Reconsidering Context in Psychedelic Research: Rituals as Ancient Libraries of Knowledge
Journal of Scientific Exploration February 11, 2023 Heather Lutz 1 citation
Psychedelic research is gaining public and private attention, but most studies focus on clinical settings while ignoring the ritual context in which indigenous peoples have used entheogens for millennia. This manuscript conceptualizes entheogenic spiritual rituals as ancient libraries of healing knowledge. It contrasts the biomedical diagnosis-and-treatment model with the ritual context, identifying explicit and implicit ritual attributes that may contribute to healing. The paper argues that cultural assumptions favoring mechanistic causation lead to a dismissal of ritual context in psychedelic studies. It proposes alternative research design philosophies and suggests that viewing spiritual rituals as ancient libraries could generate hypotheses currently blocked by scientific bias.