A comfortable dogma that ethnography doesn’t support
Inside and outside the psychedelic culture, a widely held idea persists: that these substances are ancestral tools reserved for highly structured rituals with spiritual or therapeutic goals, and that using them “for pleasure” is a frivolous degradation of something sacred. It is an attractive narrative. It is also, to a large extent, a contemporary construct rather than a faithful portrait of how these plants and compounds have actually been used.
Researcher José Carlos Bouso, of the ICEERS Foundation, has stated this clearly: when contrasted with ethnographic and anthropological literature, the “dogma of sacralization” looks quite like a Western myth. Not because the sacred doesn’t exist in these uses, but because it coexists with many other registers—everyday, conflictive, playful—that the idealized version prefers to ignore.
When “ancestral” isn’t what we imagine
Some classic examples are uncomfortable for precisely this reason. Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon described the Yanomami—an Amazonian people on the border between Brazil and Venezuela—as using epená, a tryptamine-based snuff, very frequently. Their worldview is supported by the visions it provokes, yes, but consumption is repeated several times a day and is associated with a local idea of irresponsibility: under its effects, except in the hands of a shaman, one is “not responsible” for their actions. An alibi that, according to Chagnon, was even used to justify aggression within the group. It is worth remembering that Chagnon’s work has been heavily debated; even so, the nuance matters: even there, the pattern does not fit the pristine ritual we imagine.
Wade Davis, much better accepted by the psychedelic community, recounts a revealing scene in One River. When ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes asked a Cofan shaman in the Colombian Amazon how often he drank yagé (ayahuasca), the question simply made no sense to his interlocutor: it is drunk in sickness, in death, in adversity, when a child gets their first haircut, at puberty, when piercing the nose and ears… and also to sharpen aim while hunting or to demonstrate physical endurance. The message Schultes received, according to Davis, was that it was drunk “whenever one felt like it,” at least once a week. In the same book, Schultes is offered a potent drink of deliriant nightshades (brugmansias) almost as one might offer a beer to a new acquaintance here; he avoids a multi-day trip only thanks to a warning from a companion.
And it is best not to romanticize the shaman. Spanish anthropologist Josep Maria Fericgla calculated that among the Shuar, a notable proportion of shamans die violently due to their practices, often at the hands of a colleague: ayahuasca has also been used there for witchcraft and to settle conflicts. Bouso’s conclusion is sober: the Western image of “sacred and always prudent use” in cultures that sanction these substances is, at the very least, poorly calibrated.
From Stonehenge to the Gold Museum: trance as social infrastructure
There is a thread that runs through cultures and millennia. In Bogotá, the Gold Museum could rightly be called a museum of shamanism: many pieces refer to the use of plants and visionary practices, including gold objects that were hung from the ceilings of malocas to fragment light during rituals—a function not very different from that of a strobe light on a dance floor. On the other side of the world, musicologist Rupert Till (University of Huddersfield) argued in 2010, in the journal of the IASPM, that Stonehenge may have been a space for playing and dancing to trance music during ritual festivities.
The pattern repeats: percussion, dance, song, and, very often, psychoactive substances, articulated in social spaces whose main objective was to reinforce group bonds by inducing altered states of consciousness. In most ancient cultures, there was no clear boundary between healing, celebrating, creating, and praying; everything happened within the community. Viewed this way, the raves of the nineties, the happenings of the sixties, or current festivals like Boom or Ozora would not be a modern anomaly, but another form of the same impulse: to belong to something larger than oneself.
“Collective effervescence”: Durkheim on the dance floor
Émile Durkheim coined the idea of “collective effervescence” to describe that state in which a congregation moving in unison begins to vibrate with a shared excitement. For him, it was the engine of the religious, visible both in the prostration of the faithful and in monastic chanting. The interesting thing is that in secular society, this phenomenon does not disappear: it transmutes into what we call “going out to party.”
There are physiological indications that something real happens there. Anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas (University of Connecticut) has documented how heart rate tends to synchronize among those who participate together in a dance ritual, something that does not happen in mere observers. Anthropologist Emma Cohen (Oxford) summarizes it: synchrony and coordination increase the feeling of union, even among strangers. The body, not just the symbol, does the work.
The healing we forgot: from the group to the couch… and back
Bouso introduces an observation here that is uncomfortable for therapeutic culture. People tend to consume in company: ayahuasca ceremonies are group-based; khat is chewed collectively after work, much like having a few glasses of wine here. It is hard to find a human use of substances that is solitary except, precisely, in dependence… and in the laboratories of those who research them. A good part of the most problematic patterns is better explained by drug policies than by pharmacology.
Classical psychotherapy, on the other hand, was born by isolating: two strangers in a closed room, away from the social world, in exchange for money. When Freud reduced distress to the intrapsychic, healing became trapped in the solipsism of the couch. But a good part of suffering is relational and occurs in a social context; hence, group therapies can be read as an attempt to return healing to its community roots.
Eusocial animals: why we dance together
There is even an evolutionary hypothesis. Biologist Edward O. Wilson maintains that we are a eusocial species, something extremely rare among vertebrates, subject to selection that operates simultaneously on the individual and the group (The Social Conquest of Earth). Some neuroscientists suggest that dance—choreography as an early form of syntax—could have been key in the evolution of complex social skills and language itself. In The Singing Neanderthals, Steven Mithen tracks how gesture could have given way to rhythm, rhythm to music, and music to language; and the premotor areas involved in dance are, not by chance, very close to those of language.
If all this is true, shared trance would be a very ancient language that goes beyond words and whose message is acceptance: I belong, I am not alone. Perhaps that is why rituals that combine song, dance, and psychoactives have never disappeared—from ayahuasca religions to raves—and today reappear with force. ICEERS itself gathered representatives from nearly twenty indigenous peoples in Rio Branco (Brazil) one recent October, some of whom have incorporated ayahuasca after its global expansion: the plant returned “from outside” to places where it was not used, closing a century-long circle. Are those new rituals less authentic than Western pagan ones with synthetic psychedelics? For Bouso, no: they are the same collective effervescence in different clothing.
Partying, well-being, and the unfinished business of safe spaces
That this has effects on well-being is not just intuition. A study by Weinberg and Joseph (Deakin University, Australia), published in Psychology of Music with data from the Australian Personal Wellbeing Index on about a thousand people, found that those who dance or attend musical events report greater well-being—especially when they do so accompanied—with higher scores in health, life achievement, relationships, and community connection. Shared music matters, and dance even more so.
The final reading is not “anything goes.” It is exactly the opposite: if we want the party to function as a transformative space and not as a roulette wheel, we must stop pushing it into clandestinity. That means socially recognized environments where people can express themselves and dance freely, but also know what they are taking and have assistance available for those who have a hard time. As, deep down, has happened throughout almost all of human history.
Critical reading
Bouso’s argument is valuable because it deactivates an idealization that is often used to rank and exclude (“your use isn’t sacred enough”). It is, however, advisable not to replace one myth with another. That communal use is widespread does not make every party therapy, nor every trance healing: there are contexts that harm, power dynamics within groups, and rituals—shamanic ones included—traversed by violence, as the Amazonian examples themselves show.
Prohibition is not the only factor, either: drug policies explain much of the risk, but not all of it; pharmacology, doses, mixtures, and prior health still carry weight. And the cited studies (heart synchrony, well-being, and dance) describe correlations and suggestive mechanisms, not guaranteed recipes. The sensible conclusion is not “more partying,” but better frameworks: drug checking, the presence of care, honest information, and communities that do not abandon those in need.
