Animal Transcosmological Traveling in the Casas Grandes World

Paper originally presented at he 2022 Society for American Archaeology Annual Meetings, held in Chicago, Illinois on April 1. Here we observe that one of the hallmarks of altered states of consciousness (ASC) produced by entheogens is seeing spirals and the feeling that one is spinning through a vortex to travel to another realm—perhaps deep into the earth or far out into the cosmos. Lewis-Williams and Pearce (2005) call this spinning “transcosmological travel” and provide firsthand ethnographic accounts of it. ASC also commonly includes the feeling of partly or fully transforming into another animal. Previously we have discussed Casas Grandes shamanic journeys based on tobacco using male smoker effigy jars and female effigy jars, but here we focus on Casas Grandes bird and snake effigies. We suggest these vessels reflect transcosmological travel in features such as the spiraling snake and bird effigy jars. We explore the cosmological significance of both transcosmological travel and its association with macaws and snakes, which served as axis mundi (gateway) animals in Casas Grandes cosmology.