#alteredperception

David Abrams The Spell of The Sensuous, pg. 10

“But in generally oral, indigenous cultures, the sensuous world itself remains the dwelling place of the gods, of the numerous powers that can either sustain or extinguish human life. It is not by sending his awareness beyond the natural world that the shaman makes contact with the purveyors of life and health, not bu journeying into the personal psyche; rather, it is by propelling his awareness laterally, outward into the depth of a landscape at once both sensuous and psychological, the living dream that we share with the soaring hawk, the spider, and the stone silently sprouting lichens on its coarse surface.”

The shaman holds the ability as the enchanter within these social structures, called on in an instance that ranged from singular healing to great communal outpourings of emotion and psychic power. 

Within all of these instances, the context created by the shaman in whatever social milieu elicit a charged energy when ‘activated.’ It is within these spaces and rituals that the mundane can transcend into wonder and supernatural power. --> Does this remind you of Walter Benjamin in Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm the ability to provide/conjure ‘aura’ through intent, resulting in the establishment of context. 

///As a means of relating to phenomena of our natural world (as a means of attempting to gain understanding of the reality that we both create/inhabit), we animize the unknown, the unsure and the supernatural. Deities carry the weight of an individual ailment to large-scale natural disaster. These effigies and symbols are deposits of human emotion, threads of archived experience and spaces to relate or to placate through offerings.