Michael Langevin on Discovering Shamanism in South America

Michael Peter Langevin has spent his career working at the edges of what most people would call shamanic transformation, writing books that trace how consciousness shifts and how older cultures understood wellness of the body, mind, emotions, spirit, and community. Among the titles he has published are The Secrets of the Ancient Incas and The Secrets of Amazon Shamans. For a time he also handled public relations for the Monroe Institute. In a conversation with Erik Lenderman for the online series A Psychology of the Future, he described where all of it began.

The story goes back decades, to his student years in Boston. He signed up for a class on Latin American politics taught by someone who had just come back from the region. By the time the semester ended, the pull to go see it himself was too strong to ignore. Money was the obstacle. He didn't have much of it.

So he hitchhiked out of Boston in the middle of a snowstorm, made his way down to Miami, and bought a round-trip ticket to Lima. He stepped off the plane in Peru with thirty dollars to his name and a plan to stretch it as far as it would go.

That turned out to be further than you might expect. Prices were low compared to what he was used to in the States, and people kept offering him help and hospitality along the way. Six weeks unfolded as a string of adventures: the Nazca Lines, the canyon country around Arequipa, Lake Titicaca, the scattered ruins around Cusco, and finally Machu Picchu.

Something changed at Machu Picchu. Standing there, Langevin began to have visions of Inca gods and of Peru's past. He came away convinced that his work was tied to this history, specifically to recovering what had been buried when the Europeans arrived.

The Incas, he explains, lived inside a completely different set of assumptions. Their relationship to nature, and to one another, had little in common with the way the modern world operates or with what has grown up since the conquest. Pieces of that older way of living have never fully disappeared. They persist in the remote villages tucked into the Andes and deep in the Amazon.