What Every Shamanic Healing Tradition Has in Common

So I'm just going to talk about, you know, about 13 of the case studies briefly.

One year we're basically looking at the mushroom traditions of central Mexico by Gonzales Mariscal, Guzola, Martinez, Osiris, and Maria de Carmen Marcil.

And so these are basically common traditions that we know a lot about Maria Sabina, not as much about the Nahua traditions.

Basically, they have these practices.

You have purification beforehand, steam baths, abstaining from sex sometime for up to weeks, and fasting.

And what you eat is very restricted in terms of foods.

And then it's a nighttime ceremony and preferences in nature.

And the context is familial and community.

It's not the patient going to see the doctor.

The family and friends are going with this person.

All of these practices emphasize the songs, the sacred language, the music, the chanting, the whistling as part of this melodic envelope that at times is seen as really being even more important than the entheogen itself.

And then the dancing, the percussion, the whole kind of musical accompaniment.

to the visionary experience, and then the idea that these are diagnostic visions.

They tell you what disrupted your balance in life, and more importantly, how to restore it, what it is that you're going to do to get back to a state of well-being.

And this may be seen by the patient or the healer, or likely in a combination between the two of them.

The patient divulges, the healer comes forth with a vision of how to resolve it.

And the conditions that they address is just, you know, the whole spectrum from physical illnesses, emotional illnesses, psychological problems, social conflicts, a whole range of things we might call magical, you know, witchcraft, sorcery.

You bring it, we can deal with it.

This is a way to reorganize your life around what's afflicting you.

And the integration, if we want to use that concept, is important.

Seclusion, you stay away from strangers, you stay at home, you stay with your family, no sex, no alcohol.

You work on understanding what it is you need to do to change your personal behaviors, how it is that you are interacting with the world.

A couple papers here, one about cannabis, Santa Rosa, presumably African import, is clearly not understood exactly how cannabis ended up being incorporated about 250 years ago into the Otomi.

And then the morning glories, the virgin seed, widely used across Mesoamerica, sometimes as an alternative to psilocybin when it's not available.

um sacred you know hantarosa special diet sexual abstinence and work the healers working on the emotional state and here they eating the cannabis not smoking it okay and right ritual not well there's a lot of different kinds of rituals but the ones mostly focused on individualized kind of healing rather than collective healing nighttime ceremonies with family and community And you've got the sacred songs.