Food Of The Gods: A Radical History of Plants, Psychedelics and Human Evolution

Product Information

This seems to suggest that Greek wines were more akin to extracts and tinctures of other plant essences than they were to wine as we know it today.

The book covers a very wide range of topics, from the description of legal and illegal synthesized drugs, natural drugs, history of drug use, and it´s influence on human evolution and history. The Tassili-n-Ajjer of 12,000 BC may well have been the partnership paradise whose loss has created one of the most persistent and poignant of our mythological motifs—the nostalgia for paradise, the idea of a lost golden age of plenty, partnership, and social balance. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. In addition, McKenna’s description of the environment that early humans thrived in is truly one-of-a-kind.

Anyhow so his thing is like, mushroom trips break down the ego and through mushroom tripping and orgies society was more equal and women were shamans and decision makers and everyone got along and made telepathic decisions about what the group should do, which is why he thinks we need everyone to trip on mushrooms or smoke raw DMT and communicate with entities I guess. I encourage everyone to read him, I think his voice is necessary in a world where addictions run rampant and our understanding of ourselves has hit a trough where value is measured by productivity and consumerism. There are more ways to crack open the egg of consciousness than he gives credit to in his book, and I wonder if he is leading people down a hippy cul de sac/dead-head end, rather than relativising drug use into just one possibility for entrance into the Age of Imagination which he prophecises.

An eloquent proposal for recovering something vital--a sense of the sacred, the transcendent, the Absolute--before it's too late. His writing style is reminiscent of Tom Robbins, who led me in McKenna’s direction in the first place. Again and again, and in various ways, we find Soma intimately connected with the symbolism and rituals related to cattle and pastoralism.

What cannot be contained are the effects that psychedelics would have in shaping the cultural self-image if all drugs were legal and available.

Fanciful ideas and interesting concepts, but at the end of the day chuck-full of new age psycho-babble.We tend to rely on public ignorance and fears to drive the drug laws, which would be funny if it wasn't for all the people in jail for no reason or dying in drug wars. Ritual, isolation, and sensory deprivation are the techniques used by the Archaic shaman seeking to journey in the world of the spirits and ancestors. As an odyssey of mind, body and spirit, Food of the Gods is one of the most fascinating and surprising histories of consciousness ever written. For instance, he repeatedly claims that crack cocaine is more addictive and therefore more dangerous than powder cocaine, but as Dr.

If we want to be really awesome and reach our true potential, then we need to follow this new ideology I just pulled out of my ass. I am very health conscious so I’m a fervent believer of the power of the plants have on the body and mind, and that yes, in fact it’s usually the legal drugs that kill us more. The drive for unitary wholeness within the psyche, which is to a degree instinctual, can nevertheless become pathological if pursued in a context in which dissolution of boundaries and rediscovery of the ground of being has been made impossible. In my country, psychedelics are illegal, but there’s a clear sort of agreement between government and narcos that benefits them both, meanwhile the people suffer. There is very little substantive basis for determining which specific drugs are dangerous and should be outlawed, and which are harmless or even beneficial in certain conditions.might have been shaped by coincidence or by consciously consuming certain herbs, plants, berries, mushrooms, etc and second, how this might have influenced the development of all kind of faiths and beliefs. What could genetic engineering make possible, like combining the positive or mind-altering aspects in one single plant?