Felicitas Goodman (1990) observed that naive participants experienced unique trance states, characterized by specific visionary content, when they assumed particular postures and listened to monotonous rattling. Students (n = 284), enrolled in various sections of the course Introduction to Psychology, experienced one of four conditions with their eyes closed: Sitting Quietly with and without Drumming, Standing (Feather Serpent) Posture plus Drumming with and without Suggested Experiences. Participants completed the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory (Pekala 1982, 1991c) and wrote narratives following their (...) respective stimulus conditions. Participants reported less imagery, joy, and absorption, but more internal dialogue, self‐awareness, and muscular tension in the posture, compared to the sitting quietly, conditions. Goodman's results of specific posture (content‐related) effects with naive participants were not replicated. (shrink)

Despite renewed interest in shamanic patterns of phenomenal properties such as journeying imagery, these phenomena are neither well defined nor sufficiently understood. Consequently, we propose criteria pertaining to four necessary conditions for a visual mental image to qualify as a shamanic journeying image. Finally, we demonstrate how these necessary conditions may be used to extrapolate a scoring system that allows one to empirically test, via falsificationism, a visual mental image’s ostensible shamanic status. Keywords: shamanism—shamanic journeying imagery—necessary conditions.