Tags / 8 quotes from 1 source
#shamanism
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Seeking the magic mushroom
By the time I had read a couple of books and looked through some underground magazines, I realized that this was far from being the case. Both LSD and MDMA had been eclipsed by the plant hallucinogens, in particular by magic mushrooms and dimethyltryptamine. A large proportion…
Eliade's shamans
The next book I set about reading was Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, which proved to be an inspired choice. Mircea Eliade’s groundbreaking research had been published only a few years before the Wassons’, and in many respects their books dovetailed…
Shamanic flight between three worlds
Only after this experience of death and resurrection were they apprenticed to an established shaman. The teaching they received was substantially the same over a vast geographical area—that they were not their physical body, but were capable of sidestepping time and space. For…
Schultes finds natural LSD in morning glories
The dispute was to be resolved from an entirely different quarter: from the fieldwork of the Harvard botanist Richard Evans Schultes. Richard Schultes was the last of the great explorer/botanists of an earlier age. As a graduate student he had researched the peyote cult in the…
Schultes puts ayahuasca on the map
In particular, Schultes put the ayahuasca brew in its commanding position on the South American cultural map and started to unpick the complex chemistry involved.
How ayahuasca makes DMT work
Before Schultes, no one had understood that the decisive ingredient of ayahuasca wasn’t the giant Banisteriopsis caapi vine so much as the various dimethyltryptamine-rich admixture plants that also went into the brew. The visions came, or came largely, from the DMT. What the…
Taught by the plants themselves
Indeed, the far-reaching question Schultes’s fieldwork raises is how the local tribes could possibly have worked it out. Trial and error, in a jungle containing some eighty thousand different species of plant, hardly seems credible. The case of curare, the paralyzing arrow…
Shamanism is about healing
Neither Wasson, nor Eliade, nor Schultes—nor, for that matter, Carlos Castaneda, nor Wasson’s disciple Terence McKenna—none of these great trailblazers of shamanism have paid much attention to what is clearly its primary feature. Shamanism is about healing, about curing pain…