Psychedelia and the Outside: the shaman’s pharmacy

Abstract

In this essay I seek to present the meaning of psychedelia as something that goes beyond mental dimensions, questioning precisely the “psi” character – also brought in the form of altered consciousness – as a central element for thinking about the experience involved. To this end, firstly I highlight the ascetic vocation of philosophy – from Plato to Descartes – based on the critical positions of Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida and Denise Ferreira da Silva. The search for “transparency” involves a pure consciousness and, therefore, a repulsion towards pharmakon. However, it has never been possible to achieve “consciousness” without the help of “external” artefacts: writing, or pharmakon, is the term that crosses the oppositions between pure and impure. After, I contrast the shamanic experience with the psychedelic experience, presenting a comparative counterpoint based on symmetrical anthropology and spectrology that allows us to think about shamanism – thought from The Falling Sky, by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert. While white people “only dream about themselves”, the shaman forms an alliance with the “master plants” in order to trigger a journey towards the Exterior, and not towards a repressed, mystical or hallucinatory interiority.