Suggest edit — Kogi Tribe

Title

Name

Note

---
confidence: medium
related:
- wiki/concepts/super-conscious-state.md
- wiki/concepts/spirit-as-substrate.md
sources:
- raw/transcript.md
title: Kogi Tribe
type: entity
visibility: public
---

# Kogi Tribe

Indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia. One of the few pre-Columbian high-civilization descendants in South America still living relatively traditional life. Population ~20,000.

## Why they matter in this conversation

Jacob brings them up as evidence that **institutionalized cultivation of altered consciousness states works** at the cultural level, and that some traditions take it seriously enough to organize their society around it.

## The shaman-rearing practice

> "The most interesting tribe is the Kogi tribe. I think for me, they identify certain children as the potential to be shamans, and they raise them in total darkness until they're age eight."

The biological hypothesis Jacob offers:

> "What this does is it activates the pineal gland in the head to produce far more endogenous DMT. And DMT taken externally is the most potent psychedelic known to man. And what most people don't really understand externally is, what are these psychedelic ancient cultures about? What are they even doing? And it's that people can enter these psychic states. They say they can walk in each other's dreams. They can do all these mystical things."

The mechanism (endogenous-DMT upregulation via pineal-gland sensitization through extended darkness) is **speculative** and not well-established in mainstream neuroscience. Jacob acknowledges this. The cultural fact (the practice exists, the Kogi take it seriously) is much better attested.

`confidence: medium` overall — high that the practice exists, low-medium on the specific neurobiological mechanism.

## "Younger Brother"

> "The Kogi tribe is very interesting. They didn't reveal themselves... they revealed themselves to us, and their name for the rest of us of the world — they call it 'Younger Brother' — and they say younger brother is destroying himself, so we had to reveal ourselves."

This is well-documented. The Kogi made deliberate first contact with industrial civilization in the 1990s, partly through the BBC documentary *From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brothers' Warning* (1990), with a follow-up *Aluna* (2012). Their position: they (the **Elder Brother**) understand how the world's natural systems work; the rest of us (the **Younger Brother**) are destroying the planet through ignorance; they are reluctantly intervening.

## Why this fits the conversation

Two threads converge here:

1. **The [[Super Conscious State]] thread** — evidence that some cultures take psychic states seriously enough to organize child-rearing around them
2. **The [[Existential Risk and Spa Diplomacy|existential-risk thread]]** — an outside view on industrial civilization's trajectory, from people who explicitly identified the destruction and chose to reveal themselves to warn us

Jacob ends with: "We should go visit them sometime. Yeah."

## Cultural context (added by the wiki, not in transcript)

The Kogi are descended from the Tairona civilization. They believe the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is "the heart of the world" and that their ritual practice maintains balance for the whole planet. The mamos (their priests) are the children identified and raised in darkness — the "shamans" in Jacob's framing.

## Related

- [[Super Conscious State]] — the broader concept
- [[Spirit as Substrate]] — the metaphysics that makes psychic-state claims coherent