SWIMMING IN THE SACRED: WISDOM FROM THE PSYCHEDELIC UNDERGROUND

In this book the psychotherapist Rachel Harris carries out in depth interviews with some fifteen long term underground psychedelic women guides in the US. She soon discovers that they are definitely not psychotherapists like herself. She calls them ‘warriors’ because they need to remain under the radar since the variety of psychedelics they use is mostly illegal. These women are willing to take enormous risks in their chosen path. Harris calls them shamans and priestesses, often comparing them to the priestesses of the ancient Greek Eleusinian mysteries.

Even though Michael Pollan in his best seller How to Change your Mind took psychedelic mushrooms under one such woman guide, he had to remain silent about her identity. Much of his book is about the scientific renaissance in the study of the therapeutic effects of psychedelics. In the literature about the latter, these women mostly disappear altogether. Many of them told Harris that they want their perspectives to be included in the psychedelic renaissance. This book goes a long way toward fulfilling this goal. Harris often points to the difference between these underground women guides and the university researchers who are mostly new to the world of psychedelics, whereas the women underground guides have taken different psychedelics for self-healing during many years and for them their path is a life-long commitment.

About half of them apprenticed to indigenous shamans whether in the Amazon basin or among Native American tribes in the US. Their apprenticeship and healing have typically taken years, even decades. However, several of them apprenticed with luminaries in the US such as Stan Grof, Ralph Metzner or Leo Zeff. Although Carl Jung’s descent to another world and his encounters with different figures there were not caused by consuming a psychedelic, the experience itself is sufficiently similar to that with a psychedelic to warrant Harris labeling his colleague Toni Wolff, a woman guide. This woman sat with him and received his communications about what he experienced in those descents, many of them recorded in his posthumous Red Book. Wolff and Jung together developed the technique of “Active Imagination”. Like Jung, all the underground women guides received guidance from unseen realms such as plant teachers, ancestors, angels, and other unknown entities. Harris also quotes Henry Corbin and his notion of the “mundus imaginalis” which she understands as Corbin’s effort to overcome Western man’s too rigid real/unreal opposition while giving credence to the reality of the imaginal. Harris also sees Corbin’s mundus imaginalis as a response to the modern divorce between thinking and being.

Harris insists on the marked difference not only between psychedelic researchers and the women underground guides but also between the worldview of the guides and that of the medical and psychological model focusing on the wellness of the individual and used primarily for the reduction of symptoms. One of her interviewees, whom she calls Charlotte, has this to say: “The (plant) medicines want us to wake up to our inherent connection as part of nature, to stop the destruction threatening our own extinction” - a theme running the length of the book. Another difference Harris lingers on is the women guides’ understanding of the entheogens as a compelling encounter with death leading to its greater acceptance.

Harris reports on her own ayahuasca experience where she learns greater flexibility in her psychotherapeutic work through learning to surrender mental control. This involves an erasure of her boundary achieved by “ayahuasca infiltrating my inner space with great refinement.” This act of ‘infiltration’ takes place mostly through the icaros - the shamanic songs – entering her body directly. She credits her own work with this entheogen for achieving greater efficacy in her work as a psychotherapist. She asserts that Western cultures have yet to create a safe and sacred container for entheogens, one that conduces to sustainability as well as to reciprocity with the natural world by inducing a permeability between the inside space of the person and the outside world. Harris insists that the process of recognising divinity within oneself – often birthed by the entheogens – is the reflection of the divinity outside.

The experience of ego dissolution is often referred to by the women underground guides as well as by Harris herself. She ends her book by emphasising the connection between this ego dissolution and a merging with nature from which emerges more generosity toward humans, the other-than-humans as well as with living and non-living nature, emphasising that we need to hear from such women guides more than ever.

Having myself participated in ayahuasca ceremonies for close to thirty years in the Peruvian Upper Amazon and having been closely involved in the initiation by discarnate beings of my ‘heart son’ in our non-profit center there, I recognise all those transformations Harris describes leading precisely to the outcomes she writes about. There is, however, one area in this book that surprises me by its absence. She mentions more than once the absence of a sacred container for these entheogenic experiences; however, she remains silent on the result of the historical eradication of the mostly women healers during what has come to be known as “the burning times” from approximately the 15th to the 17th century. During these times entheogens were considered diabolic by the church, both the Catholic as well as the newly minted protestant ones.

These two Christian churches disagreed on just about everything and erupted in violent civil and international wars for a century and a half. However, they agreed on a single issue, namely the need to eradicate shamanism and related entheogenic practices. Those were finally successfully eradicated by their respective inquisitions by the end of the 17th century, an eradication that had a deep influence on the shape taken by the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th century. The European peasantry - where entheogenic practices were common - as well as the literate occult philosophers shared a worldview known as Anima Mundi that blended Christianity with entheogenic practices. This worldview disappeared along with the practitioners of entheogenic healing and divining and with it any sacred container in modernity for entheogenic practices. It is no wonder that most of these underground entheogenic guides were apprenticed to Amazonian shamans or to native American ones.

For a more sustained exposition of this point see my book with Randy Chung Gonzales Initiated by the Spirits; Housatonic, MA; Green Fire Press:2022.