Review: Food of the Gods

By Terence McKenna

Full text: http://herbarium.0-700.pl/biblioteka/Food%20of%20the%20Goods.pdf

Physical text: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/102/1024395/food-of-the-gods/9780712670388.html

McKenna presents his “Stoned Ape Theory”, the idea that psilocybin mushrooms sprouted from cattle dung in Africa sparked the evolution of the modern homo sapien brain. Specifically, mushrooms helped humans create language, the characteristic that most separates man from ape, directly contributing to the human trajectory towards civilization. As generations of homo sapiens consumed mushrooms, they developed consciousness and religions organized around the relationship between man, mushroom, and nature in the “Garden of Eden.” Due to abrupt and extreme climate change, this mushroom-consuming culture who worshipped an Earth Goddess was forced to migrate into Palestine and Anatolia at Catal Huyuk around 10,000 BC. According to McKenna, invaders from the Russian steppe conquered the Middle East and put this society on the run. McKenna claims the mushroom culture relocated to Crete where they started the Minoan civilization around 6000 BC. On Crete, the ancestors of the mushroom cults probably lost their attachment to mushrooms due to unavailability, but they kept the religious rituals and social behaviors that were developed in the era of Eden, evidenced by their worship of the Goddess. McKenna claims that as this society lost contact with mushrooms, they substituted other substances, like opium, to achieve shamanic ecstacy.

Venus Figurines

The Minoans’ decline bring us to the Mycenaean civilization that arose around 2000–1500 BC and later to the Athenian civilization around 800 BC. As the Greeks on the mainland conquered their neighbors, a syncretism of religions occurred in which the ancient Goddess religion was absorbed into the Greek pantheon. The Greeks came from a very different set of traditions and beliefs, worshipping a religion that recognizes a male, lightning-wielding god as the supreme being, but the impact of the Goddess is evident in Greek mythology. Specifically, with the cult of Dionysus and the Eleusinian mysteries involving Demeter and Persephone, the tradition of consuming drugs to celebrate nature, fertility, and sexuality was kept alive, though the Greeks were probably unaware of the mushroom-eating origins of these rituals. After the Greeks, the Romans practiced a more removed version of these rituals before the Senate attempted to ban the rituals in 186 BCE, followed by the Catholic church suppressing the remnants of the original mushroom culture during and after the fall of Rome as they consolidated power over western Europe.