Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

Terence McKenna opens with a manifesto declaring that humanity's relationship with psychoactive plants must be fundamentally reexamined. He observes that governments wage "drug wars" while often colluding with the cartels they claim to oppose, and that synthetic chemistry has produced compounds far more potent and addictive than their natural predecessors. McKenna proposes an "Archaic Revival," a return to preindustrial attitudes toward community, substance use, and nature rooted in the Upper Paleolithic period of nomadic pastoralism, partnership culture, and Goddess worship. Drawing on Riane Eisler's distinction in The Chalice and the Blade between egalitarian "partnership" societies and hierarchical, male-dominated "dominator" societies, he argues that the suppression of ego-dissolving plant use has severed humanity from nature and produced the alienation and environmental destruction that define the modern world. The book follows four sections: "Paradise," "Paradise Lost," "Hell," and "Paradise Regained?"

In Part I, McKenna establishes shamanism as the foundational human spiritual practice, defining it, following the religious historian Mircea Eliade, as the Upper Paleolithic tradition of healing, divination, and natural magic. Ecstasy is its defining element: The shaman undergoes symbolic death and resurrection to access a spirit realm. McKenna lists multiple techniques for achieving this state but argues that none is as effective or ancient as visionary plant hallucinogens. He describes his own encounters with psilocybin mushrooms, a type of hallucinogenic fungi, in Colombia and ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew made from Amazonian plants, as personal authentication of the shamanic tradition.

McKenna then advances his central evolutionary thesis: Psychoactive compounds in the early human diet drove the rapid expansion of the human brain. As early hominids moved onto African grasslands and adopted an omnivorous diet, they encountered psilocybin-containing mushrooms growing in the dung of wild cattle. He proposes that psilocybin operated at three dosage levels: Low doses improved visual acuity, aiding hunting; moderate doses stimulated sexual arousal, promoting reproduction; and high doses produced shamanic ecstasy, dissolving ego boundaries and fostering community bonding. Psilocybin's most important effect, he contends, was its catalysis of language: It activated brain areas concerned with signal processing, excited vocalization, and transmuted language into something visually beheld. Women, as gatherers under greater pressure to communicate about plants and locations, were the primary drivers of linguistic evolution.

To identify the specific plant, McKenna establishes criteria: The candidate must be African, native to grasslands, require no preparation, and confer immediate benefits. He eliminates Tabernanthe iboga (a tropical forest plant used in the Bwiti religion of West Africa), LSD-type compounds, and Peganum harmala (giant Syrian rue, which contains beta-carbolines, psychoactive compounds that affect neurotransmitter breakdown). He arrives at Stropharia cubensis (also called Psilocybe cubensis) as the only candidate meeting all his criteria: It contains concentrated psilocybin without nausea-producing compounds and is found throughout the tropics wherever zebu cattle graze.

McKenna presents archaeological evidence for this thesis. Rock paintings on the Tassili-n-Ajjer Plateau in southern Algeria, dating from the late Neolithic, depict shamans with mushrooms and grazing cattle. He proposes this region around 12,000 B.C. was the partnership paradise whose loss produced the mythological motif of a golden age, connecting the Biblical story of Eden to a Goddess-oriented society disrupted by drought. He traces the migration of these pastoralists to Çatal Hüyük in central Anatolia (modern Turkey), which he presents as the culmination of partnership culture, with its Goddess shrines and cattle imagery. Its fall around 6500 B.C., followed by waves of horse-mounted Indo-European invaders from north of the Black Sea, marked the triumph of the dominator model.

Part II traces the loss of the original mushroom sacrament. McKenna examines the Vedic hymns praising Soma, the mysterious intoxicant central to Indo-European religion, and reviews the mycologist R. Gordon Wasson's identification of Soma with Amanita muscaria (fly agaric), a red-capped mushroom used in Siberian shamanism. McKenna finds this unconvincing: Fly agaric is chemically variable, often produces only nausea, and Wasson himself acknowledged that psilocybin intoxication is "clearly superior." McKenna proposes that the original Soma was a psilocybin mushroom encountered by Indo-Europeans when they conquered valley-dwelling pastoralist cultures on the Anatolian and Iranian plateaus. He traces the decline of the mushroom tradition through Minoan Crete, the last outpost of partnership culture, where opium eventually replaced earlier psychedelic sacraments. He discusses the Eleusinian Mysteries near Athens as the final vestige of the Archaic Goddess religion, examining two theories about the identity of its sacrament: the writer Robert Graves's psilocybin mushroom hypothesis and an ergotized beer theory advanced by Wasson and Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who proposed that grain infected with the fungus Claviceps purpurea produced alkaloids related to LSD.

McKenna argues that alcohol is the dominator drug par excellence: Distillation, discovered by medieval alchemists, transformed relatively benign fermented beverages into a concentrated substance that reinforces male dominance and suppresses the feminine. He examines cannabis as the plant most capable of promoting partnership values, attributing its persecution to its implicit threat to competitive, ego-dominated culture.

Part III examines the modern drug landscape. McKenna argues that sugar emerged as a key commodity driving colonial expansion, a highly addictive substance whose Caribbean cultivation generated the transatlantic slave trade. He connects coffee, tea, and chocolate, introduced to England in the 1650s as the first alternatives to alcohol, to the colonial sugar economy. He traces how the tea trade's monopoly crises led ultimately to the opium trade with China, culminating in the Opium Wars of 1838-1842. McKenna contrasts society's treatment of opium and tobacco to expose the hypocrisy of drug policy: Tobacco is equally addictive and far more deadly than heroin, yet legally sold, while opium derivatives are suppressed. He traces morphine's isolation in 1805, heroin's development as a supposed cure for morphine addiction, and cocaine's trajectory from traditional South American coca use through the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's early advocacy to the racist hysteria that produced the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. He introduces television as an "electronic drug" whose content can be controlled to impose cultural values.

Part IV surveys the modern rediscovery and suppression of hallucinogenic plants. McKenna chronicles the pharmacologist Lewis Lewin's introduction of peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus, to European science in the 1880s, early mescaline accounts by the neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell and the writer Havelock Ellis, Wasson's 1957 Life magazine article announcing psilocybin mushrooms, and Hofmann's synthesis of LSD in 1938 and accidental discovery of its effects in 1943. He argues that LSD functioned as a deconditioning agent threatening all factions, including the CIA, which explored it for mind control through programs such as MK-ULTRA before recognizing its uncontrollable nature. He details the suppression of psychedelic research despite promising results in treating alcoholism, depression, and terminal illness, and credits Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes as the central figure in modern ethnobotany.

McKenna closes by advocating for the tryptamine hallucinogens, a class of compounds structurally related to the neurotransmitter serotonin, particularly psilocybin and DMT (dimethyltryptamine), the most powerful short-acting hallucinogen. He describes the DMT experience as the penetration of a membrane into a dimension inhabited by "self-transforming machine elves" who offer gifts of new language, and proposes the octopus as a model for future communication, since cephalopods wear their linguistic intent as visible color and body transformations. He presents a ten-point drug policy reform proposal including heavy taxation of tobacco and alcohol, legalization of cannabis, recognition of the legality of all plants, legalization of psychedelic therapy, and eventual decriminalization of all drugs. In the epilogue, McKenna frames current global crises as by-products of the broken symbiosis with hallucinogenic plants. He calls for a remaking of human self-image, rejecting the dominator portrayal of humans as creatures guilty of sin and embracing nature not as an enemy to be conquered but as ourselves to be explored.