January 2017

Varieties of Ritual Involving States of Consciousness 

Article by Ralph Metzner published in the online journal Confluence

 

Ritual is the purposive, conscious arrangement of time, space and action, according to specific intentions. In working with psychedelics rituals are the conscious arrangement of the set and setting. In this essay I discuss, for comparison, the rituals associated with drug consumption in general; the rituals of everyday life; institutionalized rituals in academia, religion and the military; healing and therapeutic rituals in Western medicine and indigenous shamanism; rituals associated with peyote, mushrooms, San Pedro cactus, ayahuasca, iboga in traditional and Western hybrid shamanic ceremonies; rituals of divination; rites of passage in transition and initiation ceremonies. 

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