THE psychedelia ISSUE
Did eating psychedelic mushrooms play a role in early primates’ ascendance to higher consciousness?
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IT ALL STARTED in 1992 when McKenna broke the world’s collective brain with his book “Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution.” In it, he proposed a radical evolutionary theory: that psilocybin mushrooms were responsible for catalyzing our evolution from Homo Erectus into Homo Sapiens. In other words, our bodies and brains function as they do today because our ancestors tripped out on psychedelic mushrooms. The psychoactive effects of these mushrooms, he argued, essentially reorganized the information processing center of the primitive primate brain – sparking the evolution of consciousness, cognition and language – by prompting hominids to engage in experiences like community, spirituality and self-reflection. Psilocybin, McKenna wrote, brought us “out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.” This theory would eventually come to be known as the Stoned Ape Hypothesis (though McKenna himself never actually used that term). Since its publication, people haven’t stopped talking about the Stoned Ape Hypothesis – despite the fact that traditional scientists have consistently dismissed it as “simplistic” and nothing more than a “high thought” (albeit the most elaborate high thought ever, articulated in over 300 pages). But recent developments in psychedelic science have greatly expanded what we know about the impact of entheogens (particularly psychedelic fungi) on the brain, and some believe these new findings bolster the validity of the theory.
leafmagazines.com
32
FROMAPETOGREAT
aug. 2022
he internet is both a blessing and a social curse. However, one of its better contributions to society is that it has kept the spirit of late ethnobotanist and psychedelic pundit Terence McKenna alive. Though he died in April of 2000, McKenna’s ideas and philosophies still soar through the interwebs, thanks to Reddit, podcasts and numerous social media platforms. One theory in particular that has continued to gain steam is the so-called “Stoned Ape Hypothesis.”
