Terence McKenna and the "food of the gods"

Exactly 20 years ago, on April 3, 2000, Terence McKenna took off towards Hyperspace: for the occasion we review his book "Food of the Gods", recently republished in the Italian translation by Piano B editions, focused on the relationship of humanity through the millennia with the so-called "master plants", but which also critically dwells on the relationship of dependence of modern man with various drugs, legal and illegal, among which McKenna also includes television.


di Marco Maculotti

Β«The comfortable and silent darkness is the best environment for the shaman to set out on what the Neo-Platonic mystic Plotinus called" the flight of the solitary to the Solitary. " "

- Terence McKenna, The food of the gods, P. 319

The name of Terence McKenna will not be new to our readers: in fact we already talked about it extensively some time ago, with an essay focused on his psychedelic eschatology in which we tried to give a coherent image of the author's "world view" that took into account the main key ideas of his work - twigs TimeWave Zero to the "ecology of souls", from stoned-bee alΒ Archaic Revival. To this end we had analyzed some of McKenna's best-known books, fromΒ DMT a The Archaic Revival to True hallucinations and the "trialogue" with Sheldrake and FoxΒ The evolutionary mind.

To these titles must be addedΒ The food of the godsΒ (Food of the Gods), out of print for years, whose very recent re-publication by Plan B editions, with a preface by Federico di Vita, can only be applauded. In this book, released in the USA in 1992, the author continues the discourse on the history of humanity and his own sacred relationship with the β€œvegetable masters”, that is to say entheogenic plants, from the Paleolithic to the present day. The peculiarity of this paper is that, in addition to investigating the sacred use of these drugs in traditional societies, McKenna here also analyzes the relationship of modern man with drugs, both illegal (cocaine, heroin, opium) and legal ( sugar, tea, coffee, chocolate) to reach what in his opinion is configured as a drug sui generis nowadays… television!

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As we have already amply reported in the previous study, McKennian's conception of "Other transcendent" takes it from historians of religions such as Rudolf Otto (the Sacred as Mysterium tremendous and Β«Totamente OtherΒ») and Mircea Eliade, but at the same time it echoes the oriental traditions and the mystical visions of the most imaginative poets. In theΒ Food of the gods specifies [p. 79]:

On the one hand, the transcendent Other is nature, correctly perceived as living and intelligent; on the other hand it is the extraordinarily unusual union of all the senses with the memory of the past and the anticipation of the future. The transcendent Other is […] the crucible of the Mystery of our being, both as a species and as individuals. The transcendent Other is Nature deprived of its reassuring mask made of ordinary space, time and causality. "

As is well known, McKenna began his career as an anthropologist and ethnobotanist, and had his first insights by studying the traditions of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon rainforest: it was precisely at that time, in the early seventies, when he realized that the world of shamanism "is far more real than the constructs of science can ever be" and that "peoples outside Western history, men still immersed in the dream era of pre-literacy, have kept the flame of an extraordinary mystery alight" [p. 43].

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Gnostic and hermetic studies were also central to his training: like the ancient alchemists and followers ofArs hermetic also McKenna believed that it is possible to operate, also taking into account the example given to us by shamanic cultures, changes in "this world" by acting on a subtle level, taking into account "Sympathies, resonances, intention and personal will".

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Nonetheless, in the course of his life, great poets such as William Blake, whose conception of "Divine Imagination" and whose eschatological vision centered on the longing for a return to the Original Source echo repeatedly in this book as in his entire work. Here it is natural to go with the mind to the studies of Benozzo and Alinei dedicated to the primordial conception of "Shaman-poet-dreamer-singer-healer", since all these concepts derive from the same root in the cultures of ancient Eurasia (and probably elsewhere too). In this transcendent Other accessed by the shaman and the dreamer, identical to the Blakean World of Imagination [p. 35]:

Β« the causality of the ordinary world is replaced by the rationale of natural magic. Language, ideas, and meaning exercise greater power in this realm than the laws of cause and effect. Sympathies, resonances, intentions and personal will are linguistically amplified through poetic rhetoric. The imagination is invoked, and sometimes its forms are perceived visually. "

On the other hand, he writes Aldous Huxley quoted by McKenna, "what in religious language is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and so to speak petrified, by language. The various "other worlds" with which human beings come into occasional and casual contact are as many elements belonging to the totality of that awareness which is the domain ofIntellect in general"[P. 89].

In McKenna's opinion, periodic access to this invisible world which he called the Β«Other transcendentΒ» or "Hyperspace" has always been of primary importance in the history of humanity, our dark age deriving precisely from the progressive abandonment of its exploration and therefore from the loss of the sense of the creative imagination itself [pp. 93 and 315]:

β€œIf the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unlimited hyperspace of the transcendent Other, there will always occur a slow separation of the consciousness of being part of the greater whole which is nature. The ultimate consequence of this separation is the fatal boredom that permeates Western civilization today. "

"The interrupted psychological symbiosis between us and visionary plants is the unrecognized cause of the alienation of modernity and mindsetΒ culture of planetary civilization. "Β 

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In Food of the Gods McKenna analyzes the history of mankind in 4 phases-chapters, which he respectively entitles "Paradise", "Paradise lost", "Hell" and "Paradise regained?". In the first chapter he exposes his own conceptions regarding the birth of consciousness and the use of the techniques of ecstasy within the ancient shamanic cultures of the Palaeolithic; the second analyzes the cultural transformations that took place with the passage to the most recent eras, from the Neolithic to the classical era, with mentions to the Vedic Soma and the possible use of psychotropic mushrooms and opium within Eleusinian Mysteries (Demeter, on the other hand, was represented with an ear of corn in one hand and a poppy in the other) [p. 171]:

"The great Mystery cults that coexisted in the ancient Greek world of the fourth century BC - which we call Dionysian and Eleusinian - were the last, fragile western outposts of a tradition that drew on the use of psychoactive plants to dissolve personal boundaries and access to gnosis, to true knowledge of the nature of things, to a tradition that is thousands of years old. "

The third chapter analyzes the relationship of Western man in recent centuries (from the discovery of America onwards) with drugs, whether legal or illegal. It is from this perspective that McKenna frames the so-called "War on drugs" of the Western world which, analyzed here in its contradictions and its real purposes, turns out to be a red herring.

More interesting is to understand why governments and government agencies allow (and sometimes even participate in) the spread of drugs such as cocaine andheroinby demonizing mostly plant and entheogenic drugs and even the medical and psychiatric applications that can be made of them; the fact is that, to give just one example, "A double dose of TV therapy and cocaine was prescribed to the misguided hippies, and they, quickly cured, turned into consuming yuppies" [pg. 285].

McKenna also observes how the Western mind was shaped not only by the preference granted to this type of illegal drugs, but also by the spasmodic use, starting from the XNUMXth century, of four great stimulants on which our lifestyle is based: sugar, tea, coffee and chocolate - to which the tobacco which, imported from America where it was ritually used in ceremonies, underwent an immediate process of descaling. And yet "our addictions over the ages -" she writes, "from sugar to cocaine to television - represent the story of the restless search for what has been snatched from our hands in heaven"[P. 340].

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It is therefore, in the first instance, necessary "Rebuild our image of ourselves and of the world", as "not knowing one's true identity is being made insane - of the golems. And in truth Β», comments Our [pp. 340-1]:

β€œThis sickening Orwellian image could apply to the great mass of human beings living in high-tech industrial democracies today. Their authenticity consists in the ability to adhere to and obey the mass style changes conveyed and promoted by the media [...] condemned to toxic lives, totally aware [...] they are like the living dead, estranged from everything except the act of consuming Β»

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Giving some orientation to reverse the course is the goal of the fourth and final chapter of the book, entitled "Paradise regained?". Ultimately, and taking into account what has already been said, in the opinion of McKenna [p. 330]:

Β« There is no solution to the "drug problem", nor to the problem of environmental destruction, nor to the problem of nuclear weapons stocks until, and to the extent that, our image of ourselves as a species is reconnected. to the Earth. […] Once we understand the centrality of the symbiosis between humans and plants mediated by hallucinogens in the scenario of our origins, we will be able to understand our current state of neurosis. "

McKenna's proposal to the ugly turn that the history of humanity has taken is known to all and contemplates, before anything else, an interior and ontological change, which is concretized in the reunion with what he defined "Vegetal Mind", that is to say the cosmic Logos that permeates everything and on which everything is ringed like the pearls-worlds of Vishnu in eastern myth. In other words, once we realized that "the betrayal of the symbiotic relationship with plant hallucinogens has made us victims of an increasingly neurotic relationship with the world around us and with each other" [p . 349], we just have to go with the mind to antiquity, and understand that [p. 324]:

Β«It is in the Archaic Renaissance that our possibility of transcending the historical dilemma lies. "Β 

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Heinrich Schlitt

8 comments on β€œTerence McKenna and the "food of the gods""

  1. Hello, the text mentions "the studies by Benozzo and Alinei dedicated to the primordial conception of" shaman-poet-dreamer-cantor-healer ". I would like to know which text (or texts) of the two scholars the writer of the article refers to. Thanks, a warm greeting.

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