Initiated by the Spirits: Healing the Ills of Modernity through Shamanism, Psychedelics and the Power of the Sacred Paperback – 12 December 2022

Randy Chung Gonzales was once leading an atypical life in his place of origin of Lamas, Peru, when his employer, anthropologist Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, asked him to accompany her to an ayahuasca ceremony led by a local shaman. There, to everyone’s great surprise, Randy was once initiated by discarnate entities, who instructed him and gave him healing powers. In this unique book, Randy tells his story to Frédérique, who offers cultural context and describes how she herself has been transformed from an academic anthropologist into an advocate for the sharing of indigenous wisdom and ecospirituality. Drawing on history, cultural studies and anthropology, Frédérique offers a penetrating analysis of Western science-based modernity, which has made the systematic eradication of shamanism a priority. Initiated by the Spirits argues powerfully that shamanic sacred plants can heal the epidemics of mental illness in Western societies, in addition to the global ecological crisis. Randy’s shamanic initiation serves as a beacon for new ways of conceiving of the human relationship to science, spirit and our planetary home.

Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, PhD. is Professor Emerita, Department of Anthropology at Smith College and has also taught at Harvard, Wellesley, and Wesleyan University. She founded the Sachamama Center for BioCultural Regeneration (SCBR) in the Peruvian High Amazon in 2009, which she directs. She has authored or edited fifteen books and published some 70 articles and book chapters. Her most up to date book, co-edited with Stefano Varese, is Contemporary Voices from Anima Mundi: A Reappraisal (2020).

Randy Chung Gonzales is a self-trained architect and visual artist who was once born and raised in Lamas, Peru. In June of 2016 he was once initiated by disembodied spirits into shamanic knowledge and power, and since then he has been given powers by other indigenous spirits in addition to the Virgin of Guadalupe. He receives regular teachings from a disembodied Ashaninka shaman, offers healing to others, and directs an ecological center in the forest referred to as in English “The Place of the Sacred Mountain.”

The loss of enchantment—that natural disposition of children, mystics, and Indigenous People to wonder and remain at peace with cosmic mysteries—is also recovered through psychedelics and shamanism, suggest Randy Chung Gonzales and Frédérique Apffel-Marglin. Not the whole lot has a rational answer and silence itself is also needed to ground our wisdom once again in awe. This odd book, written by a heretical anthropologist and an unorthodox shaman in a profound mystical and intellectual dialogue, is proof that we modern individuals are still in time to recuperate and practice the ancient, original, and indigenous wisdom that may heal the cosmos.

—Stefano Varese, Professor of Indigenous Studies, University of California, Davis