Shamanism is the magic of ecstasy, of leaving the body and soaring to great heights of mystical illumination. Mircea Eliade, the famous scholar of comparative religion calls the shaman ‘the technician of the sacred’. In the strict anthropological sense, shamanism is best represented in Siberia and in South and Central America among the native Indian tribes. Perhaps the most impressive role of...
In Western countries psychedelic drugs, because of their dangerous random use have understandably been the cause of considerable controversy. Hallucinatory drugs cause altered states of awareness, which in the shamanistic societies are often used for positive purposes like healing. One of the first contemporary drug-explorers was Aldous Huxley, the British novelist, who was later to be hailed...