Psychedelics and the modern world II — shamanism, prophecy and the unconscious mind

Note: this is part of an essay series on psychedelics, you can read part one here.

It has taken us decades since the rediscovery of psychedelics in the West led to their mass banning and illegal status to recover the possibility that rather than being dangerous stimulants they relate to a set of experiences that are not pathological but something the human mind is wired with the capability to enter into, and the effects of a positive experience can be extraordinarily beneficial. Although they have their set of dark experiences and a ‘bad trip’ remains a risk, scientific research, as I wrote in the last essay, is making steps towards understanding how these ‘drugs’ might be used within a medical environment to treat the mental health of patients.

Again as I wrote in the last essay the appropriation of the sheer mind-shattering experiences of Psychedelics to ‘drugs’ that ‘treat’ mental health is woefully reductionist. We are nowhere near the beginnings of understanding what is going on, or why on earth our minds have the capacity for such non-pathological experience, let alone why certain plants illicit them.

One thing we do know is that their use in human culture is more ancient than our recent rediscovery and dismissal of them. It has been suggested Psilocybe mushrooms have been ingested by hominins since the pliocene that began 5.3 million years ago1, although how long they have been a part of culture is unclear. A 9000 year old cave painting in Tassili n’Ajjer in Algeria shows an image of a shaman with mushrooms sprouting all over his body, interpreted as evidence for their use in ritual culture2. Evidence of mescaline and peyote from Rio Grande, Texas suggests their use as long as 5700 years ago3.

Their connection to shamanism is an important way of gaining perspective of how we struggle to approach them in the modern world. Shamanism is a broad term to refer to figures in indigenous and tribal societies who had a role of intermediaries between the profane world and the world of spirits. Through ecstatic rituals involving hallucinogens they sought answers to various cultural and individual problems as well as existed as repositories of cultural oral tradition. Shamans were chosen partly by because of hereditary lineage but also personality. In early youth a Shaman would enter a period of near-insanity, take to wandering and experiencing hallucinations and visions, and their return to the world enabled them to undertake this liminal role in society.

It’s difficult to interpret such a role in the modern world. In the sense that it relates to a communion with the unconscious this is the position of artists, writers, and other creative roles in society, although in our recent times even such roles are sufficiently secular and economically subsumed to have little serious place in collective vision or problem solving, we no longer have space for the voices of the poet or the author, and music has become a realm of vapid celebrities.

One significant value of psychedelic experiences is they take us beyond the ego, both individual and collective. Part of why the shamanic initiation involves a bordering on madness and a ‘return’ is that to go beyond ego requires a kind of death. You have to sincerely lose yourself in order to see beyond what divides us. A large part of the reason we have no way of integrating them is because we don’t have aspects of art or culture that allows vision beyond the ego. Music culture again, for example, by depending on commodification is rooted in ego and obsession with the self. Artists are not famous for being liminal figures who commune with the universal, but rather because they write about their journey, their relationships. One way to begin thinking about how psychedelics might be integrated into society is to first think about how art might have a proper place in society. This absence also to some extent explains why we are developing a renewed obsession with them that is not itself necessarily a good thing. The demand for extravagant experience can in part reflect an absence of a wholeness of meaning in our lives as they are.

Artists too have in the past been seen as partaking in the prophetic. The poet Shelley says a poet “beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry.”

Part of what this means is that the role of an artist is to be the highest point of consciousness in a society. To be able to see the present within its context, to look outside of time and see the spirit of things being their present form. Such a vision is moral, requires freedom from the ego and a communion with the unconscious, that which is not recognised but is being suppressed. It is the voice of judgement, self reflection and moral vision. Again, the integration of vividly expansive tools such as psychedelics requires figures who already cross these lines in ordinary consciousness, use the tools of language or art to go beyond the ego and chronological blindness of the current moment of a culture, who partake in a tradition that gives a deep collective identity, and is connected to moral truths that judge us, and that we judge ourselves by, as we move through time.

In a time when we do not have these figures, it is easy to think about psychedelics as a compartmentalised solution to broad scale problems. I recall someone I read recounting how they suffered a depressed period after a particularly euphoric experience taking DMT, because of the intensity of contrast between feeling like you experienced absolute love and returning to a world where people care about the Kardashians and treat each other with indifference. How can the two be put together? How do you return to the world? Unless such experiences are integrated into both individual life as well as collective society, they remain as fragmented as any other encounter with the transcendent we have in the heap of broken images that is the modern world. As the philosopher Roger Scruton pointed out, “you certainly cannot achieve the goal of philosophy merely by swallowing a drug”, and that while it might allow you to perceive a light down the path to the inwardness of things “To take that path requires sacrifice and renunciation”. We like things to be boxed into simple solutions — if you’re depressed take anti-depressants (even though research has shown little effectiveness), try running, eat kale — rather than recognising the forms of societal malaise, the absence of meaning, or that people with varying psychological experiences of the world might have something to say to society. The Waste Land, for example, one of the most prophetic works of modern poetry, was written by T. S. Eliot while suffering from a period of intense depression. Out of it came a searing vision of the condition of modernity. That doesn’t mean such states are desirable, or that we should pursue them, rather that they have something to tell us and can be transfigured as much as they can be treated. If we simply relate every state of mind within the category of ‘optimisation’, and the constant pursuit of the sensory feeling of happiness it’s not surprising we find ourselves seeking medication. Shallow goals produce shallow solutions.

Of course, an idealisation or romanticising of the past should not blind us. Shamanic figures were not supernatural, they were human beings capable of superstition, ignorance, deceit and ego just like any of us today. There is no perfect ideal in the past where we lived in magical harmony with the transcendent, and much cultural artistic flourishing at other times in say Western history has constituted visions of the possibility of such harmony too. No time is perfect, but we live in a moment running on the fumes of past moral systems, in a commodified cultural landscape that has become increasingly empty of meaning. The paradox here is clear. Mind-shattering visions of an ethical reality require some place within a properly ordered ethical society that has figures of initiation and ritual who grant us access to them, be they the shamanic, the artistic, or the prophetic. It requires collective beliefs that enable us to interpret them. Our society is not flagrantly un-ethical, it is simply listless and secular, devoid of meaning and lacking myths and belief systems. As much as we need mind blowingly varied states of consciousness, we also need forms of communion within the apparatus of ordinary consciousness, the landscape of the poet, the writer; the believer.

References: 1. Arce & Winkleman, Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.729425/full#:~:text=It%20is%20likely%20that%20psychedelic,et%20al.%2C%202009).

2. Open Culture, Algerian Cave Paintings Suggest Humans Did Magic Mushrooms 9,000 Years Ago: https://www.openculture.com/2021/01/algerian-cave-paintings-suggest-humans-did-magic-mushrooms-9000-years-ago.html

3. El-Seedi et al, Prehistoric peyote use: alkaloid analysis and radiocarbon dating of archaeological specimens of Lophophora from Texas: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15990261/