As a scientific discipline dedicated to the study of the forms and laws governing human social behavior, cultural anthropology has historically centered its inquiry on primitive or non-literate communities.
By Dr. Josep M.ª Fericgla
Today, for a variety of reasons, that focus has branched into several distinct directions. We see contemporary anthropologies, in the plural, increasingly prioritizing the study and resolution of problems within our own complex societies. We also witness humanistic anthropology gaining ground over its positivist counterpart. Methodologically, this shift has been reflected since the 1980s in the rise of the New Ethnography: cultures must be described on their own terms, utilizing emic indigenous categories rather than the traditional reliance on etic taxonomies created by academic anthropology itself, which all too often disregarded the categories generated by each culture. Third, vanguard anthropological research now exhibits a decisive commitment to transdisciplinarity.
At the same time, contemporary anthropology frequently fractures into the study of minuscule subjects: urban gardens analyzed as micro-landscapes, fieldwork in neighborhood bars treated as self-contained social microsystems, or the musical preferences of undergraduates in a single lecture hall. As a result, alongside painful epistemological reckonings over the ultimate purpose and meaning of anthropological science, academic journals overflow daily with an overwhelming, seemingly chaotic proliferation of hyper-specialized topics. My hope rests on the emergence of a new paradigm capable of weaving these specificities into a broader framework that lends purpose to today’s diverse anthropologies, which too often drift far from lived reality and broad social relevance.
Within this context, ethnopharmacognosy was born—a neologism coined by American ethnobotanist Jonathan Ott to encompass the vast, underappreciated field of study concerning the cognitive and cultural significance of entheogen use in both ancestral and contemporary societies. Ethnopharmacognosy unites the vanguard drive toward cross-disciplinary integration, opening broad new investigative horizons. It anchors itself in current fascination with cognition and mind as the primary crucible of human cultural production. Ethnopharmacognosy could never have gained its current momentum without the dual emic and transdisciplinary stance of its researchers; the visionary effects of entheogens can only be thoroughly investigated through a holistic, systemic approach rooted in self-experimentation and an attentiveness to the metaphorical categories each society devises to articulate these experiences. Furthermore, this inquiry cannot advance without deep disciplinary synthesis, making it genuinely transdisciplinary rather than merely multidisciplinary.
In this sense, the necessarily emic stance of ethnopharmacognosists has fostered an understanding and embracing of indigenous conceptual categories perhaps unprecedented in the history of our discipline. The diverse states and processing modalities of human consciousness can only be expressed and understood through grand metaphors, which represent some of the most subtle creations of any culture. No anthropological researcher can claim to have seriously analyzed a culture without grasping the profound meaning of the overarching metaphors a people uses to build its immaterial realm, as projected through its worldview. This recognition has broadened cultural anthropology’s horizons so significantly that phenomena once dismissed as inexplicable are now subject to rigorous scientific inquiry, without lowering any methodological standards—quite the contrary. In this regard, the widespread use of entheogens among non-literate peoples, religious leaders, shamans, inspired artists, and mystics—along with the scientific attempt to decode these practices—opens vast doorways into the study of the human mind and its most prized creation: culture.
Allow me to clarify the term I am employing here: entheogens. Proposed in 1979 by a small group of scholars comprising classicists Carl Ruck and Danne Staples, ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson, and ethnobotanists Jeremy Bigwood and Jonathan Ott, this term has gained steady traction among specialists and now appears widely throughout the scholarly literature. The etymology derives from classical Greek, roughly translating to “generating the divine within” or, more loosely, “god within me.” Its roots are theus (god) and gen (to generate or awaken), terms originally employed in the Hellenic world to describe poetic or prophetic inspiration and the sacred catharsis induced by psychotropic plants—a practice sustained in classical Greece for more than two millennia. Initiates into the sacred Eleusinian, Delphic, or Samothracian mysteries were those who had undergone the transcendent ecstatic experience termed epopteía, the interior perception of divinity; they were known as epoptes, meaning “eyewitnesses” as well as “seers who have attained the highest initiation into the sacred mysteries.” Despite twenty centuries of secrecy, we now know that this epopteía or sacred ecstasy was attained through the ritual ingestion of entheogenic fungi (Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, 1980; Wasson, Kramrisch, Ott, and Ruck, 1996), and that this practice formed the origin of the core mystery later adapted by early Christians into their ritual ceremony, the Mass (Allegro, 1985)—even if the sacred inebriant was eventually supplanted by a placebo.
In this context, the term “entheogen,” whether used as a noun or an adjective, replaces labels such as “hallucinogens” or “psychodysleptics,” whose pathologizing connotations of psychosis and hallucination render them scientifically unsuitable. It was never accurate to claim that shamans take “psychodysleptics” or “hallucinogens,” nor is it literal to say they consume “narcotics.” At best, one might call them “stupefacients,” given that the ecstatic experience leaves the subject literally stupefied; yet even this linguistic category is best discarded due to its contemporary association with illicit street drugs.
The use of sacred inebriants is virtually universal, spanning Indigenous American traditions and cultures across the globe, from deep antiquity to the present day. For instance, recent excavations led by archaeologist Jordi Joan of the University of Barcelona uncovered Europe’s oldest known physical evidence of entheogen and beer consumption at a Bronze Age Iberian settlement in Catalonia (the Alt Empordà and Segrià regions). At another newly excavated Iberian site in Mas Castellar (Ponts, Girona), chemical analysis of pottery fragments revealed residues of beer combined with the parasitic fungus known as ergot of rye, whose primary psychoactive component is lysergic acid, the chemical foundation of LSD-25. Traces of this entheogenic fungus were also identified on human jawbones unearthed at the site. Further excavations at the Christian castle of Cornellà in Catalonia revealed an unearthed pipe that had been used for smoking cannabis, while Catalan archaeologists at the Neolithic mines of Gavà (Baix Llobregat, Catalonia) uncovered a human skull with opium residues embedded between its teeth (Armengol, 1997). The same pattern holds for the celebrated Similaun Man (Ötzi), dating to the fourth millennium BCE, discovered frozen and preserved in the high Alps along the Italian-Austrian border. Among the possessions carried by this prehistoric traveler when he died were European psilocybin mushrooms. One leading hypothesis regarding his sudden death from exposure suggests that he ingested these mushrooms and became disoriented on the alpine peaks due to his inebriation. Given the visionary fungi in his possession and the intricate blue tattoos adorning his body, scholars have hypothesized that he was a local shaman.
Furthermore, we must recognize that the anthropological study of non-literate healing systems, decision-making strategies, adaptive mechanisms, identity formation, symbolic systems, and pervasive religious practices cannot be fully understood without acknowledging entheogen consumption as an indispensable foundation.
To illustrate some of the most globally renowned shamanic uses of visionary plants, one can point to the traditional consumption of the visionary mushroom Amanita muscaria throughout Siberia and parts of ancient Western Europe. The Mexican shamanic use of teonanácatl is likewise extensively documented—psilocybin mushrooms sought for sacred inebriation by various Mesoamerican indigenous groups, such as the Mazatecs, whose famous curandera María Sabina introduced the modern world to the enduring vitality of entheogenic traditions. Pan-Amazonian shamanic and non-shamanic use of the entheogenic brew ayahuasca (or yagé) among more than seventy Amazonian ethnic groups is equally prominent—a tradition I have analyzed in detail in earlier works with respect to decision-making mechanisms and religious rites (Fericgla, 1994a; 1997a). One must also note the use of psychoactive snuffs containing potent inebriating tryptamines throughout the Caribbean and Amazonia (Ott, 1996). No less widespread across South and Central America is the tradition of drinking the extraordinarily potent juice of Brugmansia species, commonly known as floripondio or “tree datura,” whose state of inebriation can endure for three to four days. Morning glory seeds, which synthesize ergoline alkaloids, likewise hold a central place in divination and healing rituals. Nor can we overlook peyotl, or the peyote cactus, revered as the entheogen with which the Huichol (Wixárika)—among other indigenous peoples—partake in sacred communion; today, this small cactus also serves as the sacrament for nearly 500,000 members of the Native American Church and the Peyote Way Church of God across the United States and Canada. Finally, one must cite the widespread ecstatic use of the columnar San Pedro cactus—named for the saint holding the keys to heaven—throughout the Andean cordillera, as well as wild tobacco, which the eminent anthropologist Johannes Wilbert regarded as the quintessential American hallucinogen due to its ubiquitous ritual use across all latitudes of the continent (Wilbert, 1987).
Moreover, the consumption of psychoactive flora is by no means unique to human beings. Growing evidence indicates that non-human animals also seek out inebriants and medicinal plants. The American Association for the Advancement of Science recently hosted presentations on zoopharmacognosy demonstrating that the consumption of intoxicating substances is an ordinary, widespread behavior across the animal kingdom (cited in Ott, ibid: 30–31).
Thus, entheogen consumption represents a near-universal human practice, especially among non-literate societies, holding substantial weight across cultural life rather than occupying a marginal fringe. Despite this reality, until very recently almost no anthropologists devoted themselves to ethnopharmacognostical research. One notable exception was Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, an Austrian-born Colombian anthropologist who consistently emphasized in his fieldwork the prominent presence of narcotics—as he termed them—in the rites and ceremonies of the Desana, Tukano, and other Colombian peoples. He also documented the cultural role of nighttime dreams in indigenous decision-making systems; as I will explain below, dreams and the mental imagery induced by entheogens play interchangeable roles in many societies, to the extent that the Ecuadorian Shuar do not even maintain distinct terms to differentiate the two visionary experiences.
Methodologically, ethnopharmacognosy offers an organized, transdisciplinary, process-oriented framework that captures the complex variables intersecting across cultural practices tied to sacred inebriants, yielding explanatory models far more comprehensive than those of the past. This approach aligns my analysis with general systems theory as a vehicle for transdisciplinary synthesis (von Bertalanffy, 1968; Bateson, 1993).
Through this modest contribution, I hope to convey the profound significance of entheogens within social and cultural processes, both among indigenous peoples and across contemporary multiethnic Western society. I do not claim to offer a single magic key for decoding cultural dynamics and evolution—that remains an impossible dream for any scientist. My goal is simply to draw attention to a phenomenon that has long been dismissed by much of the scientific community: the extraordinary cultural and cognitive weight of altered states of consciousness induced by sacred, predominantly botanical inebriants, and the vital role they play within cultural systems undergoing the rapid transformations of our era.
Years ago, shortly after beginning my fieldwork among the Amazonian Shuar—the most populous group of the greater Jivaroan family, as A. C. Taylor designates them—I drank the visionary brew ayahuasca for the first time. I realized why Shuar and Achuar elders explained that they could not genuinely believe the biblical dogmas preached by Christian missionaries: the Shuar could directly perceive what they understood as the living forces and spirits of the rainforest, whereas the missionaries demanded faith in things they had never witnessed themselves, nor had anyone living. In that moment, I grasped the profound cultural significance of entheogen consumption in oral cultures, and I came to understand the enduring anchor that has allowed Amerindian peoples to preserve their unshakable sense of identity throughout centuries of colonization.
II.
Let us turn to a schematic analysis of the observable connections between the effects of entheogens and their specific cultural weight. This inquiry follows foundational categories in the anthropological study of human societies, examining how entheogens relate to:
II.1. Subsistence (the ecological environment)
II.2. Helping relationships (healing systems)
II.3. Collective memory (identity)
II.4. Individual and group decision-making systems
I will conclude with an assessment of the enduring significance of these dynamics across contemporary indigenous and mestizo America.
II.1. Relationship between entheogens and subsistence strategies (the ecological niche)
First, we must examine the cognitive style of non-literate, non-industrialized societies. This mindset is grounded in concrete world-cognition: rather than relying predominantly on abstract models, symbolic processing operates within the realm of imagery. It follows a Kantian logic of images, which corresponds to distinct patterns of neural organization recently highlighted by neuroscientists (Kremer-Marietti, 1993). Animal behavior, for example, is of supreme interest to indigenous hunters not only because it enables successful tracking, but because it provides a living template of successful evolutionary adaptation. Shamanic lore routinely contains meticulous descriptions of communication and information exchanges between humans and animals. Many shamans report having acquired essential specialized knowledge from animals that revealed unexpected food sources, medicinal cures for disease, or practical techniques for solving daily crises.
Through this logic of images, the interdependence binding humans to the living world becomes immediately obvious, imbuing the natural landscape with an animistic character. As is well documented, countless indigenous peoples describe animals, plants, and even manufactured objects using terms typically reserved for humans: “the car failed” (when it breaks down), “the lightbulb has the power to illuminate,” or “the faucet knows how to give water” are commonplace animistic expressions.
Broadly speaking, the indigenous person recognizes that they are woven into a complex web of interactions encompassing the entire cosmos. Consequently, relationships between human beings and their environment are framed not merely as ecological or cognitive interactions, but as intimate, affective bonds wherein individual animals and plants are treated with deep reverence and restraint (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1983: 296). “Why kill this animal today if you do not need it to eat?” an Amazonian Shuar hunter asks when presented with an effortless target.
Within this systemic equilibrium, food shortages occasionally arise, and it is precisely during these crises that cultural survival strategies become most visible. When game grows scarce, a community must adopt an alternative hunting strategy to escape starvation. As I will discuss below, they must introduce the element of chance. How does this work in practice? Consider an ethnographic example from the Colombian Amazon: the Tukano. In this society, the shaman enters an entheogen-induced ecstatic trance to visit the Master of Animals and request the release of game. Yet the shaman does not ask for individual creatures; he petitions for entire herds or for favorable seasonal hunting conditions. This spirit, manifested across numerous personifications, is understood as a steward of communal usufruct rights (ibid, 299). Because game resources are finite, strict limits on harvesting them are established by these spiritual guardians, and the shaman serves as the mediator. To maintain balance, this ecstatic specialist establishes strictly pragmatic regulations: restricting which species may be hunted, limiting the size of hunting parties, and dictating permitted days and geographic zones. In instances where the delicate equilibrium between human populations and their ecological niche is disrupted, the corrective measures applied to “heal the environment” are formulated from premises—or “revealed knowledge”—developed during dialogic mental states experienced as transcendent revelations under the influence of entheogens.
Furthermore, regarding the rigorous taboos that govern indigenous life during critical transitions—strict dietary prohibitions, sexual abstinence, social isolation—it is worth noting that the activities most crucial to biological and cultural continuity receive the highest degree of ritual protection. These critical thresholds include menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, periods of mourning, the harvesting of medicinal herbs, the preparation of hunting poisons and expeditions, and the ritual processing of traditional entheogens.
II.2. Relationship between entheogens and helping relationships (healing)
The role of the shaman is best understood as a helping relationship. While I have not defined the term up to this point, I view the shaman as a visionary individual, trained to decode internal mental imagery, who enters profound states of catharsis on behalf of the community with the aid of spiritual allies, all while maintaining wakeful awareness of their perceptions. During this self-induced mental dissociation, the shaman’s dreaming ego engages with immaterial entities and can, to a degree, reorder the invisible cosmos in the interest of the individual or the collective (Fericgla, 1997b: 75; Hultkrantz, 1988: 57–67).
These helping relationships operate broadly, functioning both at the individual level—centered primarily, though not exclusively, on healing—and at the cosmic level. Individually, shamans restore that delicate balance each culture defines as health. Beyond curing physical ailments, which is extensively treated in the literature, shamans engage in forms of assistance that might be called existential realignment. For instance, the Ecuadorian Shuar believe they can shape future events through visions experienced under the influence of ayahuasca. When an individual fails to receive auspicious visions regarding a critical milestone—such as a prospective marriage or a vendetta planned to avenge an offense—they consult a shaman, who enters an inebriated state to reorder the person’s trajectory toward greater effectiveness and success.
Additionally, many indigenous traditions hold that the cosmos exists in an ongoing state of entropic decay. In ancient times, people say, human beings were healthier and stronger, gardens yielded more abundantly, and shamans commanded far greater power. This sense of progressive disorder cannot simply be dismissed as a reaction to modern encroachment, where industrial society has caused acute cultural breakdown and physical devastation. Rather, this belief in the steady decline of nature reflects an ontological premise embedded deep within their cosmology, perhaps derived from observing the natural cycles of growth and decay within any ecological niche (as Reichel-Dolmatoff clearly illustrates among the Tukano; ibid, 305). Crucially, this expectation of creeping disorder is consistently met by institutionalized human intervention: through ritual action, people symbolically recreate the world and restore cosmic harmony.
This unbroken cycle of ritual creation, dissolution, and restoration appears across indigenous communities in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, as well as in European agrarian traditions—such as the annual ritual cycle spanning Christmas and Midsummer (St. John’s Eve). These practices represent vital cultural mechanisms for social and biological survival. At the ceremonial heart of these negentropic rites lies entheogen consumption and the cognitive realignment facilitated by internal dialogism.
Returning to healing as a helping relationship, three core dimensions must be rigorously regulated to protect community health: population growth and demographics, the exploitation of the ecological niche, and the containment of internal and external aggression.
These three variables must be meticulously balanced if any community hopes to survive. In Western societies, these same three dilemmas currently bring our collective survival to the brink: global overpopulation accelerated by colonial disruption of indigenous social norms; the depletion of natural resources and runaway climate change resulting from reckless consumption; and urban violence in contemporary cities.
Field anthropologists know that members of traditional societies clearly recognize that survival depends on balancing these factors. Consequently, they enact targeted adaptive behaviors to maintain equilibrium across each domain.
To regulate these critical pressures, societies impose strict codes on individual conduct; the simpler the social structure, the more rigid the taboos. In general, a culture’s strategy for enforcing these boundaries mirrors its fundamental understanding of disease. Illness is typically viewed as a transgression of a core cultural norm, manifesting in physical symptoms attributed to external forces, even as the patient bears responsibility for becoming vulnerable to them. This interpretive framework applies as readily to non-literate communities as it does to modern popular attitudes toward AIDS (often moralized as the outcome of a transgressive lifestyle) or lung cancer (where physicians point to the patient’s smoking history). Thus, diagnosis by a traditional healer or a modern psychotherapist entails two distinct evaluations: one addressing the patient’s immediate somatic complaints, and another uncovering the root vulnerability that allowed the pathology to take hold. Shamans uncover these underlying causes through entheogen-induced trances, visionary techniques, and dream analysis.
In this diagnostic process, the shaman does not treat illness merely as an isolated biological malfunction, but as a symptom of disorder within the surrounding cosmic web. Restoring health is, in a profound sense, an act of cosmogonic repair. The shaman must pinpoint the precise relational imbalance before reestablishing cosmic order through spiritual communication, using entheogens to facilitate this work. Paraphrasing Reichel-Dolmatoff, an indigenous shaman does not treat isolated patients; their mission is to heal social dysfunction. In doing so, the shaman serves as a pivotal force for collective governance and resource management. Indeed, as documented by Reichel-Dolmatoff (ibid, 304) and observed during my own fieldwork (Fericgla, 1994b), shamans have orchestrated community migrations, advising villagers to relocate their settlements to avert approaching epidemics or malicious spiritual forces revealed during entheogenic divinatory trances.
In short, the central duties of shamans—healing rituals, rainmaking, weather propitiation, and the renewal of alliances and trade between exogamous clans—function as systemic mechanisms for managing resources and community equilibrium through individual and collective support, all conceived and guided under the influence of entheogens.
I set aside contemporary speculations regarding hypothetical links between the individual unconscious accessed through entheogens and the external physical world. I do not discount the possibility that visionary plant experiences might heighten non-ordinary perceptions of our surroundings. This might involve an exceptional sharpening of intuition, a faculty C. G. Jung placed alongside sensation and perception as an empirical source of environmental data. Modern physics has demonstrated that unobservable realms—spanning cosmic macro-distances and submolecular interactions—operate beyond classical laws of causality, time, and mass, opening doors to scientific possibilities unimagined decades ago. It is equally true that indigenous divinatory practices yield accurate outcomes at rates exceeding pure chance. Nevertheless, this does not justify dressing speculative fantasies in scientific language: shamans often fail in their healing attempts, and forest-dwelling peoples suffer from serious endemic illnesses—facts that must not be overlooked.
II.3. Relationship between entheogens, collective memory, and individual identity reference points
Two branches of contemporary anthropology carry particular relevance for our multiethnic societies: identity formation and adaptive mechanisms, fields now studied alongside artificial intelligence and adaptive expert systems capable of partial self-programming, giving rise to neuroinformatics and adaptation modeling (Álvarez Munárriz, 1994).
In non-literate societies, individual identity is inseparable from symbolic systems and communal adaptation strategies, which form the bedrock of collective memory preserved in myth. As several authors have observed, the revitalization of identity markers during rites of passage is routinely accompanied by the consumption of psychoactive plants or brews. We see an analogous pattern among Western adolescents, who frequently consume alcohol, cannabis, and synthetic substances to cement belonging within street-corner peer groups, turning collective intoxication into an informal rite of passage. During sacred ceremonies—whether community-wide or confined to kinship circles—when the cosmos is ritually refreshed through negentropic acts of renewal, one objective takes precedence: restoring bonds with ancestral, living, and future generations through mythic narrative. Ritual focuses on unifying the group, reinforcing social identity, and preserving the continuum linking the living community to its heritage, while laying the foundation for its future. Elaborate genealogical recitations and ritualized chants sung during ceremonies serve as powerful cohesive forces.
The cognitive hallmark of these altered states of consciousness is an internal mental dialogism, clearly visible in indigenous art and accessible through subjective self-experimentation.
Ordinary waking consciousness operates through dualistic, disjunctive frameworks (either this or that, now or later, here or there, you or me) that isolate the individual from the collective. When I asked Shuar informants during fieldwork, “What do you think of this?” the typical response was, “We think such and such.” Much like entheogens, Eastern meditative practices, stress-reduction techniques, and analytical psychology seek to suspend this dualistic processing, training the mind to integrate opposing realities without conflict—a dynamic that recalls Arthur Koestler’s theory of holons and open hierarchical systems (Koestler, 1983: 171ff.).
Operating above ordinary dualism, cognitive dialogism represents a higher state of consciousness central to understanding spirit encounters, ecstatic visions, and shamanic flights. In dialogic mental states, the mind engages in self-reflection, observes its own processes, reinterprets past and present emotional content, and achieves acute self-awareness. This is the metaphor of the disembodied eye found from ancient Greece to the Mexica. To this we must add psychological projection: perceiving internal subjective realities as external phenomena. Classical anthropology labeled this process “the primitive’s mystical participation with the environment” (Lévy-Bruhl, 1985)—a cornerstone in the creation of mythic systems and a decisive factor in personal identity formation.
This dynamic is essential for understanding the adaptogenic potential of alternative states of consciousness. Cognitive dialogism facilitates deutero-learning relative to everyday cognition: the individual reflects on their own thought processes and learns how to learn. This explains the valuable application of entheogens in modern psychotherapy (exemplified by the clinical research of S. Grof, C. Grob, R. Yensen, S. Roquet, and psychotherapist Ann Shulgin, among others).
The presiding shaman—or modern therapist—guides the visions that emerge from sacred intoxication toward adaptive outcomes (Fericgla, 1994a). Participants experience themselves returning to primordial origins, taking an active role in the sacred creation of the self. In this space, personal memory merges emotionally with collective memory through the entheogenic experience, underscoring its pivotal role in forging enduring identity.
Furthermore, as research has shown (Fericgla, 1997: 43–80), the visions experienced during sacred inebriation blend personal imagery with archetypal or universal forms. The existence of universal mental imagery rooted in the human unconscious is well established, echoing the “elementary ideas” identified by nineteenth-century anthropologists like Adolf Bastian and later Marcel Mauss, which C. G. Jung and psychological anthropologists subsequently detailed. The ecstatic state allows participants to encounter narratives that weave personal biography into collective heritage, solidifying identity anchors to a depth rarely understood by the average Westerner. This explains the remarkable resilience of Indigenous American identity throughout centuries of colonization, especially when contrasted with the fluid, shifting identities of the modern West: entheogens—whether peyote, ayahuasca, San Pedro, or mushrooms—allow individuals to directly participate in the ongoing construction of their cognitive, symbolic, and social universe.
While visionary experiences validate the truth of ancestral myths by imbuing them with living emotion, these accounts remain subject to collective discussion and reinterpretation based on personal encounters. Myth remains living and dynamic rather than static. Any ethnographer gathering Shuar, Aguaruna, or Quechua mythologies quickly learns that they must harmonize multiple narrative variants into a unified account.
II.4. Relationship between entheogens and individual and group decision-making
One area I have prioritized in my research on cultural dynamics is the study of decision-making systems. How does a culture make decisions individually and collectively? What underlying logic directs these choices? In essence, determinations rest on two pillars: preexisting knowledge regarding the choice at hand, and the role of chance, which shapes the circumstances surrounding the decision.
Without resorting to simplistic Darwinian interpretations, biological evolution relies heavily on chance as an adaptive survival strategy. Consider a basic example: the reciprocal dynamic between predatory humans and hunted game requires both hunter and prey to adapt based on anticipated behaviors. In this interactive system, survival favors the party capable of avoiding rigid, predictable conduct. Observable habits provide the opposing side with the ability to anticipate actions; game animals subjected to persistent hunting patterns learn human tactics and evade pursuit more effectively. Groups can easily fall victim to their own established habits. Among hunting societies, repeated success in a single area routinely exhausts local game populations (Moore, 1983: 309–317). In other words, unbroken success risks inducing systemic failure: a community can quite literally die of its own success. This principle applies equally to cultural systems and the adaptive decisions they execute.
We must remember that humans, like all animals, struggle to escape behavioral automaticity that hardens into predictable routines. Modern psychotherapy rests on this challenge: helping patients alter entrenched behaviors that cause suffering, even when the individual clearly recognizes their harm. As statisticians George Udny Yule and Maurice Kendall observed, human beings make remarkably poor random selectors (Yule and Kendall, 1948: 337). The biological necessity of introducing randomness into strategic decision-making—setting aside here the profound questions surrounding synchronicity and acausal connection—has driven human societies throughout history to employ divinatory tools. Examples range from scapulimancy practiced by the Naskapi of the Labrador Peninsula—interpreting cracks produced by scorching the shoulder blade of a quarry animal—to the formal consultations Roman leaders held with augurs before military campaigns.
By reading the fractures formed on charred bone alongside the hunter’s recent dreams, the Naskapi chose which direction to hunt. This practice decided daily survival: the Naskapi lived in small, vulnerable family bands because subarctic ecosystems could not support concentrated populations without exhausting local resources, requiring their hunting decisions to remain as unpredictably effective as possible.
The drive to incorporate chance into strategic decision-making recurs throughout human history. Scapulimancy traditions similar to those of the Naskapi appear across North America, Asia, India, and ancient Europe. In ancient China, diviners heated turtle plastrons, developing up to twenty-five distinct crack patterns for predictive interpretation (Plath, 1862: 81–927, cited in Moore, 1983: 309). Modern societies employ everything from complex random number generators to dice. Divination and games of chance share identical structures, frequently utilizing the exact same instruments. Mathematicians John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern contributed a vital insight here (Neumann and Morgenstern, 1947: 143–165): divination aligns fundamentally with games of strategy rather than pure games of chance. Without detailing game theory here, its central lesson is that short-term advantages can become liabilities over time; unless chance introduces novel strategies, an initial advantage fades, resulting in failure through predictability.
During altered states of consciousness, the mind constructs novel connections among memories and experiences. Entheogens foster what I describe as emotional amplification: the cosmos derives its meaning from the emotional relationship we establish with each of its elements. This state illuminates systemic possibilities obscured by routine cognitive automaticity. Because our minds generate foundational thoughts through images rather than abstract formulas, we must look to the logic of images to escape habitual mental ruts.
This does not imply that non-literate communities consume entheogens incessantly, which would recreate the very predictability they avoid. My research among the Amazonian Shuar indicates that individuals drink ayahuasca for major decision-making an average of eight times across a lifetime. As a statistical average, this means specialized shamans partake frequently, while others may consult the brew only during life-altering crises.
III. The Present and Immediate Future of Entheogens
To conclude, allow me a few reflections on the immediate trajectory of sacred inebriants across modern societies. Contemporary analyses of globalization point to a world transformed into an open supermarket of symbols. Everything can be bought and sold so long as consumers settle for the image—the surface aesthetic. Society borders on an expansive commercial marketplace where individuals curate identities with a shopping cart: adopting Buddhist mindfulness for stress, displaying progressive politics regardless of profession, wearing African textiles, or donating to an NGO for personal reassurance (regardless of the aid’s practical impact). We are building a culture anchored in image consumption. Even indigenous communities are learning to navigate this reality: having adopted Western dress and daily routines, some find they must perform traditional identity to secure developmental grants and attract tourists from affluent nations. This performative dynamic suits the regulatory apparatus of modern states: when personal expression is confined to surface markers—clothing, hairstyles, nightlife venues—populations are easier to manage and tax through escalating consumer levies.
Entheogens, by contrast, foster a dialogic encounter with oneself—with the core of personal cognition and psyche. They support the restructuring and grounding of the ego, helping individuals discover their genuine place in the world—a direct antidote to the detached consumption of surface symbols. In truth, indigenous shamans do not cure physical illnesses with the romantic perfection imagined by Western admirers; yet they understand their duties, rights, and standing within their social fabric and natural cosmos. This groundedness explains their rich linguistic vocabulary, robust health, and resilience in adapting to cultural disruption, frequently enabling them to serve as effective community leaders (Eliade, 1976, 1982; Poveda, 1997). For these reasons, I emphasize the adaptogenic value of sacred inebriants (Fericgla, 1994a), which underpins the therapeutic potential now being investigated by European and North American psychiatrists and psychologists. Modern states, preoccupied with social conformity to maintain institutional control amidst weakening representational models, perceive in entheogens substances that could foster alternative communal cohesion outside bureaucratic control. This dynamic helps explain the severe prohibition placed on the modern Western entheogen par excellence: lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25. The widespread adoption of LSD during the 1960s sparked a counterculture whose artistic and social influence endures today: pop art, psychedelic music, fashion, immersive lighting, and transformed perspectives on intimacy and sexuality. Despite protests from clinicians and researchers who had used LSD with remarkable success in therapeutic settings for nearly two decades, the compound was criminalized (Escohotado, 1989; Lee and Shlain, 1994). Naturally, the historical value of traditional inebriants does not mean their consumption is free from risks under improper conditions—hence the strict taboos governing their use in oral cultures. Yet by that same logic, one would have to prohibit automobiles, sacramental communion wine, and aspirin, which causes internal bleeding in excessive doses.
Regarding the immediate future, entheogen use appears to be dividing into recreational experimentation and two broader cultural developments. First, consumer culture is expanding tourism centered on entheogen consumption within neo-shamanic settings. In the United States, commercial agencies market affordable tours to Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil that include ayahuasca rituals led by local practitioners hired for travelers. A similar recreational scene exists in Europe, though on a smaller scale. Second, we are witnessing a revival of entheogenic religion, exemplified by the European spread of Brazilian Daime traditions. Although these communities remain modest in size, the pursuit of religious ecstasy through ayahuasca—revered as Santo Daime—holds great anthropological interest as an adaptation of entheogenic practice within modern industrialized environments. Across Santo Daime, the União do Vegetal, A Barquinha (under Mestre Manuel Araújo and Mestre Antônio Geraldo), the tradition of Francisca Gabriel, and the lineage of Mestre Daniel, formal membership numbers roughly 15,000 to 17,000 people, with occasional ceremonial participants potentially adding 60,000 to 70,000 adherents. Meanwhile, established peyote-centered religious traditions continue: the Native American Church in the United States and the Peyote Way Church of God across the US and Canada. It is plausible that independent Andean and Amazonian ayahuasqueros and curanderos will continue establishing regional followings.
Finally, entheogenic research in Western clinical medicine is poised to expand, challenging decades of prohibition. In recent years, regulatory agencies in the United States and across Europe have issued research licenses permitting medical and psychiatric investigations into the therapeutic properties of entheogens. In Spain, the national ethics committee recently granted its placet for clinical trials evaluating the pharmacological effects of ayahuasca in humans—a landmark protocol that involves administering the entheogen to healthy, psychedelic-naive volunteers. (Such protocols remain virtually impossible for controlled trials involving heroin, MDMA, or cocaine, where researchers would face accusations of encouraging drug use, restricting clinical studies to registered dependent users). While current investigations operate under tightly controlled, legally delicate pilot frameworks that limit immediate generalizations, emerging findings are demonstrating the extraordinary therapeutic promise of entheogens, pointing toward potential mainstream clinical integration in the decades ahead.
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