Speaker: Kenneth Proefrock, NMD  When Mircea Eliade wrote the classic text with the same sub-title in 1951, he was writing as a historian of religion, synthesizing the approaches of psychology, sociology, and ethnology to study the figure of the ‘shaman’, at once magician and medicine person, healer and miracle-doer, psychopomp, priest, mystic, and poet. In similar fashion, we walk back through Eliade’s work and draw out the botanical agents that have been used worldwide as plant allies and inducers of altered states of consciousness by the people that Eliade described as ‘Shamanistic’. We will discuss current and historical uses of the traditionally ‘shamanic’ Siberian plant allies tobacco (Nicotiana spp) and Amanita muscaria as well as the similarly employed Native American plant allies Haemia salicifolia, Salvia divinorum, Ephedra spp, Trichocereus pachanoi, Sophora secondiflora, Datura spp, Ipomoea violacea, and Anadenanthera colubrina and peregrina.

Related product: The PowerPoint for this recording is available here: 2022 Medicines from the Earth Herb Symposium Book Download (PDF)

  Also available in video (for purchase separately on Vimeo).

Continuing Education:

Naturopathic Physicians: This recording has been approved for 1.5 General CME 

• Oregon Board of Naturopathic Medicine (OBNM)