Psychedelics and Magic with Julian Vayne

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Julian Vayne.

Julian is a British occultist, psychonaut, and author known for his work in chaos magic, entheogenic spirituality, and modern paganism. He’s the author of several books including Getting Higher: The Manual of Psychedelic Ceremony, and is co-organizer of the Breaking Convention conference in the UK.

We touch upon topics of:

• Julian’s background and path to psychedelics and magic (00:50)
• Magic as “the technology of the imagination” (05:06)
• Aleister Crowley’s psychedelic rituals and Julian’s first LSD experience (05:59–09:48)
• Navigating psychedelics using magical frameworks like Hermetic Kabbalah (07:27)
• Language around drugs, medicines, and entheogens (08:23–09:19)
• Placebo effect, imagination, and healing (29:57–30:27)
• The Western magical tradition and its roots in Egypt (20:06–22:06)
• Hermes Trismegistus and the Hermetic tradition (22:26–24:40)
• Magic vs. religion and the self-experimentation of spiritual practice (24:40–25:39)
• Using ayahuasca for spiritual gifts and personal transformation (26:45–29:27)
• Spirit animals, ego inflation, and spiritual humility (33:43–34:29)
• Do people have specific spiritual gifts or all of them? (35:27–38:17)
• Spirits and animism explained through real-world analogies (39:36–44:22)
• What shamans do and how they interact with spirits (44:22–47:42)
• Lost European shamanic traditions and their traces today (47:42–52:38)
• Saunas, altered states, and ancient European heat rituals (53:06–57:46)

If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats go to http://www.lawayra.com

Find more about Julian Vayne at http://www.julianvayne.com or on social media @julianvayne. Also check out the Breaking Convention conference and their YouTube channel for more of his work.

Transcript

Julian Vayne: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com. One of the things about magic, like taking ayahuasca, you have to take the ayahuasca. You have to take this potion and you have to put it inside yourself. It’s about a practice. It’s about a technique. How do we use these plants to make the brew? Although it might be within a container of a religious movement or a particular retreat setting or whatever.

It’s also deeply personal. There’s a tension, I think, between sometimes religious beliefs, where I wanna say to you Sam, you don’t have to do any of your own self-inquiry. Here is a book. Here is my interpretation of this book, and this is all you need to run your life, right? This is what you basically need.

Whereas what magical processes tend to do is they’re very much about how can I make sense of the world for myself? How can I do this experiment in order to explore spirituality for myself? And there’s no more obvious a way of doing that self experiment than to take a powerful, mind altering substance.

Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast, as always with you, the whole Sam Leaf. Today I’m having a conversation with Julian Vain. Julian is a British occultist writer and OT known for his work in chaos, magic psychedelics, and modern paganism. He has written extensively on esoteric topics, including ritual, magic and genic spirituality, and altered states of consciousness.

One of his notable books is Getting Higher, the Manual of Psychedelic Ceremony. In this episode, we talk about connection between magic and rogens. What is magic placebo effect? Western magical tradition, Hermas, where does the world abracadabra comes from? What are spirits? What is animism, dri tradition, spiritual gifts, and so much more.

Enjoy this episode. This episode is sponsored by Laira Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Laira, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you, Julian, welcome to the show.

Julian Vayne: Sam. Thank you very much for inviting me. It’s a pleasure.

Sam Believ: Julian, before we begin, tell us a little bit about yourselves for people that don’t know you what you’ve been up to and what brought you to this line of work?

Julian Vayne: Okay, so briefly i’m a 56-year-old white working class cis presenting man from the British Isles. And I have always been interested in magic for as long as I can remember. If we are being poetic about it, we might say that it was a vocation or reincarnation memory, or we might be less poetic and say that I have a neurological disorder, which meant that right from the, as young as I can remember, I was fascinated with this subject of altered states of consciousness with the edges of human experience with magic.

So I spent my childhood doing all the stuff that children do, but also learning as far as I could from books and from any pieces of information I could pick up. All kinds of things. So I started meditating. I started doing fairly haphazard form of forms of yoga, and by the time I was in, I was, I guess I was like 10, 11, I started encountering literature, which is about ceremonial magic.

I became involved in a Wiccan coven when I was 16 and then had the opportunity over the course of the next 10 years to be quite involved in the Pagan community, in the British Isles. I published a zine which was quite a kind of an extensive kind of project. We are doing a thousand copies a month at one stage.

And I have the opportunity to work with lots of different people from lots of different kind of lineages and styles of magical practice. And then about, I don’t know, 30 years ago, I guess it is now I started making or suddenly encountering people from the Americas entheogenic practitioners who were starting to find their way over to other parts of the other side of the Atlantic.

And so I had the opportunity to work with a number of different kind of practitioners from those kind of lineages in Europe. And. My kind of involvement with psychedelics continues. So I’m a co-organizer of breaking convention, which is the largest, and I like to think the most diverse psychedelic conference in the British is that’s coming up in April of this year.

I’ve worked as a research participant in EEE experiments in the British Isles. I did a couple of years ago extended state DMT which is quite interesting at Imperial College. And I get brought in to do lots of teaching on this because I come from a, I’m not a, I’m not a researcher, I’m not an academic and I’m not a clinician.

But the magical tradition what academics call the western magical tradition, which is my sort of starting point has a strong lineage with using plants in particular to alter consciousness. So that’s me. Basically. I’m an occultist who finds that the things I was interested in as a child now are suddenly things that lots of people are interested in.

And it turns out that there was a whole lineage from the Americas who were also doing other stuff, which is very similar that I got to encounter. Yeah. And a number of decades ago. Now that’s more or less it. Sam,

Sam Believ: thank you for the description. It’s interesting that for you, it seems that you were into magic first and then it brought you to work with antigens.

And for a lot of people, and myself included, the psychedelics and plant medicines were first and then later after some healing has been done, then the magical side of things have became more prominent. So as I like to say, for me personally, and he might disagree, but like ayahuasca is as close as it gets to magic and like real life.

How did how did you discover the antigens? I know, drugs, medicines, whatever you call it. And how has it affected your understanding of magic or your ability to do magic? And I wanna talk about magic.

Julian Vayne: Okay. So I guess, where we’re going is talking about, what magic is or possibly more interestingly, what magic does.

So rather than it being a thing, we might think of it more as a process. Briefly while we are there, I, my working definition of magic is that te magic is the technology of the imagination. So it’s the ability to use the imaginative space. Which can definitely be a space of delusion and confusion, but can also be a space which allows us to sometimes in quite remarkable ways, transform aspects of ourselves and our relationship with the world.

And sometimes even the, what appears to be the external world, let’s call it. So it’s the technology of the imagination. I first encountered psychedelics through reading people like Alistair Crowley, but Anta k Crowley is famous as an occultist who use drug. But in fact, most oc Cultists historically have made use of mind altering substances.

Crowley is not actually that unusual. And reading books about Crowley. People are familiar with his use of things like opiates and cocaine and so on, but he also was one of the first people to make use of peyote. So peyote comes into European culture in the la latter part of the 19th century, and Crowley is using both peyote and then an extract masculine fairly early on.

He’s run, he ran psychedelic rituals between 1907 and 1917, like regular psychedelic rituals. He’s one of the first people to have done this, so he’s very much part of my kind of lineage, if you like. So I knew about this stuff and of course I’d read things like, all this Huxley and so on.

And then, i’d, as I mentioned, I joined a WIC and coven when I was 16 and I started practicing group ceremonial magic. I’d already done a number of years of meditative and other practices before that, and then I had what we could call a youthful misadventure. So I accidentally took far too much acid because I didn’t know how big acid was.

And someone had given me some, and I thought it was two doses, but it actually turned out to be eight doses. So I just ate all these things and had a very intense and quite experience of some duration. But what was interesting in that was that I found I was able to navigate the experience because of the other magical work that I’d done previously.

So all the other kind of preparation, all the other kind of work with altering consciousness, I guess also practices like one of my kind of internal maps, if you like, is the hermetic Kabbalah, so the Hermetic Tree of Life. So the, its Origins and Judaism and then is transformed and used in the Western ACO tradition.

And it was that internal map that helped me navigate my way through this experience of taking a, a substantial dose of LSD. And I guess at that moment it was like I thought, oh, I see there’s magic, there’s, all the kind of different ways of changing awareness and all the different techniques.

But one of the critical ways, one of the ways that I became passionately interested in was this use of, again, antigens, plant medicines, drugs, all of these words. I like, actually, when I wrote Getting Higher, one of the things I deliberately did was to use lots of different words to refer to these things, because I think if we get stuck too much in, oh no, we don’t take drugs, we just have entheogens and they’re these sort of spiritual and elevated and animism and blah, blah.

That’s great. That’s also true. But I think that one thing that can happen to us is if we get too locked into one description, sometimes we miss. Aspects of reality. We’re only looking through one, one lens. So I like to use sometimes the word medicine, sometimes the word drug, sometimes the word entheogen.

And to vary those things. So I guess for me it was like I encountered magic. I had this very powerful psychedelic experience. I found that the magical techniques both allowed me to navigate it, but also that for me it was like, this is not quite a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle. ’cause I knew it was there.

That was the reason that I’d, that I’d I’d read all this stuff from other writers and the reason I’d got the acid in the first place. But it was like, okay, this is a really strong, powerful engine for transformation. This is this is the, the a-list type way of changing consciousness.

And of course it’s by and large. Fairly reliable. You can do lots of meditation, you can do lots of ecstatic drumming or dancing or whatever. And sometimes you’ll get into these kind of profound and different states of awareness. But the thing about a substance is that it has a degree of repeatability.

And also I think that there’s something to be said for the fact that it’s a physical substance as well. It’s like an external thing. It’s like you going into a relationship with the world with this material. And I learn the deeper our relationship with that material, whether we cultivate it or we grow it, or we forage it, or, whatever.

And as we take it multiple times, we develop this relationship with this other spirit, this other experience. So yeah, I guess that’s in summary the backstory.

Sam Believ: Yeah. No it’s a great answer to the question. If you would’ve said magic to me maybe five years ago and I would say it’s either you’re talking about a magic trick or you’re crazy, right?

And I went to Alaska, for example for healing from depression. Spirituality wasn’t the part of my interest. And it gradually became, because it’s inevitable with with the work of plant medicines. And also, so by saying spirituality, I mean like spirituality and also anything esoteric or abnormal or supernatural.

And that started with me having a ceremony where medicine told me I can heal people with my hands. And I was like I’m an engineer by trade. I come from a very non-religious place. I was like, this is crazy. But then it worked. Like it, it literally worked anytime that I would do it when the medicine would tell me it actually worked.

So that kind of made me, put me on that path of learning. And regarding wording when people come to our retreat I always say, sorry to disappoint, but there are not gonna be any drugs served during this upcoming retreat. And there, and and it puts, puts it in the perspective. So I think it’s not correct to I also don’t wanna be that person that you say oh, I was as a drug and then you get offended, then we start fighting.

It’s like you miss the point, right? But at the same time, wording is also important because if you say we’re gonna be working with the medicine, and you then create this container of healing, everyone is okay, this is medicine. I’m here to heal. And it changes their experience. But if you say Ioas is a drug, I personally will not get offended.

Just so you know. I don’t know. That was just my. Comments on your previous answer? I know if you, if there’s anything you wanna say and I can go to the next question.

Julian Vayne: No I guess for me it’s about having a degree of fluidity with the language that we use and also our understandings about the world.

You said, I was an engineer, I had this kind of rational way of understanding the world, even that’s quite funny. You and I know that if we start philosophically teasing apart, what do you mean by rationality? What do you mean by the real world? Like all these concepts they’re rather like trying to grab hold of water, we have these kind of cultural fictions that exist that, only crazy people see spirits or only people who mentally deranged in one way or another have these kind of encounters or have these things happen to them. And that’s simply not true. It’s simply not the case. The, the mythology of in the sense of untruth in this instance the kind of story that we get told that, culture is this sort of rational pacing thing is far from the case. And I think that there are so many ways of demonstrating that really quite clearly. So I think that both in terms of the language that we use for things and our ways of understanding the world, I like to have a kind of quite fluid open-minded way of, someone tells me about an experience that they had.

They did, they took some medicine, they took some myos, something like this. They had this encounter. There’s no there’s very little value, at least at the, in the initial part of that process, me saying you do realize this is just something in your own mind, don’t you? Frankly, this conversation is just something that’s happening in my own mind in the sense that it’s all being modeled internally.

You know that if you look around the world, things in with depth perception. You close one eye, you still see things with depth perception, even though you’ve only got depth perception relies on binocular vision. So a lot of stuff is built in our mind, and the imagination is one of the, the elements of that.

I think that there’s, we, I think we’re at this sort of po interesting point in, in many cultural spaces where we are just starting to go, do you know what these experiences, these for want of better terms, magical experiences. We can even just use magic and say, we don’t, we can’t give you a a coherent explanation of this, but we can say that there’s this interesting phenomena.

We do know that lots and lots of people encounter these things. It’s actually not surprising. It’s take an example of, animism within culture. The idea that in some sense things have spirits, there are spirits abroad in the world and they can be encountered and they can be interacted with and so on.

Now, a culture that doesn’t believe that’s the anomaly historically, cross-culturally and actually in most people’s experiences, lots of people have encountered. The ghosts of their departed loved one. Lots of people have encountered mysterious voices advising them of something or protecting them.

Un from some kind of calamity. This is very common. It’s everyday staff actually.

Sam Believ: Yeah. That, yeah, if you look at the history, there are always, religion or some form of spirituality involved in governance and stuff like that. And what I, what, I think what I wanted to talk about is do you think that in in my experience I was not spiritual.

I was not I didn’t believe in anything abnormal. I had Ayahuasca experience and I do believe many things I didn’t believe prior. Do you reckon it’s the fastest way for, our culture that’s missing that to connect like through in the agents? People can quickly, one or.

Experience experiences, and you’re there, you’ve pretty much started to explore and you no longer have this closed mind. And so the, do you reckon there was in intelligence involved in the discovering of magic or the creation of magic and Yeah. What do you think about that?

Julian Vayne: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

The, it’s, I think it’s, I think, I don’t think the, I think human spirituality is such a complicated and rich thing that I don’t think we can say this is as the, as a result of entheogenic experiences. But I think we can certainly say entheogenic experiences play a very important role in human spirituality and certainly in the history of reli religious movements and so on.

We’ve got plenty of examples of this. And I’m sure that people who are listening to this podcast are very aware of those examples. So we don’t need to rehash the game, but I, I. Certainly if we look at the western magical tradition, I’ll give you, I’ll give you a really simple example.

The Blue Lotus that you find is growing on the Nile. So that’s a mind altering substance. It can be smoked, it can be taken, it can be eaten, it can be taken as an infusion in wine and so on. This was used by the engine Egyptian people for a variety of different purposes, both religious and also partying.

That the knowledge about the minding quality of that substance exists within the western magical tradition. I found, I was doing some research for an article in a book that’s coming out later this year. And there are examples of Western magicians talking about that particular flower as something that you can add to incense to allow spirit communication to happen.

Now that. Particular plant wasn’t looked at by, let’s use the word western science until I think the 1980s. So yeah. Are these things part of the tradition? Absolutely, they are. And many of these things are quite some of the stuff is obvious when you talk about, psychedelic fungi and talk about psychedelic plants and so on.

But if you put someone in a room and you burn lots of frankincense, that will have a mind altering effect. Frankincense is a mood lifter for most people, by and large. So yeah, these things are always there. They are important influences at the root of religion, and they are certainly part of the the magical tradition, certainly the western magical tradition, which I’m most familiar with.

Definitely part of that story.

Sam Believ: What is the western magical tradition like specifically when did it start? Where is it coming from?

Julian Vayne: Okay, we can tell a var variety of stories about this. Its origin point is probably if, if we want to part take a particular place, we would say Egypt.

We would say ancient Egypt. And there are a number of ways of thinking about this kind of story. But basically the western magical tradition includes things like alchemy. It includes things like ceremonial magic includes processes like the interaction with spirit beings which obviously as they come into the Abrahamic religious envelope become understood as sometimes they’re understood as demons.

Sometimes they’re interested as angels and so on. There are, there’s also the whole, a whole layer of folk magic that exists in pretty much every culture all of the time. Whether that is amulets and charms for protecting us against the evil eye, or whether or not it’s spells to heal people or whatever.

For the western magical tradition, you can basically draw a line that kind of starts ancient Egypt, and then it goes into several centuries later on, we have things like the the renaissance magical traditions that exist within the kind of, 14 hundreds, 15 hundreds mo emerging out of Italy with the rediscovery of classical text.

Things like the Emerald tablet of Hermes, dry scrape and so on. But this stuff that’s been in the Islamic world, but hasn’t managed to be translated and moved into the Western world. So there’s a whole kind of, there’s a whole story, but basically it has its origin point, both poetically and historically in the ancient Egyptian temples.

That’s where a lot of this stuff comes from. If I say a word like abracadabra, so abracadabra is a classic magic word. Where does that come from? Ultimately, it’s rooted in a series of magical texts called the Greek Magical Papyri, which are from. Agent Egypt or their, that have their origin point in Agent Egypt.

So that word as an example, can be traced through this lineage, which is, a couple of thousand years old, something like this.

Sam Believ: Interesting. Did you mention Hermes Tris Majesty? I did. Yeah. Yeah, I was can you tell people about it? ’cause I have I’ve watched some videos on a topic. I think it’s fascinating.

The the seven, seven principles, right?

Julian Vayne: There’s a whole variety of things that we can think about. The person that I always re recommend people go and learn from is a guy called Justin Sledge, who has an a YouTube channel called Esoterica. He’s an excellent scholar of the magical tradition, particularly the western magical tradition.

And he’s a. Funny and likable Guy does a really good presentation. So go and have a look at the Esoterica YouTube channel. Hermes Trius is Hermes thrice. Great is the Imma the alleged author of things like text called the Emerald Tablet. Emeral tablets are relatively short text, but it has it phrases in it like as above, so below which most people will have heard of.

Hermes is obviously the ancient God, mercury. He’s f or toth in the ancient Egyptian mythology. This is like a kind of a sort of semi mythic teacher. In the way that Lao Sue for the Daoists is a kind of, a semi mythical kind of teacher. And there are various texts which are ascribed to his authorship as the, homeys wrote this or whatever.

And that’s why it’s called the Hermetic tradition. It’s the tradition of the, that’s inspired by the ideas around this magical figure who of course predates Christianity. ’cause that’s one of the other interesting things about this lineage is that it locks into ancient Jewish thought but it also locks into pre-Christian.

Pagan thought as well. And that’s and that, that’s also why it’s sometimes a bit of a problem. That’s why sometimes things that to do with its practice become illegal, not because they’re doing anything nefarious, but because it provides a challenge to some extent from the point of view of like dominant religious discourse.

Yeah. So one of the things about magic, like taking ayahuascan, how do you take, you have to take the ayahuasca, you have to take this potion and you have to, to put it inside yourself. That’s, it’s about a practice. It’s about a technique. How do we use these plants to make the brew? And it’s about a practice.

And the practice is also, although it might be within a container of a religious movement or a particular retreat setting or whatever, it’s also deeply personal. There’s a tension I think, between sometimes religious beliefs, where I wanna say to you Sam, you don’t have to do any of your own self-inquiry.

Here is a book and here is my interpretation of this book, and this is all you need to run your life, right? This is what you basically need. Whereas what magical processes tend to do is they’re very much about how can I make sense of the world for myself? How can I do this experiment in order to in order to explore spirituality for myself?

And there’s no more obvious away of doing that self-experiment than to take a powerful, mind altering substance.

Sam Believ: Yeah. I like this way of looking at things. My, something I like to say is the biggest difference between a cult and an ayahuasca retreat is that like a religious cult. And the retreat is that.

A cult, they tell you what to believe in. Somebody else comes and tells you, this is what we believe in, and you believe this or otherwise you don’t belong. And with ayahuasca, the flow of information comes from the medicine or the spirit into to people and then from them to the retreat. So it’s the reverse reversal of this flow.

It’s, it people are listening and they’re probably thinking like what are we talking about magic? What does it really mean? I know you said it’s it’s an imaginary technology, but let’s say somebody is interested in ayahuasca not for healing, but for to learn magic.

You know what does that mean? Does that, what does that entail for them practically, if somebody is drinking ihu was to become a magician and to be able to, I don’t know, what changed their future or what does that. What does magic mean? Practically together with the strong anti agents,

Julian Vayne: I guess any good practice, whether we call it magic or not, one of its potential outcomes or one of the things, one of the processes that it invites us to do is to be fully human, is to be fully the beings that we can be allowing for the conditions in which we find ourselves and the limitations and the opportunities that we might find ourselves within.

So it’s about this kind of it might be the cultivation of special powers. There you are taking ayahuasca and learning that rather strangely sometimes when you. Lay your hands on people or you go through some kind of process. You can assist them with their healing because of course, always the person does the healing.

We can by and large, only really assist with these things or create conditions that, that optimize it, perhaps. But I think the most important part of it is not necessarily the acquisition of cities, the acquisition of special powers. It’s this process of engaging with the mystery of what it means to be a human and how we might get good relationships with the spirits that we encounter.

And by that other people as well as the plants, the animals, and the spirits that don’t appear to have bodies in the way that you and I have. So a magic can look like all kinds of different things. It would be hard for me to say how would it look for a particular individual? It might look like an alchemical transformation.

It might look like the fact that you have and I’m sure you have seen this in the retreat settings where somebody comes in and they have, some terrible thing that’s happened to them some trauma to use a rather overused word these days. That can’t be undone. That’s part of their history.

And what the iwas can sometimes do is help that person turn that lead into gold so they can help that person not just get over their trauma or process their trauma or their trauma is no longer a problem, but actually do something that’s beyond that, which is really powerful and important from the human condition from the perspective of the broader human condition, which is that bad stuff’s always gonna happen, but can we transform that bad thing into something good that can help us and maybe can help the community around us?

So it, sometimes these things look, very psychological. That’s the, because we tend to believe in psychology. We tend to believe in the existence of consciousness and unconscious minds and egos and IDs and desires and complexes and all these sorts of things. That language is a very good language to talk about magic.

It doesn’t quite get far, go far enough because it may well be that person who you are able to do some sort of healing process on that maybe they don’t even know that you are doing this. And yet the process still happens. Obviously when we talk about healing, we have to talk about things like the placebo effect.

So the placebo effect is an effect where imagination plays an, a critical role in transformation sometimes of things that look very, for want of better words, physical in people’s bodies, and we know that we can optimize things like those effects. We can certainly optimize. Let’s just call it for the moment, the placebo effect.

If we use mind altering substances, if I take the shaa and I put, and I use that with the person who’s and particularly if they’ve taken the medicine, maybe I’ve taken the medicine as well, they can be an interaction, which is very powerful. We’re in a very plastic space.

Yeah. Everything is very malleable, very changeable. And so there can be sometimes things that look really physical that can be changed under these conditions that might not be amenable to, other medical practices. So being a magician, I think is about recognizing the power of your imagination.

The fact that you can feed and nourish your imagination in a variety of ways. So if you go and look at entertainment, there you go. You turn on your Netflix channel and have a look at what that looks like, what. Stuff is going into your nervous system. What are you using to relax and unwind with your beloved on the sofa in the evening?

Are you watching people running around, shooting each other, for example? So you might just think of it in terms of psychic cleanliness. Is that what I need to do? When I work with people with psychedelics, obviously one of the things I say to them is, for the week or two before you come for the session, disconnect a little bit from social media.

Don’t worry about the news. If you are in the habit of watching war films or horror movies, don’t bother doing that. Because we’re trying to prepare the right conditions to optimize the experience of the medicine. So if you realize that the imagination is a space, yeah, so it’s a and that thoughts are things to quote the magician Dion fortune.

Then it brings a different attitude to the way the world is. Also the idea of magic. Presumes that the world is much more flexible and surprising than we might consider it to be. So somebody who’s an engineer and a magician would just go, oh, turns out I can do this practice of laying on hands and healing people.

Because as you make your move into that understanding about the world you are prepared to acknowledge the possibility of this. None of these things are beyond criticism or beyond reflection. And it’s not that, again, we can’t be deluded. Plenty of people come out of ayahuasca with all kinds of inflated experiences about, what they should do or what they should be.

I, I hope one day for the day that people come out of their their journey with Ayahuasca or any other medicine and declare that they want to be a heating engineer or a plumber or something genuinely useful rather than just another person who serves the medicine, which all of us do because we get to that excited, oh my God, this was amazing.

I want to share this with my mother, with my father, with my grandmother, with my children, with, it’s understandable, but I think that allowing for the fact that we can be inflated, allowing for the fact that we can misunderstand things, nevertheless, recognizing that there is a potency in the imagination and the power in it is really important.

Sam Believ: There’s many topics you touched upon that I wanna. Also comment on, but about the inflated ego and sort of things. I’m, the example I like to use is spirit animals. It’s always jaguars or eagles and it’s it’s never I don’t know, like a mole or or a worm, something that, it’s, the spirits are always glorious, but not always, interestingly enough, like there was one time we had a guy and he said that he realized his spirit animals is lost, and he looked and acted and he was just like, it was it was the one that I said you know what?

This is accurate. This is actually not inflated. And when we talk about placebo, it’s definitely if placebo is this imaginary thing that you imagine that you’re healing and you’re actually healing, then well, it is magic, right? You just, in your head you healed yourself because everything else was not real.

So that’s a good example of that. And yeah. Regarding spiritual powers that you mentioned, or spiritual gifts, what I noticed is that there seems to be a pattern of people, not everyone, but occasionally people discovering their sort of spiritual gift and or special power as you say. And there, there seem to be different people with different gifts.

And I would wanna know your opinion on that. Whether one person can have several gifts or somebody can have none, or one person can have many gifts, or we’re open to everything. It’s just a matter of expression, but it’s either healing or talking to, dead spirits or seeing future or seeing the past or getting messages for other people.

What you would expect at towns ancient tribes, shaman, to do like one of these things. But rarely all at the same time. So what do you think about the word vomit that I just put out?

Julian Vayne: Yeah, I, yeah, no it’s an interesting question. I guess it’s like. In a way, I often think when we talk about sort of spiritual matters, we can take it if we reimagine what we’re talking about in terms of other things.

Are there lots of are there some people who speak more than one language? Yes, of course. There are plenty of people that speak more than one language. Are there some people who seem to be particularly gifted at languages and seem to be able to very quickly pick them up and learn them successfully?

Yes, there are. So maybe it’s the same like that. Maybe there are some people who, for whatever reason maybe family history, maybe who knows reincarnation, memory, genetic codes could be anything, but they’re particularly good at a part, a special one, one skill. There may be. Obviously there are plenty of other people, you yourself are a parent.

When you’re a parent, you start to realize that you actually have to have lots of skills in lots of different things. So you have to, and just as a person, you need to be able to do a variety of different sort of practices. And but there, there will be people, obviously who are like specialists in a given field.

But I like the idea of, one of the, the way that we sometimes use the word medicine, the way that my experience of hanging out with people from North America, particularly the sort of First Nations people, the way that they sometimes use the word suggests that everyone has at least one good medicine.

Everyone has at least one interesting thing they can bring to the party if they can unlock whatever that is. And sometimes that thing can be quite a difficult thing. Maybe they’re the person who always asks the awkward question. That’s also a special power, right? If you are running an organization, you’re running a retreat or whatever, the person who said who’s asking the awkward question, they can be incredibly valuable.

Very important. Some of the time you might go, oh my God, no, it’s not, it’s, it’s Dave again who’s asking this thing about, he’s always got a downer on. But actually it might be that is the medicine that this person’s bringing to the story. So I guess it’s the same as any other kind of ability that humans have.

Sometimes we have specialists who are very good at a particular area. We have lots of people who are generalists, who have one or more skills to some degree. And when we find ourselves in different parts of our lives, we have to step up and find, like what you’ve had. You’ve got children, right?

So one of the things you learn as a parent is, which you didn’t know before, perhaps, particularly if you’ve not been around children, is you learn to listen for the different sounds of how a baby sounds. What does it need? You have to be able to interpret. And get a sense of in your body very often, oh, the baby is hungry.

The bod the baby needs changing, the baby needs this, the baby you. And you develop that as a sense. Yeah. If you are parenting of course, sometimes you get it wrong. Same when you’re sitting with people, as you’re sitting with people and you are, you’re trying to develop that sense about what does this, how does this person, how can I support them?

Do I need to take a step back? Same with the children, sometimes you have to take a step back from the, from those people, let them fall over. Let them, don’t let ’em kill themselves, but do let them oh you took the lid off that. Now you are covered in, the pain, aren’t you?

Okay. So we’ve learned something there. So I think that there’s a, again, there’s a kind of flexibility in the way that we do this. I think everyone’s got something interesting to bring to the party, that’s for sure.

Sam Believ: Yeah, I agree with that. So you mentioned spirits several times through the conversation and also animism.

What are. Spirits.

Julian Vayne: Ah, yeah, that’s an interesting question. Isn’t that? It’s an interesting question. I think any sufficiently complex set of information that can arise in my perception as an apparently external other, which with whom I can either dialogue or that can tell me something that I didn’t know is a spirit.

So what I mean by that is that the spirits are everywhere all the time. But our perception allows certain clusters of information to add up to a thing that I can interact with. So there’s kind of Sam at the moment who, despite the fact that you are actually a square on my computer screen, I we’re interacting, I’m assuming that you are a, you’re, you’re not like an AI bot and you are not just like a delusion in my mind.

You are like another external, we can have this conversation now I can bring an animist view of the world into my everyday experience, which means that I can interact with any number of things in terms of their spirit. So I went out walking today and here in the British Isles, it’s the early part of the spring.

So I went walking to see a particular tree that I like to go and talk to. And of course it’s a tree so it doesn’t talk like a human talks. It talks like a tree talks. And I have a sense of the. The personhood, if you like, of the tree. I also then spent the rest of the walk, because things are starting to come out and grow.

There are several plants not psychoactive plants, but nevertheless power plants that I would, that I was able to eat today. There was some Turkey tail mushroom, there was some GOs, there was some wild garlic. There was some I think called naval wat. And when I eat these plants, I don’t just grab them and eat them.

I’ll just take a moment just out of politeness, out of sense of beingness of the plant and say, is it gonna be a, do you happy for me to eat a bit of this? Or whatever, if I got a strong feeling, the answer was no, I would listen to that as well, because isn’t, talking to things is one thing.

Listening to things is something else, so I think the spirits are always there all the time. But spirits can build their bodies in order to communicate to us often things that sometimes we already know these things, but we need someone else to tell us. Like how it is with your friends.

Sometimes you know a thing and then your friend says it and you go, yeah, you are right. Yeah. I understand what you’re saying. Yeah. I get it. I get it. But I needed something outside of me to tell that story to me, so I could hear it. And so any complex system, you go into a library, this is an example that I like to use.

If you go into a library consists of all the books and all the authors and all the story, and all the editors and all the librarians and so on. The library has a spirit. The library is a very complicated thing. And certainly if I sit down in the library and I’m quiet in the library and I quiet my mind, I might be able to find the personhood.

Of the spirit, I’m of the library, the personhood of that place. I might find that it’s able to talk to me. Maybe it would talk to me through me randomly selecting a book and randomly selecting a page and reading something. Maybe that’s how a library would talk to me, because a library has made a printed text.

If I take ayahuasca and I find myself in that state, the ayahuasca can build its body. The ayahuasca spirit or the spirits that I’m encountering build their body. Often it seems to me, from stuff like junk, I’ve got lying around in my head, so I remember the first time I encountered the spirit of the queen of the forest, and without going into all the details, I could see that there was this real being that wanted to communicate with me.

And it was almost like it went through my brain going okay, so there’s a kind of body that it will recognize. There’s a sort of shape, there’s a style of voice and so on, so I think that animism is an attitude to the world that allows, again, like magic allows for the imaginative possibility that all things, computers, cars, satellites, stars, rivers, oceans, they all can be seen as people, as beings.

And that by entering that way of understanding the world, we can learn new things.

Sam Believ: What is what does shamanism have to do with with spirits? The what is it in that case, like shamans interact with spirits. If, because your version of spirit is kinda almost like something out there in collective unconscious sort of.

Created by other minds. It’s a, it’s not a question, it’s just a hint for you to go in that direction.

Julian Vayne: Yeah. It’s interesting music. ’cause again, when we talk about shamanism, we can talk about this is a very contested word, applies to a particular group of people from the sort of northeastern part of Asia north Asia.

But it’s a word that gets moved by ethnographers into, places like South America, right? So we use this word even though there are, there’s plenty of kind of indigenous words and also words that come through from the Spanish and Portuguese and so on. But essentially what we’re talking about is we’re talking about somebody who’s going back to your thing about special skill, somebody who is particularly, able to connect with these spirit beings. And, we, there’s many ways of understanding what they might be, but let’s just accept that these are encounters that people have. And depending on where that person finds themselves, they may be treated as somebody with a mental disorder or they may be treated as somebody with a special power.

And they sometimes get treated as both, depending on what their story is. So I think that there’s definitely a sort of relationship with it. And I guess one of the other things about shamanism, particularly if we look at, say the sort of tous origin of the word and the practice is that shamanism is about altering states of awareness.

And the most common way of altering states of awareness is with the drum. Things like, percussion, basically as a as, which is incredibly useful. Percussion is the first thing that we encounter in our world. When we’re still inside our mother, we hear the sound of her heartbeat and our heartbeat, that’s the shaman’s drum that starts before we’re even born, so by playing around with percussion we can engender of consciousness. So that kind of idea of altered consciousness, where Arda writes about shamanism as the technology of ecstasy. When anthropologists then look at South America and they go and hang out with, folks from various indigenous communities and they see stuff that looks similar.

We, they just transpose that word from one state to another and it’s become a generally useful word to talk about a practitioner who has. Maybe a variety of ways of changing awareness and they change awareness so they can drop into this perception of the world as a, a place inhabited by spirits that perhaps other people find it more difficult to encounter well until they take something like Aya Oscar or psilocybin or something like this, perhaps.

Sam Believ: What do you know about the lost shamanic traditions of Europe, British Isles or even beyond?

Julian Vayne: Man, it’s really hard. I have a suspicion that in terms of Europe, what, where we should be. Obviously we can look at things like Scandinavia. We have, there’s, there there’s information and stuff from people like the Samami people.

There’s probably some interesting stuff that I don’t know about, but I suspect exists in Eastern Europe. And throw over into sort of, Asia into Russia and Asia and so on. We have very little. For example, people often ask me because I’m from the British, is they’ll ask about Druids.

Yeah. They’ll ask about Druidry. What do we know about the Druids? We know very little about the D dreads we have, there’s a couple of texts from the Romans that talk about what they did. We dunno if any of it’s true. We know that for example in TAUs, Jamar and I, he talks there there’s that whole thing about, harvesting missile toe dressing in white.

There’s a what might be some kind of trance process that involves wrapping a person in the hide of a bull so they’re tightly wrapped and then placing a stone on them and maybe suggestion that percussion is used to put them into this altered state of awareness. But we have very little information at all about those traditions.

Having said that, the, there’s a, there’s, there’s a rich kind of folk tradition about things like all kinds of ways of interacting with the world that are very animus, that are very kind of shamanic, that are very yeah, closer to the things that, that, we can see more clearly in places that have either got written traditions like India or traditions that lots of anthropologists have been looking at say South America.

So there are little hints and similarities. We know, for example, that sweat Lodge Temescal is a practice which was done in ancient Europe. We’ve got archeological evidence of something like that. We know that a little bit further east, that things like cannabis were being, was being thrown on the hot stones.

There’s little pieces. But this is, going back to that thing about the animal spirits where people I remember sometimes being asked by people say, what, what’s your special magic animal? What’s your kind of, and I have to say that one of mine is the magpie.

Yeah. So this bird that has to find little bits of shiny gold in amongst all of the mud and the leaves on the forest floor. And that’s where I am in my story, ’cause I don’t come from a family that has any particular lineage in this this subject.

I’m born into a world where I’m fascinated by magic, and it seems that it’s hidden away. So I’ve had to pull out those little pieces, which is why it was incredibly helpful 30 odd years ago, encountering people from, particularly from South America, who had a whole bunch of stuff that was like, oh, I see.

So what we’ve got here is we’ve got these little tiny morsels, these tiny little points of brightness about how these places may have been used. So I’ll give you an example. In the British Isles we have chambered tombs. They’re often called neolithic or prehistoric buildings, which are lots of stones with a tunnel inside.

You can go down to these places. Now, these are probably tubes. They’re people where ancestors bones were laid down. But they also are places where we now know from archeological work that they have really interesting sounds, sonic architecture. So they’re designed as places that you go into and you sing.

And new tone and that and we can be pretty certain that because of the architecture, because of the way that the, what’s called acoustic archeology has been exploring these, we’re pretty certain that this is not just, a coincidence. This is deliberately done. So we have these chamber tombs all over the countryside, in particular locations and obviously, famous landmarks.

People know about Stonehenge or the Avery Stone Circle and so on. So these are the, the Malacca, these are the kind of the the sacred places. But exactly what was done in them is lost to history. Probably the best thing to do is to take some mushrooms and go in there and see if you can reconnect with the ancestors, which is, I think I’ve done on a couple of occasions.

Sam Believ: Yeah, that’s a good good idea. I know mushrooms will probably help. It’s interesting you mentioned sweat lodge and so I’m originally from Lavia and I. I’ve been living in Columbia for eight years now, but one of my very first alternate consciousness experience was a laan, pagan sauna ritual saunas.

The name sauna was popularized from Finland, but that entire part of north northeastern Europe they were always using saunas or various shapes. They have different names, but, and the ritual involved alternating he heat and cold, so like contrast therapy, but an intense kind of contrast therapy very high heat for a long time.

And then they would use different plans for different genders and male plans, female plans, and. You would have to drink herbal teas, but there is nothing psychoactive in it except for the heat itself. And then you get put in the ice water and they hold you. So you’re floating and after a lot of heat for a long time, it makes your, gives you like, an autobody experience.

It’s a very interesting thing. I would love to do it again, but definitely it probably has roots somewhere in the past because, it’s in like a forest and the plants, it’s still like it was before. And interestingly enough, Laia was the last Pagan part of Europe the last one to be baptized to Christianity.

So essentially how do you, what do you think is the mechanism is of somebody tripping on heat and cold?

Julian Vayne: Human beings are relatively simple creatures in many respects. If you want to, if you want to alter consciousness, what have you got? You’ve got protracted periods of darkness ritual, poetry, inspi, inspirational ritual, poetry.

You’ve got temperature, that’s the thing that you can play with. Movement is a thing you can play with. Restriction is a thing you can play with, obviously altering that person chemically. So I think that, if you ever tried something like a flotation tank for example, which you can try completely without taking any drugs of any description, that will give you a powerful experience.

Going off and doing vision quest without any substance being on your own, being in this kind of, in, in silence for a time. All of these things are really. Powerful ways of making these kind of changes of awareness. And I think that the other thing that’s interesting is that there’s a lot of there’s a lot of subtlety to it.

So for example, in, in Europe when we talk about things like beer is a substance now that has a relatively simple chemical makeup, but in age times we know that lots and lots of other interesting herbs were added to beer. Beer is one of the most ancient of our, my daughter in substances or alcohol generally.

And we know that in Britain, in Scandinavia that lots of the ale that was brewed probably had all kinds of interesting things added into it. Now, what you’ve also got to put into the mix is the fact that you and I, although we might cultivate our sensitivity through using entheogen and other practices we’re also we’re fairly hard nuts to crack in the sense that I can turn on my computer and I can see all kinds of things and I can get access to music immediately.

It’s no problem. Whereas a hundred, 200 years ago, those things are completely impossible. My world doesn’t consist of this kind of stuff. And so those experiences of drinking, the herbal tea, of having the heat in the cold, of having maybe songs or other practices that are happening become even stronger, even more powerful.

Whereas now we’re oh yeah, it’s just more music. Like music itself is such a powerful thing, as a way of moving us and as a way of transforming and changing our awareness. It, irrespective of whether or not we’ve taken sacred mushrooms or we’ve taken, our Oscar or any of these kinds of things.

We, we can just have, we’ve got it on tap, 24 7, no problem. It’s also probably more powerful a hundred, 200, 300, 500 years ago, way before there’s any recorded music and when music has a different kind of position within culture. Yeah, so I think that changing people’s state of awareness is actually relatively straightforward.

The levers to do it are pretty pretty easy to identify. That if you can make that person sensitive if you do that solar ritual that you’re speaking about and you prepare by having three days in the wilderness with no access to your phone, I would pretty much guarantee that the sauna rich will be more powerful than if you’ve just driven from the city and just rocked up there.

You know this with the retreats that you wrote. Like it’s all about creating this really good wave of the experience, which both makes it easier to get into and also stronger.

Sam Believ: Yeah, the mindset is is very important and the preparation as well. Julian, it’s a very fascinating conversation, but we are running out of time unfortunately we haven’t touched much about topic of of what you talk about new book.

I know you’re writing another book now. So just talk to our audience about where they can find your books. Which books would you recommend them specifically knowing that those are people that are interested in ayahuasca and the ceremonies?

Julian Vayne: Okay my website is really easy. It’s just julian vain.com.

And you’ll see most of the resources on there. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that I’ve written in the past, some of which is, traditional plant medicines, but I’ve also written quite a lot about, novel molecules, different stuff that’s been made in Alchemist Laboratories over the course of the last kind of 50 years, something like this.

So just go and have a look at the social media. Go and have a look at the website and you’ll see all the things on there. If people are around and about in the bridge, Charles, they wanna come over, I recommend going to break in convention, which as I mentioned previously, is a really excellent conference on psychedelic consciousness.

And you’ll find it is a YouTube channel as well, which has lots of the lectures and presentations that break in convention have done for the last decade. We’ve been doing this conference for quite, quite a number of years now yeah, easy to find me and plenty of stuff out there to explore.

Sam Believ: Yeah, guys, go check Julian on the social media and go to the conference. If you’re in uk, definitely you should go. I would love to go myself. I’m really far away. And check out his books. Julian, thank you for this conversation. I think it was very interesting, a little different, and entertaining and educational.

Julian Vayne: Educational. Thank you very much, Sam, for inviting me and yeah, really appreciate it. Thanks everyone for listening.

Sam Believ: Thank you for listening, guys, once again, I was with you, the host Samie, and I will see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to support us and psychedelic renaissance at large, please follow us and leave us a like, wherever it is you’re listening, share this episode with someone who will benefit from this information.

Nothing in this podcast is intended as medical advice, and it is for educational and entertainment purposes only. This episode is sponsored by Lara Ayahuasca. At Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Laira, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you.