dial a shaman

  https://pen-online.com/culture/an-encounter-with-the-last-shamans-in-japan/

HALF A CENTURY ago, as archaeologists worked in the wooded Pavlov Hills of the Czech Republic, they made a remarkable discovery. During the excavation of the Upper Paleolithic site known as Dolní Věstonice, they found a pair of shoulder blades from a mammoth. The bones had been placed so as to form the two sides of a pitched roof, one of them leaning against the other. Beneath them was a human skeleton, and in the earth that covered it and on the bones themselves were traces of red ocher. The body had been painted red before it was laid to rest. If nothing more had been found in this grave, it would have added little to what was already known about Ice Age peoples and their customs. During the Upper Paleolithic, corresponding to the final years of the Ice Age, about sixty thousand years ago, people already had the same anatomy as modern human beings. In Eurasia, most of them lived not in caves but in the dark coniferous forests and wide-open steppes that lay beyond the reach of the gla...

  CIA experiments, Mormon ravers and reformed racists: the untold history of MDMA | Drugs | The Guardian

  https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/may/22/a-new-start-after-60-i-had-my-first-psychedelic-experience-at-68

  Exploring how the hallucinogenic substance in psilocybin mushrooms works on the molecular level (phys.org)

  The big idea: should doctors be able to prescribe psychedelics? | Drugs | The Guardian The big idea: should doctors be able to prescribe psychedelics? A move to allow Australian psychiatrists to treat depression with psilocybin may herald a new era Farrah Jarral Mon 10 Apr 2023 12.30 BST S o-called magic mushrooms (those that contain the molecule psilocybin) have been used by people around the world medicinally and ceremonially for a very long time. Rock art in Kimberley, Western Australia, that depicts mushroom-headed beings, suggests people were using them 10,000 years ago to attain trance-like states. Strikingly similar images have been found in the Sandawe paintings of eastern Tanzania and in the Algerian Sahara. Now, after decades of these hallucinogenic fungi being consigned to the grubby margins of legality, humans appear to be rediscovering their benefits. From July, authorised psychiatrists in Australia will be permitted to prescribe psilocybin to patients with treatment...

  https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/stoned-ape-return/