Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution
This week’s book was, I think, a random Amazon suggestion following some of my Graham Hancock purchases, which makes sense, making this week’s book Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution by Terence McKenna.
This book is part history book, part botanical walks through, part political manifesto, and a whole lot of speculative theory. It…was kind of a hot mess, to be honest. It’s broken down into four parts, Paradise, Paradise Lost, Hell, and Paradise Regained?...yes with the question mark. And I also question his idea of how to regain paradise, but I’ll come back to that.
So, for Paradise, he brings us back to prehistory. This part was a little hokey, as he started each chapter with a bit of fictional supposition of what life was like for our early ancestors, not necessarily homo-sapiens, but somewhere in the family tree. As odd as I found these chapter starts, the points he made in the actual chapters were not necessarily wrong. He points out that it’s not inconceivable that in our far distant collective past, something we ate as hunter/gatherers sparked the mutation that made the leap from monkeys in the trees to homo-erectus, to homo-sapiens. And since we were, in that far distant past, exploring the vast botanical garden that was planet earth, it’s most likely the something that sparked the mutation was a plant. And he points out that psilocybin is a good choice for the source of mutation, largely based on increased visual acuity, increased vocalization, increased hearing…basically your senses are heightened, and you want to talk about it.
Out of all the possible hallucinogens, McKenna picked psylocibin as the most likely plant for some pretty plausible reasons: It grows easily and readily in the manure of the animals they were hunting. And it does not cause nausea on ingestion. That last one is actually pretty big, since nausea is one of the human bodies evolved warning systems that something is toxic. So if you eat a hallucinogenic, like say the ever popular Amanita muscaria, that causes nausea, then you’ll vomit it up before you really get a chance to experience the heightened senses and verbalization.
I am completely fine with his logic here. Where he starts to lose me is where he talks about how humanity used to be a partnership society, until the evil patriarchy started enforcing their dominator culture on everyone. Like…I’m pretty sure there is a metric shit ton of recorded history that says that’s not quite what happened. Like….there is virtually no proof of the existence of partnership societies, or that matriarchal cultures are less violent than patriarchal cultures. There’s a lot of historical evidence that women are as capable of violence as men. The violence may be in the form of poison versus actually strong arming someone, but dead is dead, regardless of method of execution.
McKenna, for the rest of the book, consistently mentions the dominator culture as the source of all evil. Its simplistic and ignores large swaths of history that don’t support his suppositions. It was irritating. But the best is yet to come.
In Paradise Lost, he mentions Soma, actually provides a pretty solid synopsis of the book Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality by R. Gordon Wasson, which I have not read, because the used version is $128, but he does refute Wasson’s supposition that Amanita is the source of Soma, for some pretty solid reasons, and cites another book, Haoma and Harmaline by David Stophlet Flattery and Martin Schwartz, to point out that Syrian Rue is one of several plants to naturally produce harmine. The other, most well known plant, is Banisteriopsis caapi, aka the active MAO inhibitor in Ayahuasca, which makes the magic of ayahuasca work. So that made sense to me, that Syrian Rue might be a real contender for Soma, although…reading the actual book is going to have to wait. Obviously. I don’t currently have a spare $128, due to needing to pay off my vacation I’m back on a book buying hiatus, and I would want to read the Haoma and Harmaline book to, which is not available for sale. Anyway, first world problems, back to this book.
He briefly touches on the Wasson, Hoffman, and Ruck’s book, The Road to Eleusis, and he points the finger of blame not just at the patriarchy, but at alcohol. But whereas Brian Muraresku delineated between beer, wine, and distilled alcohol, McKenna blames all alcohol, and makes the bold assertion that domestic violence would not exist without alcohol. Now…I am 100% sure that is grossly inaccurate and a wild simplification of the problem of Domestic Violence. IT also indicates that only men are capable of domestic violence, which is also inaccurate. Because again, women are just as capable of violence, including, incidentally, smacking their partner around. It doesn’t get the press that violence against women does, but men are absolutely capable of being in an abusive personal relationship.
He also seems to have something against cannabis. Which is odd because usually people who are pro-hallucinogens, are also pro-cannabis. This section also includes quite a few contradictions, because he will say something like no bad has ever come of cannabis use, then site a historical anecdote from early Islam and cannabis abuse…then blame monotheism, rather than the cannabis. As we learned from Dr. Strassman’s book, The Psychedelic Handbook, any negative impact is an adverse effect. If you have a bad trip, that’s an adverse effect. If you think you’re smoking too much pot, that’s an adverse effect. If you smoke so much pot you lose the ability to go to work…THAT’S AN ADVERSE EFFECT. Losing the ability to function on a daily basis IS NOT GOOD. So saying that pot use has no negative consequences when that is provably false does not bolster your argument any.
Just like saying in the following section, Hell, that opium use, pre-further processing into morphine and heroin, only has one recorded instance of abuse in history and never any adverse implications to your internal organs is flat wrong. Because even just straight opium can result in death if taken too much. I would call death an adverse side-effect. Additionally, if you look at the parable of the Lotus Eaters in Homer’s the Odyssey….too much opium results in loss of care for the outside world and memory loss. These are known, medically, as adverse side effects.
Also in Hell, he brings up how sugar, coffee, tea, and chocolate are all addictive substances that are perfectly legal. This was actually one of his strongest arguments, along with the fact that tobacco is highly addictive and perfectly legal. Excellent points. The weakness of his argument here is again in blaming “dominator culture” aka The Patriarchy for the evils of slavery, which he claims vanished during the middle ages but rose again with the discovery of the new world. Yeah…slavery never went anywhere. And he also makes the false argument that the Atlantic slave trade was the first time in history that a group was targeted purely on their ethnicity, even though the root of the word slave is from slav, meaning the northern people, who were heavily enslaved by the Romans purely because they were Slavic… seriously, for awhile I had a subscription to Great Courses and watched a series on the Vikings/Norse cultures. Very informative. Also watched a series on ancient Babylon which definitely contradicts his theories of partnership vs dominator cultures. Yeah, see why I say this book was a hot mess?
His final section, Paradise Regained? He discusses the rediscovery of psychedelics in the 20th century and his “roadmap” for ending the war on drugs. Which included a 200% tax on alcohol and tobacco, and a 200% tax on cannabis products…but all plants should be made legal. So you could just grown your own? Also, “Currency and banking regulations need to be strengthened.” And “strict gun control laws”…. Yeah, so it’s the child’s argument that everything I dislike should be heavily regulated or made illegal…by the dominator culture he hates so much, by the way, but everything I like should be 100% allowed.
Now, the book had some excellent points, and there were several lines which I agreed with whole heartedly, like when he says “The war on drugs was never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long as possible in order to allow various intelligence operations to wring the last few hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits from the global drug scam; THEN defeat will have to be declared.”
Or when he says “The craving for heroin and the illegal or violent acts that the craving may induce have given heroin the reputation as a drug whose addicts will kill for it. Tobacco addicts might kill for their fix, too, if they had to, but instead they simply walk out to a 7-Eleven to buy cigarettes.”
Or, “The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.”
But singular bon mottes do not make for an overall awesome book. And overall, this book was all over the place and an overall hot mess. I mean…if I needed to create a list of books to suggest for the legalization of hallucinogens, I don’t think I would include this one.
