When Bwiti shamans eat Iboga, they are granted the power to see the future, heal the sick and speak with the dead. The Babongo use it as a stimulant before hunting and during initiation ceremonies. They believe that Iboga frees your soul to leave your body and go on a great journey, to speak with the spirits of animals and plants.

Part I

Part II

Christian Ratsch is an author, an anthropologist and Germany’s leading expert on ethnopharmacology. He lived for three years with the Lacandon Indians in Chiapas, Mexico and did his doctoral thesis on their spells and incantations. Ratsch works in Hamburg, Germany, as a freelance author and lecturer and conducts research into the ethnopharmacology of psychoactive plants and animals. He has published a number of books on these topics, both in German and in English, and is the founder and co-editor of The Yearbook of Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness.

The film examines the re-emergence of archaic techniques of ecstacy in the modern world by weaving a synthesis of ecological and evolutionary awareness,electronic dance culture, and the current pharmacological re-evaluation of entheogenic compounds. Within a narrative framework that imagines consciousness itself to be evolving, Entheogen documents the emergence of techno-shamanism in the post-modern world that frames the following questions: How can a renewal of ancient initiatory rites of passage alleviate our ecological crisis? What do trance dancing and festivals celebrating unbridled artistic expression speak to in our collective psyche? How do we re-invent ourselves in a disenchanted world from which God has long ago withdrawn? Entheogen invites the viewer to consider that the answers to these questions lie within the consciousness of each and every human being, and are accessible if only we give ourselves permission to awaken to the divine within.