Banner by Elizabeth Gilfeather

Shamanism and the Multiverse

By Ariel Barriero

Are there traversable universes outside of our local universe? The story of the “Ant of Knowledge” tells the tale of how ayahuasca, an Amazonian vine with hallucinogenic properties, came to be. A vegetalista shaman — a shaman who gains their powers through plants — rode on the back of the ant as it told him the ayahuasca vine was born of the “dust and pollen which cling to a sticky substance coming out of the ant’s body” and that thousands of years ago, the ants were intelligent beings. Asteroid collisions destroyed their cities, and the ants became smaller and smaller, losing their imagination while becoming robotic and the species we recognize today.

Shamanism is considered to be the most ancient religion on Earth. While there are plenty of Western (new-age) adaptations these days, they mostly lend to the bastardization of early religions, and strip from them the truly spiritual connection and experience. Furthermore, Western cultures discredit shamanism as baseless science, but this attitude is founded in the demonization of cultures that were brutally colonized by Euro-American invaders.

Shamans are considered renaissance people in their villages — healers, doctors, psychiatrists, therapists, musicians, actors… the list goes on. One of the principal ways the shaman gains these abilities and their breadth of knowledge is through their “spirit” helpers — and we must use the word spirit loosely here, as it does not mean the same to them as it does to us. Spirit is essence, and it is in everything. In order to gain a spirit guide, shamans must visit another world. “The Siberian shaman’s soul is said to be able to leave the body and travel to other parts of the cosmos, particularly to an upper world in the sky and a lower world underground.”

For all the contrivances shamans seem to inherently know, we are in the process of using science to explain. As healers, they know which chants and medicine to use for each particular illness and believe these illnesses are brought on by the spirit world and other realms. This also relates to their psychopharmacology knowledge, where they use different mixtures of plants to induce trance and healing. In shamanism, the scientific method is alive and well. Thousands of years of trial and error and the help of the spirits — which take form as animals, ancestors, plants, and entities we have no names for — have allowed them to come up with healing mixtures such as ayahuasca. “There are over 80,000 evolved plants in the Amazon [Rainforest]; any combination of this would have produced only a one in six billion chance of finding it.” Jeremy Narby, author of “The Cosmic Serpent,” said this in the Other Worlds documentary in regards to ayahuasca and the use of the chacruna plant to produce the effects used in religious ritual settings.

Hundreds of anthropologists have studied the amazing healing powers and unlikely phenomena of shamanistic religions and have written about the other worlds shamans visit in their journeys. Dr. Marcela Perdomo, a visiting religious studies professor at the University of Pittsburgh, lends some insight into these practices.

Parallelism, the technique of threading verbal images, can be applied in a religious ritual setting for the experience of an ill person. “It becomes a way to construct a supernatural dimension which is thought of as a possible world, possessing an existence parallel to that of the ordinary world,” says Dr. Perdomo. She says there are many parallel worlds, some where animals and plants can talk, where shamans can become the plants and animals, where you can soar through rocks and water without getting hurt.

Only recently (the past 75 years or so), when Hugh Everett III proposed his many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, has the idea of multiple worlds and forms of reality become a popular theory. It has since been known under many monikers: multiverse theory, string theory, parallel universe theory, and more. Of course, with the popularization of science fiction (hello Marvel Cinematic Universe), most derivations of these theories hold no merit, but there are a few interesting theoretical studies that try to legitimize this theory as a way to explain special relativity at the quantum level. 

There are many interpretations of multiverse theory, but publications by physicist Max Tegmark generated a strong distaste for it in the astrophysics community. The Feynman path integral, however, can offer a more reputable argument for this case. The Feynman path integral “accurately predicts the behavior of any quantum system… but it is more of a philosophy than a rigorous recipe. It suggests that our reality is a sort of blending — a sum — of all imaginable possibilities.” This observation supports string theory, where any decision anyone has ever made leads to two worlds being created, resulting in an infinite number of universes simultaneously existing.

The latest study to touch on these creative theories was done by Andrzej Dragan and Kryzysztof Turzynski, co-authors of the paper “Three time dimensions, one space dimension: Relativity of superluminal observers in 1+3 Spacetime.” The paper alludes that if observers could move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum (the superluminal observer), time would become three dimensional and space would be one dimension, the reverse of what we exist in. In this instance, a particle would move through three time dimensions in the same space, effectively having the particle age (think past, present, future) in different intervals while moving through the same space. Shamans do something similar with parallelism, where they astral project into a parallel universe in which time moves differently, called a mirror world.

“The plane mirrors us, but it functions differently. You use a geometric tunnel to travel. New-agers call it sacred geometry, but it is universal; ancient cultures have instances of [traveling through geometric tunnels],” says Dr. Perdomo. I began to describe the Einstein-Rosen bridges, more commonly referred to as wormholes, to her during this discussion, to which she just smiled and said, “Yes, that’s it!” The wormhole is only a theory, a theory that involves the travel of an observer through time and space, but there are versions of math to support it. As usual, the supporting math is highly complicated, but basically, if one based the math on the vacuum solutions of the Einstein field equations, the wormhole stays consistent with the general theory of relativity. They are not traversable, though, meaning an observer could not go through it — but a particle could, in one direction. 

What the shaman does, perhaps, is leave the physical behind and use a wormhole to travel with their soul. If a shaman’s soul leaves their body, might it be the size of a particle? Dr. Perdomo called this the spirit voyage, or astral projection as we know it in the West. Sacred geometry is used in Indian cultures as well, where shamans see mandalas in their travels.

There are several accounts of the many worlds through the shamanistic religions, and there are many physicists trying to prove the existence of wormholes, parallel universes, and multiverse theory. The shamanistic religions do not need our scientific proof to make these theories valid; these studies and mathematical proofs are for our own peace of mind in Westernized society. Are we shutting down our greatest form of study by referring to shamanism as primitive and false? “An emphasis of what can be seen and measured may, though, shut out what religious adepts such as shamans claim to ‘see’ as they break through to different states of consciousness.”