Food of the Gods

This process of deepening cultural psychosis (an obsession with ego, money, and the sugar/alcohol drug complex) reaches its culmination in the mid-twentieth century with Sartre’s appalling assertion that “nature is mute.”

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

Chapter 4 will detail psilocybin’s remarkable property of stimulating the language-forming capacity of the brain. Its power is so extraordinary that psilocybin can be considered the catalyst to the human development of language.

If Soma is Stropharia cubensis, then the tradition could be traced unbroken back to prehistoric Africa.

If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western civilization.

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?

It is extraordinary that in the relatively short span of two centuries four stimulants—sugar, tea, coffee, and chocolate—could have emerged out of local obscurity and become a basis for vast mercantile empires, defended by the greatest military powers ever known to that time and supported by the newly reintroduced practice of slavery.

Governments that had dealt drugs with impunity for centuries suddenly found themselves, in the new atmosphere of temperance and social reform, forced to legislate this lucrative trade out of the realm of ordinary commerce and into the status of an illicit activity. Governments would now make their drug money in kickback schemes and in situations in

Such descriptions go a long way toward making clear why the “artificial paradise” was so alluring to the Romantic imagination: it was almost as though one were made for the other. And, indeed, the Romantics, with their attention to the dramatic moods of nature and their cultivation of a sensitivity that their critics found “feminine,” bear all the