Initiated by the Spirits - Frederique Apffel-Marglin

Initiated by the Spirits (eBook)

Healing the Ills of Modernity through Shamanism, Psychedelics and the Power

Frederique Apffel-Marglin (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
319 Seiten
Green Fire Press (Verlag)
979-8-9858064-3-4 (ISBN)

Randy Chung Gonzales was leading an ordinary life in his hometown of Lamas, Peru, when his employer, anthropologist Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, asked him to accompany her to an ayahuasca ceremony led by a local shaman. There, to everyone's great surprise, Randy was initiated by discarnate entities, who instructed him and gave him healing powers. In this unique book, Randy tells his story to Frédérique, who offers cultural context and describes how she herself has been transformed from an academic anthropologist into an advocate for the sharing of indigenous wisdom and ecospirituality. Drawing on history, cultural studies and anthropology, Frédérique offers a penetrating analysis of Western science-based modernity, which has made the systematic eradication of shamanism a priority. Initiated by the Spirits argues powerfully that shamanic sacred plants can heal the epidemics of mental illness in Western societies, as well as the global ecological crisis. Randy's shamanic initiation serves as a beacon for new ways of conceiving of the human relationship to science, spirit and our planetary home.

Randy Chung Gonzales was leading an ordinary life in his hometown of Lamas, Peru, when his employer, anthropologist Frederique Apffel-Marglin, asked him to accompany her to an ayahuasca ceremony led by a local shaman. There, to everyone's great surprise, Randy was initiated by discarnate entities, who instructed him and gave him healing powers. In this unique book, Randy tells his story to Frederique, who offers cultural context and describes how she herself has been transformed from an academic anthropologist into an advocate for the sharing of indigenous wisdom and ecospirituality. Drawing on history, cultural studies and anthropology, Frederique offers a penetrating analysis of Western science-based modernity, which has made the systematic eradication of shamanism a priority. Initiated by the Spirits argues powerfully that shamanic sacred plants can heal the epidemics of mental illness in Western societies, as well as the global ecological crisis. Randy's shamanic initiation serves as a beacon for new ways of conceiving of the human relationship to science, spirit and our planetary home. Frdrique Apffel-Marglin, PhD. is Professor Emerita, Department of Anthropology at Smith College and has also taught at Harvard, Wellesley, and Wesleyan University. She founded the Sachamama Center for BioCultural Regeneration (SCBR) in the Peruvian High Amazon in 2009, which she directs. She has authored or edited fifteen books and published some 70 articles and book chapters. Her most recent book, co-edited with Stefano Varese, is Contemporary Voices from Anima Mundi: A Reappraisal (2020). Randy Chung Gonzales is a self-trained architect and visual artist who was born and raised in Lamas, Peru. In June of 2016 he was initiated by disembodied spirits into shamanic knowledge and power, and since then he has been given powers by other indigenous spirits as well as the Virgin of Guadalupe. He receives regular teachings from a disembodied Ashaninka shaman, offers healing to others, and directs an ecological center in the forest called in English "e;The Place of the Sacred Mountain."e;

1. INTRODUCTION: SCIENCE AND SHAMANISM IN THE PERUVIAN RAINFOREST

This book tells the interlinked stories of the transformation of each of the two authors. Randy Chung Gonzales was transformed in a sudden and radical way, one not welcomed initially but impossible to refuse and eventually accepted, which completely changed his life. My own final breakthrough, the result of my directly witnessing Randy Chung’s journey, was the last step in a long and slow transformation. Randy was initiated by discarnate beings in an ayahuasca shamanic ceremony to which I insisted he accompany me. This kind of initiation is extremely rare in the region, where typically a neophyte shaman seeks the teachings of an older living shaman.1 Randy tried, unsuccessfully, to reject that path. At the beginning it left him totally disoriented and confused. His three-year initiation by disembodied beings eventually transformed him from a materialist secular person into an effective healer, an empowered shaman, and a deeply spiritual person. As far as my own final breakthrough is concerned, it led me to ask new questions concerning the sustained efforts to eradicate shamanism in the Western tradition. It allowed me to perceive how the eradication of shamanism is embodied in our contemporary modern institutions, and to recognize that shamanism can be a powerful tool for addressing some of modernity’s most intractable ills: the ecological crisis and the growing epidemics of mental illness, including drug addiction.

The recent renewal, around the year 2000, of the scientific study of shamanic psychedelic substances—referred to as “the psychedelic renaissance”—along with other neuroscientific breakthroughs, have contributed greatly to my recognition of the potential for shamanism to play a role in addressing the ills of modernity. These shamanic substances are still classified as Schedule I illegal drugs in most countries, although not in Peru. This renaissance of the scientific study of psychedelics, taking place in many universities and hospitals in North America and Europe, as well as a few in Latin America, has been given new urgency by the dire epidemics of mental illness worldwide, combined with the limited efficacy of legal treatments. I am part of an interdisciplinary research project funded by the National Autonomous University of Mexico focusing on “magic mushrooms” containing psylocibin.2 The Nahuatl name for those mushrooms is teonanácatl. This project is unique in that it works collaboratively with indigenous Mexican shamans and their communities, something that is not happening in the psychedelic renaissance in the global north.

Randy’s narration and black and white line drawings, which form Part Two of this book, are based on his telling me his most important visions and other experiences during his three-year initiatory journey. Randy is not loquacious; his medium is not the word but visual expressions: drawing, architecture, and landscaping. He has designed and overseen all the buildings and landscaping in our non-profit center in the Peruvian Upper Amazon, in the town of Lamas in the department of San Martin.3 Now, because of his initiation, he is also healing a growing number of patients seeking his help in ayahuasca ceremonies.4 It is important to note that the shaman leading such ceremonies will also ingest the ayahuasca potion. This radically differentiates the shaman from the doctor or psychotherapist who must remain clearly separate from the patient and does not partake of their medicines or treatments.

My voice in the third part of the book is a more intellectual one, reflecting on the meaning, implications, and results of the longterm eradication of shamanism in the West. I especially reflect on the demonization of shamanism during the “scientific revolution” in the 16th and 17th centuries in Western Europe, known as “the burning times,” which destroyed a worldview rather like the Amazonian indigenous worldviews. The successful erasing of the Medieval and Renaissance worldview known as Anima Mundi (the Soul of the World), as well as the wars of religion, were instrumental in the invention of a mechanical, insentient, and purely material understanding of Nature and the cosmos. This enabled the creation of a system of knowledge totally outside of religion, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics; a reconceptualization that was perceived as necessary during a time of religious wars. The new secular knowledge paradigm was indispensable in re-establishing the certainty that was believed to be necessary to achieving law and order. In Part Three I explain how this association between certainty and law and order came about. Robert Boyle was a key figure in establishing the rules of the scientific experimental method in mid-17th century England. Boyle created the “public laboratory” along with a series of rules to be strictly observed within it. Within a century, Boyle’s method became accepted throughout Europe and it is still considered indispensable in the pursuit of science to this day. One of Boyle’s rules was the complete separation between the seeker of knowledge and the object of knowledge. In his youth, Boyle had been an occult philosopher, an alchemist. By the mid-17th century alchemy was already tainted with the brush of heresy, since occult philosophers shared the worldview of Anima Mundi with the so-called “witches,” a variety of folk healers, many of whom were shamans.

The worldview of Anima Mundi understood the world/cosmos as being completely integrated. Plants, minerals, animals, humans, the planets and the stars, among many other things, were all connected among themselves materially, psychologically, and spiritually, with the whole being pervaded by the divine. However, by 1484, the Pope had declared witches to be heretics and with them most of the occult philosophers also came to be seen as heretics. By Boyle’s time, it was necessary for him to make very clear that his public laboratory was the opposite of the occult philosopher’s cabinet of experiments, where in his youth he had pursued simultaneously a knowledge of the world and a refinement or purification of his own soul.

This development came on the heels of René Descartes having established the philosophical bases for this new knowledge, what some at the time called “the corpuscular” theory of reality. Today we would replace the word ‘corpuscular’ with ‘atomic’ or ‘materialist,’ perhaps. This new knowledge began much earlier with Copernicus’ theory of heliocentrism, published in mid-16th century, and was continued by many others, including Galileo in the early 17th century. Together, these new philosophies completely delegitimated the worldview of Anima Mundi, replacing it with a mechanical, materialist, reductionist worldview that was radically separated from the sacred and the ethical. These new developments opened a chasm between the seekers of knowledge—then known as natural philosophers, today known simply as scientists—and the object of their knowledge, namely nature or the cosmos. Seeking knowledge of the world could no longer be simultaneously a refinement of the seeker’s soul/mind. This new philosophical practice quickly came to be known as ‘science’ tout court. It was not seen as one more knowledge system among the many existing in the world, but as the only correct, universal one, totally independent of any religious or cultural or historical tradition. Today it has indeed spread worldwide.

From the point of view of this new scientific knowledge, shamanism is at the antipodes of the mind, meaning the opposite of rationality.5 Although shamanism was eradicated in Europe during the 17th century,6 it survived in the Americas, despite laws that were passed at the beginning of the colonial period to eradicate it, especially in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. Shamanism, and with it the knowledge of psychedelic plants and mushrooms, was preserved by indigenous societies throughout the Americas even in the face of severe persecution. Today, the last glowing embers of this ancient Western fury against shamanism can be recognized in the illegal status of shamanic plants and mushrooms, classified as Schedule I dangerous drugs. This law, passed in 1970 in the US and imitated in many other countries,7 makes no distinction between destructive, addictive substances such as cocaine, heroin or oxycontin, and non-addictive shamanic plants such as mushrooms and derivative substances like LSD.

In the historic battle between science and shamanism, the latter has recently reemerged as a strongly efficacious remedy for curing a long list of modern mental illnesses, which have acquired epidemic proportions in the more modernized parts of the world. The scientific study of shamanic substances, started in the 1950s and interrupted in 1970 for almost thirty years, has recently resumed, despite the fact that in most parts of the world shamanic substances are still illegal. In various countries and certain U.S. states such as Oregon, these shamanic drugs have now been legalized for therapeutic purposes.8

I have included the ecological crisis in the list of the ills of modernity and to introduce this aspect of the healing effect of shamanic substances, I will here turn to the work of a neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, who suffered a massive stroke in 1996 that incapacitated her left brain. It took Taylor eight years to completely heal from her stroke and regain her speech, mobility, balance, and several other faculties controlled by the...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	11.1.2023
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
ISBN-13	979-8-9858064-3-4 / 9798985806434

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