Can Drugs Help to Heal Your Spiritual Wounds?

There are ancient tribal traditions, which have used hallucinogenic drugs in spiritual ritual as a means of invoking the Wisdom of the Ages.

The tribal shaman- often a ‘two-spirit’ (LGBT person) would imbibe the liquor obtained from soaking certain macerated roots or seeds in spring water and then enter a trance state- walking between the worlds of the mundane and the divine! Stories told of these spiritual journeys would offer the tribe guidance in times of uncertainty. The shaman was venerated and respected for undertaking this dangerous ordeal.

There are cultures today in South America and East Africa, which use elaborately extracted plant alkaloids (psycho-active substances) to induce epiphany-like states during tribal rights of passage.

For example the roots of two Amazonian rain forest plants are used to make the drink used in the sacred Ayawaska ceremony of South America. Shamanic healers supervise an induced hallucinatory state, which may be accompanied by energy cleansing vomiting. Participants later report an intense and unique spiritual experience. There is the sense of communing with the divine with profound and life changing consequences. In recent years an industry of Ayawaska tourism has materialised for westerners looking for a fast track to spiritual enlightenment experience.

Another example is the use, by Western Central African peoples, of small fragments of the Iboga plant root bark in spiritual ceremonies, learned from pygmy forest dwellers, to promote radical spiritual growth, stabilise community structures and resolve pathological problems. There is now a growing awareness in the west of how the prolonged hallucinatory experiences which often evoke past events in a participants life may have the potential to cure the spiritual starvation state symptomatic of western drug dependency culture.

Mainstream gay culture seems to have got its knickers in a twist over sex and substances. Repetitive sexual arousal and psycho-actives swallowed like smarties have been sold as the birthright of the post-guilt era pervert. We have opened the flood gates and the result has been an outpouring of a hitherto deeply repressed need to express our queer natures. But without the framework of a guiding spiritual context we are left with a sad, bloated yet undernourished feeling.

Radical Faeries today are reclaiming their roles as tribal shamanic healers. They are experimenting with the use of plant based entheogens (substances capable of internally generating a sense of oneness with spirit) in the context of pagan ritual. Moving away from the exhaustingly repetitive and empty habits of sex and recreational drugs as a means of temporarily escaping the banality of everyday existence, they are finding ways in which Joy comes through the ritual practice of Sex, and the judicious use of, among other substances, Alcohol, Tobacco, Coffee, Tea, Mushrooms, Callamus Root and Morning Glory Seeds.

This is spirituality, Jim, but not as we have known it! You can become a part of this revolution. Check out the Euro Faeries and dare to attend a gathering at Featherstone Castle in Northumberland or Folleterre in Eastern France. I look forward to seeing you there!