Pharmakeía: The Witchcraft Behind Modern Psychiatry

The Greek word φαρμακεία (pharmakeía) originally meant the use of potions or enchantments-what we would call witchcraft. From this same root we derive pharmacy and pharmaceuticals. Linguistically and historically, medicine and magic share the same mother tongue.

But this overlap is not just linguistic. The connection between witchcraft and pharma exposes a deeper truth: psychiatry, though draped in medical garb, remains structurally and conceptually closer to the shamanic art of enchantment than to scientific medicine.

From Pharmakeía to Pharma

In ancient Greece, the pharmakeus-the practitioner of pharmakeía-was both healer and sorcerer. They mixed substances that could heal or harm, guided by ritual and belief. Over time, this art of potions evolved into pharmacia in Latin, and later into pharmacy. Yet the transformation was not a rupture, but a refinement: the same alchemy of substances, the same faith in the unseen, now renamed as science.

The ambiguity of the pharmakon-as both remedy and poison-remains the essence of modern pharmacology. Every psychiatric drug continues this ancient paradox: it alters the soul’s (minds) chemistry.

Psychiatry’s Shamanic Lineage

Psychiatrist Allen Frances, former chair of the DSM-IV Task Force, makes an unintentional but profound admission in Saving Normal (2013):

“Psychiatry seems like a young profession, barely two hundred years old-but you could fairly say it is the oldest. Diagnosing and ministering to the mentally ill was part of the job description of the shaman... Doing psychiatry was always a big part of a shaman’s practice.”

Frances does not trivialise psychiatry by comparing it to shamanism. Rather, he reveals their shared epistemological structure: both rest on socially sanctioned authority to define invisible causes and prescribe invisible cures. The difference lies not in what they do, but in how their authority is framed-ritual versus laboratory, spirits versus serotonin.

In both cases, the healer interprets meaning, classifies deviance, and prescribes the ritual of return. Whether that ritual involves drumming or diagnosis, chanting or drugging, the underlying mechanism is symbolic and social, not medical in the empirical sense.

Psychiatry’s Metaphysical Core

Medicine deals with disease-measurable, bodily pathology. Psychiatry, by contrast, deals with disorder-a term defined not by biology, but by behaviour and belief. No laboratory test confirms depression, no scan diagnoses schizophrenia, no biomarker proves “chemical imbalance.” Instead, psychiatry’s diagnostic categories rest on collective judgment, codified in manuals like the DSM.

Frances himself describes this dynamic vividly:

“Abnormal behaviour constitutes a threat not only to the individual; it is also a clear and present danger to the future of the tribe... The shaman had all the tools to define and deal with abnormality... Magical belief and suggestion can go a long way.”

This passage reveals psychiatry’s social function: to label, contain, and ‘normalise deviance’. Whether in the tribe or the clinic, the “healer” restores social order by interpreting the meaning of distress within a framework of sanctioned belief.

In this sense, psychiatry operates not as medicine, but as a moral and social and spiritual institution-a system for managing conformity and meaning under the guise of treatment.

The Religion of Psychiatry

A 2018 article in Psychiatric Times by Kenneth J. Weiss and the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry acknowledges psychiatry’s ancient ancestry:

“Early civilizations relied on shamans, sorcerers, magicians, mystics, priests, and other approved healers... The shaman acted as both priest and healer.”

This is not metaphorical-it is historical continuity. Modern psychiatry retains the ritualistic, metaphysical, and hierarchical features of its shamanic predecessors. It interprets suffering through invisible frameworks (spirits then, neurotransmitters now), and administers symbolic substances (potions then, pills now).

Like a religion, psychiatry defines sin and salvation in scientific language: “disorder” replaces “possession,” and “recovery” substitutes for “redemption.” Its authority depends on collective belief, its power on institutional sanction.

The Myth of Medicine

To call psychiatry “medicine” is to mistake symbolic interpretation for biological science. Medicine diagnoses tangible disease through objective signs-tumours, pathogens, broken bones. Psychiatry, by contrast, diagnoses patterns of behaviour through interpretive consensus.

This is not an attack, but a clarification: psychiatry is not medical science, but a cultural technology of meaning. It translates human suffering into a codified language of disorder and cure. Like the shaman, the psychiatrist mediates between chaos and coherence-only now through the grammar of neurotransmitters instead of gods.

The Hidden Continuity

Both systems-ancient and modern-share key structural features:

Epistemological authority: the power to define what counts as real or illusory.

Ritualised practice: diagnostic sessions, symbolic objects (the pill, the chart), and formalised ceremonies of healing.

Faith in transformation: the belief that an expert can restore balance to the psyche through specialised knowledge.

In this light, psychiatry is best understood not as a branch of medicine, but as neo-shamanism-a ritual system of psychological and social control, draped in the white robes of scientific legitimacy.