“If psychedelic therapy embraces animism it can do wonderful things” says star anthropologist Dr Luis Eduardo Luna

Mention an interest in animism and most folk’ll think you’re holding a seance.

It’s become a fancy term for the kind of ‘spiritualism’ where a Madame Xanadu type supposedly relays messages from beyond the grave… with wildly varying degrees of authenticity.

Trivia buffs might extend their apocryphal knowledge to animism being an early religion where pretty much everything – the sea, your spear, that sabre tooth tiger over there – had a spirit essence dwelling within it. They probably got it from anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor who wrote in 1866, ‘the theory which endows the phenomenon of nature with personal life might perhaps conveniently be called animism’ in an article with a title that’d come back to haunt him… Religion of the Savages.

“Animism is not a religion, or a philosophy”

Tylor did actually challenge convention at the time by pointing out that the tribes were no less intelligent per se: but their civilisation, such as it was, hopelessly backward.

You may be unsurprised to learn that most the above displays a grasp of animism that is loose at best.

“I’m not idolising Amerinidian cultures; there was human sacrifice,” said Dr Luna in the question and answer session after his keynote at this year’s Philosophy of Psychedelics conference, “huge festivities alongside people waiting to be burned.”

But swotting up on animism seems sensible, considering it’s the guiding ethos of the people who’ve been using psychedelic medicine for at least 4000 years longer than we have.

If western psychonauts can get to grips with animism, despite our “impoverished worldview” as Dr Luna puts it, the advantages to psychedelic therapy will be significant, he claims.

And we may be able to arrest the climate crisis. Plus even halt the dreaded Anthropocene. 

“Animism is not a religion, or a philosophy” says Dr Luis Eduardo Luna, who was born in the Amazon and first drank shamanic yagé with Terrence McKenna in 1971.

Dr Luna’s lecture climaxing Vital’s therapy-focussed training module was packed with guidance for modern-day western practitioners the anthropologist brewed up from the historic psychedelic rituals of South America and beyond.

“Once you re-connect with the world, you know are never alone”

The religion of many Amazonian tribes is… actually a syncretic christianity, and they combine animistic principles with catholic worship in their ceremonies. The translated lyric sheets of Maria Sabina’s LP contain artfully improvised prayer mixed up with references to her local ecosystem. Syncretic combinations of animism and christianity have been recorded since 1930 and are thriving today.

Animism is instead a practical path for successful interaction with your environment, “Entirely based on experience,” that urges a “non-conceptual relationship with the natural world. Once you re-connect with the world, you know are never alone,” whispers the man who brought Pablo Amaringo and ayahuasca art to the West.

Before you think this is all sounding a bit vague and maybe there’s a Zoom lecture coming up about it that you can check out, “it’s not based on a book, or a doctrine,” cautions the anthropology expert.

Vital lecturer Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner, who worked as a guide on Imperial College’s landmark PsiloDep 2 trials, has studied the effect of traditional ayahuasca use on mindfulness and cognitive flexibility. While presenting the results to the MIND Foundation in 2019 Ashleigh used meditation as an example of a skill that is better learned by practice – direct experience – than via spoken explanation.

Animistic tribes prize directly acquired knowledge so highly that they don’t have schools. Formal education nonetheless has existed for millennia. The tribespeople never stop learning, and they do have teachers. These are plants (and fungi). Guess which ones? A 4000 year-old fossilised San Pedro cactus, for example, was found in a dig near Lima, Peru. Ayahuasca the concoction is only around 250-300 years old, but its cousin Caapi much older.

You know exactly what those plants and fungi have to say about ‘reconnecting to the world’ don’t you? Plus how good they are at giving you advice (most of the time, after careful reflection)? 

Remember too that veteran psychedelic therapists stress the pretty much total importance of first hand experience, not only of the medicine itself but the guide process in particular. More on that over in this week’s Space Holding section.

Connecting to nature, community and self is apparently key to psychedelic therapy’s success. Luna says a ‘non-conceptual relationship to nature’ is intrinsic to animism too. The ‘lived experience’ of our relationship with the natural world is starkly apparent in the environmental crisis, no matter how many ‘theoretical’ arguments that it doesn’t exist there are. Me weeping over the David Attenborough film with the turtle wrapped in plastic bags while carrying on smearing the same carbon footprint is a ‘conceptual’ relationship with nature, not a real one.

Recently, some of us in the West who fancy ourselves as adventurous have been re-learning the importance of a (non-conceptual) relationship with nature with the help of the same plant and fungi teachers that have been used in the Amazon for 4000-plus years. In the past we’ve found a load of other useful stuff we found lying around the place. Like cotton, rubber or the majority of medicines we use and food that we eat. Which the inhabitants told us about after we beat the shit out of them.

“If you feel lonely go outside. Look at the grass growing between the paving stones in your street”

Hence the weary attitude heading from that direction. “Europe was simply a peninsula of Asia in 1492 when Columbus landed. Power in the region was centred on the Middle East,” mulls Dr Luna mischievously in his presentation to Vital students. He even rolls his eyes at western understanding that man is ‘disconnected’ from nature. In fact, according to Luna the situation’s far worse. “We are narcissists,” he says, “my gut is teeming with bacteria – of course I am connected. But we look only within ourselves. If we were to have silence: no radio, advertisements, vehicles… the answers will come.” 

Luna's animistic life hack for the western condition? “If you feel lonely, go outside, look at the grass growing between the paving stones in your street.” Doesn’t appeal much to your dopamine receptors? Unsurprisingly so perhaps, because as Luna explains “the most essential lesson is re-enchantment with the world,” an appreciation of the moment, also a favourite subject of our plans and fungi teachers. Less enamoured are, as Dr Luna puts it, “The people with the habit, the black one or the white one, it is difficult for them.” Sounds like it might be tough for anyone to get their heads around let alone psychic gatekeepers like the the clergy and clinicians. 

“Selfhood does not apply exclusively to humans. How arrogant an assumption”

Help explain please Andy Letcher, high-level druid and author of Shroom a definitive history and analysis of psilocybin-based fungi. “It’s about building a relationship with place,” Letcher told Graham Hancock’s son Luke on a podcast for funky Japanese set-up the Kakuichi Institute, “really listening to the world around you in the wider sense. Get close to any plant, meditate next to a tree, and you will feel it.”

Animism urges respect for the natural world, to the extent that man is a humble part of it alongside not only “the river and the jaguar,” but also “the bee people and the ant people,” as Dr Luna calls our six-legged friends during a keynote presentation about his Wasiwaska psychedelic nature reserve at Exeter University’s 2022 Philosophy of Psychedelics conference.

Indeed the beaches of nearby Cornwall, Dr Luna points out, are ‘animistic’ and would be ascribed a ‘spirit’ too, one that represents the combined effect of sea, wind, tide, pebbles, crabs, grasses… and humans.

Importantly, “Selfhood does not apply exclusively to humans, how arrogant an assumption,” advises Dr Luna. Instead according to animism we’re part of an ‘ecology of selves’ symbiotic to the environment.

It works both ways. “Any sentience is worthy of respect,” says Dr Luna and mankind has certainly done well out of stuff he’s found lying around over the centuries. In the Amazon especially, as it happens. The better we do by it the better it’ll do by us. In general, that is. One of the lessons of life’s direct experience is that some thing are simply bigger than us, and this can develop self-compassion to soothe more challenging emotions like loss.

“Animism is entirely based on experience”

Being a dickhead to another human on the beach in Cornwall would probably cause a ruckus, right? Applying animism to the beach scenario, being a dickhead to anything – anyone – up to and including the pebble people (maybe beyond) causes a degree of disharmony. And from disharmony, not singing in time, comes disenchantment, a lack of meaning, purpose, and belonging.

Through lived experience we learn, sometimes bitterly, that we’re not the only things that might cause disharmony, or spread it. It teaches us ways to hone our own vibration, to just the right pitch.

Usually. Because we are not as important as we think we are… another pet subject of the plant and fungi faculty. 

We don’t like to accept that we aren’t, though. And we’ve dreamed up ways to avoid any lived experiences that might remind us we’re not. I initially made a long ranty list of these to publish here, but let us all instead ponder our own myths of avoidance and denial. For inspiration, Luna quotes Davi Kopenawa, a shaman from the Yanomami region where gold mining has caused mercury levels in unborn babies to rise by nine times. “His is a sort-of ‘reverse anthropology’,” says Luna:

‘White people call us ignorant because we are other people than they are. But their thought is short and obscure. It does not succeed in spreading and rising because they prefer to ignore death. They constantly drink cachaca and beer, that overheats their chests and fills them with fumes. This is why their words become so bad and muddled. We do not want to hear them anymore.

They do not dream as far as we do. They sleep a lot, but only dream of themselves. Their thoughts remain blocked in their slumber, like tapirs or tortoises. This is why they are unable to understand our words.’