Food of the Gods

During the waning of the millennia-long Minoan civilization and its religion of Archaic worship of a Great Mother, the original source of the connection to the Goddess of vegetable nature came eventually to be replaced by the intoxication of opium.

Use of hallucinogens can only be sanctioned in hunting and gathering societies. When agriculturists use these plants, they are unable to get up at dawn the morning after and go hoe the fields. At that point, corn and grain become gods—gods that symbolize domesticity and hard labor. These replace the old goddesses of plant-induced ecstasy.

Discussion of alcohol gives us our first opportunity to examine the distinction between natural and synthetic drugs, for though distilled alcohol waited for hundreds of years to be joined by a second example of a chemically refined intoxicant, it was the first highly concentrated and purified drug, the first synthetic drug.

In the sixth millennium B.C., settled agricultural populations had already been present in Europe for over two thousand years and urban civilizations were already ancient in the fertile river valleys of the Near East and the Anatolian plain.

the chief culprit among the drugs labeled “legal” and “recreational.”

The opium dream was seen as a kind of waking theater of the imagination. And there is in the fascination with dreams an anticipation of the psychoanalytical methods of Freud and Jung; this fascination is felt throughout the literature of the nineteenth century—in Goethe, in Baudelaire, in Mallarmé, Huysmans, and Heine. It is the sirens’ song of the

My own contention is that Stropharia cubensis, or a conspecific coprophilic species, was well established in Africa, Anatolia, and perhaps the Iranian Plateau millennia before the coming of the Indo-Europeans.

The strongest argument for the legalization of any drug is that society7 has been able to survive the legalization of alcohol. If we can tolerate the legal use of alcohol, what drug cannot be absorbed in the structure of society?

The woman ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; this mysterious fruit is the psilocybin-containing mushroom Stropharia cubensis that catalyzed the Tassili partnership Eden

In our state of denial we must proclaim nature mute—how else to avoid facing the awful crimes we have committed for centuries against nature and each other. The Nazis said that Jews were not true human beings and that their mass murder was thus not of any consequence.