id stringlengths 14 16 | text stringlengths 6 1.97k | source stringlengths 40 117 |
|---|---|---|
3812caf0ea45-1 | JM: While I think most notable in South America is the drug ayahuasca.
JM: Isn't it the case, that, I believe it was the German, uh, chemist who isolated this, uh, chem [stumbles] the chemical active ingredient in ayahuasca originally named it telepathine.
JM: I would imagine that many of our viewers have seen the mo... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Hallucinogens+%26+Culture |
3812caf0ea45-2 | JM: For authentic-
JM: Sort of still under the sway of a Victorian sense of, uh, morality.
JM: You have the same controversy, don't you now, within the Hindu tradition where many gurus say 'no drugs', and are denying I suppose the, uh, um, the tradition of the Rigveda which we spoke of earlier.
JM: Do you find the u... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Hallucinogens+%26+Culture |
3812caf0ea45-3 | JM: Well, Terence McKenna, this is a very interesting discussion. You seem to be suggesting that our evolution, I suppose, from the animal kingdom into the human kingdom itself was catalyzed or, or triggered by our encounter with these hallucinogenics um.
JM: Yeah. And one can only wonder how these hallucinogens might... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Hallucinogens+%26+Culture |
0bfa7f74799e-0 | Ask TMK
Talks
Wiki
Login
Search
Talks
Wiki
Login
Ethnobotany of Shamanism
Share
Download PDF
Download Audio
Download Video
Last Updated: 15/09/18
Info
Youtube
Reviews
Date
Location
Words
5-6 November 1988
California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California
49017
End of Results
No... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-1 | I’ll say just a little bit about my own interest in all this, or how I got into it. I don’t know, I mean one creates a false history when you look back into time to try to explain how you got to where you are, or at least I do. Trying now to understand how I came to be involved in the psychedelic experience, it seems t... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-2 | In all of that, somehow I began reading Aldous Huxley, the social novels: Antic Hay, Chrome Yellow, these comedies of manners of British academic society. I was 12 or something, but I always drove myself to read beyond my level. This lead me to The Doors of Perception. I had read Brave New World, which is an anti-drug ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-3 | So I wanted to pursue this, and this was 1962 or something, I was about 14 years old. Then a few months later there were stories in the newspaper that morning glories were being abused for their psychedelic effect. There was a bindweed that grew locally, so I went tearing out and gathered half a peanut butter jar of th... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-4 | Then a few months later I got my data a little more together and learned that it was a certain species of morning glory and that you had to buy the seeds from a seed company. Then I discovered what it was, though not the full-blown psychedelic experience. By this time I was in southern California going to school, and a... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-5 | It wasn’t long after that that I went to Berkeley in the fall of 1965, and LSD was available a few months later, DMT was available. I was just stunned and have never lost that sense of profound astonishment that such things could exist. I mean, DMT seems to argue — convincingly, I might add — that the world is made ent... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-6 | What I saw in the iconography of Tibetan Buddhism seemed to me to bear certain kinds of parallels to the hallucinations that I had by that time glimpsed in LSD states. So I studied the Tibetan language, went to Asia, and learned that the iconography of Tibetan Buddhism is a rip from the pre-Buddhist shamanism of Tibet,... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-7 | Then in late 1970 I went to the Amazon and very quickly, through using mushrooms and through using ayahuasca, learned that there it is accessed, the traditions are alive and the attitudes were simpatico with my own. There were not lineages, you didn’t have to pledge eternal fealty to some character. They were explorato... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-8 | It is no easier for an Amazonian Indian to come to terms with these things than it is for a native of Manhattan. Ultimately, this coming to confront the Other is coming to confront the mystery of being. Not as a phrase, “mystery of being,” I mean we all give lip service to that — the mystery of being is everywhere, it’... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-9 | As we went around this morning a surprising number of people spoke to it as an experience. This is what makes the great distinction between the shamanic, pragmatic approach and what I called last night the political ideologue approach: that we are not working here from theory, our theories are the weakest part of what ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-10 | In 1992 we will celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America. Now, notice that when Columbus set out from Spain there was a large body of intelligent opinion which believed that he was sailing over the edge of the world. Literally, that he was sailing out of mind. Instead, what lay at the end of th... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-11 | We cannot cognize reality without our language, but in the psychedelic state somehow this happens. Somehow syntax is replaced by hypersyntax, linguistically-moderated and modulated perception is replaced by perception in the raw; not coded and sculpted and sifted for culturally validated meaning, but rather just the fu... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-12 | One of the things that’s so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness, the absence of serious neurotic patterns of behavior. This is because this translinguistic reality is allowed to work its will through shamanism, is allowed to regulate the society. In other words, our model of ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-13 | There’s a strange phenomenon, at least in the evolution of cultures and perhaps more generally, which is that every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage. Here’s an example of what I mean by that: women in charge of the gathering phase in hunting-gathering cultures developed language, I... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-14 | This same kind of freedom which binds occurred in the shamanic effort to steer culture by mnemonic means, because eventually even the greatest of the shamanic memory artists were overwhelmed by the amount of data, by the size of the epics, by the sheer length of these genealogies, so then symbolic notation is brought i... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-15 | This understanding that quantum physics has brought the physicists and that the psychedelic state has brought the people who pursue that has not fed back into the mainstream of society. We’re still living in a male-dominated, object-dominated, subject-other kind of world model, a world model inherited from the 18th cen... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-16 | Our demonic investigations into matter have lead us to create the machinery to produce the apocalypse. It was interesting, somebody said of the Reagan administration — this was when James Watt was running around saying that we didn’t have to save the trees because Jesus was coming anyway, so it didn’t matter — someone ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-17 | Some of you may know Riane Eisler’s work The Chalice and the Blade. If you haven’t read this book I recommend it to you — for psychedelic people, for feminists, for people concerned with the state of society, this is certainly an important book. What she’s saying is that it is not true that the story of the human race ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-18 | This thing which the shamans are contacting, which we can call another dimension, hyperspace, the collective unconscious — whatever it is, it is the ground of our becoming. The only way to unhitch ourselves from the ego is to open pathways of communication to this invisible field of intentionality in which we are embed... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-19 | What has happened since the 1960s is that the straight people all went off together — and by this I don’t refer to sexual preference, I use “straight” in the earlier sense — they all went off and became very weird together, with their golden Mercedes and their Picasso ceramics and all that. The freaks all went off and ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-20 | Out of the incredible mystery of whatever the universe is, a microsecond of opportunity against impossible odds has sprung into being. We are embedded in that moment of opportunity, so what are you going to do with it? Are you going to sweep up around the ashram for 30 years and then decide that that was a mistake, or ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-21 | I think people are waking up to the fact that we must use what works. When we went around the room someone talked about yoga and how the psychedelic gives the experience on demand, but are we ready, and how do you gain skills? This sort of thing. To my mind, the goal is not the psychedelic experience, the beginning of ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-22 | is where people write into Penthouse and detail these astonishing, unpredictable sexual exploits — threesomes, foursomes and twelvesomes that just fell upon them — and whenever I have some occasion to read these things, what is amazing to me is that these appear to be descriptions of the behavior of an alien species. T... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-23 | this pill shows me that reality is at least a thousand times larger than I thought it was. It showed me that I don’t know who I am, where I am, what I am, or anything else.” I don’t know what it takes to instill that in people, maybe intellectual self-reflection. | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-24 | One of things that is so puzzling about shamans when you actually deal with them in the field is that they are not like the other people in the tribe. The other people in the tribe are very tribal people. In other words, they have all the curious cultural limitations of people in every culture. They think you smell fun... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-25 | I think what we need to do when we try to revivify shamanism in our own lives is to recover the profound reality of what it’s doing. Sometimes I have flashes when I’m giving these talks of how different it is to be stoned than to talk about being stoned. I mean, here we sit in our cotton underwear, with our schedules i... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-26 | The extraterrestrial invasion that so many people anticipate, or the extraterrestrial contact that so many people hope for and that sells so many cheap newspapers is well under way. It’s simply that the words we have to describe it are utterly inadequate. So words like “extraterrestrial invasion,” “contact with an inte... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-27 | Audience: I was curious about what you were talking about with extraterrestrials and not having the appropriate language to really discuss it, and your view of what’s going on.
It changes for me all the time. I don’t have a point of view, and my primary job is not public speaking or writing, but exploring. When I firs... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-28 | Now, several things may be happening here. The only time when we have the experience of focusing on an incoming message, decoding it in real time, and responding to it immediately is when we have a conversation with someone. So if you find yourself responding to a message in real time, your brain automatically thinks y... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-29 | A slightly different argument that would see the mushroom as extraterrestrial is to look at its style, for want of a better word. What is a mushroom? First of all, they reproduce by spores. Spores are the most economical biological unit imaginable. They can survive the radiation levels of interstellar space. They can s... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-30 | Great economy, great artistry, tremendous Zen-like aesthetics seem expressed in the mushroom if you view it as a designed piece of work rather than an object in the environment. Then finally, of course, the major argument for the extraterrestrial origin of the mushroom — but it’s an insider argument — is the content of... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-31 | Then you wonder, while this thing is talking to me, how engaged is the mushroom by me? Is all of its attention focused upon me when I’m talking to it the way all of my attention is focused back on it, or is it like a multi-user computer system, is it able to simultaneously deal with huge numbers of organisms? What is t... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-32 | One reason why I think people have had trouble confirming the animate and intelligent quality of the mushroom is that you must ask. You just don’t take psilocybin and sit there because it won’t do it, but if you take psilocybin and call it in some sense, whatever that means — invoke, call, try to visualize — then it wi... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-33 | Well, I think, and I am so far as I know pretty alone in this opinion, that a very small percentage of information is able to tunnel backward through time, that there is a very small counterflow to the forward movement of causal efficacy. One of the things that shamanism is about is going into that hyperdimensional pla... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-34 | This seems to be one of the things that you can do with these psychedelics, tune this in. It’s a cliche, and I’m sure you’ve heard it, that artists are society’s antenna for change, that artists are supposed to be somehow more sensitive than the rest of us and they pick up the new design forms, the evolving aesthetic c... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-35 | “Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space,” that we’re living in. We, as a culture, must conventionalize and believe that today is whatever it is, November 5th or 6th, 1988, but some of us are living in the 21st century and some of us are living in the 18th century. The goal is to try to move all this forward. It... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-36 | This thing about time, though, is very interesting and operates on many different levels. Ultimately, I think what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality; that the reason it is so puzzling and so familiar, so alien and so exalting is that it is, in fact, mundane. It is in fact... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-37 | A way to make this cogent for people who are now thoroughly confused is to recall Edwin Abbott’s fantasy Flatland, where he imagined a world of two dimensions where a house was what in our world is what’s called a blueprint, and that was all you needed, and you could live in the blueprint, because you could walk in and... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-38 | I think it’s clear that we’re in a race between apocalypse and breakthrough. I suppose breakthrough is the dark horse. Everything seems to be set up to favor apocalypse, it has the inside track, although very few people would own up to saying that they personally would want to die. So why is it, if none of us really wa... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-39 | Perhaps cybernetics come in here; perhaps this exoskeleton of mnemonic material that allows us, essentially, to freeze and record our entire culture. Everything is going into the databanks. One way of thinking about what’s going on is compression of information, and history represents a compression of information magni... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-40 | I think that there is some kind of event ahead of us in time, on the order of 20-40 years, that is casting an enormous shadow back through the lower-dimensional slice of being which we call history, so that religions, mystical visions and the visions of revolutionary leaders are a response to flickering intimations of ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-41 | One of the horror fantasies of the 1950s — when this conservative, straight, crew cut point of view was really at its height — one of the fears of the future that people would just toss off off-handedly was that in the future machines would take over and run everything, and this notion of the control of the planet wres... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-42 | I think that this linking-together, feminizing, cybernetic thing is part of the anticipation of this object at the end of time. What seems to be happening is that we are all flowing together. We keep talking about unity, globalism, completion: well, you’re going to get what you ordered. I think what it means is that pr... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-43 | I speak only from my own experience, of course, but to me the LSD experience seemed more psychoanalytical than psychedelic. I mean, I was in my early 20s when I encountered LSD, maybe I had more “stuff,” as they say, to deal with, but it was not a reliable visionary drug for me. It caused me to have funny ideas; it see... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-44 | For instance, psilocybin is, to my mind, in many ways the most anomalous, because, number one, this thing about how it speaks; it does speak. None of the others do. The others, you may occasionally in years of fiddling get a sentence or two, but the mushroom is just voluble, it just comes on and raves, and people have ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-45 | and plants, and life, and water and sunlight. It’s this totally earth-bound, terrestrial, life-affirming thing, and it does not speak. It’s an eye, and its language is visual, and after an ayahuasca trip you just feel like your eyes are literally bulging out of your head. I mean, you’ve spent 6 hours looking, not reall... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-46 | It’s important to learn what you like and to learn what you can put up with. I said to someone at a recent weekend who takes mushrooms quite religiously and quite regularly, “Does it ever get easier?” He said, “No, it never gets easier. Each time what I pray as I go into it is, “Please let me be able to stand a little ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-47 | Well, at the beginning of your question you characterized LSD. It’s that it is a non-specific amplifier, but of the contents of the personal unconscious and the sensorium. What people notice about LSD is either what’s right or wrong with themselves, or how freaky the world is. A bug, a drop of water, it can be anything... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-48 | What I am interested in is bringing back artifacts to share with the tribe, and I’ve accepted that they will come in the form of either things that can be painted or things that can be said. Since I’m better at the saying than the painting, I work like that. Stan is a good friend of mine, we’ve talked about this over t... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-49 | This afternoon I thought we would do some operational homework and academic referencing. One of the most important things about all of this that we’ve been discussing is to get the information straight, to be as well informed as possible. It’s as important to be well informed in this area if you’re going to do it as it... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-50 | I hauled some titles off my own bookshelf and I’ll go through them, this is by no means all. I simply chose books that I thought were either important to the field or that I felt would be fairly easy for someone to obtain if they wanted to look into these matters. This one some of you may know, this is probably the eas... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-51 | From a slightly more countercultural point of view, this is the revised edition of the Psychedelics Encyclopedia by Peter Stafford, who some of you may know. Again, this is an effort to be compendious. No one of these books should be taken as gospel; you want to get it from several different sources before you conclude... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-52 | Then for those of you who are more inclined to pharmacology and neurophysiology, this is a fairly hard book to obtain but in a way it’s never been surpassed. It’s called The Hallucinogens by Hoffer and Osmond, and there was never a revised edition after 1965. It discusses a lot about LSD and psychotherapy, and also has... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-53 | What these books are good for, besides whatever they say, is that they contain excellent bibliographies, so tracing a particular problem you go to these books and then they direct you to the journal articles that give you what you want to know. Most of the literature of psychopharmacology is in journals which you will ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-54 | Then sort of moving out of the realm of pharmacology and psychology and into the specifically anthropological stuff, this is one with a number of various contributors, Alternate States of Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives on the Study of Consciousness, edited by Norman Zinberg of Harvard. This deals not only with sh... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-55 | A sort of similar book by a different author is Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens by Peter Furst. He’s an anthropologist who made his reputation among the Huichol in Mexico. This has articles by Wasson, Furst, Doug Sharon, William Emboden, Fernandez, Reichel-Dolmatoff, the usual names in this ethnobota... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-56 | Here’s another one of these anthologies of writing about psychedelics, also by the same author as Flesh of the Gods, Hallucinogens and Culture by Peter Furst. Again, this has articles on mushrooms, on the discovery of LSD, on ayahuasca, on cannabis and tobacco, the biochemistry of consciousness, shamanism as the ur-rel... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-57 | This is sort of the granddaddy of all of these anthologies, a very interesting book, hard to get but fascinating. It’s called The Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, and it was the name of a conference that was given in San Francisco in 1967. The plan at the time of the conference was to have it occur eve... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-58 | Then for somebody who really is serious, or technical, or plotting an expedition or a research project of some sort, this is really a pretty amazing book. It’s dull as death, because it’s essentially listings from the herbarium sheets at the Harvard Museum Botanical Library. It was put together by Siri von Reis Altschu... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-59 | Then a book by a good friend of mine, and if any of you are interested in ayahuasca, or plan on going to South America where you may encounter ayahuasca, this book, Vegetalismo: Shamanism Among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon, this is a lovely book. This is about the people that I spent most of my fieldwo... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-60 | This is the last one that I was going to mention, because this could have been the title of our weekend. This is Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered by Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar. Lester Grinspoon managed to find his way into Herb Caen as a name freak when he published a monograph on the dangers of excessive cocaine... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-61 | It’s important to have this information, to have it at your fingertips. The compartmentalization between areas of knowledge that impinge on this always amazes me. I mean, you get psychologists who don’t know what an MAO inhibitor is, you get people combining things without knowing how drug synergies work. You get peopl... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-62 | Audience: Could you explain the difference between psychoactive, psychotropic and psychedelic?
Psychoactive means exactly what it implies, that you can detect this compound as a higher cortical experience, that’s all. To my mind a higher cortical experience is a shift of mood, depression, elation, acute hearing, sensi... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-63 | I use the word “hallucinogen” a lot, and a lot of people don’t like that, even people in the field. They say, “Hallucinogen seems to imply that it’s an illusion,” but not in my mind, I don’t hear that. I’m fascinated by hallucinations. To me that is the sine qua non that you’re getting somewhere. I guess that’s just my... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-64 | People have claimed to me that they have seen objects which are not there which are completely ordinary. That is more typical of accounts of datura users, people who take high molecular weight tropanes, such as occur in jimsonweed and those kinds of things. My brief experimentation with that is that it’s what I call a ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-65 | Audience: What about Salvia divinorum?
That’s an obscure one about which not much is known, although in the past year they’ve learned the absolute chemical characterization of the psychoactive compound, which is called salvinorin A. More work has to be done. Anthropologists who have taken it with Indians in Oaxaca des... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-66 | Yes, that was what he said, but if you actually look at the etymology of the word “hallucination,” what it has come to mean in English is a delusion, but what it really means in the original language is “to wander in the mind.” That’s the meaning of hallucination, to wander in the mind. Well, that’s a pretty good opera... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-67 | Audience: The DMT and the toad, whatever it is, how is that extracted?
Well, I haven’t had the good fortune to be present at the milking, so I really couldn’t say. I gather that you put pressure on the back of the neck in two places and this exudate emerges, exactly where I’m not sure, and probably decency should scar... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-68 | North America is extraordinarily poor in hallucinogens, perhaps the poorest of all continents, so that the psychedelic phobia that Europe created against paganism was completely reinforced, or at least not eroded, by the colonization of the New World or of North America, because there were no plants here to challenge t... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-69 | Now, a brilliant and respected commentator on comparative religion like Mircea Eliade, who I quote whenever it suits my purpose, totally disagreed with this and said no, what he called “narcotic shamanism” — which means psychedelic shamanism, the choice of the word tells you that the guy had a problem — “Narcotic shama... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-70 | Moving out of drug-impoverished North America, or psychedelic-impoverished North America, where there are more than 20 species of indigenous psilocybin-containing mushrooms but, and this is interesting, no evidence whatsoever for tribal or traditional usage. In other words, in this Northwest Coast Indian complex — the ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-71 | What is an ordeal poison? This is a plant where you take it and you are so convinced that you are dying that you have an experience of self-abandonment, getting straight, surrender, and then you live and you’re fine. You are absolutely convinced that you are dying, your heart pounds or fibrillates, or you convulse, or ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-72 | What we’re assuming is that about 500 or 1,000 years ago, sometime in that span, the Sophora cult was replaced by the peyote cult which came from a much smaller usage area. Then, also in southern California, there were what were called the toloache religions, religions of datura intoxication, initiation of young men by... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-73 | A kind of parallel phenomenon to the peyote cult of the Southwest is in the deserts of northwestern Peru. There are very large columnar cacti in the genus Trichocereus that contain mescaline, and they have been used for a long time, a lot longer than peyote. We have Moche ceramics dated to before 1,000 B.C which show a... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-74 | Naturally, the export of cattle throughout the warm tropics has allowed the coprophilic mushrooms, the mushrooms which grow on manure, to be spread throughout the warm tropics. Then in places like England and France you get the occurrence of the diminutive psilocybin mushrooms, Semilanceata, but again, only the most un... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-75 | Let me say a little bit more about the morning glory complex, because it’s very interesting. LSD, discovered by Albert Hofmann in 1938, comes from ergot, comes from an organism called Claviceps purpurea which is a smut which grows on ergot. A humbler organism you could hardly imagine. This is basically “Yuck!” That’s h... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-76 | Audience: Probably you would not be able to get any hardcore data on the use of mushrooms in Arthurian times, but I was delighted to note in The Mists of Avalon that when Morgaine was supposedly banished, one of the fairies of Avalon left her some mushrooms to accompany her on her journey.
Well, Marion Zimmer Bradley ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-77 | Audience: The deterioration of the etymology of hallucinogen into a delusional, romantic meaning kind of catalyzed my mind going into how mythology has devolved into “a lie.” If you look up the original meaning of mythology, it means “the mutterings of eternity,” mytho-Logos, and this whole thing with Avalon being that... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-78 | It’s very interesting that when the Jesuits arrived in Mexico and talked to the Indians and found them eating these mushrooms, they said, “What do you call it?” and they said, “We call it teonanacatl,” and when they got their lexicons out and got that pieced together, what teonanacatl means is “flesh of the gods.” Well... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-79 | OK, we discussed the central Mexican complex. It has minor components such as were mentioned here, Salvia divinorum, and there are others not chemically well understood but also not widely or regularly used, but then as you pass down across the Darién Gap and into South America proper there is just an explosion of avai... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-80 | cults and options based around two pharmacological approaches: one, you orally ingest DMT as the same time as you orally ingest an MAO inhibiter. MAO is monoamine oxidase: this is the enzyme system that oxidizes monoamines, that makes them harmless. Monoamines are this whole family of drugs we’re talking about, and man... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-81 | a psychedelic experience. This is the strategy of ayahuasca, also called yagé. North of the Caquetá it’s called yagé, south of the Caquetá it’s named in the Quechua language ayahuasca. | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-82 | This is a really fascinating thing for many reasons. First of all, this begins to look like the world’s first truly designer drug. Notice what’s happening here: all these other things I’ve been talking about — peyote, mushrooms, datura, cannabis, what have you — are single plants that require very little preparation. B... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-83 | A perfect example of this is actually in the chemical literature. Melvin Bristol was a student of Schultes in the late ’60s and he specialized in the Brugmansias, the arboreal daturas, and he went to the valley of the Sibundoy, and there they actually add the datura to the ayahuasca. He took this ayahuasca, and while h... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-84 | The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it’s called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another. Either by drinking this “ghastly beverage,” as the literature calls it, this psychedelic beverage, ayahuasca, or as you go east into the lowlands, the ayahuasca complex is replace... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-85 | There are many stories of these Yąnomamö and Waika people going out on the hunt and honking up their supply of drug, just getting their poison arrows out and scraping off the points so the guys can get a buzz on and won’t have to go back to the village. It’s a very interesting complex, it hasn’t been very much research... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-86 | Coca, of course; there’s not a whole lot to say about coca. It’s an interesting example of a psychoactive non-psychedelic. The minute you hit the Amazon rainforest they are so concerned that you’ve been misinformed about coca. They say, “Not a drug! This is not a drug! This is a food, this is a good food, this food mak... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-87 | supposed to do. Imagine taking a tablespoon and going into a jar or a sack of flour and getting as much flour as you possibly could on a tablespoon. I mean a high-walled tablespoon; so you get that much coca, you bring it to your mouth and you put it in. It’s dry as dust, and the trick is to slime it over, get it into ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-88 | tired, and maybe you can make out what they’re saying, and maybe you’ll just try out a little of what you’ve picked up on. Before you know it you’re the life of the party, and then about 20 minutes later you think, “Maybe now I’ll knock off,” and then like clockwork they reach for the tin can again and send it around, ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-89 | Let’s see, which way shall we go? Let’s jump across the water now to Africa. I talked a little about iboga; fascinating cult, very similar to ayahuasca in the social patterns that have arisen around it. The way ayahuasca is taken in the Amazon in the Mestizo populations that Luna is talking about is that people get tog... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-90 | You will meet shamans from this place and that place, and they even have come and spoken at this school. They claim knowledge of extremely powerful plant hallucinogens but they won’t cough up the name, or the species, or a sample, and until that’s done you have to be very skeptical that these things are real. One of th... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-91 | Returning then to the African situation, there is a complex of plants and suspect hallucinogens in southern Africa in use among the Hottentots, the aboriginal peoples of South Africa. In the family of the Mesembryanthemaceae, which includes the Lithops, the Haworthias, these little ground-growing things that look like ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-92 | Yes, well it’s an interesting question, it has to do with Eleusis, and as you probably know, Eleusis was a major prophetic mystery site in classical and ancient Greece where every September a ceremony would be done, and the rule was that you could only do it once in your life, so you never got a second shot. Everybody ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-93 | He claimed that the surviving recipes of the sacrament at Eleusis, and there were I think four examples of surviving recipes, all called for the same ingredients. Don’t hold me to it, but I think the ingredients were barley, honey, water, and something else, haisa, maybe. He pointed out that a recipe for beer in Greece... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-94 | The only major complex that I didn’t discuss is the cannabis complex. This is one that is not an indole, and there are many anomalous things about cannabis. First of all, it’s what is called a polyhydric alcohol, the only psychedelic polyhydric alcohol known to science. It’s an extremely old plant. I mentioned last nig... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-95 | Herodotus describes, interestingly enough, that marijuana was used for thousands and thousands of years before it was smoked. One of the hardest things to wrap your mind around is the notion that until Columbus discovered the New World 500 years ago no one in Europe had ever conceived of smoking anything. It was a New ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
0bfa7f74799e-96 | Audience: Terence, do you want to comment about Amanita muscaria?
Yes, I’m glad you reminded me. Amanita muscaria is perhaps the Old World hallucinogen par excellence, at least in the opinion of Gordon Wasson and a lot of other scholars. The problem with it is that it’s extremely difficult to get a reliable positive e... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.