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Tribute to Benny Shanon

At the age of 77, our friend Benny Shanon has just passed away. We knew him because of his interest in the study of the psychic effects of ayahuasca.

He studied Philosophy and Linguistics at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and earned a PhD in experimental psychology at Stanford University, USA. He has been a professor of cognitive psychology since 1976 and was the former head of the Department of Psychology at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. His research interests included cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, natural language semantics, and philosophy of psychology. Shanon has been a visiting professor in France, England, the United States, Poland, Italy, Brazil, and the Netherlands. He was an associate editor of the academic journals “New Ideas in Psychology” and “Pragmatics and Cognition.” He has reviewed articles in more than two dozen journals, published several books, written more than 100 academic articles, and presented lectures at twice as many conferences.

He himself commented on his approach to Ayahuasca in these terms:

“I myself came to ayahuasca by chance, as a traveler and curious person. I am a cognitive psychologist and philosopher of psychology with a particular interest in the phenomenology of (ordinary) human consciousness. Before encountering ayahuasca, I had no particular knowledge or interest in South American cultures or altered states of consciousness. In 1991, a series of chance encounters led me to an Amazonian community in the Brazilian state of Acre; it was there that I took ayahuasca for the first time.”

He then focused his work mainly on the phenomenology of human consciousness in relation to ordinary and non-ordinary states of mind. More precisely, he conducted research on the particular states of mind induced by the age-old techniques of the Amazonians, carrying out the most extensive investigation on this subject from the perspective of cognitive psychology.

The initial contact having been made with Brazilian neo-churches of Santo Daime, Benny later became interested in rediscovering the more traditional uses of ayahuasca in Ecuador and Peru. It is in the context of this scientific and personal quest that we will meet Benny Shanon in various congresses such as the one organized by the Inter-American Council on Indigenous Spirituality (CISEI) in November 2007 in Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala. In 2009, he visited Takiwasi on the occasion of the International Congress on “Traditional Medicines, Interculturality and Mental Health” that we organized and where he gave a lecture and wrote an article published in the Proceedings of this Congress.

We then collaborated in the collective book “Psychotropic plants, initiations, therapies and quests for the self”, published in French under the direction of Sébastien Baud and Christian Ghasarian (Imago 2010), in which he presented the article “Altered states and the study of consciousness: the case of ayahuasca”.

In the new age atmosphere of some meetings, Benny brought his academic knowledge, but also his personal experience and a simple and very appropriate common sense. He suggested that it is the most rationalists who often propose the least reasonable hypotheses...

His caution did not prevent him from formulating bold proposals and, in 2008, in an article published in "Time and Mind", he caused a sensation by suggesting that the prophet's descent from Mount Sinai was "an event bringing together Moses and the people of Israel under the influence of narcotics…. The consumption of psychotropic drugs was an integral part of the religious rites of the Israelites mentioned in the Bible in the Book of Exodus". Moses would have been under the influence of psychotropic substances called entheogens, notably during the episode of the burning bush and the revelation of the Ten Commandments. He argued that the religious rituals of the Israelites included the use of harmal and species of acacia, two psychoactive plants found in the Sinai and Negev deserts.

Benny Shanon was one of the first scholars to study the content of Ayahuasca visions and perceptions in a systematic way. The orientation of his work was phenomenological and involved a systematic investigation of all the different facets of the Ayahuasca experience. Partial reports on this project were published in several books and academic articles. A complete presentation appears in his monograph “The Antipodes of the Mind”. After the publication of this book, he worked further on a critical analysis of the notion of hallucination, on the implications of the study of the Ayahuasca experience for the research of human consciousness as a whole, as well as on the epistemological questions raised by the noetic experience lived with the brew.

In 2013, Benny Shanon became seriously ill, was hospitalized, and from then on, his presence in the academic debate significantly diminished.

Let us pay tribute to this friend, a sensitive, tender, fundamentally human being, capable of seriousness and audacity, openness and simplicity.

Jacques Mabit, February 2025.

Links of interest:

• English translation of the article published in the Proceedings of the Congress “Traditional Medicines, Interculturality and Mental Health”: The cognitive-psychological study of Ayahuasca
• Video of the conference given in Spanish at the Congress “Traditional Medicines, Interculturality and Mental Health”: La experiencia de la Ayahuasca desde la psicología cognitiva
• Academic article in English: Biblical Entheogens: a Speculative Hypothesis
• Book in English: The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience
• Book “The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience” by Benny Shanon. Review by Thomas B. Roberts