Food of the Gods

With the eclipse of Minoan Crete and its Mysteries, humankind crossed a watershed into the progressively more vacant, more ego-dominated world, whose energies were coalescing into monotheism, patriarchy, and male domination. Henceforward the great society-shaping plant relationships of the Old World’s past would decline to the status of “mysteries,

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.

Outpourings of style and esthetically managed personal display are usually anathema to the nuts-and-bolts mentality of dominator cultures. In dominator cultures without any living traditions of use of plants that dissolve social conditioning, such displays are usually felt to be the prerogative of women. Men who focus on such concerns are often ass

Epigenetics refers to heritable changes that do not involve changes in the DNA sequence. Epigenetic processes usually involve modulations in gene expression that result in phenotypic changes that do not result from mutations. Epigenetic changes can arise from developmental processes but may result from external factors such as drugs, environmental

Medieval Europe was one of the most constipated, neurotic, and woman-hating societies ever to exist.

Thevet’s Nicotiana tabacum conquered Europe in the form of the cigarette and was the plant that became the basis for the tremendously important tobacco economy that grew up in the colonial New World.

And today it is distilled alcohol that is

‘Language is not merely a device for communicating ideas about the world, but rather a tool for bringing the world into existence … Reality is not simply ‘experienced’ or ‘reflected’ in language, but instead is actually produced by language.’

the breakup of Christian medieval Europe occurred as a result of an epidemic obsession with the new, the exotic, and the delightful—in short with consciousness-expanding substances.

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.