One country's sacrament is another's illicit drug, as officials in South America and the United States are well aware. For centuries, a hallucinogenic tea made from a giant vine native to the Amazonian rainforest has been taken as a religious sacrament across several cultures in South America. Many spiritual leaders, shamans, and their followers consider the tea and its main component -...
Nature PrecedingsDecember 3, 2007Juan Pablo Ogalde, Bernardo Arriaza, Elia C. Soto4 citations
Abstract Hallucinogenic plants are often regarded as the main source of psychoactive drugs in antiquity to reach deep altered states of consciousness^1,2^. Many researchers believe this was particularly true during the Tiwanaku empire expansion, circa (500-1000 A.D.), along the Atacama Desert of Chile. Highly decorated snuffing tablets and tubes are often found as grave goods during this...
Reviewed by: Black Drink: A Native American Tea Deward E. Walker Jr. Charles Hudson. Black Drink: A Native American Tea. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004 Pp. 184. In this reprint edition of the 1979 original, we are presented once again with the results of Professor Charles Hudson’s excellent research into the American Indian cultures of the southeastern United States. We have grown...
Shamanism has intrigued the Western world for over 500 years. When in 1968 an inaccessible and inscrutable student of anthropology called Carlos Castaneda published his book The Teaching of Don Juan , a legion of seekers after truth, social scientists, and scientists in the Western world became fascinated by the worldview of a Yaqui sorcerer who was teaching Carlos to “see” at twilight through...
Abstract This chapter looks at the relationship between shamanism and psychedelic culture, focusing on the experience of investment banker R. Gordon Wasson and his Russian-born wife, Valentina, with mushrooms. Valentina and Gordon eventually embarked on their lifelong quest to explore the role of mushrooms in the histories and folklore of different cultures. When Valentina died of cancer in...
Abstract For the past forty years shamanism has drawn increasing attention among the general public and academics. So far no one has tried to understand why and how Western intellectual and popular culture became so fascinated with the topic. Behind fictional and non-fictional works on shamanism, this book uncovers an exciting story that mirrors changing Western attitudes toward the primitive....
Abstract In the United States at the turn of the 1970s, the countercultural revolution, which turned many Americans on to hallucinogens and alternative lifestyles, was on the decline. Many spiritual seekers felt fatigue from the psychedelic and communal experiences and longed for natural, individually-oriented spirituality. One of these spiritual seekers was Michael Harner, an anthropologist...
The English artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) created a dense and fecund body of work that is built upon a foundation of automatism, the pursuit of a state of Vacuity, and the reification of what Spare termed “Self-Love.” Although a one-time student of Aleister Crowley and clearly influenced by some aspects of Western European esoteric currents, Spare has remained on the...
In this article, I explore the proliferation of previously suppressed shamanic practices among ethnic Buryats in Mongolia after the collapse of socialism in 1990. Contrary to the Buryats' expectation that shamanism would solve the uncertainties brought about by the market economy, it has created additional spiritual uncertainties. As skeptical Buryats repeatedly propitiate their angry origin...
Text and TalkJanuary 20, 2007Yoonhee Kang2 citations
This article explores how ritual unintelligibility reconfigures participants' engagement, based on an analysis of two video clips of a belian performance, a shamanic healing ritual practiced among the Petalangan of Indonesia. These video clips show two phases of the ritual: the shaman's performance of a magic spell and a ritual song. The analysis reveals how a specific mode of unintelligibility...