Shamanism and Psychedelics -Ernie Stanley

My final topic, as anyone in class Monday knows (Thanks Dr. Redick!), was Shamanism. Specifically I focussed on the phenomenological aspects of Shamanism, that is, why shamanism appears as it does. There are many aspects of shamanism, from drumming to ritual animal roleplay. So many in fact that one writing a 20 page essay or even a 200 page book could not hope to comprehensively cover even as few parts of the shaman phenomena. Thus I focussed on how orality influenced the ecstatic performance and vocation of a shaman phenomenon. Much to my dismay, time and topic forced me to largely ignore a huge and common aspect of the shaman phenomena, and one of my favorite topics of study: Psychedelic Entheogens (I had already written a paper on these substances for Religions and Ecology anyways). Good thing someone else picked up on the psychedelic phenomena in primal cultures and I had the opportunity to critique this person's paper. Never-the-less I still would like to present a narrative of the importance of psychedelics to Shamanism and specifically orality.

In a commentary of the psychedelic influence on the Jivaro shaman's ecstatic experience Michael Naxon-Ripinski, a prominant academic involved in the study of the phenomenology of Shamanism and its relation to psychedelics writes,

"Drug-induced visual experience, structured through a learning input, is a key in the process of culture change. Such experience contributes, through the cognitive system, to the organization of the output fed via the perceptual sensations—namely, it contributes to the demarcation of social roles, the reinforcement of cultural proscriptions, and perhaps, in some instances, to the development of language. The chemical properties of the psilocybin mushroom seem to activate centers of the brain connected with language and speaking."

This strikes me as incredibly relevant to our class topic of orality and primal cultures. The psychedelic agent in question here is the psilocybin mushroom, which is found all over the world and usually in close proximity to tribal cultures. What Ripinski is saying (and he cites several historical and scientific references) is that magic mushrooms influences the brain into forming social roles and culture. Further, he explains that psilocybin activates the speech and language centers of the brain.

This almost begs the reader, influenced by the notion of a seperation between orality and literacy to ask, has the magic mushroom and other psychedelic substances influenced primal cultures into developing and maintaining an oral conciousness and culture centered on mythological and mystic narratives? Of course, one must first accept that the psychedelic experience is not an effort to get a buzz and some nonreal images but rather an effort to achieve a transcedental and very real encounter. The DEA and United Nations (Note that there are no tribal nations in the United Nations) would instruct you to the former, but shamans and primal cultures certainly hold the psychedelic experience to have real value. As Naxon-Ripinski quotes ethnologist Henry Munn,

"The shamanistic condition provoked by the mushrooms is intuitionary, not hallucinatory. What one envisions has an ethical relation to reality, is indeed often the path to be followed. To see is to realize, to understand. . . . The phenomenon most distinctive of the mushrooms' effect is the inspired capacity to speak. . . . The shaman, chanting in a melodic singsong, saying says at the end of each phrase of saying, is in communication with the origins of creation, the sources of the voice, and the fountains of the word, related to reality from the heart of his existential ecstasy by the active mediation of language: the articulation of meaning and experience."

What Henry Munn describes in this quote is the Shaman's incredible debt to the mushroom. The mushroom not only facilitates the ecstatic experience for the shaman, but also gives him increased ability to narrate it! The mushroom allows the shaman to know the soul, a realm of reality that few have seen. Clearly the potential for psychedelics to induce a knowing of reality in humans is enormous.