The Dream on the Rock: Visions of Prehistory

4. Origins of Psychedelia

4 Origins of Psychedelia Peter Webster The Most Human Universal The search for evidence that human tribes and societies throughout global history have used psychoactive plants for religious, shamanic, philosophical, and medical purposes has met with great success. Publications citing such evidence come from an entire spectrum, from drug-use oriented screeds to the most conservative of scientific journals . The ultra-respectable Scientific American Library Series counts among its handsome and lavishly illustrated volumes its Plants, People, and Culture—The Science of Ethnobotany, and devotes an entire chapter to plants that have been used for “Entering the Other World.” A world map shows clearly just how universal psychoactive plant use has been, the historical locations of use of a dozen of the major plant species being shown across the globe.1 The science of anthropology has not always been at the forefront of such research, however, and still today some of the reigning paradigms of the discipline reveal a willful ignorance of the importance of psychoactive use in the evolution of human societies. Many examples could be cited, but one especially concerns us here: the still-ongoing “nature versus nurture” debate, which, as we will see, has allowed anthropologists to ignore psychoactive plant use as a mere curiosity , or worse, as a perversion or degeneration of a supposed original “drug-free” shamanism. 83 84 / THE DREAM ON THE ROCK Anthropological paradigms of the twentieth century have vacillated between “nature” and “nurture” as the prime cause of human behavior: whether it is culture or genetic inheritance that influences behavior the most strongly. In some professional circles the proponents of “cultural relativism” had slowly gained ground to the point of flatly denying that anything like a universal “human nature” need be considered important for theories of human behavior. It was an attempt to relegate notions of human nature to the realm of “folk psychology ,” an attempt not alone among many other twentieth-century efforts to “clear the decks” and make of science something more precise and absolute, uncontaminated with certain negatively perceived characteristics of nineteenth-century science. And then there arrived on the scene a revolutionary little book entitled Human Universals. Its author, the anthropologist Donald E. Brown, argues that not only do universals exist, but they “are important to any broad conception of the task of anthropology.” Brown immediately takes the offensive to explain how anthropology had taken a wrong turn: [T]he study of universals has been effectively tabooed as an unintended consequence of assumptions that have predominated in anthropology (and other social sciences) throughout much of this century. From 1915 to 1934 American anthropologists established three fundamental principles about the nature of culture: that culture is a distinct kind of phenomenon that cannot be reduced to others (in particular, not to biology or psychology), that culture (rather than our physical nature) is the fundamental determinant of human behavior, and that culture is largely arbitrary. This combination of assumptions made universals anomalous and very likely to be rare; to admit or dwell upon their existence raised troubling questions about anthropology’s fundamental assumptions. These assumptions also led many anthropologists to conclude or argue that anthropology should be narrowed from the study of humanity to the study of culture.2 While the final definition of a human universal may still be in a state of flux, Brown provides us with sufficient guidelines in his book so that we may apply the concept to our present endeavor. An ORgINS OF PSyCHEDELIA / 85 important point is that although a human universal may have its roots in human biology, it is above all social and cultural in nature, and not merely trivial and physiological as some had claimed. Brown’s published list of universals is a thought-provoking list indeed, and includes a wide range of human behavioral characteristics. Some seem to be inherent in human nature and biology, while others are “cultural conventions that have come to have universal distribution.” Of particular interest for us here is this one: “Mood- or consciousness-altering techniques and/or substances.” Here, I shall claim that this is one of the most important, perhaps the most important and the very first of all human universals. I should like to alter the definition of the universal a bit, however , to designate what must be its fundamental: it must be that the seeking of non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSCs) is the universal, and methods to do...