so um I normally give talks with slides. I'm nearly 74 years old now, and my memory is not quite what it used to be, so I have notes. Forgive me. That subject is Shamanism and civilization. Am I audible everywhere? Yeah, good, louder. There's a group of scholars who appoint eles as responsible for interpreting the human past to us, and those scholars are called archaeologists. Many of them are wonderful people who are doing important work in the nitty-gritty of excavation, but some of them are somewhat different, and kind of political correctness dominates their thought. They claim to be champions of the indigenous peoples of the ancient world, but though none would admit it, these scholars adhere to a religious faith in what they define as science, and it's a very particular type of science. It's known as materialist reductionism, and it seeks to reduce all of reality to a material substrate, things that can be weighed, measured, and counted, to things that can be

empirically proven by experiment. For example, an example of why this is a faith rather than the result of rational open-minded thought is the mystery of consciousness. We all have consciousness; we all know we have it, but we don't really know what it is. Scientific materialism reduces this majestic mystery to what they call an epiphenomenon of brain activity. They say it's something that emerged as an accidental byproduct of ancestral humanity's struggle to survive in the jungle of Darwinian competition. This leads to an ignored crisis of cognitive dissonance in the so-called championship by rational materialist scholars, and in particular, rational materialist archaeologists of the indigenous peoples of the ancient world. Because all the indigenous peoples of the ancient world believed in life after death, a journey that the soul must make after death, a non-material spirit world inhabited by sentient non-human entities that nevertheless interact with the material realm inhabited by humanity. It's impossible to be at the

same time, a rational materialist archaeologist, and to believe that the indigenous peoples of the ancient world, and many indigenous peoples still today in the AM rainforest, for example, could actually be correct in their beliefs about the soul, life after death, spirits, and the spirit world. On the contrary, from the perspective of materialist productionist science, archaeologists who proudly define themselves as scientists have no option but to regard such beliefs amongst indigenous peoples as at best mistaken and at worst delusions, hallucinations, inventions, or myths. While professing to champion indigenous peoples, such archaeologists dishonor, disrespect, and secretly despise the core beliefs of the indigenous peoples of the ancient world, beliefs that are still held by many indigenous peoples in the remoter regions of the world today. This brings me to the heart of the matter I hope to address here: the issue of chanism and civilization, and my work over the past 30 years to identify the fingerprints of what I suggest, and I repeat, I suggest, I do not

claim to prove was a civilization that flourished during the Ice Age more than 12,000 years ago, with origins that likely go back tens of thousands of years before that. For daring to make such a heretical suggestion, heretical because it contradicts archaeological opinion on the origins of civilization, I've been the target of vile and defamatory attacks by archaeologists who either do not understand my views or deliberately misrepresent them. Their purpose always seems to have been to get me cancelled from public discourse. For a long while, this objective was rarely admitted openly, but there can no longer be any doubt about the purpose and intentions of rational materialist archaeologists where I am, my work, are concerned. After the release in November 2022 of my Netflix documentary series Ancient Apocalypse, the Society for American Archaeology published an open letter calling on Netflix to relabel the series as science fiction and to attach dire health warnings to it, while at the same time accusing me of spreading false historical narratives that encourage

racism, white supremacism, misogyny, chauvinism, and anti-Semitism. That's all in the letter for the Society for American Archaeology. I don't have the time or the energy to detail here all the ways in which I and my work have been misrepresented by archaeologists in their ideological battle to control the narrative about our collective past. But perhaps the most egregious of these misrepresentations is the widely disseminated claim that I am advocating the existence of some sort of super civilization of the Ice Age, a civilization that was advanced in the very same high-tech materialist ways as our own so-called civilization today. My repeated caution that in looking for a lost civilization of the remote past, we should not, absolutely not, look for something like our own civilization has simply been ignored. So let me reemphasize the fundamental point here: we should not look for ourselves in the past; we should look for something completely different, a civilization that emerged out of shamanism during the Ice Age that

stayed true to its shamanistic origins that used shamanistic techniques to acquire knowledge of this Earth and of the cosmos that surrounds it and that generously sought to share its knowledge with other shamanistic cultures around the world. Not a civilization like ours that was interested in making high machines and weapons the more efficiently to murder and suppress other peoples, but a civilization that sought to understand the true nature of reality, not merely at its surface material level, but rather in its deepest and most well-concealed depths. Even at the material level, the discoveries were remarkable. I've been taken out of context more times than I can count regarding statements I have made that the Lost Civilization I'm trying to track down may have had a level of technology similar to that of our own civilization in the 18th and 19th centuries, but I was never referring to the machine technology of the 18th and 19th centuries. I was referring to evidence I presented suggesting knowledge of longitude during the Ice

Age and knowledge of the shape and location of Antarctica during the Ice Age. Our own civilization didn't crack the longitude problem until the mid-18th century and did not quote unquote discover Antarctica until the early 19th century. Likewise, I've presented evidence of precise knowledge during the Ice Age, more than 12,000 years ago, of the workings of the obscure astronomical phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes, a knowledge that archaeologists deny any ancient civilization was able to acquire until the time of the Greeks around 2200 years ago. You know, the precession of the equinoxes is an observation that our planet wobbles on its axis, and that wobble, because it's the viewing platform from which we observe the stars, that wobble affects the rising times and positions and orientations of the stars in the sky as observed from Earth. We today live in the age of Pisces. What does that mean? It means that at dawn on the Spring Equinox, the constellation of

Pisces houses the Rising Sun. The Rising Sun rises against the background of the constellation of Pisces. We all know the old song that we live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius, and that's true because the precessional wobble of the Earth's axis means that within roughly 100 to 150 years, we will have shifted out of Pisces on the Spring Equinox and into Aquarius. And if you go back in time before Pisces, you'll find the age of Aries, the age of Taurus, and so on and so forth, going right back. It's a 26,000-year cycle that repeats itself every 26,000 years. But perhaps the most vital knowledge of all acquired during the Ice Age and passed down across the Millennia through shamanistic lineages was and remains knowledge of the Consciousness-altering Virtues Of certain plants and fungi. I had my first LSD trip in 1974. Now, LSD is a synthetic, but it is derived from Urgot, and Urgot is a member of the

fungal family. I had my first LSD trip at the Windsor Free Festival in 1974. I didn't go there with the intention of taking LSD. It just happened that somebody offered me and a couple of friends a little tablet, and we divided it into three parts. I had one of those three parts, and I have to say I had the most amazing night that I've ever had in my life. I spent 12 hours wandering around the Windsor Free Festival, visiting Viking encampments, meeting some sort of spider creature that lived in a tree, and that was tuning people in sleeping bags. I communicated with flowers. It was a glorious and wonderful experience that I've never had the opportunity to repeat because it was so fresh and new to me. When I got back to our tent, I found that one of my friends was completely missing, and the other was shuddering in fear in the tent. He had had a horrific experience. The universe

had turned to stone around him. There was no meaning or purpose anymore in life. It took him weeks to recover from this experience, and as a result of that, I didn't experience psychedelics again until 2003. And when I did experience psychedelics again, it was ayahuasca, and it was in the Amazon rainforest. And I chose to have that experience because I believe I need to authentically research my books, and I was writing a book about Shamanism and about the origins, in particular, of cave art and rock art. And lo and behold, it turned out that shamans in the Amazon, after drinking ayahuasca and returning to the normal everyday State of Consciousness, were remembering their visions and were painting their visions. And those paintings were astonishingly similar to the paintings in caves like Lascaux and Pech Merle, going back deep into the Ice Age. They showed geometric patterns, they showed zigzag lines, they showed entities that were part human and part animal in form. The technical term for those is theanthropos. This is often how

Spirits are perceived by people in shamanistic cultures, and shamans themselves transform into such entities in their out-of-body journeys. Iasa for me was a life-changing experience. I went into it with my wife, Stha, who's just sitting over there, with my daughter, Lila, and my son-in-law, Jason, and another son of mine is filming this event. Um, I went into the Iasa experience purely for research purposes. In my view, I needed to have that experience myself in order to write authentically about it. I had 11 journeys in the Amazon, and the experiences were so profound and so life-transforming that I felt very strongly. Although Iasa is hard work and it does involve vomiting and it does involve diarrhea, uh, sometimes quite suddenly, uh, although as you continue with the medicine, these effects do tend to get less and less. I I've now had something in the range of 75, maybe 80, uh, Iasa journeys, uh, and I've continued to work.

with the medicine because I feel that the medicine has much to teach me. I don't feel that I'm dealing with anything other than a sentient being when I drink that medicine, and that sentient being is filled with love, but sometimes that love can be tough love. One of the first things iasa does is show you your own baggage right in your face, shows you the pain you've caused to others, those harsh words that you said to somebody 5 years ago which felt completely justified at the time. They come back to you, and you experience them as that person experienced them. We can't go back and change the past, but we can change our future. We don't have to carry on behaving in obnoxious ways to others. We don't have to allow our anger to manifest. It's difficult to change a lifetime of bad habits, but I've continued to work with iasa, and I hope gradually, little by little, as the realizations have come, that it's uh, that has helped me to be a

better person and a more nurturing person. It's curious that a plant medicine should have this moral aspect, that it should hold us to our own high standards and require us to live up to them. And I think that is one of the most important aspects of the Iowa was experience and of psychedelic experiences in general, in my opinion. Although every sovereign adult is free to do what they want, psychedelics are about serious personal work. I believe that the setting in which we take psychedelics is extremely important. The intention with which we go into the psychedelic experience is extremely important. It's okay to do it for fun, but it's better to use this medicine, to use these medicines for self-improvement in any ways that we can. So, there's this moral aspect to psychedelics, but then there's something else. There's the entities we encounter, and I've encountered many entities in many different shapes and forms. One of the early experiences I had, I've talked about this before, but

was during my first iasa experiences in the Amazon, and I was sitting on a bench, feeling quite ill, outside the Shaman's Hut. Suddenly, spaceships appeared above me; at least, that's how I construed them. They seemed to be flying sources, and I saw an entity appear with huge dark eyes and a narrow pointed chin. I suddenly realized that they were going to take me, and that's when I chickened out. I opened my eyes 'cause I was seeing all this with closed eyes. I opened my eyes and I said no. Well, what I should have done was open my eyes and said yes. We should always surrender to the medicine and see where she wants to take us. Important new work is being done at Imperial College in London, um, and at um, the University of uh, Southern California, which is giving dthy tryptamine. Is the active ingredient of iasa. Let me explain why that's a bit of a science. Dthy dimethyl tryptamine, DMT for short, is not orally active. You can

dilute DMT in a liquid and drink as much as you want, and you will have no psychedelic effects whatsoever. This is because of an enzyme in the gut called monoamine oxidase, and monoamine oxidase destroys DMT on contact. So, normally, if you want to experience DMT, you've got a number of options. One of them is to smoke it, one of them is to vape it, and what they're doing at Imperial College now is giving it as an intravenous infusion. Either way, within two or three hits on the vape pipe, you are on a rocket ship to the other side of reality. It is an extraordinary experience, DMT. It's a remarkable thing, and it makes anybody who takes it seriously wonder about the nature of reality. You find yourself in a completely other realm, a completely other world filled by intelligent entities who seem to be urgent to communicate with you. And yet, the experience is so fast, it's over in less than 10 minutes. It's so rapid that it's

very difficult to absorb the lessons that these entities are trying to teach. And this is where iasa is kind of magical because what those shamans in the Amazon did was they found the leaves of a certain plant called cotri veridus. Botanically, they call it shakuna in the Amazon, which contain DMT. And out of the more than 100,000 different species of plants and trees in the Amazon, they found the iasa vine, which contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Shamanism is the science of the best sort. Cook the leaves together with the vine, drink the liquid, and you have orally active DMT mediated by the energy of the vine itself. In the Amazon, they don't see the leaves as the powerful force; they see the vine as the powerful force. Mother iasa is the great teacher. She has harnessed those leaves for our benefit to access human consciousness. Now, what's happening at Imperial College is that people are being given DMT by intravenous infusion. These are all volunteers, and

amazingly, since this is happening in Britain, it's all completely legal. They've been given a license to do this, and these volunteers are put in an MRI scanner. I can't imagine a more unhappy place to have a DMT experience, and they are topped up with DMT through intravenous infusion every few minutes, so they remain at the peak state for up to an hour. And at the same time, one of the scientists there is interviewing them and asking what they're seeing, and astonishing numbers of them report encounters with the same entities. They're not comparing notes, but they are reporting encounters with the same entities communicating the same kind of messages. Now, normally when dozens of people report the same experiences, we begin to accept that that experience is real, but science has regarded the encounters with sentient others that are experienced under the influence of DMT. Science has in the past regarded that as mere hallucination. I'm glad to say that what's happening at Imperial College, at the University of Southern California, now those scientists are taking

those experiences very seriously, and they're beginning to wonder, is there an interface with quantum physics here? Are we gaining temporary access to other levels, other dimensions of reality which are normally closed off to us? And then, why are they closed off to us? Because we live in a physical world governed by the rules of physics. We have to function in this world. We cannot be absent from this world for very long. But if we are allowed access, sustained access to this realm, it may become possible to map it. It may become possible to understand what is going on there, and that is what is happening with DMT, tryptamine, and human volunteers right now. Now, ayahuasca means the vine of souls or the vine of the dead, and nobody who has quite a number of experiences with ayahuasca will miss the connection, the connection with deceased relatives, the sense almost that one has died and passed on into another realm, and to look back on this realm and see it in a completely different

way. I believe that our civilization today has severed its connection to its shamanistic roots, and we are paying the price for that. We are paying the price for that in these huge corporations, monopolistic corporations, in government authorities, in politicians, in the military, in all the bad mistakes that we make in terms of investment, not in human potential but in human destruction. Our society is a society that ticks all the boxes, in my view, for the next Lost Civilization. We need to get to grips with the mystery of death. We are all going to face that mystery one day, and Iasa gives us the opportunity to learn in advance and to understand in advance what we're going to confront and to know that it is not the end. This is an experience we are having in human bodies. This is a place we came to learn and to grow and to develop, but our societies have turned it into a place that has completely shut us down, where we are taught only to value ourselves in terms of our mat.

material possessions in terms of what we own, in terms of our power, in terms of all these exterior trappings of wealth, and not to value ourselves in terms of our inner strengths, our inner spirituality. If I had the opportunity, which I will never have, if I had the opportunity to change things, I would say that anybody running for high government office, anybody who's going to be a president or a prime minister or a minister of state, anybody who wants to seek a high position in the military or a high position in these big corporations, any one of them, it should be part of the job description. They should have 12 sessions of iasa first, at least 12 sessions, and then I believe that they would behave very differently. Many of them would choose not to take those jobs at all, and those who did take those jobs would handle them in a completely different way. Aasa is a great teacher in the context of shamanism, and ultimately, it teaches us what we're here for, what our lives are about, how to use this precious

gift of life in a human body that the Universe has given to us. So, that's about it really. Thank you. Thank you very much for being here and for listening to this old man. I very much appreciate your support, and I very much appreciate that you've heard me out. Um, I don't know if we're going to do any Q&A, but I'm up for it if you guys are. Hello, hello. All right, thank you so much. Another round of applause for Grand pleas, and what an honor it is to have you here again in the temple, in the common. Um, he was here 10 years ago and back here to celebrate 10 years. So, thank you so much for being here. So, we have about 10 minutes for Q&A. Does anyone have a question? Sh your hand up clear so I can see you. Great. Hi, fantastic talk, always good value. Thank you. Um, I've got two questions in May. The first is I was just wondering if you have any knowledge of

DMT V pens, whether you think they would be worth exploring. Yes, I do have knowledge of DMT vape pens. I have vaped DMT in a DMT vape pen several times in America, and they work very quickly. Personally, I do prefer vaping rather than combustion products of any kind. So yeah, they are the way to go. However, my caution would be, first of all, recognize that DMT is extremely serious business. It is not necessarily a light or easy or amusing or entertaining journey. It can be a very tough and very difficult journey. Recognize that this is like other things in our society. There are certain matters that I believe should be reserved for adults, and I believe that DMT and the other psychedelics should be reserved for adults. I'm not sure that it's helpful to give these substances to children. And thirdly, to recognize that the setting in which you experience these extraordinary medicines is at

least as important as the medicines themselves. Be in the hands of people you trust. Be in a loving, safe environment, an environment that is conducive to a positive and worthwhile journey. So, that's that question. Thank you. And I was just wondering if you'd heard the Joe Rogan talk with Terrence Howard, um, and some of the challenges to science he was making, and whether you sort of we thought. But unfortunately, I haven't heard that one, um, I intend to, uh, but been kind of busy in the last few weeks, and I've not heard it. I hear that both Joe and Terrence Howard have come in for a great deal of flack as a result of it, um, but one of the great things about Joe Rogan is that he's very open-minded. He's willing to talk to any guest, and he always talks intelligently and with enthusiasm, with interest, and brings out the best in those guests. I think Joe Rogan is playing a

very important role in the modern world. A world that has shut down freedom of communication in so many ways that channels our thoughts into narrow paths. I think Joe Rogan is one of the few people who is opening that up and doing so on a massive platform that is reaching huge numbers of people. So more power to Joe Rogan is my [Applause] view. So what is your next challenge? What you okay um well I'm I'm 74 in August um I am privileged to have lived uh an adventurous life uh to have explored the world to have lived amongst many different cultures and privileged to have a wonderful wife my wife Santa Santa and I together have six children between us two of them are here and those uh six children are all married um but but um alt together we have six children and nine grandchildren uh and my most important next challenge is to realize the Beauty and the joy of young children. I was a bit of a useless father. I was constantly on the road. I did not pay

enough attention to my children. I didn't realize what magic young kids bring into the world, and I'm realizing now through my grandchildren how full of joy they are, how full of enthusiasm, how unpolluted by the world we live in they are, how much new and precious and fresh they bring into the world. And I want to spend a lot more time with my grandchildren than I've been able to do up to now in terms of adventures and travels. Um, yeah, there's quite a bit ahead. Um, but I'm in a place right now where I'm not allowed to talk about what that quite a bit is. Um, nevertheless, I can promise you that there are interesting things coming. And, uh, last but not least, because Santa is a photographer and a brilliant photographer, uh, and Santa and I have worked together for more than 30 years. We've taken every IASA trip together. We've done every dive, and there's been about a thousand of those dives, sometimes in deep and dangerous waters.

together we've climbed the Great Pyramid five times. Together, everything we've done together has resulted in an incredible archive of photographs of Santas, many of which have appeared in my books. But we intend to do a large-format photographic book as well, detailing all our journeys and everything that we've done and everything that we've learned. Honestly, I don't know who knows; actually, none of us know how much longer we got left on this amazing planet. I don't know, um, but I intend to use every single second of it to learn and to grow and to develop myself. We never stop growing unless we choose to stop [Applause] growing. Thank you, thank you. Sorry, I really lost my voice. Thank you so much. Talk um, I would like to ask how we can get involved. I have a real calling to be hearing talk today. I've had some really profound experiences this weekend at last spr, and for the last years, I've been doing a lot of incredible self-work journey and

exploring trauma, ancestral healing, and so much profound stuff that it's suddenly been just delivered to me this weekend and in the last months. A calling to really change the world and do something quite powerful. Me and some other wonderful humans that are here that couldn't make the talk but are coming together. They seek kind of a meeting of minds. So, be it work therapy, holistic practices, and I just wonder because a year ago I didn't even have access to any of this or anything. I'm a yoga teacher and well-being practitioner but I was in the corporate world and all this. And you know, I've been on my journey. I just want to know how can I reach people that need to be reached. How can I make a difference. How can I get involved or do anything to. Yeah sure. Well first of all, changing the world, that's a big objective. Yeah, changing the world is a big objective and actually none of us as individuals can change the world. What we can do is change ourselves.

start start with ourselves. Make ourselves better, more nurturing, more positive, more helpful people, and extend that nurture and help to others. And that sounds to me like what you're doing. You feel a calling to that, and uh, I wish you Joy on that path. But you will find that there are many forces in the world that are working against you, that do not want this to happen. The way our society is structured right now, it has a huge investment in keeping the vast majority of the population fundamentally unconscious, just sort of buying and producing and selling and not causing any trouble, not questioning any so-called established truths. You're going to find a lot of pushback and a lot of opposition in everything you do, and uh, for anybody who feels this calling, I would say brace yourself, brace yourself for that pushback and see it through. I wish you Joy on your path. Thank you. I think we have time for one more. Thank you. Hi, um, you've spoken quite a lot today about um, the IASA experience.

and um the importance of that, but I wondered if you might speak a little bit to the um the shamanic ceremony element, perhaps without psychedelics, and and how that can be beneficial for the vision that we have. Yes, I I don't want to I don't want to give the impression that the plant medicines are the only way, and perhaps I have given that impression, but I don't mean to do that. The objective is altered an altered state of consciousness, the problem-solving alert problem-solving State of Consciousness that our society values is only one State of Consciousness. Consciousness is majestic. It has so many levels and dimensions that can be got into. The Alert problem-solving state of consciousness is very useful. It has its place, but the problem in our society is that it's been allowed to occupy a monopoly position and has been elevated to a status that it does not deserve. Other states of Consciousness are needed. Look, the um the the San in uh Namibia don't use plant

medicines, but they enter deeply altered states of consciousness with a kind of dance, which is called the trance dance. Sometimes, they will dance for 24 hours, becoming extremely dehydrated. At a certain point, they sense the spirit leaving the body and being above the body, looking down, and then able to travel vast distances around. This is just another way to access an altered state of consciousness. In the case of shamanistic ceremonies, for some people, the ceremony alone without the medicine can be quite enough if it's handled well, if it's done by somebody who really knows what they are doing. In IASA, there is the singing of songs. These are called icaros, and these icaros become guidelines that path you through paths, providing a kind of path through the other reality in which you're going to enter. I don't rule out the possibility that it would be quite a good chance to find.

that path without the medicine, but you're much more likely to find it with the medicine. And then remember that the medicine itself is a teacher. We're not dealing with just a plant; we're dealing with an intelligence. And this is, I guess, one of the realizations that I've had from working with ayahuasca, that consciousness is everywhere, and it's present in plants just as it's present in human beings. So while I can understand that people would not want to experience the plant medicines, I would say that to have the full journey that the plant medicines offer and to receive the teachings that the plants offer, whether it's psilocybin mushrooms (fungi, not really plants), whether it's DMT, whether it's ayahuasca, whether it's peyote, whether it's San Pedro, these are a very sure and guaranteed way to get into a deeply altered state of consciousness. But your setting has to be correct, the people you are surrounded by must be trustworthy, the person who is facilitating the

ceremony ideally deeply experienced in that matter. All of that should be accounted for. Um, and, and, uh, I also don't rule out the possibility that there are some people who can experience deeply altered states of consciousness without any ceremony and without any medicine. Uh, I think this is an innate faculty of all human beings. I think if you go back tens of thousands of years, you will find that human beings were tuned into these other realms and other realities much more closely than we are today. Our society has extracted us from them, like taking a tooth out of a jaw. Uh, and, and, uh, I see shamanism and the plant medicines as a way of putting that tooth back in and as a way of reconnecting with a wider reality. I hope that helps. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you very much. [Applause]

Graham Hancock: Shamanism and Civilization | Presentation at Glastonbury Festival 2024

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