The Pros & Cons of Spirit Possession
(Or, What The Psychedelic Mainstream Needs To Learn From Jung, Depth Psychology And Ecstatic Religions Before They Really Screw Things Up.)
This is the first in a series of articles called Revisioning Psychedelic Therapy, exploring what the current medical models for psychedelic therapy get wrong and what they could (and should) learn from depth psychology and spiritual traditions that are well-versed in working with ecstatic non-ordinary states of consciousness and archetypal energies.
TL;DR: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, mindfulness and a few talk therapy sessions just aren’t going to cut it.
It was toward the end of the ceremony when it happened.
We’d been dancing and singing for over six hours, positioned in concentric circles around the central altar, men on one side, women on the other. I was in the outermost circle with the rest of the non-initiated visitors to the church when all of a sudden I was filled with a great and powerful energy that I intuitively knew was the spirit of Saint Michael, the great archangel who led God’s army in the battle against Satan. I felt myself grow to over seven feet in height and had a vision of giant wings opening up from my broad, powerful shoulders to envelop the entire group in a circle of protection. I was no longer Brian, the middle-aged medium-sized human who had issues with social anxiety and asserting myself. I was Saint Michael.
I can’t remember what we were singing when this happened, but by the time the hymn was over I’d shrunk back to my normal size and stature, wings withdrawn, feet on the ground. Although the possession didn’t last long in our sense of linear time, it left me with an indelible felt sense of my potential to embody a kind of positive divine energy that is in service to protecting and preserving the highest values in life: Harmony, Love, Truth and Justice.
This extraordinary experience took me by surprise but it wasn’t completely unexpected given the circumstances. I’d been in ceremonies with Jesus, Mother Mary, Buddha, Yemanja and other entities of both the high and low order. I remember one ceremony where a young man was incorporating some kind of primordial lizard being, and I spent a lot of time maintaining an energetic shield around myself as he slithered, slurped and growled his way around me, seemingly looking for a way to take over my body — something I definitely didn’t consent to.
Contrary to what you might be thinking, I don’t see this kind of behaviour as problematic, because it’s happening in a context that provides a safe and well-boundaried container for these types of archetypal energies to be embodied. When the ceremony was over, the young man stopped being possessed by the ancient Lizard King and went back to being just a nice young American guy again. I didn’t walk around for weeks afterwards thinking I was Saint Michael sent back to save humanity from the forces of evil, but I did retain a bit of the renewed confidence and sense of purpose that I felt when I was Saint Michael. When this kind of archetypal possession happens within a ritual designed to contain and regulate these powerful energies, it’s not only not problematic, it can be deeply healing.
It’s only when archetypal possession happens outside the ritual context that it becomes a problem. Over the past decade or so that I’ve been working with ayahuasca and counseling others who are engaging with psychedelics for their own healing and growth, I’ve seen enough cases of out-of-control grandiose inflation to make me curious as to how and why this happens, what we can do to guard against it, and how we can help to bring the person (or ourselves) back down to Earth when it does happen.
The Santo Daime church in which I had these aforementioned extraordinary encounters uses ayahuasca as its sacrament and has a long history of working with mediumship. Since its inception in the Brazilian Amazon during the 1920s they’ve (excuse the pun) incorporated teachings from traditions much older than itself — like Spiritism and Umbanda — in order to create a safe and secure container for ritualized spirit possession.
Jung’s Theory of The Self & Archetypes
In my quest to better understand these kinds of experiences, I entered into a deep investigation of cultural anthropology which eventually led me to the work of Carl Jung and his students. Jung was first and foremost a scientist whose extensive study of world religions and mythologies led to the forming of his theories on the Collective Unconscious and Archetypes. He concluded that within each of us there is a deep, inherited psychological structure that has developed over millions of years of human and primate evolution that he called The Self, or, alternately, “the two-million-year-old human within” — a reference to the bio-psycho-social nature of this structure.
Within the greater structure of The Self are multiple energetic patterns of potential that influence and shape the way we think, feel and behave. He called these energies Archetypes because they are primal blueprints carried in our DNA that have been expressed in different ways depending on the time and culture in which they emerge. For example, there are examples of The Great Mother archetype in every culture since the dawn of time. Likewise, we can find expressions of other archetypes such as The Hero, The Warrior, The Sacred King and The Great Lover throughout all the world’s religions and mythologies. The scholar of comparative religion and mythology, Joseph Campbell did the Western world a great service by expanding Jung’s work on archetypes and making his theories relevant and accessible to laypersons, most notably in his PBS series with Bill Moyers called “The Power of Myth.”
In my view, psychedelics have the potential to take us into the deep unconscious level of our psyche where these archetypal energies are most directly accessed, just like when we dream. The difference is that we’re awake while it’s happening and able to interact and identify with the archetypal energies, as in cases where the psychedelic dreamer “becomes” a serpent, jaguar or eagle. While these energies get expressed most commonly as psychedelic visions, if the psychedelic is strong enough to dissolve the usual defenses of the ego, we can become totally possessed by an archetypal energy.
There’s A Time & Place For Spirit Possession
As I said before, within ritual contexts like the Santo Daime and with proper mediumship or shamanic training, archetypal possession can be profoundly healing. It can give us direct access to positive potentials that we’d previously been cut off from due to factors like family and cultural conditioning or trauma. However, if not properly contained and worked with, these archetypal energies will potentially leak out into the ordinary waking life of those who engage with psychedelics, causing everything from full-blown psychosis (“I am God”) to less severe but often persistent psychotic delusions (“I speak to God”) to mere narcissistic grandiosity (“I am a god-like person”). This is all waaaaay more common that the psychedelic evangelists would have you believe.
The Santo Daime has a few guardrails in place to protect its members from what I think of as psychedelic-induced grandiose inflation. The first is the ritual structure itself. Every ceremony begins with the group reciting a number of prayers to consecrate the space and reiterate the intention for the work. An example of this is the prayer called Consagração do Apresento or “Consecration of the Space”, translated from the original Portuguese:
In the perfect communion between my lower self and my Higher Self, which is God in me, I consecrate this space to the perfect expression of all divine qualities which are in me and in all beings.
The vibrations of my thoughts are the forces of God in me, which are stored here and hence radiated to all beings, thus establishing this place as a center of giving and receiving of all that is Good, Joyful and Prosperous.
This prayer, like many of the prayers and hymns in the Santo Daime, reinforces the position that we are merely vehicles for the divine energies and that our job is to channel them in service to the highest good, which is expressed through the values of Harmony, Love, Truth and Justice. Cultivating an attitude of humility is an inherent part of all well-designed and well-functioning ecstatic rituals. There’s a good reason why everyone gets into the sweat lodge by crawling on their hands and knees.
Another guardrail is that there are specific rituals or particular times within the ritual that are set aside for spirit possession. I’ve participated in ceremonies that went from full-blown Voodoo-style spirit-possession chaos to mild-mannered Christian order in a matter of minutes. If people do get out of hand (which happens on occasion), there are folks designated as Guardians who’ll politely take the person outside in order to not disturb the rest of the ceremony while they work out their demons.
There are other more subtle guidelines in place that guard against grandiosity. For one, proselytizing is strictly forbidden, so the kind of inflated post-revelation evangelism that’s so common after someone takes psychedelics for the first time is (mostly) avoided.
Another guideline is that you are discouraged from talking about your visions and revelations with others. There are no “post-ceremony integration sharing circles” that are de rigueur amongst modern neo-shamanic and psychedelic-therapy groups. I’ve been in enough of these circles to know that they can encourage and affirm ego-inflation and contaminate the group with grandiose ideas. An example of this is the “Ayahuasca told me” meme as justification for all kinds of misguided or outright bad decisions, like deciding to quit your job and become a shaman yourself. Grandiose inflation is infectious. It’s one of the reasons why successful cult-leaders and celebrities are so often of the manic type.
Jungian analyst and teacher Robert Moore emphasizes this point in his lecture on Mythology of The Great Self Within (1993, Chicago Jung Institute):
“It’s extremely difficult for us human beings to regulate our states of excitation in relationship to this grandiose energy that we run into.
Say you’ve had a mystical experience and you tell this to a group of people that respond extremely enthusiastically to it. Your psyche is in danger at that point. Why? Because the attention stimulates the continued expansion of this experience of the Great Self. The word “inflation” that Jung uses is a good one, because it’s like being blown up with hot air or helium, or hydrogen. If you see manic states, it’s people that are mainlining this stuff.
Therapists that don’t have any assumption or knowledge about any of this (archetype) stuff know that if one of your clients gets into a lot of display behaviour you have to be very careful how you respond to it. That is, if they get into very exhibitionistic behaviour and you respond to it in a way that’s not aware of how it’s likely to burgeon — if you respond too enthusiastically to it — then you may find yourself driving your patient into a hospitalization because you responded too enthusiastically to an exhibitionistic display.
There are many therapists that don’t have any idea of the grandiose energies in the human psyche that are waiting to be overstimulated.”
Rethinking Psychedelic Terminology & Current Clinical Models
The fact that these God-sized archetypal energies exist in the human psyche and that psychedelics are so effective in potentiating and inflaming them, is cause for ensuring that there are ritual structures and leadership in place that are capable of containing, contextualizing and regulating them. The sort of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and mindfulness-based approaches being utilized in current psychedelic therapies are just not equipped to properly deal with psychedelic-induced grandiose inflation. We need, at the very least, psychedelic integration counselors and coaches who are familiar with, and well-studied in, depth-psychological models that account for extreme and mild states of archetypal possession.
One simple way we could start is by reconsidering the term “psychedelic”. The term psychedelic is a compound of the Greek words psyche and delos and means “revealing the soul”. However, because the term was originally coined by a Western psychiatrist within a medical context, it’s usually mistranslated as “manifesting the mind”. The Western medical establishment has no place for things like “soul”, “spirit” or “God” so it’s no surprise that this mistake has (consciously or unconsciously) been perpetuated since the term was coined in the 1950s.
Another lesser known Greek-rooted term for psychedelic substances coined in the late 70s by Greek scholar and expert on Dionysian ecstatic ritual Carl P. Ruck is entheogen, which means “producing God within”. Although entheogen accurately captures the numinous quality of the psychedelic experience, it inaccurately suggests that it’s the substance which produces the “God effect”, rather than simply allowing us to access what is already inside us. One only has to look at dreams, waking visions, and the well-documented and common varieties of mystical experience available via meditation, prayer, breathwork, dancing and chanting for proof that the archetypal energies are already and always active within each of us. We simply need to get out of our rational, materialist heads to touch into them.
Perhaps a better term for these substances is entheodelic, which means “revealing the divine within”. It might seem like a small thing, to haggle over terminology, but I believe that our language shapes the way we perceive and engage with the world, so having an appropriately respectful and reverent attitude toward these substances starts with having a term for them that recognizes their true power and potential.
I want finish by making the argument that if we, as modern civilized people, are going to engage with these powerful entheodelic substances responsibly, then we must carefully study the spiritual and psychological traditions that have worked with archetypal energies for generations, and (perhaps most importantly) look to living ritual elders for guidance in developing safe, effective and integrative holistic models for psychedelic therapy — ones that don’t leave the soul out of psychedelics, or the God out of entheogens.
Thoughts on this article? Email me at hello@brianjames.ca
