CONSCIOUSNESS SCIENCE · ARCHAEOACOUSTICS · QUANTUM BIOLOGY
What Chavín de Huántar, endogenous DMT, and quantum coherence may share — and what it means for how we understand consciousness itself.
By Jasmine Angelique · Jascotee Editorial · 2026
In response to 'Shamanic Sound Rituals of Ancient Peru' by Dawid Rakowski
In 2025, an archaeological team from Stanford and the University of Florida unsealed a chamber at Chavín de Huántar and found elaborately carved bone snuff tubes coated with chemical traces of Anadenanthera colubrina — the plant source of bufotenine and DMT-related tryptamines. The physical evidence confirmed what the architecture and iconography had long whispered: that altered states of consciousness were not incidental to the ritual at Chavín. They were its purpose.
Dawid Rakowski's essay on the shamanic sound rituals of ancient Peru presents a compelling argument that this 3,000-year-old ceremonial center was engineered as a precise technology of perception — layering psychoacoustics, plant medicine, darkness, and architecture into a system of consciousness transformation. His account is grounded in direct field experience and draws on archaeoacoustic research led by Professor John Rick at Stanford.
This post does not contest or embellish what Rakowski describes. It asks a different question: what does 21st-century science — specifically quantum biology, neuropharmacology, and emerging theories of consciousness — make of what those priests and initiates were doing? And does modern physics lend any coherence to the idea that the universe might be, as ancient Andean cosmology assumed, fundamentally resonant?
Ancient ritual technology and cutting-edge neuroscience are converging on the same territory: the relationship between frequency, biology and the boundaries of conscious experience.
The endogenous molecule problem
Central to Rakowski's account is the use of Willka — Anadenanthera colubrina — a snuff containing bufotenine and DMT-related tryptamines, used during the upper-terrace phase of Chavín ritual. The 2025 archaeological discovery places this beyond hypothesis. But there is a deeper layer to the DMT story that archaeology cannot yet excavate: the question of what the brain does with these molecules, and why it may already be producing some of them on its own.
In 2019, a landmark study led by Jimo Borjigin at the University of Michigan, published in Scientific Reports, identified for the first time that the mammalian brain synthesises and releases DMT at concentrations comparable to those of conventional monoamine neurotransmitters like serotonin. INMT mRNA — the transcript for a key DMT-synthesising enzyme — was found expressed in the cerebral cortex, pineal gland, and choroid plexus of both rats and humans. Crucially, DMT levels in the visual cortex were observed to surge significantly following experimentally induced cardiac arrest.
This does not confirm the popular thesis that the pineal gland floods the brain with DMT at death or during dreaming — that remains contested. David Nichols, in a 2018 paper specifically addressing the pineal-DMT hypothesis, argues that the quantities detected are sub-threshold for psychoactive effect, and that alternative neuroendocrine explanations exist for near-death phenomenology. Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging this debate rather than collapsing it.
What the research does establish, with increasing confidence, is that DMT is endogenous to the mammalian brain — present at baseline, produced locally in the neocortex, and responsive to extreme physiological states. It is not merely a plant compound that ancient peoples discovered. It may be part of the brain's own biochemistry, which ancient peoples learned to activate, amplify, or entrain through specific practices.
If DMT is a native molecule of the brain at baseline, then the initiates at Chavín were not importing a foreign substance. They were unlocking a door that was already in the wall.
The 2024 ScienceDirect review 'Why N,N-dimethyltryptamine matters' consolidates evidence for DMT's roles in neuroplasticity, neuroprotection, and immunomodulation through its action on sigma-1 receptors — intracellular proteins involved in cell survival and neuronal differentiation. DMT is not simply a psychedelic. In the language of current pharmacology, it may be a native signalling molecule whose full function we have not yet mapped.
Frequency, architecture and the brainwave alignment
Rakowski describes the pututu conch-shell horns of Chavín as producing low, resonant drone frequencies that acoustic researchers have confirmed were tuned to interact with the temple's architectural cavities, generating standing waves throughout the stone galleries. He links these frequencies to theta and gamma brainwave states associated with trance, visionary experiences, and neuroplasticity.
This is not speculation without basis. The Earth's own electromagnetic background — the Schumann Resonance, first measured by physicist Winfried Otto Schumann in the early 1950s and verified in subsequent decades — has a fundamental frequency of 7.83 Hz. This frequency falls exactly at the boundary between theta waves (4–8 Hz) and alpha waves (8–13 Hz) in the human brain. A 2024 paper in Researchgate reviewed evidence showing 'real time coherence between variations in the Schumann resonance and brain activity spectra within the 6–16 Hz band' across multiple independent studies. A 2025 PubMed paper examining extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields found that the Schumann Resonance at 7.83 Hz may influence cellular calcium influx and action potential generation, with downstream effects on consciousness and behaviour.
The significance for Chavín is this: if sustained low-frequency acoustic stimulation can entrain the brain toward theta states — as neuroscience confirms it can — and if those theta states are associated with heightened receptivity to endogenous and exogenous psychedelic compounds, then the pututus were not merely ceremonial objects. They were neurological primers. The sound came first. The plant medicine came after. The architecture amplified both.
This is, structurally, the same logic as modern binaural beat technology, which uses slightly offset frequencies in each ear to induce specific brainwave states. The Chavín priests were operating without the conceptual vocabulary of brainwave entrainment — but they may have arrived at the same functional outcome through centuries of experiential refinement.
Quantum coherence in biology: not as exotic as it sounds
The most speculative layer of Rakowski's essay — and the most intellectually interesting — concerns the possibility that consciousness is not entirely a product of classical neurochemistry, but may involve quantum processes. He invokes the language of quantum physics when discussing light as information and the cosmos as a web of resonant relationships.
These are not fringe ideas in current physics. They are actively contested but seriously engaged. The Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) theory, developed by physicist Roger Penrose and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, proposes that quantum computations occur within the microtubule structures of neurons, and that consciousness arises from moments of quantum collapse — objective reduction — in these structures. A 2025 paper in Neuroscience of Consciousness at Oxford Academic reviewed evidence from anaesthetic research, arguing that microtubules are a likely substrate of consciousness and that the Orch-OR theory, while unproven, is consistent with available data on how anaesthetics produce unconsciousness.
In December 2025, a paper published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (Keppler) proposed that conscious states arise from the brain's capacity to resonate with the quantum vacuum — specifically the zero-point field (ZPF) that permeates all space according to quantum electrodynamics. The model argues that cortical microcolumns couple directly to the ZPF through glutamate-ZPF resonance, producing the coherence dynamics associated with consciousness. If the model is correct, awareness is not merely electrochemical — it involves the brain tuning itself to a fundamental field of the universe.
These are theoretical models, not established facts. But they are produced by researchers publishing in peer-reviewed physics and neuroscience journals. The direction of inquiry is significant: a growing body of serious science is asking whether consciousness connects to something more fundamental than synaptic firing.
If consciousness resonates with a field that permeates the universe, then the ancient intuition — that ritual, frequency, and intention can tune the mind to something larger than itself — is not metaphor. It is, possibly, physics.
Quantum biology is also establishing that biological systems exploit quantum effects in ways previously considered impossible in warm, wet environments. Photosynthesis in green plants achieves near-perfect energy transfer efficiency through quantum coherence. Migratory birds navigate using a radical pair mechanism — a quantum biological process in the visual cortex that responds to the Earth's magnetic field. Human olfaction may involve quantum tunnelling. The brain is wet and warm, yes — but biology has apparently found ways to sustain quantum processes that physicists once assumed it couldn't.
From my research on the topic and trying to explain my job in natural medicine as a quantum healer, intention is the key word. There is already scientific research proving that in healthcare different intentions set by the practitioner, such as wanting to kill cancer cells while treating the cells, can influence the results of experiments in preclinical biofield studies.
Practitioner engagement is also important because there may be conditions that seem appropriate from the scientific perspective but would interfere with a particular practitioner's ability to perform optimally.
Further what might be of surprise to people who function mainly on visible phenomena, research has also found that it is unclear whether it is appropriate for scientists to ask practitioners to try to kill cancer cells and healers differ in their attitudes to this request. The intentions for these types of studies should be for the “highest good” instead.
The research in Chinese medicine has also partially proven to work on the molecular level. Even external qigong (a physical activity) treatment can reduce phosphorylation of the protein molecule myosin in a cell-free system. The results obtained in this study demonstrate that Qigong practice can consistently affect a biologically relevant enzyme system, requiring no physical contact between the practitioner and the sample.
On the level of treatments performed not in person, it is also proven that remote energy healing affects the biological enzyme system. I have been working in this field for 7 years and I have seen it working. During sessions of egyptian energy healing my clients in 95% of the times feel something not only on the mood level but also on the physical level.
The three-world architecture and the topology of consciousness
Rakowski's account of the tripartite Andean cosmology — Kay Pacha (the living world), Uku Pacha (the underworld) and Hanan Pacha (the sky world) — is not presented as folklore but as a functional map of the initiatory journey through the temple. The descent through black stone, the crossing of the threshold between dark and light, the ascent to white granite under open sky: these were structural, not symbolic, interventions in the initiate's neurological state.
What is remarkable is how precisely this architecture maps onto what neuroscience now describes as the default mode network (DMN) dissolution model of psychedelic experience. The DMN — the brain's self-referential narrative system, associated with the maintenance of ego identity — is systematically suppressed under the influence of psilocybin, mescaline, and DMT. Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College London has described this as 'ego dissolution': a temporary structural loosening of the self-model, associated with feelings of unity, boundlessness, and contact with something other.
The underground galleries at Chavín — total darkness, narrow corridors, forced prostration — would have initiated this process through sensory deprivation alone. Modern dark retreat research confirms that after extended periods in complete darkness, the brain begins producing visionary experiences endogenously, without any chemical assistance. The Tibetan practice of dark retreat, lasting days or weeks, is documented to induce geometric and luminous visions — experiences described with exactly the phenomenological vocabulary of DMT users in clinical settings.
The Chavín system layered all of these: darkness, acoustic entrainment, plant medicine and fasting. It was redundant by design. Each component potentiated the others. This is systems engineering of consciousness — not primitive ritual but iterative protocol refinement across generations of practitioners.
Graham Hancock and the legitimacy of the question
Dawid Rakowski's essay sits within a broader intellectual tradition associated most prominently with Graham Hancock — the argument that ancient people possessed sophisticated systems of knowledge about consciousness, cosmology and the nature of reality, which mainstream archaeology has systematically undervalued or misread.
Hancock's contribution, across books from Fingerprints of the Gods to America Before, has been to take seriously the possibility that the symbolic, architectural, and astronomical precision of ancient sites reflects genuine knowledge systems rather than coincidence or cargo-cult imitation of natural patterns. His argument that altered states of consciousness — specifically shamanic plant medicine use — may have been central to the development of human symbolic cognition, documented most fully in Supernatural (2005), anticipates many of the directions that academic psychedelic research has since pursued.
It is worth being precise about what Hancock has and has not established. His most provocative claim — that an advanced Ice Age civilisation was destroyed by comet impact around 12,900 years ago and seeded the earliest known cultures with their knowledge — remains a hypothesis that most archaeologists find unsupported by available evidence. The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis itself is a live scientific debate, with serious geological support for a cosmic impact event at approximately that time, but mainstream consensus does not currently endorse the civilisational narrative built upon it.
What is less contestable is Hancock's central intuition: that consciousness was the primary technology of ancient advanced cultures, not an accessory to it. The 2025 discovery at Chavín adds direct physical evidence to a case that was previously built largely from inference and iconography.
The most important question ancient ritual sites raise is not 'how did they move the stones?' It is: 'what were they trying to experience — and did they reach it?'
The octopus problem
Rakowski raises, in passing, the convergence between DMT-induced visions of cephalopod-like beings and the extraordinary biology of the octopus — specifically the fact that octopuses can edit their own RNA, a capacity with no known vertebrate parallel. He notes ongoing scientific interest in this as a potential marker of a distinct evolutionary pathway.
This deserves careful handling. The RNA editing in coleoid cephalopods is a documented and genuinely remarkable biological fact — extensively studied, including in a 2017 paper in Cell by Liscovitch-Brauer and colleagues, which found that coleoid cephalopods (octopuses, squid, cuttlefish) use RNA editing to diversify their proteome to an extraordinary degree, particularly in neural tissue. The proposed explanations are evolutionary, not extraterrestrial. But the phenomenon is unusual enough that it is cited in serious scientific literature as an example of biological complexity that challenges simple models of evolutionary convergence.
Whether the recurring imagery of cephalopod-like entities in DMT visions represents a genuine encounter with non-human intelligence, an archetypal pattern generated by the human visual cortex, or a cultural transmission of imagery through ancient trade routes — this cannot be settled by current science. Rakowski presents it as an open question. That is the correct epistemic posture.
What is the range of human conscious experience?
The priests of Chavín were working without the vocabulary of quantum field theory, neuropharmacology or brainwave entrainment. But they were working on the same questions: what is the range of human conscious experience? What frequencies and substances can expand it? And what becomes available to perception when the ordinary boundaries of self are temporarily dissolved?
The emerging science suggests the following, provisionally:
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DMT is endogenous to the mammalian brain, present in the neocortex at concentrations comparable to classical neurotransmitters and responsive to extreme physiological states. Ancient plant medicines may have acted as amplifiers of an existing biochemical system.
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Low-frequency acoustic stimulation can entrain the brain toward theta and gamma states associated with trance and visionary experience. Architectural design that amplifies and focuses specific frequencies is a plausible mechanism for reliably inducing these states.
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Quantum biology is establishing that living systems exploit quantum coherence in conditions previously thought prohibitive. The brain's relationship to quantum processes is an active area of serious inquiry, not pseudoscience.
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Sensory deprivation, combined with fasting and rhythmic breathing, reliably induces altered states without any external substance. The Chavín design incorporates all of these.
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The Schumann Resonance at 7.83 Hz overlaps with theta-alpha brainwave boundaries. Research shows measurable coherence between this planetary electromagnetic background and human brain activity. Whether the stone water channels of Chavín entrained this frequency is unknown — but the question is not absurd.
None of this proves that the initiates of Chavín communicated with divine intelligences. It suggests that they designed an extraordinarily sophisticated system for accessing states of consciousness that modern science is only beginning to characterise — and that the architecture, sound, darkness and plant medicine were not separate components but a single integrated technology.
What we call mysticism, they called engineering.
A note on intellectual honesty
This post has tried to hold a specific line: presenting what the science actually says, distinguishing established findings from contested hypotheses and neither inflating the claims of Rakowski's essay nor reflexively dismissing its implications because they are unconventional.
The history of science contains many instances where unconventional frameworks — proposed first by practitioners and explorers rather than academic institutions — preceded formal verification by decades. Psychedelic research itself is the most recent example: the clinical findings of the 1950s and 1960s, dismissed for fifty years, are now being replicated and extended at Johns Hopkins, Imperial College London and NYU.
The questions Chavín raises about consciousness, frequency, and the biochemistry of visionary states are not settled. But they are no longer fringe. The temple was built to ask them. Modern science is, finally, building the tools to begin answering.
References & Sources
https://grahamhancock.com/rakowskid3/
Dean, J.G. et al. (2019). Biosynthesis and Extracellular Concentrations of N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in Mammalian Brain. Scientific Reports, 9, 9333.
Nichols, D.E. (2018). N,N-dimethyltryptamine and the pineal gland: Separating fact from myth. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 32(1), 30–36.
Chaves, C. et al. (2024). Why N,N-dimethyltryptamine matters: unique features and therapeutic potential beyond classical psychedelics. Frontiers in Psychiatry. PMC11576444.
Penrose, R. & Hameroff, S. (1994/2014). Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR). Physics of Life Reviews.
Hameroff, S. (2025). Quantum microtubule substrate of consciousness is experimentally supported. Neuroscience of Consciousness, Oxford Academic. DOI: 10.1093/nc/niaf011.
Keppler, J. (2025). Macroscopic quantum effects in the brain: new insights into the fundamental principle underlying conscious processes. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1676585.
Escolà-Gascón, A. et al. (2025). Evidence of quantum-entangled higher states of consciousness. ScienceDirect (PMC11960655).
Koch, C. et al. (2024). Quantum mechanics and consciousness. Entropy (Allen Institute collaboration).
Youvan, D. (2024). Brain Waves and the Schumann Resonance: Exploring the Electromagnetic Connection. Researchgate.
Farshchi, M. (2025). Exploring the influence of Schumann resonance and electromagnetic fields on bioelectricity and human health. PubMed, 40394813.
Liscovitch-Brauer, N. et al. (2017). Trade-off between Transcriptome Plasticity and Genome Evolution in Cephalopods. Cell, 169(2), 191–202.
Rick, J. et al. Chavín de Huántar archaeoacoustics research. Stanford University archaeological fieldwork, ongoing.
Rakowski, D. (2026). Shamanic Sound Rituals of Ancient Peru. thealchemyofself.info.
Hancock, G. (2005). Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind. Century, London.
Carhart-Harris, R. et al. (2016). Neural correlates of the psychedelic state. PNAS, 113(17).
Jasmine Angelique is a Swiss-certified naturopath and Traditional Chinese Medicine specialist. She works at the intersection of integrative medicine, quantum biology and consciousness science. jascotee.com · medicinacinese.ch
