MCA 1994: His Harlem girlfriend, Fayne, recalled, "He was so tormented and just so torn apart, like he was obsessed with something really evil. He'd say, 'Well, you're from Georgia,' so he'd say I should know how people drive demons out, because I used to talk about my grandma and all her weird stuff. He'd talk about us goin' down there and havin' some root lady drive this demon out of him! He used to always talk about some devil or somethin' was in him, and he didn't have any control over it."

RP 1999: Mushroom hallucinogens and other psychoactive plants enhance the perceptual skills of the shaman. Being the tribal seers, their peers rely on shamans to interpret urges and translate behavior. Their heightened intuitions enable them to sense intentions hidden by social customs. "At its fullest," notes Terrence McKenna, "shamanism is not simply religion, it is a dynamic connection into the totality of life on the planet."

RP 1999: Describing a typical shaman transformation, Joseph Campbell explains, "A boy becomes sick, psychologically sick...the child begins to tremble and is immobilized and the family is terribly concerned about it and they send for a shaman, who has had the experience in his own youth, to come as a psychoanalyst, you might say, and pull the youngster out of it. But instead of relieving him of the deities, he is adapting [the boy] to the deities and the deities to himself. It's a different problem from that of psychoanalysis. I think it was Nietzsche who said 'be careful lest in casting out your devil you cast out the best thing that's in you.' Here, the 'deities who have been encountered of the powers,' let's call them, are retained, the connection is retained, it's not broken, and these men then become the spiritual advisers and gift-givers of their people...The shaman is the person who has in his late childhood/early youth, could be male or female, had an overwhelming psychological experience that turns them totally inward, the whole unconscious has opened up and they've fallen into it. It's been described many, many times and it occurs [worldwide] all the way from Siberia right through the Americas right down to Tierra del Fuego. It's a kind of schizophrenic crack up, the shaman experience: dying and resurrecting, being on the brink of death and coming back, to actually experience the death experience; people who have very deep dreams - dream is a great source of the spirit - or people who, in the woods, have had mystical encounters."

RP 1999: Like you might see an animal or something like that, and all the sudden you might have a very funny feeling go through you for a second. Like one time I seen this deer, I see a lot of deer around where I used to be from, and I said, "Wait!" Something went through me for one second, like I seen him before, like I had some real close connection with that deer for one split second, and then it just went away...Have you ever laid in bed and you was in this complete state where you couldn't move or nothing? You're like that and you feel like you're going deeper and deeper into something, not sleep, but it's something else. And every time I go into that then I say, "Oh hell, I'm scared as hell," so you try to say, "Help! Help!" You can't move, you can't scream, and you say "Help!" and you finally get out of there, because you just can't move. It's a very funny feeling.

But one time while that feeling was coming through me I said, "Oh, here we go, this time I'm just gonna let it happen and see where I go, see what happens." So I was getting really scared in there. I was goin' ZZzzzZZZzz - like that. I said, "I'm not even asleep!" I said this is really strange, and somebody knocked on the door. I said, "Aw!" Because I wanted to find out. - Jimi

RP 1999: "Shamans play the role that the priesthood plays in our eyes," notes Joseph Campbell. "There's a major difference, as I see it, between a shaman and a priest: a priest is a functionary of a social sort, the society worships certain deities in a certain way and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry on that ritual, and the deity to whom he is devoted is a deity that was there before he came along. The shaman's powers are symbolized in familiars; deities of his own personal experience, and his authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination. He would become the interpreter of the heritage of mythological life...The myth makers in earlier days were the counterparts of our artists today."