It is found in a wide variety of plant and psychoactive toad species and, like its close relatives DMT and bufotenin (5-HO-DMT), it has been used as an entheogen by South American shamans for thousands of years.
Players take on the role of various mundane or arcane character types, including Gunfighters, Lawmen (such as U.S. Marshals or local sheriffs), Hucksters (magic users), Shamans, Blessed (those of faith), and Mad Scientists in an attempt to learn about the Reckoning and the mysterious beings behind it.
It has a long continuing tradition of use as an entheogen by indigenous Mazatec shamans, who use it to facilitate visionary states of consciousness during spiritual healing sessions.
He argues that we live in a state of emergency, citing Walter Benjamin, that is not ‘an exception but the rule.’ To show the universality of the nervous system he takes his reader through the heights of Macchu Picchu, the world of Cuna shamans, and the pale world of New York’s hospital system.
The area’s religious practices attracted researchers around the same time and the first Otomi bark paper sold to foreigners were in the form of cut outs by the shamans, to researchers such as Frederick Starr and Bodil Christensen who wrote about the manufacture and use of the paper.
Further criticism of some of Eliade's positions came from the English historian Ronald Hutton of the University of Bristol in his book, Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination (2001).