I have ever experienced. ” He continues:

My body felt disconnected from “me” and objects and people appeared cartoonish, surreal and marvellous. Then, as suddenly as it had began, it was over. The visions vanished and I was back in my bedroom. I spoke to my “sitter” — the friend who was watching over me, as recommended on the packaging — but my mouth was awkward and clumsy. When I attempted to stand my coordination was off. Within a couple of minutes, however, I was fine and clear-headed, though dripping with sweat. The whole experience had lasted less than 5 minutes.

Poet Dale Pendell, in the Salvia divinorum chapter of his book Pharmako/poeia, quotes some users who have smoked dried Salvia leaves: “It’s very intense, I call it a reality stutter, or a reality strobing,” says one report. And another: “It’s like heavy zazen, like after a very long period of sitting, the place you can get to there. It’s changed my life, turned my life around.”

Two Guyz Trippin on Salvia at the Same Time (2009)

Popular use of Salvia, especially among young people, has been increasing. A National Survey on Drug Use and Health Report published in February 2008 estimated that 1.8 million persons aged 12 or older had used Salvia divinorum in their lifetime, and approximately 750,000 had done so in the past year. As we have mentioned here, the plant is being made illegal in an increasing number of states, and — while not currently regulated by the federal Controlled Substances Act — the DEA has listed Salvia as a “drug of concern.” The legal situation has been aggravated by a number of YouTube videos of teenagers, allegedly high on Salvia, laughing uncontrollably and apparently unable to perform simple tasks or to communicate.

Now the prestigious and generally sober Scientific American has published, in its August 2009 issue, an article by science writer David Jay Brown, calling for restraint in the march toward legal prohibition of Salvia. The article points out that only two labs currently conduct human studies with salvinorin A — one run by psychiatric researchers Deepak Cyril D’Souza and Mohini Ranganathan, both at the Yale University School of Medicine, and the other by pharmacologist John Mendelson of the University of California, San Francisco. Both groups are performing preliminary tests to determine how best to administer salvinorin A to human volunteers and collect basic data. The article states:

The unusual properties of salvinorin A intrigue scientists. Psychiatric researcher Bruce Cohen and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School have been developing analogues of salvinorin A and studying their possible mood-modulating properties. The team’s work with salvinorin A in animals suggests “that a drug that would block kappa opioid receptors might be an antidepressant drug — probably a nonaddictive one — or a mood stabilizer for patients with bipolar disorder,” Cohen remarks. By activating the kappa opioid receptors, drugs such as salvinorin A could reduce dependence on stimulants and the mood-elevating and mood-rewarding effects of cocaine. Because salvinorin A can produce distortions of thinking and perception, researchers speculate that blocking the receptors might alleviate some symptoms of psychoses and dissociative disorders.

D’Souza and Ranganathan argue that scheduling the drug should wait until evidence about its effects and toxicity becomes clear. “The issue is a serious one, with implications for policy, drug enforcement and research,” Cohen says. If salvinorin A becomes a federally scheduled drug, research on it would become “much more difficult,” predicts Rick Doblin, director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Approval boards at universities and research institutions view proposals involving criminalized drugs with extreme caution. “And funders are reluctant to look at potentially beneficial uses of drugs of abuse,” he adds.

Classic Maya vase depicting a scene of the royal court

The paintings on these ceramics provide important information about the daily life of the Maya elite class, Reents-Budet said; they depict the decorations that adorned their now bare stone palaces, and the perishable interior furnishings that have not survived in the archeological record — curtains and throne covers of cloth and jaguar skin; ceramic, gourd, wood, and basketry containers; books; regal costumes; musical instruments; scented torches. And she mentioned, in passing, that the botanical motifs with which many of these ceramics were decorated remained unidentified.

This remark inspired Zidar, a natural historian and archaeologist, to focus his research on plants illustrated on Maya ceramics, culminating in the creation of a botanical resource database of the plants depicted in Classic Maya art, with the goal of rediscovering currently unknown or forgotten plants that had been important — symbolically, ritually, or economically — to the ancient Maya.

Painted and sculpted images of whole plants, leaves, fruits, and flowers are represented on many Maya artifacts; the “breath soul,” the carrier of life, was often conceptualized as a flower. However, “despite the importance of plants to the ancient Maya and the many advances in understanding ancient Maya iconography and hieroglyphs,” Zidar says, “there has been scant identification and interpretation of botanical motifs in Classic Maya art. Many Classic period monumental and personal artworks feature plants, the rich variety of imagery reflecting that of the natural environment.”

Trunk spines of Ceiba pentandra (left) depicted on a ceremonial incense jar

Now some of this research has appeared in an article, co-authored by Zidar and botanist Wayne Elisens, and published in the journal Economic Botany.

This first analysis focuses on artwork produced in a single geographic area — the southern lowland region of the Maya, located in the modern countries of Belize, Guatemala and Mexico. In particular, too, the authors searched for depictions of bombacoids, a diverse family of neotropical trees characterized by swollen or spiny trunks and big, colorful, conspicuous flowers with long folding petals. The goal was to see which of these plants were important to the culture, and why.

The study involved evaluating more than 2,500 images of Maya ceramics from the collection of Justin and Barbara Kerr, curated by the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, located in Crystal River, Florida. “It has amazed me that so many plants are depicted,” said in a BBC interview. “These plants are not as stylized as previously thought, and thus you can name the plant family, genus, and even the species.”

Flower of Quararibea sp. (left) painted on a vessel used for sacred chocolate

For example, among the discoveries were numerous depictions of the kapok tree, Ceiba pentandra, which grows around 150 feet high, and was sacred to the Maya as the “first tree” or “world tree,” thought to stand at the center of the earth. The thorny trunks of the Ceiba tree were found to be represented on ceramic pots used as burial urns or ceremonial incense holders.

“The Maya have lived and used rainforest plants to heal themselves for thousands of years,” Zidar said in a BBC interview. “We are just beginning to understand some of their secrets.” He continued: “By determining what plants were of importance to the ancient Maya, it is my hope that identified plants can be further studied for pharmaceutical, culinary, economic and ceremonial uses.”

The Peruvian response was dramatic, with legislators defiantly chewing coca leaves on the congressional floor. The current meeting of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna has elicited a strong response from Bolivia as well. Some context might be helpful.

Morales wearing indigenous clothes

Evo Morales, an Aymara, is the first indigenous president of Bolivia. He came to power in 2006 promising a decolonizing revolution, a term with a special meaning to indigenous Bolivians. The first decolonization took place when Bolivia became independent from Spain in 1825; but, for Bolivia’s indigenous population, this political separation meant only that their exploitation and marginalization took on new forms. For the poor and disenfranchised indigenous people who helped bring Morales to power, colonialism is still very much alive in Bolivia, in everything from the educational system to the Catholic Church.

Although publicly declaring himself a Catholic, Morales has actively promoted indigenous beliefs, including appointing traditional shamans to his government. Bolivia’s previous constitution had allowed for freedom of religion, but had specified Roman Catholicism as the sole state religion. The new Bolivian constitution, approved in January, has the stated goal of refounding Bolivia as a “socially just state guided by indigenous beliefs,” including the elevation of Pachamama, Earth Mother, to the same stature as the God of Christianity.

In a recent dissertation in social anthropology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, entitled As Though We Had No Spirit: Ritual, Politics and Existence in the Aymara Quest for Decolonization, Anders Burman examines how the government policy of decolonization has been interwoven with indigenous rituals and cosmology. He carried out his ethnographic field work among shamans and activists within the Andean indigenous people’s movement.

Morales receives a sacred staff from an indigenous shaman

Burman distinguishes three different ways of looking at the decolonization project. The government views colonialism as inherent in existing political structures, and therefore seeks institutional change. Indigenous activists view Bolivia itself as a colonial project, and therefore seek to build a new country from the ground up. But the shamans and their apprentices with whom Burman worked perceive colonialism to be a sickness and decolonization as the cure, and, based on traditional cosmological linkages, work to decolonize not only the state and society, but the landscape and the self as well.

Still, these three ways of looking at decolonization overlap in significant ways. Political activism and the ritual practices of shamanism, Burman says, derive from the same interpretive cultural framework — how to deal with that which is understood as alien, whether a national power elite that is perceived as foreign, or unfamiliar spirits that bring about sickness. In the same way, traditional Andean cosmology is one of the cornerstones of the government representation of its decolonizing policies.

Morales campaigning with a coca plant

And Bolivian indigenous beliefs are deeply intertwined with the sacred coca plant. Morales, a former cocalero union leader, won his greatest political support in the impoverished coca-growing areas of central Bolivia. In a New York Times op-ed piece published three days ago and entitled Let Me Chew My Coca Leaves, Morales challenges the United Nations to reverse what he calls a forty-eight-year-old mistake — the false notion, incorporated into the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, that the coca leaf is a narcotic in the same category with cocaine, and the concomitant order that “coca leaf chewing must be abolished within 25 years from the coming into force of this convention.”

That deadline passed in 2001. “So for the past eight years,” Morales writes, “the millions of us who maintain the traditional practice of chewing coca have been, according to the convention, criminals who violate international law. This is an unacceptable and absurd state of affairs for Bolivians and other Andean peoples.”

Morales urges the UN to distinguish between a narcotic and the plant from which it is derived. “What is absurd about the 1961 convention is that it considers the coca leaf in its natural, unaltered state to be a narcotic,” he writes. “The paste or the concentrate that is extracted from the coca leaf, commonly known as cocaine, is indeed a narcotic, but the plant itself is not. ” And he concludes:

The custom of chewing coca leaves has existed in the Andean region of South America since at least 3000 B.C. It helps mitigate the sensation of hunger, offers energy during long days of labor and helps counter altitude sickness…. Today, millions of people chew coca in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and northern Argentina and Chile. The coca leaf continues to have ritual, religious and cultural significance that transcends indigenous cultures and encompasses the mestizo population…. It is time for the international community to reverse its misguided policy toward the coca leaf.

According to ABI, the official Bolivian news agency, Morales chewed coca leaves at the conference on drug policy in Vienna as he asked the Commission reverse its decision to qualify the coca leaf as a narcotic./>

At the same time, the pan-Indian nature of the church made it a powerful vehicle for the diffusion of musical styles and content. Early studies of peyote songs, dating from the 1940s, found Navajo peyote singers using the Ute musical style, and recognizably the same peyote song among the Tarahumara, Navajo, and Cheyenne. Such studies can be helpful in tracing the historical spread of the new religious movement.

An important aspect of peyote songs is their use of non-lexical vocables — sequences of phonemes without conventional semantic content, but meaningful to the singer in the context of the ceremony, and often an indication of the song’s origin as a spiritual gift. Peyote songs often combine the consonants y, w, h, c, k, t, x, and n with vowels, in the sequence CVCVCV… to produce vocables such as the important peyote word heyowicinayo.

Beginning in the 1990s — their first CD was released in 1995 — two singers, Verdell Primeaux, a Sioux, and Johnny Mike, a Navajo, developed a new form of peyote music they called healing songs, characterized by mesmeric and meditative vocal harmonies and frequently without the paradigmatic driving beat of the water drum and gourd rattle.

Brian Stoner

The songs, sung in Lakota and Navajo, became immensely popular, not only with Native Americans, but also among the same audience that was eagerly purchasing the similarly meditative flute recordings of R. Carlos Nakai. Their crossover appeal is evidenced by the fact that, in 1998, their seventh recording, Peyote Songs of the Native American Church, won both the Native American Music Award for Best Traditional Music and the New Age Voice Music Award for Traditional Native American Music.

Their haunting music, however, embodied a partial disconnection from the traditional roots of the peyote song, where the gourd rattle and water drum have traditionally been an integral part of the ceremony, and tying the soaked deerskin drumhead onto the cast-iron drum kettle is an important and symbolically resonant part of the preparation. Indeed, this disconnection in part drove their popularity. One music reviewer — apparently intending to be complimentary — went so far as to say that the new peyote music “transcends the usual ethnographic feel of peyote recordings and becomes true art.”

Whitehorse and Crowe

There is now a new generation of peyote singers. The term new generation means, apart from relative youth, two things — first, that the singers have been deeply influenced by the harmonizing peyote songs of Primeaux and Mike, yet most often retain the traditional accompaniment of the gourd rattle and water drum; and, second, that they have MySpace pages and distribute their videos on YouTube, and selectively incorporate English into their songs.

Three of these singers are Brian Stoner, from the Ponca and Cherokee tribes of Oklahoma; and the brothers Maynard Whitehawk and Lance Crowe, of Plains Anishinabe and Saulteaux heritage, who sing together under the name Wikiwam Ahsin, which are Anishinabe words usually translated as tipi rock. I have attached two representative videos below.

The first video features a song set from the album With Love and Faith We Pray, which was named the Best Spiritual Album at the 2007 Indian Summer Music Festival, and which features Whitehawk and Crowe joining Stoner on several songs. The second features a set from Whitehawk and Crowe’s eponymous album Wikiwam Ahsin. Listen for the children’s songs at the end.

]]> http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/03/peyote-songs/feed/ 9 http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/02/good-blog-legitimos-guerreritos/ http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/02/good-blog-legitimos-guerreritos/#comments Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:00:00 +0000 Steve Beyer http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/02/good-blog-legitimos-guerreritos/ Jerónimo M. M. is a professor of interactive TV and mobile applications, as well as a consultant on Internet video, online communities, and user experience for such clients as MTV, Tele5, The Movie Channel, and Telefonica. For the past seven years he has been working on a documentary film project entitled The Ayahuasca Conversation.
]]> Jerónimo M. M. is a professor of interactive TV and mobile applications, as well as a consultant on Internet video, online communities, and user experience for such clients as MTV, Tele5, The Movie Channel, and Telefonica. For the past seven years he has been working on a documentary film project entitled The Ayahuasca Conversation.

The Ayahuasca Conversation is intended to explore ethnobotany, pharmacology, and the roots of faith. The project began, Jerónimo says, “with filming the way in which indigenous peoples have protected themselves from acculturation by hiding their traditions back inside the religions of the colonizers.” This focus then expanded into a consideration of “the process by which religions are created and lead invariably to healing, to that point of human history where medicine and religion were not separate things,” and then into traditional medicine.

“We have traveled a dozen countries and three continents,” Jerónimo writes, “interviewing priests and shamans, scientists and curanderos, intellectuals and illiterate farmers, leading thinkers and anonymous people whose lives have been transformed by their encounter with these worlds. We have filmed otherworldly rituals and extraordinary behaviors that at the same time manifested something that seemed universal to all mankind.”

Jerónimo refuses to create a conventional documentary out of his hundreds of hours of film. Rather, he intends to create one- to seven-minute pieces, spread virally, designed for cross-media versatility and able to be repackaged into varying lengths.”These videos,” he says, “are embedded into an innovative living interface: a plant-based ecosystem that thrives or withers, branching from the central narrative and unlocking batches of additional content that grows increasingly intimate. This project is ongoing and participatory: the long-term investment allows users a feeling of inclusion into the process of the documentary.”

The evolving project is thus what he calls “a stylized narrative of serial webisodes” — a proposed gigantic online video archive where viewers can consult portions of the film at their own pace. The idea is eventually to transcribe the interviews and tag the videos, so that people can follow their own threads through the material, find interviews where a particular topic is mentioned, queue the video segments for viewing one after another — in effect, create their own documentaries. There may be a number of predefined paths through the material, but the user could jump off the path at any time and then return to the central thread — the diary of an addict undergoing transformation.

The documentary project is also multiplatform — the films, a collection of documents, and a bilingual blog, named Legitimos Guerreritos, which incorporates a wide variety of documentary videos. I am a big fan of this blog. The posts are always thoughtful, interesting, and filled with content — the penetration of Santo Daime among indigenous Cashinahua in Acre, Brazil; the work of cognitive anthropologist Josep María Fericgla on shamanism and ayahuasca; a response to a video showing teenagers drinking ayahuasca in their living room; the culture of the Kogi of Colombia. There are not many of them, but every one is worth a careful reading.

As intended, a few of Jerónimo’s films have achieved wide circulation — including the video discourse by Jacques Mabit I posted here — although far too little footage has actually found its way onto the Internet. The following example is a more-or-less extemporaneous talk that Jerónimo himself gave in July 2007 at the Third Amazonian Shamanism Conference in Iquitos.

While attending the conference, he says, “I saw people that in my opinion were not properly prepared, make a farce, a theater play, out of something I respect and love very much, the work and practices of Amazonian curanderismo. All in order to feel better about themselves in front of people who didn’t know any better … That mix of the good and the bad is certainly an integral part of Iquitos ayahuasca scene.” His critique of the commercialization and distortion of shamanism is well worth listening to.

More please.

If you are as old as I am, you remember growing up with the Golden Guide books — sturdy, profusely illustrated, pocket-sized guides to such topics as flowers, planets, spiders, birds, stars, painting, pond life, photography, and rocks and minerals, intended for a young audience. They were perfect for taking along on field trips for identification purposes. The series began in 1949 with Birds and continued — remarkably — until Endangered Animals in 1995. There is, of course, a collector’s website with details about every Golden Guide ever published.

In 1976, the series published A Golden Guide To Hallucinogenic Plants, written by famed Harvard botanist and Amazon explorer — and, some say, model for Indiana Jones — Richard Evans Schultes, with illustrations by Elmer W. Smith. Schultes spent decades in the Amazon, collected over 30,000 herbarium specimens, including 300 species new to science, and cataloged 2,000 medicinal plants. More than 120 species bear his name, as does a 2.2 million-acre tract of protected rain forest in Colombia, Sector Schultes, which the government there set aside in 1986. He studied both peyote and ayahuasca, and he was the first botanist to identify the traditional Mexican hallucinogens teonanácatl and ololiuqui. There was no one in the country better qualified to write the book.

The book has become quite rare. A quick look around the online used bookstores shows copies of the original hardcover edition for sale at prices as high as $858.00. Some maintain that this scarcity is the result of deliberate suppression — that the book was promptly recalled, pulled from the shelves, discontinued by the publisher. I have seen no evidence of such censorship; in fact, the book apparently went through four printings before being allowed to go out of print.

The book itself is wonderful, with beautiful botanical illustrations, a lot of cultural detail, and ethnographic paintings with the sort of old-fashioned charm that somehow reminds me of the dioramas of exotic peoples I used to love as a boy at the American Museum of Natural History. The writing is straightforward and is, for its intended audience, at a high level of sophistication. I suppose I should be retroactively offended by references to “primitive societies” and “early man,” but somehow I just can’t work up much indignation.

If you want to take a look, a copy has been lovingly scanned, transcribed, and posted by the invaluable Vaults of Erowid. Another copy is here. We should credit David Pescovitz at Boing-Boing for first bringing this gem to the attention of the online community.

Here is the description from the back cover of the book:

What are hallucinogenic plants? How do they affect mind and body? Who uses them — and why? This unique Golden Guide surveys the role of psychoactive plants in primitive and civilized societies from early times to the present. The first nontechnical guide to both the cultural significance and physiological effects of hallucinogens, hallucinogenic plants will fascinate general readers and students of anthropology and history as well as botanists and other specialists. All of the wild and cultivated species considered are illustrated in brilliant full color.

And, in the introduction, Schultes writes:

Hallucinogenic plants have been used by man for thousands of years, probably since he began gathering plants for food. The hallucinogens have continued to receive the attention of civilized man through the ages. Recently, we have gone through a period during which sophisticated Western society has “discovered” hallucinogens, and some sectors of that society have taken up, for one reason or another, the use of such plants. This trend may be destined to continue.

It is, therefore, important for us to learn as much as we can about hallucinogenic plants. A great body of scientific literature has been published about their uses and their effects, but the information is often locked away in technical journals. The interested layman has a right to sound information on which to base his opinions. This book has been written partly to provide that kind of information.

No matter whether we believe that men’s intake of hallucinogens in primitive or sophisticated societies constitutes use, misuse, or abuse, hallucinogenic plants have undeniably played an extensive role in human culture and probably shall continue to do so. It follows that a clear understanding of these physically and socially potent agents should be a part of man’s general education.

The argument raises a number of interesting questions, and is worth following.

Michael Winkelman

Winkelman’s position consists of two intertwined elements, one descriptive and one historical. The descriptive part begins from the concept that the human brain is modular — that it is a large collection of small modules that have evolved to perform specific functions. These modules can be quite specialized. Modules have been proposed for such functions as distinguishing living from nonliving things, identifying faces, understanding motives, throwing accurately, attaching emotions to faces, and recognizing causal relationships. Tools such as Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging may even be able to locate these modules in particular areas in the brain.

Winkelman maintains that shamanic techniques for inducing transpersonal consciousness override this modularity through what he calls integrative brain processes. In this integrative mode of consciousness, he says, ordinarily separate modules can interact, so that the brain processes information through several modules at once, in a way that is different from other states of consciousness. Synesthesia — seeing sounds or smelling colors, for example — is such a cross-modular experience, as is the uniquely human capacity for metaphor, mimesis, and symbolism. Winkelman sees such capacities as central to the role of the shaman.

There is much to be said for this last observation. Jerome Rothenberg, poet and pioneer of ethnopoetics, calls the shaman the protopoet. Poet Gary Snyder says that the shaman gives song to dreams, “speaks for wild animals, the spirits of plants, the spirits of mountains, of watersheds. He or she sings for them. They sing through him.” For these poets, the shaman is the healer who sings — the creator of metaphor, the shaper of symbols.

Winkelman’s view has started a trend toward speaking of the sacred plants — such as the ayahuasca drink, the peyote cactus, the teonanácatl mushroom — as psychointegrator plants. Such plants “enhance integration of information by eliciting cognitive capacities based in presentational symbolism, metaphor, analogy, and mimesis … representing preconscious and prelinguistic structures of the brain.” The shaman’s individual psychodynamics, Winkelman says, expressed symbolically in the language of myths and spirits, are restructured “at levels below conceptual and operational thought.”

This is also where the historical element comes in. Premodern humans, Winkelman says, had highly modular brains. It was shamanism that was the foundation for the development of “synthetic symbolic awareness” in early humans. “The integrative potentials of shamanism,” he writes, “help explain the rapid rise of culture in modern Homo sapiens sapiens and the origin of shamanistic and religious features … from the cross-modal analogic and psychophysiological integration processes from different innate modules.”

Homayun Sidky

Sidky doesn’t buy it. His critique has two prongs, both directed against Winkelman’s historical thesis. First, Sidky questions the assumption that shamanism — at least in any form recognizably similar to contemporary indigenous practice — was in fact a paleolithic phenomenon. This point has merit. As I have written before, historical materials on shamanism date back only as far as the sixteenth century. By the time the first European travelers brought home descriptions of Siberian shamanism, it had already been influenced by centuries of contact with Buddhism, Islam, and Russian Orthodox Christianity. We have no direct evidence of what any sort of indigenous spiritual practice might have been like before that time.

Second, the question of what caused the sudden emergence of behaviorally modern humans about 40,000 years ago is a highly contentious one, and a wide variety of mechanisms have been proposed, including the introgression of Neanderthal alleles into the human genome. Sidky questions whether the hypothesized integrative mode of consciousness would have been advantageous in the sense Winkelman intends. Winkelman says that “altering consciousness provides a variety of adaptive advantages through development of a more objective perception of the external world.” Sidky quotes Charles Tart as saying that altered states of consciousness are, just like ordinary consciousness, “mixtures of pluses and minuses, insights and delusions, genuine creativity and misleading imagination.” What would be the benefit of such a state of consciousness to a paleolithic human?

More interesting to me than where these two thinkers differ is where they seem to agree. Both agree that there is something we can call a shamanic state of consciousness, although they disagree about what it is. Winkelman claims it is a state in which normally discrete brain modules interact. Sidky maintains that there is no empirical justification for hypothesizing the existence of such a state. Rather, he says, the state is clearly one of dissociation — a state in which “the ordinary meta-awareness that gives us our sense of personal identity and agency, and which operates atop the brain’s cognitive hierarchey, is temporarily overtaken.” Such a state is in fact a state of increased modularity, “when parallel brain modules disengage from each other or from ordinary meta-awareness and operate independently.”

My first reaction to all this is that we seem to be theorizing far ahead of a sufficient factual basis. If cognition does work in a modular fashion, there is still little agreement about what those modules are, how many there may be, and how they might interact. There are numerous modular models of the mind, but their modules often do not correspond; one review of the literature came up with a total of fifty different modules that had been proposed in different studies. If there is little agreement about the modularity of the contemporary human brain, it is hard to see how we can reasonably discuss the modularity of paleolithic humans.

And there are continuing conceptual difficulties. If there is a speech processing module, are there submodules for semantic coding, phonemic processing, pitch recognition? Is the semantic coding module for speech reception the same as one for speech production? How do all these modules and submodules interact? For these and other reasons, modular models are currently being challenged by alternative models that are increasingly holistic and nonlocalized.

But my concern is deeper. Shamans are not states of consciousness. Shamans are people who have messy personal lives, an ambiguous social role, and the risky job of making sick people better. In fact, as I wrote here and here, I am not at all sure that there is such a thing as a discrete, unitary, contextless, disembodied shamanic state of consciousness at all. Perhaps what we should be talking about instead are the experiences of shamans in their global, postcolonial, historical, and ineluctably idiosyncratic cultural settings.

In the same way, we cannot simply assume that sacred plants all function in the same way, or produce the same experience, especially under their ceremonial conditions of use. Indeed, I think it is pretty clear that the effects of the ayahuasca drink, the peyote cactus, and the teonanácatl mushroom are phenomenologically distinct. What happens to the shamanic state of consciousness then?

• At the World Psychedelic Forum, more than fifty experts from all over the world met and discussed the psychedelic experience, including such heavy hitters as Stanislav Grof, Ralph Metzner, Jeremy Narby, Jonathan Ott, Daniel Pinchbeck, and Michael Winkelman. An entire day was spent on the topic Legacy of the Shamans: Ancient Traditions and New Dimensions. You can take a look at the whole program here, and a report of the conference is here. Couldn’t make it? You can still get audio recordings, for a price. Videos of at least a few of the presentations are available for free here.
• The Fourth Annual Amazonian Shamanism Conference also had a distinguished group of speakers — Pablo Amaringo, Howard Charing, Frank Echenhoffer, Richard Grossman, Martina Hoffman, Jan Kounen, Dennis McKenna, Robert Venosa, and many others. Recordings of a few of these presentations in a variety of audio formats — unfortunately, often of poor sound quality — are available without charge here.
  

  It is likely that videos will also be available soon, but not for free. Soga del Alma, the sponsoring organization, has made available videos from the 2005 and 2006 conferences, under a sort of rental arrangement. For £15 you can watch all thirty-one of the presentations from those two conferences, as streaming video, as often as you wish, for a period of one year. To get a sense of what the videos are like, you can get a free look — although registration is required — at Dennis McKenna’s 2005 presentation, Ayahuasca and Human Destiny. That talk, by the way, has now circulated widely, and is available both as a podcast and in its written form.

• The 25th International Conference on Shamanism and Alternative Modes of Healing included presentations by Stanislov Grof, Jürgen Kremer, Stanley Krippner, and many others; you can still see the entire program here. Especially noteworthy were presentations by a number of scholars and practitioners of Mongolian shamanism — Batbayar Gonchigdorj, Purevsuren Begziav, Sumiya Tserendorj, Battsetseg Bataa, and Saruul Magsar. Audio recordings of the conference are available here, but only as a complete set, and they are pricey.

I look forward to the day when all such conference presentations, as a matter of course, will be made immediately available as podcasts and vidcasts.

On Friday, January 30, at The Wild Project in New York, Reality Sandwich, Souldish, and Critical Mass Productions will present a screening of the film Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within. Following the film there will be a panel discussion featuring the film’s co-director Nikos Katsaounis, Reality Sandwich Contributing Editor Adam Elenbaas, and holistic health and philosophy instructor Tatiana Forero Puerta. An interview with Nikos Katsaounis is here.

Since at least the 1970s, a tenacious meme has circulated among a generally progressive youthful demographic, some of whom have now carried that meme with them into their elderhood. The meme states that there is a connection between our ecological crisis and our loss of earth-connected spirituality — a connection to both earth and spirit that we once possessed but have now lost, and which is still preserved for us by some indigenous peoples. Still, the meme says, there is hope. A spiritual awakening is coming, associated with the Age of Aquarius, or the fifth pachakuti, or the culmination of the Mayan calendar in the year 2012.

This shift is away from ego, self-importance, greed, racism, capitalism, consumerism, and left-brain linearity, and toward a recovery of our primal connectedness with nature. The signs of this shift are everywhere — in the rise of neoshamanism, technoshamanism, rave culture, and in the recovery of archaic techniques of ecstasy. Psychoactive substances, both natural and artificial, are an inherent part of this shift. Such entheogens — the term is taken to mean something like awakening the divine within — were the basis of a primal universal human spirituality and, indeed, may have been the basis of the very process of our becoming human. Today, entheogens not only reconnect us with our past but point us toward the future, where we will all be shamans — interconnected, peaceful, creative, and deeply in touch with spirit and the earth.

There. That’s the plot of the movie.

Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within is a 70-minute documentary about ecological awareness, the evolution of consciousness, electronic dance culture, technoshamanism, the revival of shamanism — and, of course, entheogenic substances. In an interview, co-director Rod Mann said: “The film Entheogen is about discovering the ways in which we participate with the dance and flow of life — and how to maintain that flow. The film also gives us context from our history — from the evolution from indigenous tribes through shamanism through world religions throughout the course of history.” He continues:

I think that entheogens offer us a window into the deeper dimensions of our Self, our psyches, our behaviors, our subconscious patterns, and we may use these substances in the proper context of course, to do the necessary work, the individuation, bringing a sense of awareness to ego inflation and self importance so that through that process we may gain a stronger sense of our community and our families, and also regarding other species, plants, etc. — how we fit into the sempiternal interconnected web of life which sustains the whole of existence.

The film features Charles Tart, Stanley Grof, Marilyn Schlitz, Ralph Metzner, Alex Grey, Terrence McKenna, John Markoff, Daniel Pinchbeck, Jeremy Narby, Barabara Marx Hubbard, Kat Harrison, and other carriers of the meme, discussing the relationship between the current ecological crisis and the re-emergence of archaic techniques of ecstasy, between dance festivals and the collective consciousness, and between the disenchantment of the modern world and the next leap in the evolution of the planetary mind.

And, if you can’t make it to New York for the screening and panel discussion, you can buy the DVD here, or you can watch the entire film without leaving your computer:

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