The Supernatural and Psychoactive Experience in Indigenous Rituals

Mystical connections between native tribes, Star People, and the Bufo alvarius toad

Midjourney AI: A vibrant gathering of indigenous people from various tribes across continents, while a Bufo alvarius toad sits prominently in the foreground

This is an excerpt from Sky Gods and the Recipe for Immortality: The secret influence of psychoactivity over science, society, and the supernatural.

Native rituals across continents have often been catalyzed by psychoactive substances with supernatural results. High strangeness in human society occurs near-universally despite vast cultural and geographical differences.

For many tribes, the supernatural phenomenon is quite natural. Or as the heretical Harvard psychiatrist John Mack once noted:

“I have been looking at this phenomenon as it manifests in indigenous people, in Native Americans — the Cherokee, the Hopi, who know these beings as the star people. We’ve looked at this in South Africa, particularly in interviewing in depth a leading South African sangoma, or medicine man, who calls these beings mandingdas…

We’ve investigated it in Brazil with a farmer… I received a letter about abduction experiences from a person in Malaysia today. In other words, this is — as far as we can tell — a worldwide phenomenon. This is not restricted, as some people have thought, to Western or particularly…