Negotiating with evil. Power artefacts, shamanic relics and brain responses in African healing practices

The human brain, since its evolution in Africa about 100,000 years ago, has been predisposed to engage with immaterial entities in a spirit world, accessed by shamans through an integrated mode of consciousness (IMC). This shamanic 'soul flight' produced internal imagery now regarded as art, aimed at negotiating with evil spirits causing disease and social disorder. Such practices elicit psychoneuroimmunological responses and symbolic healing. Today, relics of this worldview persist in African rock art, music, rituals, and healing practices. The analysis connects the psychophysical structures of various African artifacts to the IMC of the perceiver, examining cross-cultural brain responses in healing, from San trance dances to Kongo fetishes and modern Ebola reactions.

Study at a glance

Abstract

From its evolution in Africa about 100 thousand years ago, the brain architecture of all populations of Homo sapiens has shown a tendency to deal with ‘immaterial objects’ in a spirit world where virtual reality entities operated. The contact with this world was achieved by ‘shamans’, who mastered to enter it, connecting sympathetic and parasympathetic structures by psychointegrators (Integrated Mode of Consciousness, or IMC). The visual description of internal imagery, symbols and metaphors elaborated during this ‘soul flight’ is today considered ‘art’. The overall goal was a negotiation with evil spirits and their output: physical disease and social disorder. Spirits (or the like) produce manipulations of social and physiological dynamics with psychoneuroimmunological responses - up to symbolically induced biological changes - by eliciting endogenous healing responses and other recuperative potentials (symbolic medicine).In today’s Africa, many relics of this shamanistic world are still evident in rock-art, symbols, music/rhythms, witchcraft/sorcery rituals, power objects, death resolution, healing practises. Analysing different typologies of African artefacts, we connect their psychophysical structures to the IMC of the perceiver and consider basic cross-cultural brain responses in healing practises; we span from San hunter-gatherers’ trance dances to Kongo ‘fetishes’, from Ewe healers to Bozo drummers, from Lega associations to Ebola reactions in modern Liberia.