 You may have noticed that when I referred to my ancestors' medicine was a spirit medicine. I love to define spirit as the animating principle of life. This is what the West very recently started calling psychedelics. And you don't really like that word, do you? Psychedelics? I do not. I do not. Explain why. The etymology of psychedelics, at least how it is used in the modern way, is the manifestation of the mind, the human mind. But these medicines are nothing about the human experience alone.