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>> Since the dawn of modern humans,
every culture in every region practiced what some would call
shamanism.
This mystical practice is scarcely
understood but not forgotten.
In the 1960s, amateur ethnomycologist, Gordon Wasson,
wrote his first book titled, "Soma--
Divine Mushroom of Immortality," after noticing
the indigenous mushroom culture in Siberia.
Siberian shamans would collect the fly agaric or Amanita
muscaria mushrooms, and either dried and ate them
or would feed them to reindeer and drink the urine to get
the effects free of nausea.
Because this culture neighbored ancient Indian culture,
Wasson surmised that the Amanita muscaria
mushroom must be the lost ingredient of the drink, Soma.
Soma was the sacred and psychedelic beverage
of ancient India.
But how could this mushroom have ended up
in a foreign religious sacrament?
This drove Wasson to dig deeper to discover
what shamanism truly is.
>> The term itself came from the Siberian cultures and was
brought into English through Russian and German.
And people started to recognize it
as a phenomenon that was found in many parts of the world
and started applying it to Native American practices,
into Australian practices, and things like this.
What really is a shaman kind of depends
on the perspective we take.
>> So the shaman is like a spiritual bounty hunter.
He or she deliberately induces these altered states
with drugs or other means.
But then, they don't just sit there and have the trip.
They can actually actively navigate in that world.
>> The shamans have attained a sufficient sophistication
to explicitly understand that the vessel of our chemical
transformation is the body.
And the plants lift the imprisoning structures
of the ego.
And the ego flows out into the world.
>> Beyond the confines of small tribes in Siberia,
author Gordon Wasson discovered that larger societies were also
using psychedelic plants as a form of societal shamanic
ritual.
>> Even in studying the Hindu culture,
the Ganges River comes out of Shiva's top knot.
In very many depictions, you see a picture of a cannabis leaf
on top of Shiva's head.
And also, he's holding a vessel that contains bhang, B-H-A-N-G,
which is a cannabis-containing beverage that is flavored with
cinnamon and cardamom and other spices.
And I was also very interested to learn about the Eleusinian
Mysteries.
>> The Eleusinian Mysteries in ancient Greece clearly had
a psychedelic sacrament.
We even know what it was now.
It a form of ergot that grows on barley.
Was used in a beverage called the kykeon
that initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries drank.
And then, they had extraordinary and life-changing experiences
in the dark halls.
They were addressing, setting there as well.
These experiences were underwent and undergone
in a place called the Telesterion, which
was underground and in darkness, probably dimly
lit with little lamps here and there,
creating a setting for the experience to unfold in.
And the initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries,
who included people like Plato, people like Socrates,
people like Cicero, came out, and afterwards,
reported that their lives had been utterly
transformed by the experience that they had undergone.
They had lost their fear of death.
They knew that they were immortal spirits,
that they were just temporarily housed in a human body.
>> From ancient India to Greece, psychedelic plants have been
used for deeply spiritual quests and large-scale healing.
But what was the first well-organized psychedelic
society?
Scholars and historians had all but given up on uncovering
the mysterious beginnings of the shamanic society, when in 1976,
Soviet archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi unearthed
the 4,000-year-old temple complex in present day
Turkmenistan.
This complex is nearly a half a million square meters
divided into a large northern and smaller southern region.
Its walls, made of clay bricks, span 120 by 150 meters
and were reinforced by 20 rectangular towers.
Roughly 6500 to 1700 BC, the northern region
was burned down, and the whole complex was abandoned quickly,
leaving the mystery of its origins
only with the artifacts found there.
Author and researcher Chris Bennett
spent years investigating the spread of cannabis
in the ancient world and began piecing the puzzle together
from this location.
>> The debate about Soma and Haoma, the origins of them,
has changed lately because of archaeological finds.
And one of the really important ones
is the work of the Russian archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi.
He wrote about this in his book, "Margiana
and Protozoroastrism."
And Sarianidi he was doing work in the outer regions
of Afghanistan, in an area known as the Bactria-Margiana
Archaeological Complex.
And in this region, he found a number of temple sites,
and these were big temples, about the size of a football
field.
And half of the temple sites were
dedicated to the preparation of this beverage, which Sarianidi
has identified as Soma, Haoma, the sacred beverage
of the Persians and the Indians-- ancient Indians.
>> It is still debated whether this lost city of Gonur Tepe
had a supreme ruler or simply an elite class and high priest.
In many ways, the priests of larger civilizations
mirrored the role of the predecessor, the shaman.
>> So, the shaman in the traditional role is basically
a liaison for the community to this realm of the supernatural
and these supernatural forces.
So, in that sense, it's kind of a priest-like function.
>> At Gonur Tepe, the high priest was the gatekeeper
to spiritual and psychedelic experiences.
The psychedelic trip has been equated
to a mystical experience, as it allows
the user to peek behind the veil of cultural conditioning.
And the high priest was the one that bestowed these vision
quests upon the people.
Only through his approval were commoners
allowed to drink this sacrament.
Gordon Wasson claimed that the Amanita muscaria mushroom
was the psychoactive ingredient in Soma and Haoma
because of the mushroom's common use in nearby areas.
But this claim is unproven, and some believe quite implausible,
due to the kind of experience these mushrooms elicit.
Amanita muscaria mushrooms have been
known to cause euphoria but also nausea, sweating, cramping,
and salivation.
So, the mystery has continued through the ages,
until Victor Sarianidi sent scraping samples from Gonur
Tepe out to be analyzed.
>> Based on archaeological evidence that's recently come
up in the last decades, they found big bowls in the ground
where the Soma would have been ground with mortars
and pestles, and then also straining devices,
as well as bowls, with fossilized remnants in it.
And so they took some of these fossilized remnants, which
was like a fossilized liquid substance, and had it tested.
And they found evidence of cannabis, ephedra,
and in some cases, poppy.
And all these plants grow in this region as well, still.
>> Poppy is the base ingredient for opium,
which elicits a sedative and euphoric effect, while ephedra,
the basic ingredient for amphetamines,
is a stimulant and appetite suppressant.
And lastly, cannabis elicits a slightly psychedelic effect
with an increase in appetite, causing this beverage
to act as a symphony of mind-altering ingredients
for these ancient Indo-European cultures.
>> And it's interesting it has his counterpart in the Avestan
religion over in Persia, where it's known as Haoma.
Because of language similarities and mythological similarities--
they're both Indo-European languages--
this combined use and identity indicates a much older origin
from an identical call, so going considerably far back
into history.
We know that they were involved in trades
with another Indo-European culture
living in central China, known as the Gushi Culture.
And we found numbers of perfectly preserved specimens
of both cannabis and ephedra at this site.
And it's likely that these Indo-Europeans living in China,
who were exporting cannabis, were
likely the suppliers of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological
Complex's use of it and delivered by Scythians.
My view is that the Chinese term for cannabis,
which is [NON-ENGLISH],, traveled with cannabis
into the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex with
this name that became Haoma and then through dialectical
changes as it reached into India became Soma in the Vedic
language.
>> Along several ancient trading routes,
the nomadic horseback Scythians had burial kurgans that were
recently unearthed.
Not only were golden vessels found
containing remnants of cannabis and opium,
but the frozen tundra preserved the tattoos on their skin,
depicting animals warping and spiraling,
as if seen in a psychedelic trance.
Ancient Greek historian Herodotus
recorded the funerary rites of the Scythians
as they built tripod tents and fumigated cannabis seeds
inside.
But this wasn't the only place in history
we see the use of a tent with smoke and vapor.
>> There is a Polish entomologist
and anthropologist, Sula Benet, who suggested that this Hebrew
term, [? canabasin ?] was a reference to cannabis and that
this reference appears for the first time in the Exodus 30.23,
where God who--
appears to Moses in flames of fire
from within a burning bush, commands
Moses to make a holy anointing oil.
And every time that Moses has to speak the Lord,
he has to go inside this enclosed tent--
a little area called "the tent of the meeting."
And he covers himself in this oil.
And he also places some of the oil on the altar of incense.
And he speaks to the Lord and the pillar of smoke
over the altar of incense.
None of the other Israelites in the biblical story
ever see or hear the Lord.
They can only tell if Moses is talking to the Lord
if smoke is pouring out of the tent of the meeting.
>> Moses is believed by historians to have lived
in the 16th century BC, just after the period of Gonur Tepe
and connected to the same trade routes.
The phenomena of inhaling mind-altering substances
in order to speak to divine sources
are also seen with the Oracle of Delphi,
which ranged from the eighth century
BC and possibly earlier, in the late Mycenaean times.
The scholar Martin Litchfield West
wrote that the Pythia, or Oracle,
exhibited Central Asian shamanic practices, as she reportedly
sat upon a tripod above a chasm from which vapors poured forth
as she inhaled them and prophesized.
If it is true that these age-old stories show
a deep appreciation for mind-altering plants,
how much farther back can we trace shamanic traditions
into history?
>> That evidence, we first encounter it in the painted
caves of upper-Paleolithic Europe going back close
to 40,000 years ago.
And curiously enough, just quite recently in Indonesia was
discovered a series of painted caves,
which date back to more or less exactly the same period,
the high 30,000s almost 40,000 years ago in the past.
There are certain types of imagery that regularly
and routinely crop up in those deeply altered
states of consciousness brought on by psychedelics.
And it's precisely those types of the imagery
that we find in the ancient rock and cave art
all around the world.
You'll often find geometry in the paintings or engravings.
You will find-- and this is really quite
diagnostic-- you will find creatures that are referred
to as therianthropes.
That's from the Greek therian, which means wild beast,
and anthropos, which means man.
They're hybrid human and animal figures.
>> Not only were these visionary illustrations important enough
to appear in humanity's earliest art in the painted caves,
but they were also immortalized in the flesh,
as the therianthropic paintings on the cave walls conjure
similar imagery to that of the Scythian tattoos.
There are remnants of shamanic practices
in every corner of the globe.
Might we also find references to psychedelics in the creation
myth of the Bible?
>> If you look at the imagery that is conjured up
of the serpent in the Garden of Eden--
I mean, I'm not saying that painters in the 14th century
actually saw the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
But if you look at the imagery that's
conjured up, very often--
actually, I would say about eight times out of 10,
you'll find that that serpent is a therianthrope,
that that serpent has a serpent body and a human head,
for example.
Or it may be equipped with arms and legs
off-- branching off that serpent body in some cases.
So right there, there's a suggestion
that we're dealing with a classic entity of vision.
In the mainstream Christian position
on the serpent in the Garden of Eden,
is that it represents the devil, the bad guy who's
come to tempt and mislead Adam and Eve.
But the very powerful alternative point
of view provided by the Gnostics is
that the serpent was one of the ancient teachers of mankind,
that he's coming to say to Adam and Eve,
you need to learn the difference between good and evil.
If you go back to the book of Genesis,
the forbidden fruit is the knowledge of good and evil.
That's what the-- that's what that tree is.
It's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And its fruit is therefore- is therefore
the knowledge of good and evil.
But is there a deeper layer to that?
Could we, indeed, be talking about some kind
of natural psychedelic?
>> What would it mean to discover that the forbidden
fruit that the parents of our species ate was psychedelic
in nature?
And is it possible that this fruit
initiated the rapid expansion of the human neocortex?
>> Well, there's an interesting set of findings about how
humans differ from our chimpanzee relatives in terms
of the use of these psychedelics and what happens in the body.
The human serotonergic system is much more sensitive
to these substances.
The binding of the serotonin neural receptors
with the psychedelics is two to four times more powerful
that what happens in chimpanzees.
>> John McPartlin and Dr. Jeffrey Guy,
the founder of GW pharmaceuticals,
they both have speculated that cannabis may have played a role
in this time period, that the psychoactive effects
of cannabis may have resulted in new novel ways of thinking
and approaching problems.
And the creativity aspect may have provided that element
for the great leap forward.
>> Another theory, popularized by the McKenna brothers,
was the potential for coprophilic spores or rather
manure-loving mushroom species, like psilocybin,
as being the impetus for humanity's great leap forward.
Cattle worship is seen throughout ancient Egypt,
Greece, Israel, Rome, Germany, and is seen in Jainism,
Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism.
Our ancient ancestors, seeking food
in the plains and grasslands, would have eventually found
the cattle that grazed in the fields
and noticed a strange mushroom that
grew from their droppings that influenced
the lingual and problem-solving regions of the brain.
Were cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms
possible causes for such drastic differences
in intelligence between modern humans and our ancestors?
How much of our modern society has been influenced
by our shamanic roots?
>> Really, out of shamanism come the roots of religion for sure,
pharmacology.
But chemistry and poetry and theater and all of these things
really find their roots in shamanism.
>> There's a certain point when religion doesn't want
the shamanism in there anymore.
That's really where we see the decline of the shamanic use
of these substances, as religions become
more politically motivated as a means of controlling society
and organizing society.
There became, I think, both a theological and political
desire to unify the people under one consolidated head and rule.
>> As religious institutions and political leaders began
combining their powers, as we see mirrored in major corporate
mergers today, the momentum was to keep spreading.
And at the start of what we call the Modern period,
European nations began sending forces to the Americas.
And as a result, indigenous tribes were decimated,
and countless generations of shamanic wisdom
was erased from the Earth.
Was there an agenda?
If so, what was the purpose?
>> I do believe that there are many forces that see
the psychedelic movement as a threat.
And it's its vast.
In earlier times, it might have been the church.
But I also see that it's a threat
to the pharmaceutical industry.
>> Big pharma imported $86 billion in drugs and exported
$47 billion worth in 2015 alone.
The power of this industry and its advertising sector
has forced the world of shamanism
beneath the shadow of Western medicine.
But what truly is the difference between the two?
>> In shamanism, when you have sickness,
when you have an ill individual for any reason,
you don't do what Western medicine does and look
for the causes of that illness at the level of the physical
being.
The causes of that illness are always one level above.
They're at the next level, in the spiritual dimension.
There's a spiritual disconnect which
is the source of this illness.
So, the shaman will address the spiritual problem,
the nonphysical problem in order to step down and solve
the physical problem.
In Western medicine, we have no such concept.
Because Western medicine doesn't even
believe in the spirit or the soul
or any such aspect of human beings.
Western medicine really does regard human beings as rather
clever and sophisticated meat robots.
But that is not--
that is not the shamanistic view.
The shamanistic view is that we are immersed in an incredibly
complex multi-layered reality and that--
and that what is happening at other levels of that reality
directly impact what happens at the level of reality
that we inhabit.
>> This perspective on the nature of healing is summarized
by radio host and filmmaker Max Igan,
who has spent years traveling the world to visit shamanic
tribes to preserve their wisdom.
>> Shamanism, it can be seen as something integral to the human
experience.
I'm a firm believer that all life progresses according
to the Fibonacci sequence.
If you look at Fibonacci sequence,
how that sequence works is you actually get the present,
and you combine it with the past to create the future.
That's how it works.
If we can get our present culture
and combine it with these past ways,
we will create a viable future.
But if we discard all of that ancient knowledge
and simply go with our technological flow,
we're going to lead ourselves to a very bad place.
>> A few modern healers, such as Kimba Arem,
utilize ancestral and modern techniques in her alternative
practices.
And her experience has taught her
where the healing intelligence truly
lies in terms of shamanic ceremonies.
>> And I actually see that rather than the shaman is
healing them, that the shaman is activating that person's own
inner healing ability.
Because that's really the true power,
is reminding people that they, too, are the divine.
We're the healer.
Like if you cut your finger, you're the one who heals it.
The doctor or the shaman can help address the wound.
But we're actually doing the healing work.
>> Perhaps it is the adoption of unhealthy patterns that builds
and obstructs the pure healing intelligence within each of us.
So if we look beyond the cultural adornments
and poetic language, might we find a more scientific basis
to shamanic rituals?
>> One of the things that they did was use ritual practices,
including chanting and singing and drumming,
that begin to change our brain wave pattern.
The alteration of consciousness in the shamanic ritual
starts off with a stimulatory phase--
dancing, drumming, singing, chanting--
to the point of exhaustion and to the relaxation phase.
Well, this is a shift from stimulating
the sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic nervous
system.
The parasympathetic nervous system
is the part of the nervous system that relaxes us.
And so basically, the relaxation response
is part of what's brought about by ritual activities.
>> American-based psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich mentioned
a similar pattern when he spoke about the four stages
of a primal pattern that healthy cultures share--
tension, charge, discharge, and relaxation.
It is seen in the movement of many forms
of classical and modern music, all forms of storytelling,
love-making, as well as healing catalysts.
Even though the content on top of this pattern
will always change, the underlying flow
is what establishes a space for a healing response.
Something must dredge up the traumatized
psychological material from the unconscious, which would be
during the stimulatory phase.
The contents must be processed, breathed through,
and exacerbated in order to bring about a critical point
when the psyche transforms the way it holds that content.
Finally, the discharge is a pivot point in which
breakthroughs are made--
not by the shaman, but by the natural healing intelligence
of the one who is seeking the remedy.
This leads to the relaxation phase,
which allows a new unhealthy pattern to integrate.
This is the same as what's seen in the Savasana stage of yoga.
What other shamanic anomalies may have a physiological
and neurological basis?
>> It Is by agreement there's a marker at the beginning
and at the end.
You invoke the spirit at the end.
You thank the spirits and each other at the end.
And you move into ordinary time-- ordinary space time.
So that's the significance of ritual.
It's a fantastic-- to do it in the right way,
it opens up fantastic possibility.
Because then, [INAUDIBLE] feel safe.
For example, if you're in a ritual
and you're exploring something and you--
say psychologically you're working on your relationship
with your mother or your father or traumatic things,
and people are laughing back in the dining area,
cracking jokes, and drinking whatever-- beer--
what's that gonna be like?
It's not respectful of people.
It's like trying to do therapy in the middle of the subway.
>> It is likely that in traditional shamanic
communities, the whole group was not only involved
in the ceremony, but they all had similar belief systems,
allowing all of them to be more rooted in the customs
of their ritual.
If one person was experiencing a healing crisis,
the rest of the group was likely holding
space for their healing, rather than distracting them
with unnecessary noise or movement.
If they understood the basic criteria
for psychological healing, are there other shamanic anomalies
that may have a physiological or neurological basis?
>> Shamanism has certain characteristics that are pretty
much universal.
And a lot of what the shaman does is retrieve souls--
illness-- mental and physical illness in these cultures
is often understood as a loss of souls.
The idea of the shaman is a soul traveler
will often go to what's conceived
as the center of the universe, the world tree.
>> There is a well-known phenomenon of the out-of-body
experience, or astral projection.
Well, what we know is that there is a particular part
of the brain that's supposed to integrate our sense of self
with our body, the temporal parietal junction.
And when this part of the brain is taken offline,
then we're able to experience ourselves
independent of our body.
>> Does this mean that the shaman simply convinces his
or her own brain that the mind and body are separating?
And if so, does that mean that it's just a mirage?
Or is belief, imagination, and creativity
the physical mechanisms by which an aspect of the shaman
leaves his or her body to perform work
in other dimensions?
Perhaps this is the underlying knowledge
that shamans utilized when crafting a healing environment.
>> Shamans become healers.
They become good artists.
They can design their own rituals.
They create their own music and so on.
Again, what makes the shaman a shaman
is that he or she had a substantial number
of personal experiences.
>> Through lifetimes of shamanic experiences,
bringing wisdom from the other side to this physical world,
could this be the basis of all shamanic rituals?
What would the shamans of today look like?
Would they still be wearing the same clothes
and singing the same songs, or would they
be doing brand new work with the same spirit,
joining hearts and hands in ancestral twine,
as Xavier Rudd would say?
And if shamans of the past did healing work
for their village, what would a modern shaman
truly use to get their music and their message to the people?
If this shamanic power is still present today,
it would be present within all of us,
and the real tragedy from there would
be to remain ignorant of this gift.
The modern mindset seems to marvel
at the latest and greatest technology while disregarding
the importance of our heritage.
What if this is exactly why the health of the masses
and the health of the planet is struggling
to keep up with the rapid changes that we are causing?
What if the passing of each generation to the next
is a direct connection to our shamanic ancestry
and the biological technology of the human body
remembers all that our lineage has been through?
And what if the remedy to all our human problems
is simply to remember who and what we truly are,
embodied in the heart and soul.
If psychedelic plants and shamanic rituals
are a vital key to unlocking our past,
is this why they've been suppressed, feared,
and crusaded against in the old world, as well as the new?
In the late 1400s, as European Naval forces set out
to the New World, they would soon
stumble upon shamanic tribes in every corner of the Americas
with a rich history in using psychedelic plants.
One such region in South America would soon
reveal an ancient psychedelic cocktail of several botanicals.
Was there any connection between this ancient religious
sacrament and the Old World's Soma and Haoma,
or is the shamanic phenomenon of seeking deeply-expanded states
of consciousness through plant medicines an innate function
of those people that lived closest to nature?
Up next, join us as we explore the deep mysteries
of the Amazon rain forest and the ancient shamanic traditions
that live there.
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