In the previous post, I compared the Stoned Ape Theory of human origin to René Girard’s theory on the same. I critiqued the former in the light of the latter. Here, I discuss where psychedelics would fit into Girard’s theories on cultural development.
Psychedelic drugs do not play a central role in human culture, but they do play a role. As mentioned in the previous post, the historical record is not as big on them as Terence McKenna would have liked, but they are not absent. Psychedelic mushrooms and other plants, such as ayahuasca, have been consumed for millennia. Modern anthropology finds them used by various shamans and medicine men in indigenous (archaic) cultures across the continents. They tend to be used for healing, which, in these cultures, is invariably seen as spiritual, as expelling evil spirits.
We can take a broader view and also acknowledge the consumption of cannabis across Eurasia, among ancient Scythians and Hindus, among others. We can note that the medicinal use of the opium poppy is rooted in ritual, too. These are only the first cases to jump to my casual memory. We can expand the list of psychoactive substances to tobacco and alcohol, and especially wine, and their historical importance to culture.
There is no doubt that humans have universally sought and used mind-altering substances. Girard’s anthropology once again offers insights into the original why and how of the cultural role of psychoactive drugs.
Written and archeological evidence shows that the first consumption of intoxicating substances was done in a ritual context. Even in historical times, leading up to just before the modern era, drinking alcohol was reserved for festivals, which may no longer have kept the strict confines of older rituals but were still seen as occasions with special permission that were prohibited or frowned upon on regular days.
To see the original role of all drug use we should look at the origin of ritual. Girard has a lot to say on ritual. He proposes an original blueprint from which all rituals, and later all institutions, evolved. To him, the original ritual was a deliberate replication of the sacrificial crisis and its violent resolution.
Girard writes how archaic humans had two opposite ways of dealing with social unrest. The first was the “rules and prohibitions” approach, which attempted to prevent the bad behaviour that leads to it. But, when these inevitably failed to keep order, the elders did a hundred-and-eighty and decided to plunge into the dreaded crisis in a deliberate but controlled manner, so as to come up on the other side with minimal hurt. They decided to do a ritual.
Prior to ritual, societies would, through ordinary interpersonal frictions, suffer a collapse of order every now and then that could only be solved through unanimous execution of a culprit believed to be responsible for it all. This culprit would be thought of as a supernatural being, a god or a demon, because he would need supernatural powers to throw the entire community into despair, as well as deliver it from it through the act of its own expulsion or “catharsis.”
The original ritual would retrace the crisis in five stages.
Onset of crisis: this stage of the ritual would simulate a cause of the crisis, like theft or drought, and the confusion resulting from it. It might act out crimes or violence, or depictions of despair through music.
Heightened strife and rivalry: This stage simulates the proliferation of feuds. It may stage strife with athletic contests, duel dances, martial music, etc.
The mania: unresolved strife aggravates and leads the community into what we might call a mental health crisis. People begin to rave, hallucinate, see monsters, spirits, gods, demons, etc. The ritual may attempt to induce spiritual possessions or invoke or summon spiritual entities believed responsible for the whole mess.
Expulsion of the culprit: discordant collective madness must be led to an accord. Disparate spiritual visions must be coalesced into a unifying vision of a single spiritual force responsible for the crisis. Hypnotic techniques may be used. Early on, the unifying vision would point to a human culprit who cast a spell on the community. In later, more civilised times, the victim would be a bull or a goat, and the laying or transfer of blame or “sin” onto the animal would be deliberately affected by the ritual process itself. Either way, the resolution of the crisis through the sacrificial act — the catharsis — called for the victim to be killed.
The feast: the elimination of the victim produces a feeling euphoria. It’s now time to celebrate. There is no celebration without a feast, and the food is usually the body of the victim. The benevolent magic of catharsis, its blessing, is absorbed by eating the victim’s flesh. There may be celebratory dances and music.
The universality of ritual arises from the universality of the sacrificial crisis. Humans anywhere on the planet had the same crises and thus the same ritual solution to them. Over millennia of cultural evolution, the original blueprint of ritual mutated and diverged into countless varieties. It did so by emphasizing one stage or aspect at the expense of another. Dissimulation of violence was at the heart of the ritual from the beginning, and it continued over time, constantly twisting and hiding aspects of the original violence.
Rituals generally become less violent over time. Human sacrifices get replaced by animal sacrifices. Simulations of violence become gentler. The mythological narrative softens the truth of violent origins and begins talking of trickster gods and demons acting mischievously and receiving slaps on the wrist from higher gods. Then, some of the five stages are altogether dropped. Finally, we reach a point where music, barbeques, or sports have become standalone things, and their origin in the sacrificial ritual can only be dug up by anthropologists.
Now, let’s finally talk about what psychedelics have to do with all this. You will appreciate that producing an effective ritual is a choreographic challenge. The presiding priest needs a powerful experience to shake your village out of a crisis. He can’t just get everyone to show up at the ritual grounds on a Tuesday morning and wave them through the motions. It won’t be convincing. No one will buy it.
No, you need to make the experience pop. You need fireworks! You need trance and ecstasy. Only then will the revellers believe that something special happened, that spiritual powers got involved and solved their spiritual problems. So how do you do that? How do you induce these extraordinary experiences? Why, drugs, of course.
We can assign an emotion to each of the five stages of ritual outlined above: confusion, aggression, mania, fury, and euphoria. There’s surely a drug to enhance each one of those emotions. However, I would single out the manic stage as the most amenable to common hallucinogens and psychedelics like cannabis and psilocybin.
The manic stage is the most important and the hardest to execute. It is the psychic climax of the ritual. It is when the monsters, spirits, or gods are supposed to manifest themselves. Out of this mania, the participants need to arise in a unified vision and coalesce from an undifferentiated mass to a unified mob ready for the sacrificial act.
One can see how a choreographed use of psychoactive substances, in combination with masks, music, colours, darkness, fire, smells, etc., can induce spiritual epiphanies, and how, with suggestive and hypnotic techniques, the priestly masters of ceremony can have the whole crowd agree on the same articulated vision. So, already, the archaic priest needs to master the “set and setting” that today’s psychedelic users talk about as essential for having an effectual “trip”. The priest could manipulate these to induce both the malevolent visions of black magic and the euphoric visions of catharsis and deliverance. The intensity of the overall epiphany and the consensus around it would be the direct measure of a ritual’s success as a cultural technology.
Understanding the effects of all the psychoactive substances out there and their potential use in ritual is beyond the scope of this article and my experience. Casually, I could observe that even wine, combined with a powerful set and setting, might be quite effective in inducing mania and rage as well as euphoria. The sacred status of wine is abundantly attested in the ancient records around the Mediterranean.
The historical evolution of the use psychoactive substances parallels that of the ritual. From their use in the collective archaic ritual as described above, drugs find their use with shamans and medicine men performing exorcism and cures. It’s quite clear that shamanistic rituals of individual exorcism parallel the collective exorcism of the five-stage archaic ritual. With Ancient Greeks, we get the onset of medicine as a standalone, desacralized endeavor. Yet, the notion of pharmakos – the polluting element that is both the poison and the cure – remains central to it and harks back to the human and animal pharmakoi of archaic times.
In shamanism and indigenous medicine as described today, the shaman uses a psychedelic drug to “access the spiritual world,” “get in touch with helping spirits,” and “expel negative spirits,” etc. Lot of these rites still involve a blood sacrifice like slaughtering a rooster in Voodoo, pointing once again to their descent from the five-stage ritual. Westerners travelling to the Amazon for ayahuasca healing sessions participate in an indigenous ritual that involves ritual priming for visions that, as much as they vary from person to person, tend to involve a common “female spirit” of the drug.
The last links in the historical chain are the psychedelic hippie movement of the 1960s, and the ongoing scientific research on the ability of psilocybin and like substances to enhance neuroplasticity and rewire our brains in ways that make us overcome past trauma, cure depression, increase energy, etc. We can see that the latest medical jargon is analog to its historic precedents. What to Andrew Huberman are traumatic experiences or addictions, to a Siberian or Amazonian shaman are evil spirits and demonic possessions. Rewiring the brain is the new exorcism.
Modern visions of monsters have changed but they too are analog to the old ones. The mind constructs monsters and visions from ordinary impressions. The archaic man hunted and observed animals, so his monsters were chimeras of various animals or humans and animals. The modern man obsesses over science and technology, so his monsters are cyborgs and aliens.
The key difference, as I’ve argued in The Modern Malaise, is that premodern men were naïve enough to exorcise their demons through violent sacrifice, whereas the moderns are left to medicate indefinitely and traffic in conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theories can be thought of as abortive attempts to move from the manic stage to the sacrificial act. A group of initiates sees the monsters plaguing the community. They agree on their vision amongst themselves but have trouble selling it to others. The mania of conspiracy theorising, like ritual mania, is associated with the use of hard drugs. Joe Rogan is the poster boy for it. He loves to get stoned, and he sees astounding visions. He loves to bring on guests who share them.
There is a tremendous sense of communion and relief when you and your buddies see the same visions. While an archaic village would be able to reach such a consesus, and eliminate the monster – some local hunchback or albino – the modern man can’t. How do you eliminate the Jews or the aliens? The first one has been tried only to fail catastrophically; the second is technologically unfeasible. The manic stage continues indefinitely, fuelled by copious amounts of hard drugs.
One day, Rogan Joe, one day everyone will see the alien spirits reveal themselves on Earth and save freedom and democracy.
In the next post, I will discuss what kind of sacred reveals itself through psychedelics, and in the post after that, through Girard’s anthropology.