The ‘Magic Mushroom’: Intergalactic Intelligence or Flesh of the Gods?
The ethnobotanist and philosophical mystic, Terence McKenna, is perhaps best known for his controversial theory of anthropogenesis: the facetiously titled ‘Stoned Ape Theory’. The basic outline of this theory is that pre-human hominids entered into a symbiotic relationship with hallucinogenic mushrooms precipitating a cognitive revolution, out of which ‘self-reflection, language, religion and all the spectrum of effects that flow from these things’ emerged.
According to McKenna, sustained consumption of the psychedelic — that is ‘mind-manifesting’ — mushroom explains the unprecedented tripling of the human brain size. Low doses of psilocybin (the psychoactive ingredient in ‘magic mushrooms’) have been shown to increase visual acuity, which, McKenna claims, would have conferred ‘a tremendous adaptive advantage to the animals that [were] including it in their diet’. These animals were then able to ‘bootstrap themselves to higher and higher states of reflective self awareness’.
McKenna argues that this symbiosis between man and mushroom may lie behind the early worship of cattle, which is reflected in the cave paintings on the Algerian…
