I agree about the benefits of science. But on the other hand, science, especially in areas such as pharmaceuticals and agriculture (pesticides) leaves a LOT to be desired. Seems that they (lately at least) are creating more problems.
I just got a delivery from Amazon - a book called
The Night Battles. It's an analysis of Church trials which took place in Italy in the 1500s, conducted by the Franciscans. I find historical information about witchcraft fascinating (especially living as close to Salem as I do) and this is an amazing story about a group of people called the benandanti who related stories about how they would wage war on the astral plane level against witches. I've only just gotten into it the other night, but it's an amazing story about how an organized religion could have so totally misread things - an example being how some witches (not all certainly) have demonstrated health issues such as epilepsy, which can place them into an altered state of reality.
Another book that I've discovered in my reading, called Dreamtime, explores the concept of altered states of reality brought on by physical conditions which have developed over time with witchcraft and shamanism.
If you have a chance to explore, you can start here - but I agree that organization, such as religions, can mess things up as well as science can.....
The Night Battles
The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries is a historical study of the benandanti folk custom of 16th and 17th century Friuli, Northeastern Italy. It was written by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, then of the University of Bologna, and first published by the company Giulio Einaudi in 1966 under the Italian title of I Benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento. It was later translated into English by John and Anne Tedeschi and published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1983 with a new foreword written by the historian Eric Hobsbawm.
In The Night Battles, Ginzburg examines the trial accounts of those benandante who were interrogated and tried by the Roman Inquisition, using such accounts to elicit evidence for the beliefs and practices of the benandanti. These revolved around their nocturnal visionary journeys, during which they believed that their spirits traveled out of their bodies and into the countryside, where they would do battle with malevolent witches who threatened the local crops. Ginzburg goes on to examine how the Inquisition came to believe the benandanti to be witches themselves, and ultimately persecute them out of existence.
Considering the benandanti to be "a fertility cult", Ginzburg draws parallels with similar visionary traditions found throughout the Alps and also from the Baltic, such as that of the Livonian werewolf, and also to the widespread folklore surrounding the Wild Hunt. He furthermore argues that these Late Medieval and Early Modern accounts represent surviving remnants of a pan-European, pre-Christian shamanistic belief concerning the fertility of the crops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Battles
Dreamtime (book)
Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization is an anthropological and philosophical study of the altered states of consciousness found in shamanism and European witchcraft written by German anthropologist Hans Peter Duerr. First published in 1978 by Syndikat Autoren-und Verlagsgesellschaft under the German title of Traumzeit: Über die Grenze zwischen Wildnis und Zivilisation, it was translated into English by the Hungarian-American anthropologist Felicitas Goodman and published by Basil Blackwell in 1985.
Dreamtime opens with the premise that many of those accused of witchcraft in early modern Christendom had been undergoing visionary journeys with the aid of a hallucinogenic salve which was suppressed by the Christian authorities. Duerr argues that this salve had been a part of the nocturnal visionary traditions associated with the goddess Diana, and he attempts to trace their origins back to the ancient world, before looking at goddesses associated with the wilderness and arguing that in various goddess-centred cultures, the cave represented a symbolic vagina and was used for birth rituals.
Later in the book, Duerr looks at ethnographic examples of shamanism, focusing on the shamanic use of hallucinogens and the experiences which such entheogens induce. He argues that "archaic cultures" recognize that a human can only truly understand themselves if they go to the mental boundary between "civilization" and "wilderness", and that it is this altered state of consciousness which both the shaman and the European witch reached in their visionary journeys. Believing that the modern western worldview failed to understand this process, Duerr criticizes the work of those anthropologists and scientists who had tried to understand "archaic" society through a western rationalist framework, instead advocating a return to "archaic" modes of thought.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamtime_(book)