Hallucinogenic Ritual and Theater
| An Excerpt from Hallucinogens: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (University of New Mexico Press, 1984) reprinted with the kind permission of the author |
Hallucinogenic Ritual and Theater
An Excerpt from
Hallucinogens: Cross-Cultural Perspectives
(University of New Mexico Press, 1984)
reprinted with the kind permission of the author
Anthropologists interested in hallucinogens and culture have often remarked privately upon the expressive elements in the hallucinogenic drug experience. These aesthetic elements have been reported in societies all over the world, from simple hunter/gathering people, pastoralists, and incipient agriculturalists, to members of ancient civilizations and folk segments of nation states. Cross-cultural expressive and theatrical dimensions of hallucinogenic rituals, as well as their instrumental functions, are important to consider.
The internal thespian flavour of an hallucinogenic journey can hardly be sensed by the casual observer. Intrinsic to the drug effect is the power of the plant to evoke expressive experiences equal in force and drama to the best theatre available anywhere. Unlike the urban theatregoer, however, who find his way to a physical structure called a theater, in which actors give life to a script which another person has created in imitation of real events, the hallucinogenic questor experiences an entirely different genre of drama. In such rituals, the imbiber is actor, playwright, stage director, costumier, make-up artist -- even musician. Fast-moving, brilliant kaleidoscopes of colors, forms, patterns, and movement more exotic than most individuals ever see in normal waking consciousness, are produced entirely from within the individual's psyche.
My colleague Fred Katz and I have suggested that sudden access to the unconscious by means of hallucinogen ingestion, despite the aesthetic and expressive dimensions possible, is dangerous for human beings. Psychodynamically oriented researchers stress that the emotional response to such entry is displayed by the nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, tachycardia, and high blood pressure of the participant. Our early work pointed out that music, with its implicit structure, provides a substitute psychic structure during periods of ego dissolution. According to this hypothesis, music functions not merely to create mood within the drug setting. The shaman-guide creates - just as a stage director might - a corpus of music whose intrinsic structure provides the drug user with a series of paths and banisters to help him direct his visions during the actual experience, instead of becoming disoriented by the change in ego structure, anxiety, fear, and somatic discomfort brought on by the drug.
Shamans with whom I have worked claim that the music created during the drug experience provokes specific and highly valued drug visions. For example, music may evoke access to a particular supernatural entity, or permit a vision which displays the source of witchcraft, suggest contact with ancestors, and so on. During most hallucinogenic drug ritual, there is little physical activity, although a few exceptions are recorded. Participants tend to be quiet and contemplative. However, sensory stimulants are consistently employed. Natural odors and plant perfumes, colorful body decorations, and tooth darkening are found. Percussive music is universal. Tactile stimulation comes from the close proximity of participants in group rituals, or from exorcism-like rituals of laying on of hands.
These rituals may be valuable because they provide a catharsis. Drugs work by creating an emotional abreaction similar to that felt by a Western audience who might witness a well-staged, well-written piece in a theater. Ludwig (1969) described the salient somatic and psychological effects associated with altered states of consciousness, many of which readily lend themselves to dramatic form. Especially in the area of emotional expression there seems to be a continuum of effects--the heavens and hells alluded to by Huxley (1954) in The Doors of Perception. Moreover, abreaction -- a releasing of psychic tension through the acting out of a repressed traumatic experience -- causes an appropriate emotion or effect to be felt by the individual, even when psychotherapeutic dynamics are not programmed into the hallucinogenic experience by a shamanic/priestly guide. Aristotle argued (1961:9) that the aim of tragedy was to purge pity and fear: "The praxis that art seeks to reproduce is mainly a psychic energy working outwards." This commentary from ancient Greece can be illustrated from my work with ayahuasca (various Banisteriopsis spp.) in the Peruvian Amazon. In this setting, men and women sought the hallucinogenic experience to obtain visions, during which they saw before them the events of their bewitchment which they believed led to the onset of the diseases or misfortunes they suffered. The visions were the catalyst for shamanic ritual intervention, which signaled imminent cure through retribution directed toward the perpetrator of the evil.
This Amazonian psychic drama, without doubt, has been ritually reenacted elsewhere since time immemorial, inasmuch as throughout human prehistory illness has been thought caused by supernatural means (see Ackerknecht 1971). In those areas where plant hallucinogens have been used for healing, antecedent cultural variables in the form of specific beliefs provided the material from which interior scripts were designed (Dobkin de Rios 1975).
One additional area of interest to this discussion concerns the role of synesthesia, the experiencing of one sensory modality as another. Shamanic guidance of such experience entails staging these interior dramas in natural settings with the use of a variety of odors, sounds, visual cues, and tactile aids to enhance the hallucinogenic effect. This aspect of synesthesia contributes to the overall dramatic effect of the drug experience.