Ritual, Art and Visionary Experience

Introduction: Psychedelic and transpersonal experience as an artistic subject

The modern literature on psychedelic experience contains extensive descriptions of visual pattern, autonomous imagery, apparent encounter, radical shifts of scale and episodes of intense personal or metaphysical significance. Accounts of transpersonal experience extend this field beyond psychoactive substances to include contemplative practice, breathwork, trance, dreams, ritual, spiritual crisis and spontaneous visionary episodes. Many participants subsequently draw, paint, write, sing, compose or construct environments. The resulting work occupies a distinctive position in the study of altered experience. It records aspects of phenomenology, participates in psychological integration, and gives private or ritually bounded experience a social and historical form.

José Eliézer Mikosz describes visionary art as an interaction between non-ordinary states of consciousness and the cultural contexts through which their contents become intelligible (Mikosz, 2015). This formulation avoids treating visionary images as direct facsimiles of an invariant inner world. It also preserves the formative force of the experience itself. An artist works from perceptions, affects, convictions and encounters that may have been unusually intense, while drawing upon learned techniques and an available archive of religious, artistic, biological and technological forms. Visionary art develops at this point of interaction. Lisa Hester's recent art-historical account places contemporary visionary art within a longer trajectory involving Romanticism, modernism, psychoanalysis, C. G. Jung and the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism (Hester, 2025). Mikosz and Hester together provide a basis for studying psychedelic art within art history while retaining the importance of altered-state experience.

Explicit psychedelic influence remained difficult to discuss within many later twentieth-century art institutions. Artists could refer to dreams, spirituality, automatism or the unconscious while references to LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, DMT and ayahuasca often associated the work with a countercultural style, a pharmacological curiosity or an illustration of intoxication. This asymmetry contributed to a partial historical record. Psychedelic causation, recurring entheogenic practice and post-session creative labour frequently remained outside the critical frame even when they played a substantial role in an artist's development. The growing literature on psychedelic art and the inclusion of ayahuasca-related production in major exhibitions have started to make this history more available (Rubin, 2010; Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, 2023; Hester, 2025).

The present discussion concentrates on integration.¹ Psychedelic and transpersonal experiences may remain unresolved, continue to invite contemplation or become intelligible through a gradual psychological and social process. Their visual contents can be difficult to retain with precision, although memory varies considerably among individuals and is shaped by attention, training, repetition, emotional intensity and the interval before recording. Some artists respond to a singular episode. Others sustain frequent contact with ceremonial, contemplative or intentionally liminal conditions and create from within a continuing mode of life. Integration encompasses both patterns: the extended interpretation of an event and the cultivation of a durable relationship with recurrent experience.

Artistic practice can become one axial point in this process. It coordinates remembered perception, affect, bodily action, technique and reflection through a material task. The artist must choose scale, medium, contour, colour, rhythm, sequence and degree of finish. Each choice differentiates material that may initially have appeared simultaneous or difficult to articulate. The resulting work gives the maker a stable object for later contemplation and gives other people access to a configured trace of the experience. This essay uses the phrase technology of integration for that organised conjunction of attention, skill, material procedure, repetition and transmission.²

Ritual enters the argument as one historically important context rather than a universal explanation. In many traditions, ritual organises the sensory, relational and interpretive conditions of visionary experience through music, scent, darkness, movement, patterned objects, restrictions, invocations and specialised forms of attention. In other settings, the creative process develops privately or within studios, clinics, informal circles and artist networks. The essay follows artistic integration across these settings. Its concern lies with the procedures through which extraordinary experience acquires form, the networks through which those forms circulate, and the ways established images influence later perception.

Artistic practice as a technology of integration

The language of integration entered psychedelic therapy as a way of describing the work that follows an acute session, yet the underlying process has a much wider history. Narration, song, image-making, pilgrimage, dietary discipline, apprenticeship and communal interpretation have long provided ways of establishing a relationship with extraordinary experience. Contemporary clinical definitions commonly describe integration as an ongoing process involving psychological, bodily, relational, behavioural and spiritual dimensions (Bathje, Majeski and Kudowor, 2022). Artistic practice adds a specific material dimension. An image, melody, text or object can retain traces of the experience while remaining available to repeated attention.

This availability matters when experience remains open to several possible meanings. A painted image can be revisited after emotional intensity has changed. Details that initially appeared central can recede; peripheral material can acquire significance; biographical and cultural associations can develop over time. The work records several moments in that process. Underpainting, alteration, erasure, glazing and revision preserve a history of changing relations between the maker and the subject. Integration occurs through these material negotiations rather than through the final image alone.

The acute experience and the creative process also possess different temporal structures. Psychedelic imagery may appear rapidly, transform without transition or present several scales at once. Painting, carving and writing proceed through sequences of physical decisions. A musical phrase must acquire duration, pitch, repetition and relation to silence. Weaving develops through counted movements and returning pattern. The slower structure of making allows elements to be isolated, compared and recombined. This temporal dilation can support memory and interpretation without presuming a complete or literal transcription of the experience.

John Dewey's Art as Experience provides a useful account of this transformation. Expression develops through interaction between emotion, prior experience and the objective conditions of a medium (Dewey, 1934). A felt intensity becomes artistic expression as it is organised through paint, sound, movement or language. The medium contributes resistance and consequence. Pigment changes as layers accumulate; a line alters the balance of a composition; words acquire implications through syntax; a repeated melody changes the bodily state of the singer and listeners. The material process participates in the formation of meaning.

Marion Milner approached related processes through free drawing and painting. In On Not Being Able to Paint, she described the emergence of order through a receptive engagement with marks, accidents and material variation (Milner, 1950/2011). Her concept of a “pliant medium” concerns a material capable of receiving projection and experiment while returning perceptible differences to the maker. This reciprocity is especially relevant to post-psychedelic work. A surface can receive unstable or partially remembered material, while its visible structure enables comparison, revision and renewed recognition.

The creative process may also reveal implications that were unavailable during the originating experience. An artist begins with a remembered configuration, bodily sense, phrase or atmospheric quality. During production, accidental forms and technical problems introduce new relations. Recognition can occur through the emerging work: a form appears appropriate before the artist can fully explain its significance. Such moments combine voluntary skill with perceptual discovery. They provide a continuation of inquiry under conditions in which attention and judgement operate differently from the acute state.

Artistic production offers no automatic guarantee of psychological integration. A work can organise difficult material constructively, preserve unresolved fear, intensify grandiose identification or establish a closed interpretive system. Its value lies partly in making these developments perceptible across time. The artwork can be discussed with trusted peers, teachers, ritual specialists or therapists. Artistic discipline supplies criteria of coherence and craft; social reception supplies further interpretation and consequence. The process remains open to revision as the artist's life and understanding change.

Liminality

Arnold van Gennep's model of rites of passage distinguishes separation, transition and incorporation (van Gennep, 1909/1960). Victor Turner developed the transitional phase through his account of liminality, in which ordinary roles and categories become temporarily unstable (Turner, 1969). Psychedelic literature often concentrates on this middle region: entry, ego dissolution, ordeal, revelation and visionary intensity. Artistic integration directs attention toward incorporation, including the practical work of returning altered perceptions and values to biography, community and material practice.

The term post-liminal can identify this function, although it need not imply a single linear sequence. A person may revisit visionary states repeatedly through ceremony, meditation, artistic concentration or psychoactive practice. Creative work can occur between sessions, during a long period of altered orientation, or alongside an established ritual life. In such cases, incorporation develops cyclically. Each work gathers material from previous experiences, participates in current practice and prepares attention for later encounters. Post-liminality describes the labour of establishing continuity across these changes.³

Turner's later distinction between liminal and liminoid activity is relevant to modern visionary art. Liminal rites generally belong to socially prescribed transitions. Liminoid forms arise more often through voluntary participation in art, leisure, counterculture and experimental communities (Turner, 1974). Studios, workshops, small presses, galleries, psychedelic societies and private ceremonial networks provide settings in which threshold experience can be cultivated without a single institutional authority. The liminoid field encourages invention, recombination and personal authorship while retaining recurrent forms of initiation, apprenticeship and collective recognition.

Turner observed that artists and prophets often occupy socially marginal or threshold positions (Turner, 1969, p. 128). The visionary artist can be described as an edge worker in this limited analytic sense. The term identifies labour conducted between extraordinary experience and established systems of representation. It does not assign a ritual office or equate a contemporary painter with an onanya, mara'akame, pajé, nganga or other culturally instituted specialist.⁴ The artist's authority usually derives from craft, testimony, influence and a body of work rather than from communal initiation into a healing or religious role.

Social incorporation begins when the work becomes available to others. A private experience that previously depended upon verbal testimony acquires a durable visual, sonic or material form. Viewers may recognise aspects of their own experience, encounter an unfamiliar cosmology or interpret the work through psychological, aesthetic and religious frames. Repeated circulation can establish motifs and compositional expectations. Raymond Williams's “structures of feeling” and Cornelius Castoriadis's social imaginary help describe this gradual cultural process: forms of experience become perceptible before they are fully codified as doctrine or institution (Williams, 1977; Castoriadis, 1987).

Art possesses a particular capacity for this incorporation because it can sustain several interpretive registers. A painting may function simultaneously as personal record, aesthetic construction, devotional image, phenomenological proposition and speculative cosmology. Its public existence does not require agreement about the literal status of the depicted world. The work preserves sensuous and affective specificity while allowing ontological interpretation to remain open. This capacity becomes important when an experience carries strong truth-feeling or a sense of autonomous presence. Material form permits sustained engagement without settling the experience through an immediate binary judgement of revelation or hallucination.

Recurrent Practice And Social Incorporation

Psychological models of artistic integration

C. G. Jung's prolonged work on Liber Novus offers an important example of visionary material undergoing artistic elaboration. Jung recorded imaginal dialogues in the Black Books and later selected, transcribed, painted and calligraphically reorganised parts of this material in The Red Book (Jung, 2009; Shamdasani, 2009). The finished folios emerged across years of renewed contact with the images. Composition, textual revision and symbolic comparison altered the relation between the originating visions and their visible form. The project demonstrates how image-making can become an extended method of psychological inquiry.

Jung's concept of active imagination formalised a practice in which imaginal figures receive sustained attention while the conscious personality remains capable of response. His account of the transcendent function concerns the emergence of a new psychological configuration through the representation and relation of previously opposed positions (Jung, 1957/1960). Artistic media are well suited to this process because images can retain ambiguity and symbolic density. A figure can be approached repeatedly without being exhausted by a single verbal interpretation.

D. W. Winnicott's potential space offers a complementary framework. Cultural experience arises in an area where personal psychic reality and the shared world overlap through play, symbol and material form (Winnicott, 1971). An artwork produced after a visionary experience occupies this relational position in concrete terms. It remains connected to the artist's perception while existing as an observable object governed by public materials and techniques. The painting can be privately significant and available to other viewers at the same time.

Stanislav Grof's psychedelic research and later Holotropic Breathwork practice provide a direct historical connection between transpersonal experience and image-making. Grof used patient drawings and paintings within longitudinal accounts of LSD psychotherapy, where sequences of images documented changing biographical, perinatal and transpersonal material (Grof, 1980). Holotropic Breathwork sessions commonly include mandala drawing and group sharing after the breathing period (Grof and Grof, 2010). The mandala supplies a bounded visual field in which participants can place images, colours and somatic impressions before verbal interpretation has become settled.

Grof's theoretical cartography remains debated, especially its claims concerning perinatal matrices and transpersonal memory. Its relevance here also lies in the empirical scale of his clinical observation and the integration procedures developed around that work. Image-making formed part of a practical response to experiences that could be emotionally intense, visually complex and difficult to narrate in sequence. Recent clinical research has begun to study comparable processes. Barros and colleagues report that mandala production within a phase I psychedelic study supported symbolic expression of subjective content that participants found difficult to verbalise (Barros et al., 2025). Bathje, Majeski and Kudowor's analysis of integration practice also identifies expressive and embodied methods as components of an ongoing multidimensional process (Bathje, Majeski and Kudowor, 2022).

The available clinical evidence remains limited. Contemporary studies do not yet establish which forms of artistic activity are most helpful, for whom, under what conditions or across what duration. The broader historical record supports a more modest proposition: image-making and other creative practices can provide structured occasions for revisiting altered experience, and their products can preserve a sequence of changing interpretations. The same practice may support psychological organisation for one person and deepen fixation for another. Assessment depends upon biography, social context, mental health, the quality of guidance and the consequences that develop beyond the artwork.

Ritual organisation of visionary perception and artistic form

Ritual studies offer a way to examine how sensory and interpretive conditions shape visionary experience. Birgit Meyer uses the term “sensational forms” for authorised arrangements of media, bodies and senses through which religious presence becomes perceptible (Meyer, 2008, 2011). Thomas Csordas's “somatic modes of attention” similarly describes culturally elaborated ways of attending with and to the body (Csordas, 1993). These concepts locate visions within organised fields of expectation, movement, sound, material culture and social relation.

In entheogenic ceremonies, darkness, song, scent, smoke, posture, dietary preparation, patterned textiles and the conduct of specialists can guide attention before and during psychoactive effects. These elements influence what participants notice, how changes are interpreted and which parts of the experience are retained. Ritual also provides established forms for subsequent narration. A participant may relate imagery to plant persons, ancestral agencies, Christian figures, energetic anatomy, sorcery, ecological relations or psychological biography according to the concepts available in that setting.

The resulting art often participates in ritual action rather than serving as a detached representation of it. Alfred Gell's theory of art and agency is useful here. Gell approaches artworks as mediators within social relations: objects can focus intention, distribute personhood and support inferences about the action of visible and invisible agents (Gell, 1998). A ritual image, patterned cloth, song or offering may alter relations among participants, ancestors, nonhuman persons and places. David Morgan's “ecology of images” develops a related emphasis on networks of viewers, practices, stories, sites and agencies (Morgan, 2014).

Song demonstrates the limits of a purely visual account of visionary art. In many Amazonian traditions, songs are described as received from plants, animals, spirits or teachers during dreams, diets and ceremonies. Their performance organises time, directs attention, names agencies and changes bodily or social relations. Santo Daime hymns similarly form a received and repeatable musical corpus through which doctrine, memory and collective orientation are enacted. In Bwiti settings, music supports the extended temporal and bodily structure of iboga initiation. Contemporary psychedelic therapy also uses carefully sequenced music to shape emotional movement, imagery and therapeutic engagement (Barrett, Preller and Kaelen, 2018; Kaelen et al., 2018).

These practices distribute agency differently. Clinical discourse often describes music as a component of set and setting. Vegetalista discourse may attribute a song to a plant teacher or regard the singer as working through relationships acquired in dieta. Santo Daime practitioners may understand hymns as received from a spiritual source. Each account organises responsibility, authority and efficacy within a distinct ontology. Comparative analysis becomes most informative when it specifies these differences while examining the shared problem of giving altered experience an ordered, repeatable form.

Shipibo-Konibo design

Shipibo-Konibo kené provides a major case for studying the relation among pattern, perception, song, embodiment and healing. Kené appears across textiles, ceramics, painted surfaces, clothing and bodily decoration. Women have historically held central roles in its production and transmission. Designs can identify aesthetic mastery, social knowledge and relations with the animate environment. Contemporary artists have extended kené onto large canvases and into international exhibition contexts while maintaining connections with Shipibo-Konibo histories and cosmology (Belaunde, 2009, 2012; Favaron and Bensho, 2020).

Angelika Gebhart-Sayer's influential account described Shipibo-Conibo healing as an “aesthetic therapy” connecting geometric designs, ayahuasca visions and songs (Gebhart-Sayer, 1986). Later scholarship has revised the strongest claims of direct equivalence between visual pattern and melody. Bernd Brabec de Mori and Laida Mori Silvano de Brabec show that relations among designs, songs and healing are historically variable and cannot be reduced to a universal synaesthetic code (Brabec de Mori and Mori Silvano de Brabec, 2009). Their work gives closer attention to Indigenous explanations, learned song repertoires, performance contexts and transformations in twentieth-century accounts.

This correction strengthens the analysis of integration. Kené and song operate through cultivated expertise, social transmission and relations with nonhuman agencies. Their significance resides in performance, bodily placement, authorship, use and explanation as well as formal resemblance. A design can organise the surface of a vessel, garment or body; a song unfolds through time and can be used to diagnose, protect, attract, transform or heal. Both provide structured media through which perception and relation are trained.

Brabec de Mori's work on Western Amazonian ritual song describes voices as techniques for establishing and transforming identities and agencies (Brabec de Mori, 2012, 2013, 2015). Songs may be understood as learned from nonhuman teachers while also requiring long periods of memorisation, vocal practice and social recognition. Relational and technical descriptions belong to different levels of the same practice. The singer's account identifies the source and agency of the song; ethnomusicological analysis traces its form, acquisition and performance.

The international reception of kené has created further contexts for integration. Sara Flores's large paintings translate designs made with vegetal dyes and wild cotton into the scale and display conditions of contemporary galleries. White Cube's exhibitions in London and New York describe these works as mappings of Amazonian cosmology and expressions of Shipibo-Konibo ancestral knowledge (White Cube, 2025, 2026). The Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac exhibition Shamanic Visions: Ayahuasca Arts in the Peruvian Amazon placed kené beside Amazonian visionary painting and Western countercultural objects in an exhibition explicitly concerned with hallucinatory imagery and iconographic production (Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, 2023). These passages alter spectatorship and scale while making Indigenous artistic systems visible within institutions that had often classified them as ethnographic material rather than contemporary art.

Song And Relational Integration

Pablo Amaringo

Pablo Amaringo's paintings established one of the most influential figurative archives of ayahuasca-related experience. Amaringo had practised as a vegetalista before concentrating on painting and teaching. Luis Eduardo Luna encouraged him to paint remembered ayahuasca visions, and their collaboration became Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman (Luna and Amaringo, 1991). The book combined paintings with detailed commentaries identifying plants, healers, spirits, aquatic beings, celestial cities, protective forces and scenes of sorcery or cure.

The paintings should be understood as sustained reconstructions rather than immediate session records. Each canvas gathers several kinds of memory and knowledge into a densely organised scene. Ceremonial events, mythic beings, Christian and esoteric figures, modern machines, historical narratives and regional cosmologies may occupy the same pictorial field. Scale shifts between human bodies, planetary spaces and minute pattern. The canvas establishes relations that the artist developed through later recollection, drawing, research and composition.

Amaringo, Luna and Sirpa Räsänen founded the Usko-Ayar Amazonian School of Painting in Pucallpa in 1988. The school linked free art education with attention to Amazonian nature, mythology and visionary experience. Its importance extends beyond Amaringo's personal work. Anderson Debernardi, Paolo del Águila and later painters developed related forms through different biographies, techniques and ritual relations. Luis Tamani's paintings and workshops have carried Neo-Amazonian figurative art into international galleries, retreats and collaborative environments. Usko-Ayar functions as a pedagogical lineage through which a method of attending to forest life, visionary memory and pictorial density became teachable (del Águila, 2014; Wasiwaska Research Center, n.d.; Meow Wolf, n.d.).

The publication of Ayahuasca Visions gave these forms an international afterlife. Artists outside Peru encountered Amaringo's cities, plant persons, patterned energies and multi-layered cosmologies through books before travelling to Amazonian ceremonies. The images supplied visual references for experiences that could otherwise be difficult to recall or discuss. They also influenced expectation. A participant familiar with the paintings enters a later ceremony with an expanded repertoire of possible forms and relations.

This feedback can be described as recursive iconogenesis.⁵ Visionary experience generates images; images enter books, schools, galleries and digital networks; these images prepare perception and memory; subsequent experiences renew or alter the iconography. The process includes personal recognition, artistic influence and cultural learning. It also explains why recurring motifs cannot be assigned exclusively to either neurobiology or tradition. Perceptual regularities, pharmacological effects, ritual training and visual culture interact across repeated encounters.

Usko Ayar And The Transmission Of Amazonian Visionary Painting

European Surrealism

Contemporary visionary painting developed through several overlapping histories rather than a single national movement. European Surrealism and Fantastic Realism provided highly finished techniques for representing dream, metamorphosis, sacred symbolism and impossible space. American psychedelic art developed through research, West Coast graphics, underground illustration, album culture and countercultural publishing. Amazonian visionary painting developed through distinct Indigenous and mestizo histories before entering extensive exchange with European and North American artists. Travelling painters, books, record sleeves, magazines, workshops and entheogenic practice brought these formations into sustained contact.

Salvador Dalí established a prominent European precedent for rendering altered and oneiric perception through academic draughtsmanship and illusionistic space. His paranoiac-critical method, double images and later religious and nuclear paintings gave visual precision to unstable perception. Cadaqués and Port Lligat also became important sites of contact. Artists, writers and filmmakers moving through the region participated in a social field connecting Surrealism, fantastic painting, esotericism and countercultural experiment.

The Vienna School of Fantastic Realism supplied a more continuous technical and pedagogical centre. Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer, Rudolf Hausner, Wolfgang Hutter and Anton Lehmden developed densely rendered mythic and oneiric imagery after the Second World War. Fuchs revived and adapted the Mischtechnik, using tempera underpainting and transparent oil glazes to produce luminous depth. The method proceeds through repeated stages of modelling, glazing, drying and revision. For artists working from psychedelic or transpersonal imagery, this procedure establishes a productive temporal relation: an experience remembered as simultaneous can be differentiated through months of material construction.

Fuchs's teaching extended well beyond Vienna. Mati Klarwein learned the Mischtechnik through his relation with Fuchs and combined it with erotic, botanical, religious and cross-cultural iconography. His paintings reached a large audience through record covers, most prominently Santana's Abraxas and Miles Davis's Bitches Brew. Album sleeves placed technically elaborate visionary paintings in domestic spaces, record shops and music cultures across Europe and North America. Repeated private viewing allowed the image to function differently from a temporary gallery encounter.

H. R. Giger developed a darker Swiss formation in which bodies, machines, sexuality, birth, death and architecture became a continuous biomechanical morphology. His work circulated through Necronomicon, posters, album covers, film design and tattoo culture. Robert Venosa introduced Giger's work to Dalí in 1975, contributing to Giger's involvement with Alejandro Jodorowsky's unrealised Dune project (HR Giger Museum, n.d.; Venosa, n.d.-b). The episode shows how personal contact connected a private graphic world to Surrealist networks and the emerging visual culture of science fiction.

Venosa became a central transatlantic mediator. A psychedelic experience and exposure to Fuchs and Klarwein redirected him from commercial art toward painting. He studied with both artists, lived in Cadaqués for seventeen years and developed a relationship with Dalí. Album commissions and publication in OMNI later brought his work to American audiences, while Boulder became a second base (Venosa, n.d.-a). OMNI played a significant role in this circulation by reproducing European fantastic and visionary painters alongside science, speculative technology and fiction. Its pages placed visionary imagery within an emergent popular culture of computation, outer space and altered consciousness.

Martina Hoffmann made this geography still more interconnected. German-born and partly raised in Cameroon, she trained in Frankfurt and met Venosa in Cadaqués in 1981. They lived and worked in Spain, travelled regularly to the United States and later divided their time between Cadaqués and Boulder (Hoffmann, 2012). Their workshops at Naropa, Esalen, Omega, the California Institute of Integral Studies and other centres combined painting technique with discussion of visionary and entheogenic experience. Their later ayahuasca practice brought European mixed-technique painting into direct dialogue with Amazonian visionary art. Hoffmann records conversations with Amaringo concerning the difficulty of translating the multiplicity of an ayahuasca journey into a finite canvas (Hoffmann, 2012).

Amanda Sage represents a later movement in the reverse direction. She travelled from the United States to Vienna in 1997, apprenticed for two years with Michael Fuchs and worked as Ernst Fuchs's painting assistant for a decade. After returning to the United States, she established a base in Los Angeles while continuing to teach internationally. She helped initiate the Vienna Academy of Visionary Art and later launched Vision Train as an online communal studio during 2020 (Sage, n.d.). Her trajectory demonstrates the operation of lineage as mobile pedagogy. American psychedelic culture entered a Viennese atelier and returned through paintings, workshops, institutional teaching and digital participation.

The Vienna Academy of Visionary Art consolidated these crossings between 2013 and 2020. Laurence Caruana provided curricular continuity, while faculty and visiting artists included Sage, Hoffmann, Jonathan Solter, Daniel Mirante, A. Andrew Gonzalez, De Es Schwertberger and others formed by European, American and global visionary traditions. Its programmes combined figure drawing, comparative sacred iconography, the Mischtechnik, spontaneous image formation and the development of individual imagery (Vienna Academy of Visionary Art, 2013–2020). The academy formalised a transmission that had previously depended upon private apprenticeship and itinerant workshops.

Fantastic Realism And Transatlantic Transmission

West Coast psychedelic art and the formalisation of liminoid iconography

The West Coast developed a related visual history through psychedelic posters, underground comics, record sleeves, fantasy illustration, graffiti and later digital production. Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley transformed publicity for music events into optically active combinations of lettering, saturated colour, symmetry and metamorphic ornament. Posters and handbills entered everyday countercultural life through streets, bedrooms and venues. Their visual organisation demanded altered modes of reading: words emerged through prolonged attention, figure and ground oscillated, and typography became image.

Burt Shonberg provides an earlier Los Angeles connection among occult art, science fiction and psychedelic research. He participated in Oscar Janiger's LSD and creativity studies and treated altered cognition as a sustained artistic problem. His paintings appeared in Roger Corman's House of Usher, on record covers and in the Café Frankenstein. Shonberg's concern with developing new visual parables for unfamiliar perceptions anticipates the later field's emphasis on communication and recognition (Philosophical Research Society, 2024).

The European and West Coast formations gradually became interdependent. Klarwein and Giger reached American viewers through albums and print. Venosa and Hoffmann taught in American transpersonal institutions. Sage carried Viennese technique into Los Angeles networks. American artists travelled to European workshops, while European artists participated in American galleries, conferences and psychedelic communities. This exchange occurred alongside the circulation of Buddhist and Hindu sacred images, Christian mysticism, alchemical diagrams, Mesoamerican sculpture, Egyptian art, Indigenous patterns, astronomical photography, biological illustration and science-fiction design.

By the end of the twentieth century, these sources had contributed to a recognisable liminoid iconography. Recurrent compositional structures included axial or bilateral figures, nested mandalas, patterned fields, transparent or energetic anatomy, portals, human–animal–vegetal hybrids, simultaneous microscopic and cosmic scales, luminous filaments, autonomous eyes, sacred geometry and architectures combining temple, organism and machine. These forms never constituted a unified symbolic code. They became a shared repertoire through which psychedelic and transpersonal experience could be pictured and recognised.

The repertoire acquired increasing formality through technique, pedagogy and reproduction. Fuchs's layered procedure, Klarwein's album circulation, Venosa and Hoffmann's workshops, Usko-Ayar's school structure, Caruana's manifesto, the Vienna Academy and online teaching networks stabilised methods and expectations. The term liminoid iconography identifies this combination of voluntary threshold practice and increasingly conventional form. Its authority derives from accumulated use rather than a central doctrine.

MARS-1, the working name of Mario Martinez, develops a West Coast abstract variant. His paintings assemble biomorphic topographies, floating structures and hypothetical ecologies whose scale remains unstable. Cellular, geological, machinic and astronomical suggestions coexist without resolving into a single depicted world. The prolonged production of each work and the density of its surface support sustained contemplative looking. Martinez's phrase “the edge of unknowing” describes a pictorial field in which recognition remains active without a fixed object (McCormick, 2024).

Jonathan Solter's I've Been There provides a more figurative example. The painting combines a luminous pyramidal environment with vegetal arabesque, temple structure, circuit-like pattern and nested colour. Its title directly names a response often reported around psychedelic imagery: another person's painting appears to recall a privately experienced world. A published reception anecdote describes a viewer recognising the image in relation to DMT before learning its title (Solter, n.d.). The anecdote carries no evidential force concerning a shared external location. It documents the social event of recognition through which private phenomenology gains a common object.

This recognitional function helps explain the field's increasing coherence. A viewer familiar with Amaringo's cities, Giger's biomechanical interiors, Hoffmann's figures, Sage's luminous bodies, MARS-1's fields or Solter's temples possesses a repertoire for noticing and retaining related forms. Existing imagery can assist later recollection and provide language for testimony. It can also shape expectation and perception. Artistic integration becomes recursive when the image produced after one experience participates in the organisation of another.

A New Logos: primary visionary imagery and the formation of a visual language

Visionary iconography begins repeatedly at the level of perceived novelty. An image may arise during a psychedelic or transpersonal experience with no consciously intended precedent and with a force that the experiencer regards as primary: encountered before it has been named, interpreted or placed within an existing artistic lineage. “Primary” describes its phenomenological position for the experiencer. The image enters awareness as an event rather than as a deliberate quotation. Its historical formation remains more complex. Human perceptual organisation, personal memory, prior images and cultural categories are already active within the conditions from which novelty emerges.

Some recurrent elements have a plausible basis in shared perceptual capacities. Heinrich Klüver's mescaline research identified recurring geometrical “form constants,” including lattices, tunnels, spirals and cobweb-like structures (Klüver, 1966). Their recurrence suggests that visionary novelty can arise through patterned properties of perception while still being experienced as unprecedented by the individual. Figurative and narrative contents bring further layers of formation. Faces, animals, temples, technologies, deities and hybrid bodies draw upon memory and culture, although their combinations, scale, animation and apparent autonomy can exceed the experiencer's familiar repertoire.

The first attempt to paint such imagery begins a movement from private novelty into symbolisation. The artist selects a bounded configuration from a more extensive field, determines its internal relations and gives it a repeatable sensuous form. Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms clarifies the significance of this transition. Art contributes to the constitution of meaningful cultural objects through symbolic formation; it gives experience an objective articulation specific to aesthetic form (Cassirer, 1944; Filieri, 2024). The painting produces an image that can be perceived, remembered and shared, while retaining the dynamic and affective relations from which it developed.

The phrase a new logos describes the next stage of this formation.⁷ An isolated image becomes part of a visual logos when it enters relations with other images and acquires a recognisable mode of articulation. Recurrent motifs begin to operate as signifiers. Eyes can indicate witness, distributed awareness or autonomous presence. Transparent bodies can signify energetic anatomy or permeability between organism and environment. Serpents and vegetal tendrils can connect growth, knowledge, medicine and metamorphosis. Portals organise passage between ontological domains. Luminous filaments make relation visible. Their significance remains dependent upon the work, artist and community in which they appear, yet repetition establishes a field of possible readings.

Visual language also develops through syntax. Axial composition can organise a human figure as a cosmological centre; bilateral symmetry can confer hieratic stability; nested scale can place cells, bodies, landscapes and planetary systems within one continuous order. Pattern can pass across skin, cloth, architecture and forest, presenting these domains as mutually permeable. Hybridisation can join animal, plant, human and machine without requiring a verbal theory of their relation. Such procedures carry meaning through placement, rhythm, continuity and transformation. The resulting logos consists of compositional relations as well as an inventory of symbols.

The distinction between primary image and formal language concerns a continuum. An artist's initial configuration may remain singular, while later works repeat, refine and combine it. Other artists recognise its usefulness and incorporate related structures. Publications, record sleeves, workshops, schools, exhibitions and digital circulation bring dispersed images into comparison. At this point a viewer can identify a work as visionary before knowing its author. Formalisation has occurred because motifs, spatial procedures and expectations have become legible across a community of production and reception.

Yuri Lotman's semiosphere provides a model for this emergence. A language operates within a wider field of signs, translations and boundaries that makes individual acts of meaning possible (Lotman, 2005). The liminoid artist works near such a boundary. Experiences that possess no settled representation are translated into forms that can enter the existing sign-world of art, religion, psychology and popular culture. Boundary regions generate new meaning because several codes meet there. Fantastic Realist technique, Amazonian cosmography, scientific illustration, sacred geometry, science fiction and psychedelic phenomenology become mutually translatable without losing all of their differences.

Mikosz's account of visionary art as an interaction between culture and non-ordinary states gains a further implication here (Mikosz, 2015). Culture supplies more than content added after the experience. It supplies techniques of attention, compositional precedents and public forms through which an image can become durable. Altered experience supplies more than an illustration for an established symbolic system. It can disturb inherited relations and generate combinations that the existing language has not accommodated. A new logos emerges through this reciprocal pressure between anomalous perception and available form.

Formalisation increases communicative range. A painter can invoke a complex field through a small number of established relations, and a viewer can recognise energetic anatomy, inhabited geometry or ecological personhood without an extensive explanatory text. The same formalisation can influence subsequent experiences. A visual language trains attention toward particular continuities, agencies and scales. Its signs become resources for memory and expectation, while each new experience can modify their use. The logos remains generative because it supports variation, synthesis and individual invention within a recognisable field.

Consequential Truths: archetypal emergence and cultural integration

Visionary images become culturally consequential when they alter perception, interpretation and practice beyond the originating experience. Their influence may appear in personal decisions, ritual forms, artistic lineages, ecological attitudes, therapeutic models or shared accounts of mind and world. William James's pragmatism offers one approach to this movement. The significance of an idea becomes available through the differences it makes within experience and conduct (James, 1907/1975). A visionary image can carry consequential truth in this sense when it becomes a durable orientation through which people notice relations, organise values and act.

This use of truth concerns operative consequence while leaving metaphysical adjudication open. An image of a living forest may deepen attention to ecological agency and reciprocity. Energetic anatomy may provide a person with a coherent way of attending to bodily sensation. A nested cosmogram may support an experience of the self as continuous with larger biological and planetary systems. These forms acquire truth-value for a community through the lives, practices and interpretations they enable. Their ontological claims remain available to philosophical, anthropological and scientific examination.

Depth psychology places part of this process within the emergence of archetypal material. Jung distinguished the archetype as a form-giving disposition from the culturally and personally elaborated archetypal image (Jung, 1959/1968). The distinction is important for visionary art. A mandala, divine child, world tree, devouring mother or death–rebirth sequence arrives in a specific visual language, even when the organising pattern is interpreted as arising from a collective psychic substrate. Erich Neumann developed this account by treating archetypes as intrinsically formless components that acquire visible form through the psychology of the artist, the available medium and the historical situation (Neumann, 1959).

For Neumann, the artist can give form to psychic material that has not yet achieved adequate representation within the conscious culture of an epoch. Artistic production then resembles an exhumation of collective consciousness: latent or excluded configurations become perceptible, receive emotional articulation and enter public comparison. The metaphor of exhumation indicates the recovery of something active but culturally submerged. The artist also participates in its transformation. What enters culture has passed through a particular body, biography, technique and historical field.

The term autochthonous can describe another aspect of this emergence.⁸ Some images are experienced as arising from the ground of a place, from bodily organisation, from a local ecology or from depths of psyche prior to deliberate artistic citation. Amazonian plant persons, desert peyote forms, aquatic beings and forest geometries may be embedded in particular territories and relations of practice. Other visionary forms appear autochthonous at the level of the individual, arriving with an unfamiliarity that suggests an indigenous formation of the psyche. Gilbert Durand's “anthropological trajectory” offers a way of connecting these dimensions. Symbolic forms arise through continuous exchange between bodily dispositions and the social and ecological milieu (Durand, 1960/1999).

Aby Warburg provides a historical complement to archetypal theory. His concepts of Nachleben and Pathosformel describe the afterlife of images and emotionally charged gestures across changing epochs (Warburg, 1999). A visual configuration can survive, disappear from prominent use and return under new historical conditions. Its recurrence carries cultural memory while acquiring altered significance. Warburg's account locates the persistence of images in transmission and transformation; Jung and Neumann locate recurrent form partly within the organisation of psyche. Visionary iconography can be examined through both registers. Some forms reactivate inherited cultural memory, while others organise recurrent human experiences through newly available images.

The phrase memetic complex is often used within psychedelic culture for a cluster of images and ideas capable of spreading across media and communities. Cultural-attractor theory offers a more precise account of the process. Representations rarely pass between people as exact copies. They are reconstructed, simplified, elaborated and recombined, while recurring psychological, social and material factors draw variants toward relatively stable forms (Sperber, 1996; Buskell, 2017). The visionary eye, luminous body, serpent–DNA analogy, cosmic web, plant–human hybrid and organism–machine temple can function as such attractors. Each gathers several sources and remains recognisable across substantial stylistic variation.

Artistic liminality acts as a cultural threshing floor for these emerging complexes. The metaphor describes a process of differentiation rather than a single institution. Images pass through repeated making, viewing, criticism, ritual use, reproduction and teaching. Some remain attached to one person's private cosmology. Others demonstrate enough affective power, formal adaptability and interpretive range to circulate between communities. Their passage through art gives them sensuous precision and exposes them to the selective pressures of craft, attention and reception.

The forms that persist can contribute to what Williams calls a structure of feeling and Castoriadis calls the social imaginary (Williams, 1977; Castoriadis, 1987). A structure of feeling gives emergent experience a recognisable cultural texture before it has become explicit doctrine. The social imaginary supplies the significations through which a society composes a world and locates itself within it. Visionary art participates at both levels. It can make ecological animacy, distributed consciousness, interspecies relation or energetic embodiment perceptible before these ideas acquire stable discursive or institutional forms.

Consequential truths develop when such images become ways of seeing. The transition is visible when a motif moves from the studio into therapy, ritual, environmental thought, fashion, film, design or everyday self-description. The image begins to organise what counts as relation, agency, body or world. Its cultural integration may be partial and subcultural, or it may enter wider public language through exhibitions, popular media and scholarly interpretation. Each movement changes the image's field of consequence.

The process also remains reversible. Established iconography can be renewed by direct experience, displaced by new forms or reduced to decorative convention. A living visual language retains contact with the perceptual and psychological conditions that first gave its signs force. Artists return its conventions to the threshold by testing them against new experience, unfamiliar materials and changing cultural realities. Consequential truth is sustained through this continued capacity to reorganise perception rather than through repetition alone.

The artist as mediator of transpersonal experience

Terence McKenna gave the artist a prominent role within late twentieth-century psychedelic culture. In lectures including “Opening the Doors of Creativity” and essays collected in The Archaic Revival, he described the artist and shaman as practitioners who enter unfamiliar domains and return with forms capable of renewing collective language (McKenna, 1990, 1991). The comparison was intentionally expansive and belongs to the countercultural construction of an “archaic revival.” Its continuing value lies in the emphasis on communication: an extraordinary experience acquires cultural consequence through techniques capable of giving it perceptible form.

The artist–shaman formulation requires terminological precision. Shamanic offices are embedded in named languages, histories, obligations, kinship relations and systems of accountability. A contemporary painter may undertake difficult inner exploration and mediate anomalous experience without acquiring those offices. McKenna's figure is most accurately understood as a modern liminoid vocation: the artist cultivates altered perception, tests established representations and contributes new forms to a voluntary cultural network.⁶

José Argüelles developed a related model in The Transformative Vision. His history of art connects visual form with changing structures of consciousness, moving through fragmentation, alchemy, shamanism, psychic transformation and planetary awareness (Argüelles, 1975). Argüelles later extended the role of art into participatory events, calendars and planetary networks. Although his historical and calendrical claims require separate critical evaluation, his practice demonstrates a movement from private image to collective temporal organisation. Art becomes a procedure for coordinating attention and community.

Laurence Caruana's First Manifesto of Visionary Art offered the field a more explicit art-historical identity. Caruana identified dreams, trance, meditation, madness and entheogens as sources of visionary imagery and situated Fuchs, Giger, Klarwein, Venosa, Johfra, De Es and other artists within a developing movement (Caruana, 2001/2010). His concept of an “ancient image-language” reflects the field's intensive comparison of sacred and mythological forms across cultures.

Caruana's phrase enter through the image is especially relevant to integration. The image begins as one outcome of visionary attention and later becomes an object through which attention can be reorganised. Symmetry, gaze, colour, recursive detail and iconographic density support prolonged contemplation. This reciprocal movement gives visionary art a prospective as well as retrospective function. It records and transforms previous experience while preparing possible forms of later experience.

Private and marginal practices of visionary integration

Visionary integration also develops outside recognised psychedelic and spiritual-art lineages. Private notebooks, domestic rooms, improvised devices and repeated personal symbols can give anomalous experience a durable organisation. These practices help distinguish the underlying artistic function from a particular countercultural style.

Paul Laffoley constructed large paintings that combined mandala, architectural plan, annotated diagram, occult schema and speculative machine. He described these works as “operating systems,” and individual paintings could require years of production. Their dense surfaces support a mode of immersion based on sustained reading and return. The viewer moves through symbols, instructions and spatial relations that cannot be retained in a single inspection (Henry Art Gallery, 2013).

Melvin Way compressed comparable complexity into small drawings carried in his pockets. Chemical formulas, mathematical notation, electromagnetic fields and machine-like structures accumulated on paper altered by folding, weather and bodily contact. The drawings operated as intimate cosmograms before entering galleries (Rousseau, 2020). Emery Blagdon expanded private practice into an inhabited environment. Across decades, he assembled wire, foil, minerals, painted bulbs and salvaged materials into The Healing Machine, an installation he understood as concentrating curative energies (Meier, 2025).

Madge Gill produced automatic drawings and extensive works on calico in relation to the spirit presence she called Myrninerest. Much of the work remained in her East London home, where its accumulation formed a domestic archive of sustained imaginal contact. Ionel Talpazan transformed a childhood encounter with an enveloping blue light into hundreds of paintings, diagrams and sculptures of spacecraft. He described the work as “spiritual technology” and presented detailed cross-sections of hypothetical propulsion systems (Wojcik, 2018).

The sources and ontologies of these practices differ. Spiritualism, anomalous encounter, personal healing and speculative cosmology generate distinct accounts of what the work is doing. Their shared relevance concerns material integration. A perception or conviction lacking an established place in public knowledge acquires a repeatable visual syntax, an archive and a setting for renewed engagement. The maker constructs a container from the materials available: pocket paper, salvaged wire, domestic space, diagram, repeated line and accumulated image.

Artistic pedagogy and collective integration

Artistic integration becomes socially durable through pedagogy. A technique learned in an atelier or family setting carries more than a visual style. It transmits procedures for attention, pacing, material preparation, recognition and revision. Fuchs's studio teaching carried the Mischtechnik into the practices of Venosa, Caruana, Sage and other painters. Venosa and Hoffmann's workshops joined technical demonstration with first-person discussion of psychedelic and transpersonal experience. Usko-Ayar connected pictorial education with Amazonian nature, mythology and remembered ayahuasca worlds.

These teaching structures provide what can be called supportive scaffolding for liminal experience. A student learns how to preserve a difficult image, maintain attention across a long production process and communicate without depending entirely upon verbal explanation. The scaffold includes material knowledge, studio routine, comparative imagery, feedback and permission to discuss experiences that may remain difficult to place in ordinary conversation. It supports representation and discernment at the same time.

The artwork's movement into collective life also changes its conditions. A ceremonial design may become a portable painting; a remembered vision may become a book illustration; a private image may become a record sleeve, tattoo, projection or online reproduction. Each translation alters scale, spectatorship and context. Museums and galleries contribute historical visibility and sustained conservation. Schools and workshops preserve technical lineages. Books and digital networks widen access while often detaching images from the explanations and obligations that first surrounded them.

The Musée du quai Branly exhibition and White Cube's presentation of Sara Flores mark a significant institutional stage in this process. Ayahuasca-related imagery and Shipibo-Konibo kené entered major contemporary and ethnographic-art settings as complex systems of knowledge and artistic production. The exhibitions also placed distinct categories—Indigenous art, contemporary art, ritual practice, psychedelic experience and countercultural production—within a shared visual history. Such juxtapositions make comparison possible while leaving substantial differences of authorship, function and ontology for scholarship to specify.

Integration at the communal scale involves more than public display. A work can become a mnemonic object within a ceremony, a teaching image, a focus for conversation or a reference through which participants recognise aspects of their own experience. It may broaden the range of experiences a community can acknowledge. It can also narrow interpretation when repeated motifs harden into compulsory expectations. The social life of visionary art includes both possibilities. Artistic and communal practices of discernment influence whether images remain open to revision or become fixed explanations.

Ontological openness and the interpretation of visionary art

Visionary experience frequently carries a sense of reality, agency or disclosure that exceeds the participant's ordinary criteria of belief. The preceding essay in this series examined meaning-salience, hyperreality and presence as phenomenological forces. Artistic form provides a distinctive setting in which their consequences can be explored. A painting can preserve the organisation and affective pressure of an encountered world while allowing several accounts of that world to remain available.

Psychological interpretation may approach a figure as an autonomous complex, archetypal image or symbolic formation. Anthropological interpretation may locate it within learned relations among humans, plants, ancestors and other-than-human persons. Neuropsychological interpretation may examine perceptual prediction, pattern formation and changes in network dynamics. Participants may regard the same figure as an encountered intelligence. The artwork gives these descriptions a shared perceptual referent without deciding among them in advance.

This openness contributes to integration when it supports continued inquiry. The artist can return to the image as biography, knowledge and cultural context develop. Viewers can respond from different positions without dissolving the work into an abstract proposition. Material specificity remains central: exact colours, spatial relations, gestures and repeated motifs carry information that a general statement about “mystical experience” would lose.

Ontological openness also benefits from discipline. Technical practice tests whether an image can sustain prolonged development. Historical comparison distinguishes inherited motifs from unusual innovations. Dialogue exposes private interpretations to other perspectives. Consequences in relationships and daily life provide further evidence concerning the effects of a belief. Art does not adjudicate metaphysical truth by itself. It creates a durable field in which experience, interpretation and consequence can be examined together.

Immersive media as a later extension of visionary integration

Fulldome and half-dome projection, stereoscopic 360-degree virtual reality, spatial sound and cyberdelic environments are extending visionary art from bounded images into navigable sensoriums. These media can organise threshold, perceptual intensity, scale, agency and return across time. They also introduce new questions concerning embodiment, exit, interpretive authority and post-experience integration. Their detailed history belongs to a later study of immersive liminal media and archaic-futurist culture. Within the present account, they indicate the next material permutation of a longer process through which extraordinary experience becomes shareable form.

Conclusion

Visionary art can function as a technology of integration for psychedelic and transpersonal experience. The phrase identifies a set of practices rather than a guaranteed therapeutic result. Attention, bodily skill, material resistance, repetition, symbolic elaboration and social transmission allow an experience to be revisited under changing conditions. The resulting work may support memory, contemplation, psychological reorganisation and communication. It may also preserve unresolved conflict or intensify a fixed interpretation. Integration remains a longitudinal relation among maker, work, experience and community.

This relation can develop after a singular episode or across a life organised around recurrent ceremonial, contemplative and creative practice. Van Gennep and Turner clarify the movement from threshold experience toward incorporation, while the liminoid identifies the voluntary and experimental institutions of modern visionary culture. Dewey, Milner, Jung and Winnicott explain how materials and symbols participate in psychological formation. Grof's clinical archive and contemporary integration studies establish image-making as a recurring practice around intense altered states, although systematic evidence remains at an early stage.

Anthropological cases expand integration beyond individual psychology. Shipibo-Konibo kené and ritual song operate within learned relations among bodies, designs, voices, healing practices and nonhuman agencies. Amaringo's paintings and the Usko-Ayar school show how remembered ayahuasca experience can become a cosmographic archive, a pedagogical method and an international artistic lineage. These forms enter museums, galleries, books and workshops while retaining histories that exceed their status as portable images.

The European, American and Amazonian histories of visionary art developed through extensive exchange. Dalí, the Vienna School, Fuchs, Klarwein, Giger, Venosa and Hoffmann provided technical and social routes connecting Surrealism, Fantastic Realism, psychedelic experience and mass reproduction. West Coast graphics, albums, magazines, ateliers and later artists such as Sage, MARS-1 and Solter developed in dialogue with these European lineages and with a rapidly circulating archive of global spiritual iconography. Amazonian visionary painting entered the same networks through books, travel, ceremony, teaching and exhibition.

Their interaction contributed to a formalising liminoid iconography: a repertoire of patterned fields, energetic anatomies, portals, hybrid bodies, unstable scales and organism–temple–machine architectures. These conventions give artists methods for representing extraordinary experience and give viewers forms through which private phenomenology can become recognisable. They also participate in later experiences by shaping attention, expectation and recall. Recursive iconogenesis describes this continuing movement from experience to image, from image to culture and from culture into renewed perception.

Artistic integration joins intimate labour to cultural history. The artist develops a material relationship with perceptions that may remain unresolved, recurrent or ontologically uncertain. The artwork permits other people to encounter that relationship in configured form. Pedagogy, ritual use, reproduction and exhibition carry it further into collective life. Visionary art occupies this connective position: a disciplined practice through which altered experience becomes available to psychological reflection, social recognition and future acts of perception.

Notes

1. “Integration” is used descriptively rather than as a synonym for normalisation, symptom reduction or acceptance of a predetermined worldview. It refers to the development of a workable and revisable relationship with an experience and its consequences. ↩
2. “Technology” retains its older sense of an organised practical knowledge. It includes bodily and artistic techniques, materials, sequences, learned procedures and social arrangements. Digital devices constitute one recent subset of this larger category. ↩
3. “Post-liminal” names a function of incorporation. In recurrent ceremonial and creative lives, this function can occur repeatedly and may overlap with preparation for later experiences. ↩
4. Comparative terms require attention to local naming. Amazonian and other traditions distinguish specialists through terms including onanya, vegetalista, banco, pajé/pagé, palero, taita, mara'akame and many others. Their powers, obligations and moral evaluations differ. ↩
5. Iconogenesis refers to the formation and social development of images. The term is used here for the process through which experiential imagery acquires stable form, circulates, gathers associations and influences subsequent experience. ↩
6. The artist–shaman analogy became influential in modernism and psychedelic counterculture. Its historical importance can be analysed without treating “the shaman” as a culturally uniform identity. ↩
7. Logos is used in the broad sense of articulation, relation and intelligible order. “A new logos” identifies an emerging visual system whose meanings remain plural and whose forms operate alongside verbal and scientific languages. ↩
8. “Autochthonous” describes imagery experienced as arising from a particular ground: a body, psyche, ecology or place. The term concerns the mode of emergence; cultural history remains active in the forms through which that emergence becomes perceptible. ↩