Here, we describe how Casas Grandes Medio period (AD 1200 to 1450) shamanic practices of the North American Southwest used tobacco shamanism, a ritual stance called the Tennessee Diviner (TD) posture, and cultural expectations to generate trance experiences of soul flight and divination. We introduce a conceptual model that holds that specific trance experiences are the emergent result of human minds interacting with additional factors including entheogens, cultural expectations, physiological states, postures/movement, and sound/stimulation. Experimental and ethnographic evidence indicates initiating trance (...) with either tobacco intoxication or the TD posture accompanied with a rapidly beating drum or rattle corresponds with perceptions of soul flight, transformation, and divination/information acquisition. Both have similar results but pairing them together as they were during the Medio period likely helped ensure the culturally desired trance experiences. This practice of mutually reinforcing factors was likely part of tobacco‐based shamanism found in other New World cultures as well. We suggest our general model can be applied to other contexts to examine how various aspects of trance induction interact to produce the cultural patterns (and resulting cosmological and spiritual frameworks) anthropologists have documented in other cultures. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze the particular perception of the world Baptists start to learn during their conversion which I call the three-dimensional perception of reality. This concept refers to the ability to incorporate narratives from the Bible into everyday life events and interpret both personal stories and world events accordingly, thereby making the Bible ever relevant. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I show how events from the believers' daily lives are perceived and explained in the light of biblical stories. Regardless (...) of the fact that the two are separated in time and in space, the biblical story is still seen as a proto-event to the current one. No matter how diverse the believers' experiences, they are capable of finding an equivalent episode in the Bible. The scripture, therefore, is ever present in the believers' lives, as a source of meaning and interpretation. (shrink)