What Are Psychedelic Entities?

The first time I heard about the plant spirit of iboga, it was from a man named Barry, who told me she appeared in different forms to different people: sometimes old and maternal, sometimes young and vibrant, usually of African descent. “Mother Iboga,” he called her. And I figured he would know: Barry ran a psychedelic retreat center in rural Mexico that administered ibogaine, the drug derived from iboga, a plant used as a visionary sacrament in Central Africa. 

As an anthropologist, I would usually receive this kind of statement with a mix of curiosity and skepticism, but at the time, I was still in the glow of my own ibogaine experience at the retreat center — nearly 12 hours of dream-like visions, which had ended a day earlier. And the carnivalesque parade in my visions had indeed been stage-managed by a gorgeous and commanding West African woman, her hair braided into an elaborate updo, giant silver jewelry adorning her arms and neck.

At the time, it was obvious to me that she was the plant spirit. But later, I would question why it seemed that way. Wasn’t this just a dubious psychedelic version of the “magical Negro” trope, where a mystical, idealized Black person comes to the aid of a white protagonist (me)? Clearly, my prior knowledge of ibogaine’s African origins had shaped my vision. The drug must have animated images and stories from deep in my unconsciousness, or so I reasoned. 

I had read about ibogaine a few years earlier in a book that described the drug as ten years of psychotherapy in one night. It had sometimes been called the world’s strongest psychedelic, with effects lasting up to two days. Online testimonials were glowing. People said they were transformed. To me, in the midst of intense depression, ibogaine appeared to be a radical solution. I went to Mexico to try it.

The experience was cathartic, ecstatic and transformative — beyond any vocabulary I had at the time. It included many varieties of visions and conversations and stories. And then it was over. Afterward, I simply went back to my life in California. I was a third-year graduate student in a program in cultural anthropology, and I threw myself into my research. Had I been cured? I still don’t know. It’s been a decade, and I still return to the experience in my mind, turning it one way, then another. 

I had always been skeptical of the “plant spirit” concept in Western psychedelic circles. You can’t simply import exotic metaphysical ideas like tropical fruits; they emerge out of complex cultural contexts with profoundly different paradigms of selfhood and reality. Its appropriation felt like a cheapening and flattening of Indigenous and traditional cultures. But over time, my thinking shifted. Perhaps it was not as simple as superficial borrowing; perhaps something more complicated was going on. 

The more I read and the more experts I talked to, the more I found that experiences like my own were both supported by, and overflowed, scientific frameworks. These encounters point to aspects of the human experience — our perceptions of agency, sentience and selfhood — that inhabit the borderlands of modern knowledge.

‘Why Did You Eat Us?’

The experience of encountering otherworldly beings, or sensing a spiritual presence, has been documented on most psychedelics. Huichol people, who are indigenous to Mexico and traditionally consume the peyote cactus, say they meet iconic divine spirit guides, from the Blue Deer (Kauyumari) to Jesus.

On iboga, users have reported seeing their ancestors and other spirits. Ayahuasca, a South American psychoactive tea, is known for encounters with snakes and big cats, and spirits, good and bad. Pure DMT (dimethyltryptamine), ayahuasca’s psychoactive component, is known for conjuring elves, aliens and insect-like creatures. Psilocybin has been known to conjure tricksters, or a benevolent guide that is felt rather than seen. 

“The experience was cathartic, ecstatic and transformative — beyond any vocabulary I had at the time.”

Such encounters abound in psychedelic literature. In “Breaking Open the Head,” journalist Daniel Pinchbeck writes about a man who said that after eating psychedelic mushrooms, he went into the kitchen to get a beer from the fridge and turned around to an extraordinary sight.

Not all such accounts are so cartoonish. More frequent is the subtle sensation of a nearby presence. This has been reported in a range of settings, from psychedelic therapy to recreational drug use to traditional ceremonies.

In 1960, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg wrote about his ayahuasca experience in Peru: “Began to sense a strange Presence in the hut—a Blind Being—or a being I am blind to habitually—like a science-fiction Radiotelepathy Beast from another Universe.” Decades later, subjects in clinical psilocybin studies describe “spirit guides” who help them navigate their trips. Last May, a Muslim religious leader told The New Yorker that she had “felt God right behind her” while under the influence of psilocybin for a study on the effects of the drug in clergy.

There are qualities to these encounters that are consistent across a range of contexts and substances, although interpreted in vastly different ways. Oftentimes, beings deliver messages or try to communicate with the user; they’re perceived as autonomous, sentient and helpful or loving; the encounters are viewed retrospectively as deeply meaningful; and they feel hyperreal, revealing a reality that is truer than our everyday experience. My experience reflected all these qualities. Over time, I began to seriously wonder: What are these entities? 

There are two principal perspectives here. One is rooted in the dominant understanding in the West that psychedelic hallucinations are projections of the intoxicated mind. “Entity encounters,” as scientists dryly refer to them, are simply an occasional feature of such hallucinations. The term “hallucination” itself, coined in 1646 by English physician Sir Thomas Browne, is from the same Latin root as “illusion” and is defined as sensory perceptions that occur in the absence of an actual external stimulus. 

From a scientific perspective, psychedelic hallucinations are similar in kind (if not in cause) to the hallucinations associated with mental illness like schizophrenia and with extreme states like near-death experience or severe hunger. In the early days of psychedelic research in the 1950s, the drugs were understood primarily as “psychotomimetic,” meaning their acute effects mimicked the “mental aberrations” of psychosis — hallucinations, delusions or disordered thinking. 

Although this thinking has shifted significantly in the decades since, the basic scientific understanding of psychedelic experiences is essentially the same: They are misperceptions based on chemical disruptions of the brain’s normal functions. They might lead to insights into normal consciousness or other abnormal states, but most social and behavioral scientists still agree on a hard boundary between what seems real in altered states of consciousness and what is verifiably real in the world beyond oneself. 

Whether they see these hallucinations as originating in the subconscious of an individual psyche, in “the social imaginary” or in the beguiling brain patterns from which consciousness emerges (or all of the above) is a matter of disciplinary orientation. Regardless, the beings one meets while on psychedelics are not really “out there” but are reflections of the mind, and the mind is a phenomenon that exists only within the hardware of the brain.

The other perspective is found in cultures with traditions of ritually consuming psychoactive substances — plants, fungi, toad venom and so on — that view these altered states as a means to perceive other aspects of reality and receive signals from other kinds of beings. The entities encountered in this process are as they seem: autonomous spirit-beings existing in other realms, who might be good or bad. These beings can also be called upon to heal, guide or offer knowledge for the supplicant.

The plant or mushroom that makes this possible is itself a being with agency that is manifested through its capacity to open human minds to other realms and channels. In cultures that practice such healing, spirit visitations without the use of special medicine are extraordinary, but not pathological, events. They can be seen as signs of one’s unique calling to be a healer or that someone is close to death.

“The more I read and the more experts I talked to, the more I found that experiences like my own were both supported by, and overflowed, scientific frameworks.”

Anthropologists have long referred to these belief systems, in which the world is full of spirit-beings with whom humans interact through ritual and prayer, as animism. In the West, this approach is often summarized as “shamanism,” a concept that has been justifiably critiqued for its homogenizing gaze. With all the caveats about the diversity of human culture, and cautions against imagining these contemporary cultures as ancient and unchanging, many Indigenous and traditional cultures do share a belief in the existence of spirits and an afterlife (as does most of humanity).

The popular fascination with shamanism often ignores the fact that spirit possession and sorcery can be very real dangers in cultures that actively engage with the spirit world. Anthropologists have noted eerie experiences while studying these phenomena, like being ensorceled by a greedy shaman, given information by a spirit that is later verified or reprimanded by a secretive goddess for asking too many questions. Anthropologist Andrew Apter refers to such stories as the “ethnographic X-files.” For scholars and laypeople alike, experiences of this sort can be deeply vexing — they cut to the heart of our ontological assumptions and destabilize them.

Wandering Souls

In the 19th century, gentleman scholars attempted to schematize metaphysical beliefs from around the world. They saw European Christendom as the most civilized religion, with everything else slotted into a hierarchy beneath it; “primitive man,” a term that encompassed everyone from Pacific Islanders to Native Americans to most of the African continent, was at the bottom. 

Influenced by a combination of scientific racism and Romantic notions of the “noble savage,” they saw belief in a spirit world as a confusion of the child-like “primitive mind.” Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, one of the founders of British social anthropology, proposed that animist beliefs arose from dreams in which the dreamer felt that their soul had wandered from their body and met spirits of the dead, and that upon waking they confused these dreams with reality.

This orientation was eventually rejected as the field was transformed by its own cultural evolution. German-Jewish émigré Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology, repudiated scientific racism in the late 1800s, arguing that all cultures make sense of the world in their own context, and that to measure other cultures by European values was foolish and an obstacle to knowledge. This concept became known as cultural relativism. (Advances in genomics later disproved the biological existence of racial categories altogether.) 

By the mid-20th century, culture was seen as a kind of language in which people were fluent and through which they expressed themselves and understood the world. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously wrote: “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.” No one language is the right one; that’s not how languages work. Cultural relativity became a guiding principle.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the invention of LSD, the discovery of psychoactive mushrooms in southern Mexico and a growing fascination with South American yagé (ayahuasca) sparked interest in hallucinogens as a topic of study. For anthropologists at the time, these substances presented a curious mix of both culture and biology: Some effects were clearly distinct from or preceded cultural signifiers. 

Anthony F. C. Wallace, an eminent anthropologist of religion, argued in 1959 that the content and nature of hallucinations exist in a kind of feedback loop with cultural frameworks, that one’s culture shapes both one’s hallucinations and one’s interpretations of them. Cultures that seek out and value visionary experiences, such as the Native American Church, will likely be conducive to hallucinations that seem coherent and meaningful. 

Wallace placed psychedelic hallucinations in the same category as trance, possession, hypnogogic states (like sleep paralysis) and psychosis. He criticized psychiatrists who regard hallucinations solely as pathological and nonsensical; this, he argued, made the experience of mental illness more paranoic and alienating. He noted that in “primitive societies,” even if visions themselves are disturbing, having them is not.

Anthropologists tend to sidestep the question of whether experiences of the supernatural are “real.” This is partly because reality itself is a slippery concept in the interstitial space of ethnographic inquiry. But most anthropological explanations tend to quietly assume that even if people believe that the beings they meet, the dimensions they visit or the divine forces they enlist are real, that’s only the result of the really real social function of belief and knowledge systems. In other words, hallucinations offer information about cultural symbolism and creativity, social dynamics and social imagination, but not about the nature of reality itself. 

“These encounters point to aspects of the human experience — our perceptions of agency, sentience and selfhood — that inhabit the borderlands of modern knowledge.”

Ideas about the metaphysics of the psychoactive substance — the spirits attached to or revealed by it — were subordinated to questions about society and culture. In some sense, the question of the ontology of these encounters is out of bounds (or even irrelevant) for anthropological inquiry. What matters is that these encounters seem real to people, and their social and psychological effects are real.

In this way, cultural relativism led to a tension in anthropological thought since it subtly delegitimized many of the cultural beliefs that anthropologists study, while implicitly privileging the tenets of impartial observation and scientific inquiry. This became a problem in the late 20th century when, inspired by postcolonial theory, the field faced a reckoning with its lingering Eurocentric bias. Critics pointed out that although anthropologists profess to be neutral observers, the field itself was clearly grounded in Western paradigms, as epitomized by the values of modern science. They argued that it was impossible for anthropologists to explain non-Western cultures without misrepresenting them on a profound level.

One area where this challenge played out was in the study of Indigenous American cultures. In the ambitious ethnological work “Beyond Nature and Culture,” the French anthropologist Phillipe Descola argued that people around the world don’t live in different cultures but rather in different ontologies — different worlds with different ways of being. When understandings of embodiment, selfhood and materiality — what it is to be alive, what is possible and impossible — are so radically divergent, so are the contours of reality. Descola’s book dethroned the modern Western paradigm and placed it alongside others. 

Descola, who did fieldwork with the Achuar people in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the late 1970s, laid out a schema to try to capture these ontologies. The world of the modern West was “naturalist”: governed by predictable, universal laws, where thoughts arise from the biological processes of the brain and are contained within the mind. Only humans have selves — the product of the human brain, our unique evolutionary advantage. 

In contrast, much of humanity has very different assumptions about who has an interior self, what constitutes a body and how to interpret and meaningfully interact with the nonhuman world. In what Descola describes as the animist world of the Amazon, people can be embodied as animals or plants or not embodied at all. And just as social ethics govern our relationships with neighbors and kin, so too do these principles govern our relationships with other beings. In this paradigm, to ignore nonhuman people is not only dangerous and unwise but a kind of disability; anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, who lived with the Avila Runa people in the Ecuadorian Amazon, refers to this state as “soul blindness.”

One of Descola’s most influential arguments is that the very concepts of “nature” and “culture” are native to the naturalist paradigm and cannot explain other ontologies. The notion that human beings can be divided into discrete layers of “biology” and “culture” is based on Western assumptions about this stark division between the material, natural world and the cultural world of ideas and values.

We see this in the boundaries between the so-called hard sciences and the humanities — and in the idea, inherent to cultural relativism, that nature is neutral and universal, while culture is myriad and fluid. (Cows are the same everywhere; whether or not we see them as agricultural commodities, sacred beings, or both, is culture.) Central to this binary is the idea that only we humans have culture while all other things exist solely on a material level, without subjectivity. 

Descola’s intervention was controversial because it obliquely undermined the premise of Western science that physical laws and material reality are universal, even if they are perceived or interpreted differently by different people. Even if anthropologists, folklorists and others in the humanities regarded these ideas as having intrinsic value within the panoply of human cultural diversity, they still implicitly classified them as only beliefs, myths and ideas. 

But for Descola, the naturalist paradigm is not any more real than the others. His analysis was hugely influential in anthropology, and though it had critics, they took issue less with the content than the neatness of the categories. His work, along with that of Bruno Latour and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, was central to what became known as the “ontological turn” in cultural anthropology, renewing old debates that haunt the field. Can Western paradigms explain other cultures at all? 

“Ideas about the metaphysics of the psychoactive substance — the spirits attached to or revealed by it — were subordinated to questions about society and culture.”

Critical voices in psychedelic studies have reflectedthese concerns. They’ve adopted British philosopher Miranda Fricker’s term “epistemic injustice” to describe the way modern psychedelic science marginalizes Indigenous knowledge and treats its ideas about traditional psychedelics as quaint but ultimately irrelevant. For these critics, the medicalization and commodification of traditional psychedelics is an extension of the long and brutal history of Western colonialism — tacitly invalidating Indigenous knowledge while extracting value from it.

Spirit Vine, Spirit Molecule

Only in the last several years have scientists begun to focus on entity encounters. As the psychedelic that most reliably produces them, DMT was the logical object of study. Pure DMT is a relatively novel drug, one that requires a modern lab for production. It owes its discovery to ayahuasca, which means “spirit vine” in Quechua, an Indigenous Andean language. Current archeology suggests ayahuasca has been used in South America since at least the 12th century.

As with other psychedelics, the history of ayahuasca is intertwined with European colonialism. Spanish missionaries and prospectors had learned about it by the 17th century (an “infernal brebaje,” or “devilish potion,” one Jesuit historian called it), and by the early 20th century, European and American ethnobotanists had taken an interest in it. Exploring the botanical abundance of the Amazon, they noted various plants that native people brewed or inhaled as snuffs to induce visions — to consult spirits, talk to ancestors, even find lost objects. One of those was ayahuasca.

Inspired by these reports, the Hungarian chemist Stephen Szára synthesized DMT in 1955 on the hunch that it was the psychoactive component of ayahuasca. At first, Szára took the drug orally, but to no effect, so he injected it. He reported seeing “brilliantly colored oriental motifs” and “wonderful scenes altering rapidly.” He then gave the drug to volunteers and colleagues. One reported that “the whole room is filled with spirits. It makes me dizzy.” Another: “In front of me are two quiet, sunlit Gods. … I think they are welcoming me into this new world. … I am finally at home.”

The discovery of DMT shed some light on ayahuasca but it also added to its mystery. It turns out that Szára had to inject the drug because the molecule is broken down by an enzyme in the human digestive system. That is how he figured out that ayahuasca contains an expert combination of the chacruna plant, which contains the DMT, and the ayahuasca vine, which contains a chemical that blocks the digestive enzyme that breaks down DMT in the gut. Their combination makes the visionary experience of ayahuasca possible. 

As for how people in the Amazon figured out this singular pairing among the countless plant species of the rainforest, ayahuasca shamans all give the same answer: The spirits directed them to the correct plants through dreams and visions from earlier versions of the brew. If all of this wasn’t puzzling enough, in 1965, scientists discovered that our bodies produce DMT naturally. A few years later, they discovered trace amounts in the human brain. What role it plays is still uncertain.

Most users today smoke or vaporize DMT. The drug is known for producing an intensely weird, often profoundly affecting trip that is over within 20 minutes. At high doses, the substance can dissociate the user entirely from their surroundings. People report that they were catapulted into other worlds, where they met strange beings who communicated telepathically with them. In an academic article on DMT, David Luke, a psychologist who studies psychedelics and parapsychology, quotes a user who said the experience of the drug was “like God punching a hole in the back of your head.” 

It wasn’t until the 1980s that DMT gained a niche following thanks to Terence McKenna, the author and underground psychedelic philosopher, who spoke at length about the “self-transforming machine elves” he met while on the drug. The most famous DMT enthusiast today is Joe Rogan, who frequently discusses it on his podcast. He once told a guest, “One of my most profound experiences, there was a bunch of court jesters giving me the finger … like openly mocking me.” As McKenna once quipped about DMT, “You get elves, everybody does.”

The brevity and intensity of the drug’s effects and its relative safety make it ideal for scientific research, while its natural occurrence in the human body makes it all the more intriguing. In 1992, DMT was the subject of the first government-funded research on psychedelics in humans since the drugs were outlawed 21 years earlier, a notable precursor to the psychedelic revival. Led by neurologist Rick Strassman, the research focused on the subjective effects of DMT delivered intravenously to volunteers in a controlled setting. Writing up his notes, Strassman was surprised to find that encounters with strange beings were a significant feature of the DMT experience: about half of the participants reported such meetings.

“When understandings of embodiment, selfhood and materiality — what it is to be alive, what is possible and impossible — are so radically divergent, so are the contours of reality.”

Strassman began to see patterns in these encounters and created a typology: aliens; guides and helpers; clowns, jokers and jesters; elves and dwarves; or reptilian or insect-like figures. Variations and outliers notwithstanding, this spectrum remains remarkably consistent with DMT studies today. Strassman also looked into the historical literature and found similar descriptions as far back as Szára, who wrote that one of his subjects reported meeting “dwarfs or something.” Forty years later and a continent away, one of Strassman’s participants put it succinctly: “That was real strange. There were a lot of elves.”

Another participant encountered “grasshoppers-like beings” that treated them like a long-lost cousin, while another met an alien octopus. One reported “a lot of very strange clowns” who were “trying to show me something.” People were often at a loss for words trying to describe these beings; “clowns or jokers or jesters or imps,” said a participant. Almost everyone who encountered beings described them as sentient, autonomous and eager to communicate with them. 

Later research reiterated these results. In a 2020 online survey of 2,561 people who claimed to have encountered entities on DMT, the vast majority described them as “conscious” and “intelligent,” and more than three quarters called them “benevolent.” The majority also reported some form of communication in their respective encounters, often telepathically or by way of a gesture, dance or presentation of an object. More than half of the respondents reported that the experience was in the top five or single most meaningful, significant or insightful experiences of their lives.

A field study of people using DMT was published the following year, and researchers found that 34 of 36 reported encounters with “sentient entities that were experienced as beyond the self.” Many also reported a sense of familiarity, or even familial intimacy. “The entities were my friends, I felt they were like my sisters,” said one user. 

However, there are few cases where the beings were perceived as indifferent or even unwelcoming. A few users felt they had been unceremoniously thrust into a private party. One reported, “I had no business there. The presence was not hostile, just somewhat annoyed and brusque.” Luke, the psychologist, wrote about one of his own experiences, “I found myself breaking through the veil like a gatecrasher into a party of swirling, smiling eyeballs all attached to snake bodies, which were as startled to see me as I was to be there.” 

The researchers in these studies have different ways to explain all of this. Some looked to these user reports to shed light on naturally occurring altered states which, they hypothesized, were caused by the release of endogenous DMT in the human brain. Strassman noted parallels between DMT entities and alien abduction stories, especially the giant eyes and telepathic communication. The coauthors on the field study refer to the strange overlap between DMT entity encounters and mythical figures like fairies, gnomes and elves — magical, diminutive trickster beings who transport hapless humans to other dimensions — as the “elf-alien-DMT entity triad.” 

Years later, Strassman developed his own theory that departed from scientific frameworks. Drawing on his expertise as a neurologist and his research with DMT, coupled with an in-depth reading of biblical prophecy and Jewish thought, he tried to synthesize the extraordinary trip reports of DMT users with prophetic states occurring outside of drug use. Rather than assuming a neurological mechanism triggers experiences of the divine, Strassman theorized that endogenous DMT is activated by divine encounters. 

This “theoneurological view,” as he called it, explains the cross-cultural parallels of mystical experience and the significant overlap between DMT experiences and stories of revelation: the sensory distortions (like disembodied voices), the intense emotional states, the awe-inspiring visions, the disclosure of other realities, the sense of receiving messages from outside oneself and (echoing Luke) a whole lot of eyes. As Strassman notes, in Ezekiel’s vision, the divine chariot is “full of eyes all around.”

Other Minds

What is actually happening in the brain during these encounters? While scientists are still unable to say with certainty, a number of new studies have come out of the DMT Research Group at Imperial College London, led for seven years by neurologist Christopher Timmerman, that give us some ideas.

In 2023, Timmerman published the first research article to incorporate both Electroencephalography (EEG) and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) readings during the acute phase of a DMT trip. The findings showed that DMT caused a dramatic drop in alpha and beta wave activity, the types of brainwaves typically linked to relaxed waking states and focused attention.

“My own trip was through outer space with a boisterous circus troupe who put on a show for me. I was shown the whole animal kingdom in all its beauty and diversity.”

These rhythms help maintain stable patterns of thinking and awareness, so their reduction suggests that under the effect of DMT, the brain shifts into a much more fluid, unstructured state. At the same time, the overall complexity of brain activity increased, meaning that signals became more diverse and unpredictable, what some researchers refer to as a more “entropic” or information-rich state.

fMRI scans also revealed that DMT disrupted the brain’s default mode network (DMN), a system of interconnected regions that is most active when we’re daydreaming, recalling memories, thinking about ourselves or imagining the future. The DMN is thought to anchor our sense of self and ordinary consciousness.

Under DMT, this network became less cohesive, and brain regions that usually operate separately started communicating more freely — a phenomenon called “network disintegration and desegregation.” In other words, the brain’s normal functional hierarchies broke down, giving way to a more globally connected, anarchic mode of processing. These changes closely mirror what has been observed with other psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD, and help explain the profound alterations in perception, sense of self and time that users report.

Speaking to me recently about the research, Timmerman framed these findings in the context of the brain’s critical ability to make sense of and navigate our environment, in particular, by creating cognitive models that help us learn, reason and plan for the future. These models fill in the blanks when we’re encountering something new: an image, object, person or situation. They’re also part of our fine-tuned instinctual awareness of our environment, the part of our brain that scans for threats and looks for familiarity. 

DMT appears to exert its strongest effects on the higher-level brain regions responsible for generating these predictive models — areas that are most evolved in humans, such as parts of the prefrontal cortex and default mode network. At the same time, DMT appears to disinhibit more evolutionarily ancient regions, like the limbic system, which governs emotion and memory. This loosening of hierarchical control allows unusual patterns of connectivity to emerge. 

But why elves? Why aliens? Why tentacles and serpents? Timmerman pointed out that, overall, only about 10% of DMT users see these specific beings. In his view, the recurrence of forms is overstated as a result of people like McKenna. He also noted that the phenomenon is often more gradient and less discrete than a troupe of bouncing elves, with many variations on a subtly “felt presence.” As for the neurological mechanism, based on his lab’s current research, preliminary findings suggest that, in the midst of the network disintegration caused by DMT, new patterns begin to crystallize as the brain tries to make sense out of the chaos. 

Timmerman hypothesized that entity encounters are caused by the brain tendency to foreground agentive behavior. We are genetically programmed to infer agency in the white noise of our environment — to notice the rustle in the trees above us, or the sound of footsteps behind us. As patterns emerge out of this drug-induced entropic brain state, they manifest as seemingly sentient, autonomous entities, but in his view, the specific make-up of the agent is culturally determined. 

Cognitive science takes us deeper into these kinds of explanations. Michael James Winkelman, a medical anthropologist who studies shamanism and psychedelics, points out that entity encounters employ critical functions of human cognition, especially a suite of functions known as social cognition. These are the subtle and intricate skills we’ve evolved as a species to cohere as social units — as kin, community, friends and trustworthy allies. Social cognition is rooted in something called “theory of mind,” the cognitive ability to understand and predict the thoughts, intentions and emotions of others. 

The name is misleading though — theory of mind is more accurately a theory of other minds. People develop this ability in early childhood: Usually around the age of 4, children start whispering secrets in people’s ears after they realize that not everyone knows what they themselves know and that people can hide their thoughts. The ability to contemplate other people’s thoughts is one that we refine and puzzle over for the rest of our lives. It’s fundamental to what it means to be a social animal, and to be human.

Winkleman hypothesizes that entity encounters are the result of psychedelics interfering with this innate ability to perceive and contemplate the autonomous consciousness of others. He points out several other cognitive functions essential to human social bonding and rooted in theory of mind that appear to be rerouted and overactivated by psychedelics. 

“I could never shake the feeling that some core element of my visions came from the ibogaine molecule itself as it moved through my system.”

One of these is “mindreading,” the unlikely term used by cognitive scientists for the attribution of emotions and internal mental states to others. Mindreading uses body language and other subconscious clues to guide social interactions. It’s essential to empathy as well, with a well-documented neurological component called “mirror neurons” that mimic the actions and emotions that we see in others in our own brains.

This is why videos of people in pain are so upsetting. This also explains our species’ hyperactive attentiveness to human faces, which we find in the phenomenon of pareidolia: seeing faces in inanimate objects, from clouds to tortillas. Winkleman speculates that the reason there are so many eyes in DMT and ayahuasca visions is because eyes are key to “reading” other minds.

Many symptoms of psychosis exhibit similar disruptions to social cognition. Paranoia can be understood as an overactive theory of mind, ascribing intentionality to people (or some larger unseen entity) where there is none. The belief that one’s thoughts can be heard by others, or that someone else is putting thoughts into one’s own mind, is a weakening of the self-other distinction essential to theory of mind. 

In contrast to psychosis, psychedelics have shown themselves to be remarkably pro-social, meaning they facilitate and promote social connections, feelings of warmth and attachment, and other positive emotions. Perhaps this is because users know that the trip will end, while people in the grip of psychosis have no such comfort. Or perhaps it’s due to the so-called “set and setting,” the term psychedelic users borrowed long ago from psychology to describe the way one’s mood and orientation (“set”) and one’s environment (“setting”) will shape the experience.

Altered social cognition is also found in cases that neuroscientists refer to as “naturally occurring” mystical experiences, such as near-death experiences, religious revelation and voices heard during life-threatening moments. Take, for example, third man syndrome: the sensation of a phantom guide or felt presence, nearby but slightly outside one’s visual frame, during strenuous and life-threatening situations. It has been reported by people during extreme endurance tests, including mountain climbers, solo sailors and deep-sea divers, and people who were injured in disasters but miraculously survived. Many later describe the presence as an angel.

The first documented case was that of the early 20th-century British explorer Ernest Shackleton, whose ship was iced-in near Antarctica for two years in the 1910s. He and three survivors trekked inland where, half-starved, they all felt the haunting presence of “another being” who disappeared once they reached a whaling station. This story was later immortalized in T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” 

Who is the third who walks always beside you? / When I count, there are only you and I together / But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you. 

The phenomenon of social cognition in human evolution attests to the fact that social cohesion is critical to our individual and collective survival. We are bound to others on every level — even neurologically. In many ways, entity encounters, both naturally occurring and drug-induced, are an extension of this suite of cognitive abilities. It is perhaps not surprising that they seem to promote pro-social behavior as well, albeit beyond the conventional bounds of modern society — toward nonhuman beings, like other animals,  plants and fungi, spirits, and perhaps other beings we don’t have names for, at least not in this language.

Le Bois Sacré

I tried not to have expectations before I took ibogaine, but it was hard. I had read every account of the drug I could find in books and online — most of them by Americans who were treating addiction or depression, or were simply curious to try it. Many referenced traditional use in Africa, where iboga is said to induce visits from one’s ancestors, who offer counsel or insight. And so I hoped to meet my own, and to answer some personal and theological questions. 

I ended up getting some of that, but not much. Instead, I got an extravagant Monty Python-esque space circus, among other visions, with a whole cast of characters, including the figure I understood as the plant spirit. Although I speculated on cultural tropes and subconscious motifs, in the end I could not find an obvious source for the vivid and strikingly coherent themes and people who filled my visions. The peculiar ebullient surrealism of it all seemed entirely de novo. 

“I’ve come to feel that these beings exist in a blind spot of modern science, where the bioelectrochemical processes of the brain reach the limits of their explanatory powers.”

In the years that followed, I began reading the scholarly literature on ibogaine, in search of experiences and entity encounters like my own, and to understand the drug that had left such a deep impression on my psyche. Ibogaine is considered an “atypical” psychedelic because its effects and mode of action differ from classic psychedelics like psilocybin and DMT. Instead of the usual entopic imagery — the geometric shapes and pulsating colors — ibogaine hallucinations tend to be narrative; rather than ego dissolution (that oceanic loss of self), one’s sense of self remains intact. The experience is often compared to lucid dreaming.

Ibogaine is also unlike other psychedelics in that it’s been medicalized even since it was introduced to Western society: first as a stimulant in France in the 1930s and then in the U.S. in the 1980s, when it was discovered to have remarkable anti-addictive properties. Its unique promise as a single-use treatment for addiction has driven ibogaine research ever since; it has also recently shown potential as a treatment for traumatic brain injury. These potential medical applications have overshadowed ibogaine’s astonishing subjective effects, which are often treated as secondary to clinical outcomes.

Ibogaine is tricky to study in humans. While the DMT trip is over in 20 minutes, ibogaine’s can last up to 48 hours. And while drugs like DMT and psilocybin generally have few physical side effects, ibogaine can cause extreme vertigo and vomiting, and in rare cases, potentially fatal heart problems. Putting someone on ibogaine in a fMRI machine is complicated and impractical, to say nothing of the legal liabilities. 

The history of ibogaine in the West is also entangled with European colonization. Its exact history is difficult to glean, but by most accounts, iboga was first used by the Pygmy people indigenous to the equatorial forest of Central Africa, who then introduced it to Bantu people, who expanded into the region over many years, becoming the dominant population by around 1000 B.C.E. Today, its consumption is part of the syncretic religion of Bwiti in Gabon and parts of Cameroon.

Although I never found another account that included the exact figure I saw, I did find accounts with similar elements. The day after I came down from ibogaine, the first word that came to mind to describe the experience was “crowded.” There had been an explosion of characters, both visual and auditory. Having visions of an assembly or a throng is a recurrent theme in the iboga and ibogaine literature. It’s described by Bwiti initiates as far back as the 1960s, when one man told the anthropologist James Fernandez that he flew with his father’s spirit over a forest where he saw “a crowd of black persons” at a gate, followed by another crowd of people “all in white” who “shouted at us words of recognition.” 

In his memoir “Long Past Stopping,” Oren Canfield, who took ibogaine to treat his heroin addiction in the early 2000s, recounts his vision of drowning in an ocean before being pulled toward the shoreline, where “everyone I’ve ever seen, or will see, is waiting for me on the beach. Alive, dead, past, present.” The neuroscientist Eduardo Schenberg interviewed Brazilian patients after they took ibogaine to treat substance-use disorder. There, one man told him that he met “a small indigenous man” and noticed behind him “a swarm of souls, spirits and a big tribe” coming toward him.   

Other common themes are screens or theatrical stages, the feeling of being an audience of one, and long passages over expanses of space. My own trip was through outer space with a boisterous circus troupe who put on a show for me. I was shown the whole animal kingdom in all its beauty and diversity (with many dogs, my favorite species). Fernandez noted that many of the Bwiti initiates said they journeyed over rivers, forests or roads, and saw what he described as “chthonic animals” that represent crossing between realms — crocodiles, hippopotami, snakes.

Some people did describe meeting a plant spirit. In his memoir, Pinchbeck recounts trying iboga in Gabon:

Days afterward, at a Bwiti temple, he met an nganga (a Central African spiritual healer) who told him that this figure was the spirit of le bois sacré — the sacred wood, as iboga is known to Bwiti practitioners — who “comes out and engages you in conversation” during the iboga ceremony. At least one patient in Schenberg’s research noted an encounter with an old lady whom he described as “the spirit of ibogaine.”

“Entity encounters exist between scientific and spiritual paradigms, normative and altered consciousness, our world and spirit worlds.”

The crowds, the travels, the beings, the ancestors — the parallels are remarkable and puzzling in equal measure. And as with other psychedelics, the profoundly social quality of the visions is conspicuous in the way they underline and fortify deep bonds to family, friends, ancestors, community and all of life itself. 

Although neurological study of ibogaine in humans is limited, studies on rats have found that both gamma waves and neural network patterns during ibogaine were similar to that of REM sleep. This leads to a familiar slipperiness, in that dreams are a means of divination and communication with spirits in many cultures, including those that traditionally use psychedelics. From one angle, this offers a naturalistic explanation, and from another, it suggests a traditional one: that ibogaine opens up the user to the spirit world, just as dreams do.

Are Rainbows Real?

I could never shake the feeling that some core element of my visions came from the ibogaine molecule itself as it moved through my system. Perhaps not only from the molecule, but somehow from the molecule’s own memory, from the people who brought it into being, cultivated it, celebrated and respected it and interwove it into their lives — as if the people I encountered in my visions came with the molecule itself, like an entourage that accompanies a superstar. 

In the years I’ve spent researching these encounters, I’ve come to feel that these beings exist in a blind spot of modern science, where the bioelectrochemical processes of the brain reach the limits of their explanatory powers. Timmerman pointed to this when he noted about entity encounters, “ultimately it is a question of ontology that is beyond science.” Neuroscience can offer answers only from the scientific paradigm of biological causes. It’s up to the people who experience it themselves to make meaning out of it. 

Winkleman, the medical anthropologist, likened entity encounters to rainbows. “Just as we explain the experience of rainbows as your physical perspective on the sunlight reflecting off of water droplets in the air, we can seek naturalistic explanations of the nature of psychedelic entity experiences,” he writes. Everyone sees rainbows, and we collectively agree on their existence as a kind of optical illusion. Winkleman argues that entity encounters are similar: Recurring patterns among people from different cultural backgrounds suggest a naturalistic cause. 

But no one argues that rainbows are not real. Our knowledge that they are only a play of light has no bearing on the delightful spectacle of rainbows, or their deep-rooted cultural meaning. If anything, the empirical explanation amplifies the symbolic aspect — rainbows reveal the true nature of light itself. 

Over time, I started to relate to “plant spirits” in the same way. Whether or not I’m ready to take Barry’s descriptions of Mother Iboga at face value, the concept seems much less fanciful to me than it once did. These entities belong to their plants as much as scent belongs to a rose or pollen to milkweed. They are, at the very least, as real as rainbows.

In his discussion of the ethnographic X-files, Apter notes that the ontological turn leaves the anthropologist in what he calls a double-bind. One cannot say they believe or disbelieve in spirits, oracles or sorcery (and so on) without somehow lying; one both knows them to be true and doesn’t believe in them at the same time. The double-bind is a “doubling of worlds,” where we find ourselves in both and neither. 

So, too, do entity encounters exist between scientific and spiritual paradigms, normative and altered consciousness, our world and spirit worlds. They have an irreducible doubleness — as symptoms of intoxication and as openings into other worlds to which we are habitually blind.