Old stories often reveal the value of elders who can help to temper the overly ambitious, ego-driven flush of youth.
Like fire, if you’re playing with psychedelic medicines, or anything filled with a power beyond your control, it's best to learn from those who’ve been around a while–people whose hands maybe have a few burn marks from their own experiments gone awry.
The tale of the sorcerer’s apprentice–iconically represented in Disney’s Fantasia with Micky Mouse as the eager apprentice–is a story most of us know in our bones. It describes how a young apprentice begins meddling with powers he doesn't truly understand, and sets off a series of events he is unable to stop.
The first thing that occurs in the story is that the initiated elder (the sorcerer) leaves the room.
For most of us living in modern Western culture, true elders are hard to come by. In the world of psychedelic therapy, many of our elders are slowly fading into the twilight of their years, or already waiting gleefully for us on the other side.
We may find them living a humble life of ceremony near Mesa Verde or the Rio Ucayali, far from the glow of city lights. Perhaps this drought of eldership accounts for why so many modern psychedelic explorers find themselves in remote Indigenous communities in search of a teacher. This was certainly the case for me.
Wherever the elders are, the sorcerer’s apprentice story tells us what can happen in their absence.
The young apprentice looks around, see’s the elder’s vacant seat, and believes himself ready to claim it as his own. Because of this void of genuine leadership, he is drawn to claim power that he has not rightfully earned. He claims authority without the authenticity to back it up. A person who lives in such a way is like a tree with no roots: sooner or later, it’s going to come crashing down.
Robert Bly referred to this pervasive trend as the sibling society: a contemporary cultural condition whereby people who are young in body or spirit look to each other for guidance because the ritual elders are nowhere to be found. It’s not just the blind leading the blind: it’s the uninitiated initiating the uninitiated.
In many Indigenous cultures, becoming the village healer or shaman was not a job people wanted. This difficult position might have entailed a childhood illness or spiritual burden that left them isolated or misunderstood. Ancestral spirits might demand things of this person, which could lead to a life on the margins of society, away from the troubling eyes of the village.
One’s community could just as easily celebrate you for healing their sick child, or blame you for that very sickness, whispering behind your back a word met universally with fear: witch. There is a reason that the shaman lives in a hut at the edge of the village. It wasn’t a glamorous gig, and was understood to be just as much a burden as it was a blessing.
One did not eagerly claim the title of shaman or healer. It claimed you.
In the Shipibo tradition, a qualified onanya, or ayahuasca healer, spends years in isolation in the jungle, sacrificing what little material pleasures they might otherwise enjoy in order to complete many painstaking plant dietas. The onanya-to-be forgoes sex, salt, sugar, alcohol, oils, and most human contact–all things which bring us pleasure– in order to learn directly from the plant spirits they seek to make a binding pact with.
Fasting, cleansing, and ceremonial work are all elements of the Shipibo dieta, which is aimed at stripping down one’s mind, body, and spirit sufficiently enough to establish relationship with the spirits of certain plantas maestras, or teacher plants. This cannot happen without a severe tempering of the ego and its pride–energies that the Shipibo would identify as cruzado, or misaligned to the energies of the plants. To cross a plant during a dieta is a serious misstep that can result in sickness, madness, and even death. Immense sacrifice was, and still is, a foundational aspect of this process.
The Shipibos–not immune to pride themselves–understand the multilayered function of the dieta. They often refer to the “cleaning” that occurs during ceremony and the dieta. While there is certainly a level of physiological and somatic cleaning that occurs through drinking ayahuasca, there is an equal if not greater depth of psychospiritual purification that the dieta facilitates.
The end result is that the person undergoing this experience is (ideally) prepared to relate to their newfound power in a grounded, mature way. Having engaged in just a few months of this practice myself, I can personally attest to the immense difficulty and sacrifice it requires.
Nothing about a dieta is easy or Instagrammable.
In the Native American Church, there is no training program to become a road man and lead an all-night peyote ceremony (as far as I know). While I can only speak from what I’ve heard and observed around this way of life, here’s what I understand: one puts their time in, slowly learning through proximity to elders within the tradition. Putting on just one peyote meeting requires countless tasks which are often imbued with many layers of cultural, ancestral, and spiritual teachings.
There are often stories attached to why things are the way they are, which is also the responsibility of the road person to know and transmit as they see fit. Becoming a road man or woman is a process that takes years and levels of devotion that are difficult for me to even comprehend.
My understanding of these roles is superficial at best. But from what I’ve observed being around even just a handful of Native American Church ceremonies, the responsibilities of a road person are immense. They must learn how to prepare the firewood, how to build and manage the fire, how to move the coals into their proper shape, how to put up the tipi in its correct form down to the most minute detail. They must learn how to prepare the medicine, how to sing the songs for different parts of the ceremony, how to work with both positive and challenging energies and spirits, and how to see what is occurring in the ceremonial space itself. They must master each ritualistic step of the all-night ordeal until finally they receive their “altar” or “fireplace” from an initiated road person and elder. These are only a fraction of the outer responsibilities required to be a road person.
The Native American Church is as much a way of life as it is a spiritual community, and a symbol of the perseverance and strength of Native peoples. It is also a living example of the time it takes for someone to authentically step into a ceremonial leadership role in an authentic and community-driven way.
In the “psychedelic renaissance,” where anyone with a handful of mushrooms and an Instagram profile can fashion themselves as an elite shaman, the tradition of the red road has much to say about what true leadership means.
Being “told by the plants” that one should serve psychedelic medicine is not a legitimate path to leadership in any Indigenous medicine tradition I have ever encountered. Claiming the title of guide, healer, or (god forbid) shaman without any contact with elders or mentors is a symptom of living in the sibling society.
We all must proceed with caution.
This is an excerpt from a chapter in my upcoming book, Psychedelics & The Soul: A Mythic Guide to Psychedelic Healing, Depth Psychology, and Cultural Repair (coming out Fall 2024).
If you liked what you read, please consider sharing this article, subscribing to my free Substack, leaving a comment, and sharing with your friends.
I’ve definitely encountered my fair share of “the plants told me I’m meant to be a shaman” types in my own wanderings so I appreciate the cautionary statement. Coincidentally, I recently passed over a copy of Bly’s book and made a mental note to explore the meaning of ‘The Sibling Society’ and then your blog post arrived. Love synchronous stuff like that.
awesome