>>31181 they may come into contact with the same metaphysical entities
use of hallucinogens in indigenous religious practices see:
> Richard Evans Schultes, a swashbuckling scientist andinfluential Harvard University educator who was widely considered the preeminent authority on hallucinogenic and medicinal plants, died on Tuesday in Boston. He was 86 and lived in Waltham, a Boston suburb.
>Born into an East Boston immigrant family fallen onto hard times, Richard Schultes was the first of his family to go to University. As a student at Harvard, he came under the influence of Oakes Ames, the distinguished orchidologist and director of the Harvard Botanical Museum. In Ames’s class on Plants and Human Affairs, the young Schultes came to study peyote (Lophophora spp.), fascinated by stories of hallucinogenic effects. A small cactus from New Mexico, this plant had at that time spread to almost 80 tribes in the USA, who used it as a medicine and ritual sacrament. As part of his studies, Schultes spent six weeks in 1936 living among the Kiowa in the midwest. He was, in Wade Davis’s words, “one of the last generation scholars to actually know the Kiowa men and women who had lived the culture of the Plains.” Taking peyote with the Kiowa, attending their night-long ceremonies and sweat lodges, Schultes listened to the stories of the Kiowa and came to understand the place of peyote in their lives. His career as an ethnobotanist had begun.
