Ayahuasca Oracle of the Dead Challenges Social and Personal Cohesion

Guest article by Edmond Furter

Author of Mindprint (2014, Lulu.com); Stoneprint (2016, Four Equators Media); and editor of Stoneprint Journal (Lulu.com). Visit www.edmondfurter.wordpress.com / www.stoneprintjournal.blog / www.mindprintart.wordpress.com

Ayahuasca visions have an apparently ‘exotic’ pedigree, vary with place and time, and have uncertain individual outcomes, posing the triple allure of a social challenge, a gamble, and a test of personal strength. Oracles of the dead are one of the rites of coming of age, taking personal stock, and quest or grand tour in every era and every culture (see other articles on Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Biblical, Indian Mayan, Medieval, Religious, Hippie, Rap and Apocalyptic oracles). Aya visions conjure many characters and episodes that recur in all cultures and cults (see the typology list in the extract on the archetypal structuralist anthropology model). The source of culture, cult, and our quest for self-integration, is archetype. We do not ‘invent, diffuse, accumulate, change or remember’ culture or psyche.

Ayahuasca is one of the drugs and gymnosophic (bodily) crafts that prompt visions of life and death, heaven and hell, culture and cult, in surreal mixtures. Trippers may encounter a god recognisable from a myth, or spies, goons and sexy temptations from psycho-drama movies (Traveler 2009). Trippers have little control of visionary episodes, yet there is as much underlying natural order in Hyperspace characters and motivations, as there is in its geometric and biological textures. McKenna (1989; New maps of Hyperspace) noted the need to map our subconscious landscape. Some websites invite reports for collating and comparison (see DMT Times Manifesto). These extracts note some aspects of physical, ritual and Gnostic preparation for the trip (see Gilgamesh, Osiris, Odysseus, Eleusis, Pandora, Vedas, Endor, Macabre, St Anthony, Princess Antonia, and artwork analyses in other articles).

The archetypal structuralist model reveals five layers of predictably recurrent features in collective and individual subconscious behaviour, that offer a map of Hyperspace, perception, culture, nature, and archetype itself. The journey to maturity poses many physical, spiritual and social risks and hazards, multiplied and sped up in the apparent quick fixes of war or necromancy. Yet we need to separate the living and the dead, and ritualise any breaches in the great divide between life and death. The Tibetan Book of Life and Death (Book of the Dead, Bardo Todol) offers prayers to guide living and departing souls to safely cross the Shadow land of startling masks and monsters. The philosophical, Gnostic and psychological ideal is to understand and tame Ego, Shadow, Anima /Animus and Inner Self, and to avoid getting stuck or lost in the subconscious.

War game Call of Duty version Three cover art (after Wikia. Archetype labels and axial grid by E Furter). Three characters in the left margin are cropped off here, but shown in earlier versions. Later versions delete some characters at top right.

In this version, type 10 Teacher is eyeless, expressed by a rifle muzzle instead of the more usual staff of quest or balance. In battle scenes without a female character, type 11 Womb is usually expressed by a vehicle or container, here by the bayoneteer’s ammunition pouch. Type 13c Head is character 13-14’s hand grenade. Structuralist layers are subconscious to artists and viewers.

Kill culture v death cult

Our innate impulse to divide, rule, demonise and kill ‘others’, is legitimised by competing polities and nations. Mainstream Divide and Kill culture sustains big defence budgets, news headlines, and game addiction (Gervasi et al 2017). But Divide and Kill culture, and its creeds of ego, elite ops units, spies and glory-or-death gamble, prompts counter-cults of defection, gangs, gurus and oracle. Dissent serves our innate impulse to measure peace, spiritual competence, maturity and meaning, against ultimate ethics and gnosis. Oracles of the Dead invoke the Great Equaliser to seek justice against physical might. They offer to conjure ancestors and enemies; gamble or bargain with heaven; perhaps ruin hell; judge self and others; rescue the righteous; purge the querent and society; and live to tell the tale.

Our exploding population entrusts our resources and fates to ever larger polities, under more distant leaders; against ever larger and more distant, demonised enemies. Populist, fundamentalist socio-economic politics reduce identity, humanity and meaning itself to stereotypes (Winnicott 1968. Zoja 2009. Pergola 2010. Sideli et al 2018. Giunta et al 2018, citing Jung 1916, 1975). As our institutions grow larger, they trade in shorter terms and lower levels of material and spiritual aspirations; and offer justifications, recognitions, escape mechanisms, projections, and mild penalties for excesses. Patriotism is an addictive habit.

Ayahuasca tours and suburban cells worldwide is our current oracle of ghosts, apparently offering a shortcut to the long quest for integration via outer and inner Egos, Shadows, Animas and Self. But anthropology demonstrates that necromancy requires as much strategy as war. The eternal quest starts in apparent darkness, by the light of subconscious logic. ‘Enlightenment is not from imagining figures of light, but from making darkness conscious,’ noted Jung (1945). Even rational post-Roman, Western culture recognises that Inner Self, collective subconscious, and utopia, lie beyond Ego, Shadow and Anima, in the realm of angels, gods and archetypes. Getting there requires quest, judgment, and purge of a vault of repressed, unsocial, unbalanced, un-integrated, supposedly ‘externalised and outsourced’ health and environmental debit.

To tip the environmental and economic scale in favour of the necessary global co-operation, Giunta et al (2018) propose self-knowledge to “expand our visions of interaction, and configure a common living space to share gifts and privileges.” We strive for national utopias as perceived in the former Indus Valley (Pakistan), India, China Chou or Djou dynasty (where philosophers formulated natural structure into the I Ching or Jee Jing archetype oracle), Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. But some eras in the Mideast, Europe, and Easter Island, demonstrate that living hell is our default condition. It would take more than education, popular psychology and leadership to tame the inherent greed by which dominant cultures degrade global quality of life.

We divide and rule ourselves by re-styling the same behaviour to look like different ‘cultures’; and by layering each ‘culture’ into classes. We rally against ‘foreigners’ while our sheer numbers demand global economy, as the EU recognises. We may need supernatural masters or ‘alien’ enemies to enforce collaboration and recognise our single human culture in its guises of different stylisation and branding. Astro-physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson mused that discovery of alien life could make us one tribe (Colbert; Late Show 2019 October). But Tyson agrees with most scientists both are unlikely. Star Wars is more probable; simply scaling up the theatre of our greed, and sustaining the physical motivations that impel and distract us from the ultimate task of self-integration. There will be wars and an oracle of the dead on the moon and on Mars too.

Kuniyoshi Utagawa; Ghosts, 1850. A samurai fights snakes, conjured by a ghost before Heian court women ancestors (after Wikimedia. Archetype labels and axial grid by E Furter). Artists express about 60% of known archetypal features; in the standard sequence; with character eyes (including a heart and a womb) on the axial grid. Type 2 Builder is a Samurai (hero), fighting (twisted) snakes (cluster), in a court (building) of ghosts (ruin). 14 Mixer is a ghost (transform, angel), far from the centre (egress). 15 Maker is a ghost rising (rampant), wounded face (face), conjuring (sceptre) snakes (reptile). Structuralist layers are subconscious to artists and viewers.

Behaviour and meaning by numbers

Raising subconscious behaviour to conscious understanding requires a map of perception and meaning itself. Since ‘the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name,’ as Confucius noted about BC 400 (Traveller 2009), we should identify the content of recurrent behaviour to find its source. These extracts cite motifs identified in legends, by their Aarne -Thompson -Uther (ATU) catalogue numbers (after Uther 2011). The ATU list still excludes major myths, and is Euro-centric (Le Quellec et al 2019). But these extracts also cite motifs in art and myth worldwide, by their archetypal or mindprint numbers and labels (see the list in the article ‘Ayahuasca artists also express universal meaning’ on DMT Times, or in articles on www.stoneprintjournal.wordpress.com).

We subconsciously express sixteen clusters of features, attached to characters which have their eyes or focal points on an axial grid (Furter 2014; 2016; 2018 journals available on Lulu.com). Death and oracle features in cultural media often express two axial opposites, or flip sides, in one; such as 5 Priest or Ritual, versus 13 Heart or Death. This 5v13 axis frequently interchanges their features, indicating that integration of opposites is inherent to ritual, oracle and death themes. Oracle themes also often express the four transitional types (2c v9c, 5c v13c) and four galactic features (4p v11p, 7g v 15g). The goal of the late anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to translate cultural structure into formulas, is now realised in the archetypal model, which offers a natural, mathematical and unbiased basis to study culture.

War types and oracle types

Persistent motifs in afterlife quest myths, reveal the archetype and source of Death cults as a cluster of meanings, including death oracle (Grateful Dead legend, ATU catalogue number 505; archetype 13c Basket Head); and reincarnation (ATU E600 -E699; type 12 Heart or Inverse); and hat, lid, weave, tree or time. These features, often cited in Hyperspace ‘tour’ reports (Mc Kenna 1989), are now identifiable and measurable as part of archetypal structure.

Mainstream Divide and Kill culture has a cluster of repetitive features. ”An average American youth sees 200 000 violent acts on TV before age 18,” (AAFP 2019). ‘Action’ series body counts run over 20 per episode (Funeralwise 2019). Shakespeare demonstrated the limitations of virtual tragedy in his play Titus Andronicus. War ethic is grand tragedy, but in entertainment it is dumbed down to panoramic voyeuristic violence, thinly justified by revenge for an ancestor (ATU E200 -E599; type 12/13 Heart or Death, inversion, weapons, war, water-work, or angel); or territorial gain; or uncertain peace (such as the Cold War); or a vague ‘license’ to kill. Culture and counter-cult remain within the bounds that eternal archetype lays down for matter, energy, nature, behaviour and meaning itself.

EDMOND FURTER, AUTHOR OF MINDPRINT (2014, LULU.COM); STONEPRINT (2016, FOUR EQUATORS MEDIA); AND EDITOR OF STONEPRINT JOURNAL (LULU.COM). VISIT WWW.EDMONDFURTER.WORDPRESS.COM AND WWW.STONEPRINTJOURNAL.BLOG