Terence McKenna

Mushrooms, Evolution, and the Millenium

8 September 1991

Masonic Temple, Van Nuys, California

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I think of this talk as the 'Mushrooms and Evolution' talk, and uh, we will rove and scan over that subject,
but it also has- it arborizes into many other areas of concern. It's not simply a revisioning of anthropology
or primatology or evolution. It is all those things, but more importantly it's a revisioning of those concerns
that then carries a political and social implication for the moment, and for how we all lead our lives.
And....it's basically a variation on the hero's journey, and I'm very indebted, uh, to a brilliant women
anthropologist. I've never met her, but her book had a great influence on me. Miss Sia Landau. She
recently wrote a book called Narratives of Evolution, and she pointed out something that I think has
needed to be pointed out for a long time, which is that science is simply campfire stories in another guise.
And you'll see what I mean as I get into this because I want to tell you a campfire story about a poor but
humble primate who came from, uh, the fringes of the action- a minor member of the flora and fauna of
this planet who embarked on a long and arduous journey into time and had many adventures along the
way, and had many allies along the way and overcame great challenges to attain the gift difficult to come
upon, the grail, if you will, or the Self. I mean all fans of Joseph Campbell are familiar with this metaphor
of the hero's journey. And what's interesting is we have actually made that hero's journey. We are, all of us
tonight, sons and daughters of the ancestral heroes who overcame drought, glaciation, disease, famine,
earthquake, migration, you name it, they didn't drop the ball and thanks to them we're here tonight.

And normally this is, uh, the beginnings of this great journey are completely cloaked in mystery. It's taught
in orthodox anthropology courses 'no one knows the factors which impelled human beings to leave, uh, the
primate existence in the canopies of the great forests of Africa and to adopt new styles of life in the
grasslands, uh, new diets, trading in vegetarianism for being omnivores, trading in, uh, a life of fruititarian
luxury for a life of hunting, struggle, migration, and uh, natural selection in an extremely harsh
environment. I believe that the reason that this seems so mysterious to straight primatologists and
anthropologists is because they have been unwilling to look carefully at the role that plants played in this
adventure, particularly the role that psychoactive plants may have played, and then, most appropriately for
this gathering tonight, the role that certain species of psychoactive mushrooms must have played in this
evolutionary adventure. And so tonight I would like to go through it with you in fairly close detail because
I haven't had that many original ideas in my life and most of what I do is book reviews and regurgitation of
other peoples' ideas. But this one, uh, they handed over to me, and I've been told by evolutionary

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anthropologists that I'm welcome to it. So if I don't make the case, who will? And if not now, when? And
if not here, where?

The great mystery of natural life on this planet is ourselves. We stand out in the natural order of things as
something completely unique, unexpected, unpredictable. You could not calculate forward from the
pinnacle of the age of mammals, some thirty thousand years ago, you could not calculate forward to a
world such as we have today, a world of enormous cities globally dispersed, linked instantly by electronic
media, a world of art, warfare, neurosis, vision, religious yearning, hope, despair, all of these things are the
unique contribution made to reality existence if you will, by the existence of the qualities in us which we
call humanness, which set us aside from the rest of organic existence. I mean, I know that dolphins discuss
arcane matters among themselves and bees dance the directions to the flowers and animal communications
occurs among pack hunting dogs of various sorts, but clearly we are something of another order. And
accounting for this other order of being that is so present in us has been the major concern of both what
we call religion and what we call, uh, science in the sense not of physics and chemistry but of biology,
anthropology, and psychology. How to account for the uniqueness of our species and then the uniqueness
that is present as a moment to moment fact in each one of us?

You have to go back to the origin scenario. Look at the other theories in place, and then look at the
possibilities for theory-making that are offered. If we're willing to include the presence of a psychedelic
substance in, uh, the experience and diet of hum- of early human beings. For several million years the, the
great apes had been evolving into tighter and tighter niches in the climax tropical rainforests of both the
new and old world. And at a point it's very difficult to place because it's locked in to the gradually shifting
dynamics of climate on this planet. These forests began to retreat. They began to diminish because of ec-
of absence of rainfall over very long periods of time. And we know that many primate lines went extinct at
that point, but one primate line, the anthropoid apes, were able to evolve a new lifestyle in the grasslands,
which were evolving as the forests retreated.

Now, some anthropologists have argued, to my mind very convincingly, that there is no such thing as a
natural grassland, that grasslands are caused by fire, human burning. The argument is very easy to
understand; it's that all the species of plants that you find in the grasslands, you also find in the understory
of the forests on the borders of the grasslands, but you don't find, uh, you find only a small number of the
forest species represented in the cleared areas. For an evolutionary botanist, this clearly means that the
grasslands are extraordinarily recent. Wherever they occur all over the earth. And this includes the high-
altitude grasslands that are called savannahs.

I think that the, the missing link in evolution is probably food. Somebody once accused me of trying to
recover the lost history of mankind and I said no, simply the lost menu of mankind. Well, what was that
menu, and how did it impact upon us? First of all, before we discuss psilocybin mushrooms specifically,
I'd like you think about the ways in which we differ from other primates. We are, um, we maximize what
is called neoteny. Neoteny is this, uh, phenomenon in which juvenile characteristics are retained into
adulthood, and this a particularly, um, uh, effective strategy in any situation where you're up against a kind
of evolutionary, uh, bump in the road or barrier of some sort. Many species show, uh, a tendency toward
neoteny, but it's very strongly expressed in human beings. For example, our hairlessness, we are like
infants. All primates are born pretty much hairless, but we retain this hairlessness throughout life. The
ratio of our skull size to body size is an infantile ratio. Compared to other primates, we look like the
juvenile form; we never lose that.

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The extreme length of human childhood and adolescence is a kind of strategy so that a lot of
developmental goings-on can occur outside the womb. And you probably know that a deer or a calf is able
to stand within hours of being born. A human infant, this is something they struggle to acquire in the first
18 months of life. What was it that promoted this neoteny? What was it that promoted our upright gait?
What was it that promoted our acquisition of language? This is critical, and I'll talk more about this later.
Language is the great divide between us and other species. Where it exists at all as a tendency in other
species, it exists as a very rudimentary, unschooled tendency. In us it has become almost the raison d'etre
of our being. Uh, physical evolution ceased in the human species when we began to elaborate, uh,
languages and the technologies that follow upon them. We have designed a way around the slower-than-
glaciers modification of species that exists where you have random mutations being acted upon by natural
selective forces in the environment. Until the invention of epigenetic, meaning, non-genetic forms of
coding, which means language, dance, theater, myth-telling, so forth and so on, until that great leap was
made, we were as much an animal as any other animal, uh, on this planet.

So, what happened was this. The, the forests retreated, these environments where food had been very
abundant became, uh, nutritionally stressed, the diet had to be expanded, the choice was simple, expand
your diet or die! Well now, it's interesting, most animals have a very narrow range of foods which they will
accept. This reaches its greatest expression in insects, which, some of you may have learned as children
that ifyou find a caterpillar walking around on the ground and you just put it on the nearest plant and by
chance you chose the wrong plant, it will die rather than eat that plant. Insects are very very food-specific.
Most animals are. Now, why is this? You would thing that it would be a better strategy to be able to eat a
lot of things. The answer is foods are chemically extraordinarily complex, and chemical complexity is
another way of saying potentially toxic or mutagenic. And mutation is the undoing of any species or any
adaptation. So there is an effort, uh, by organisms to avoid, uh- it isn't an- it isn't a conscious effort, it's
enforced by natural selection. There is a tendency to mitigate against animals with broad food tastes
because they are exposed to so many mutagens, things which split chromosomes and, uh, and damage
genetic material.

However, if you're faced with extinction, your back is already to the wall. You can see the grim reaper
drawing near. So at that point, expanding the diet becomes a perfectly credible strategy for survival. And
that is what happened to these formerly arboreal apes now descended onto the grasslands. They began to
experiment with their diet. And in addition to the fruit that they had always eaten they began to eat insects,
they became carnivores, they began to evolve a hunting style. And I have personally observed in Kenya the
food-testing behavior of baboons, and I assume that it is very much analogous to the food-testing behavior
that went on in early, uh, protohominids and early human beings. The baboon will approach something, a
potential food source, sniff it, look at it, place it in the mouth but not swallow, sometimes for as much as a
minute, and then either spit it out or swallow a small amount of it and then wait. And then if there's no
immediate negative feedback from this, like vomiting or burning throat or constriction of mucus
production in the throat or something like that, the food will begin to be accepted.

In this grassland, which was nutritionally fairly tightly drawn- there wasn't an overabundance of food
supply, there was, however, a parallel evolutionary event going on to the primate evolution, and that was
the evolution of various forms of large ungulate mammals, primitive cattle, gazelle-type animals,
wildebeasts, horned animals, hoofed animals of all sorts. And many of these animals had a style of
existence in which they congregated in herds. Well, these herds of animals clearly represented the major,

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um, uh, concrescence or deposit of available protein in this environment. I mean, if you could kill a two or
three hundred boss primitive-ogensis, or something like that, there was more nutrition represented in that
than in several hundred acres of the gathering of corms or the raiding of anthills or something like that. So
the pressure was intense to, uh, become carnivores to focus on these ungulate mammals and quite
naturally, what evolved was a kind of, uh, nomadic pastoralism based on following along behind these
large herds of animals.

The other thing was happening, that was happening was there were very large and efficient carnivores on
the scene- the equivalent of today's lions and the sabre-tooth tiger, and the hunting cats of the panther type.
And many, um evolutionary biologists believe that the suppression of our sense of smell has to do with our
actually passing through a phase where we, uh, predated on carrion. This is not a very pleasant thought, but
what we were doing was letting the lions do the work and then we were coming along with throwing sticks
and rocks and things like this, driving the lions and the panthers off these fresh kills, and then eating this
available meat, but it was pretty ripe in many cases, so there was pressure to suppress, uh, olfactory
sensitivity.

Now, in fairness to these complex issues I should tell you that another school believes that it was our
bipedal gait- that once we lifted up off our knuckles and literally got our nose off the ground, then there
was, uh, a kind of atrophication of the olfactory senses, so these two theories compete. But whatever was
going on, there was interest in, uh, these large herds of ungulate mammals moving across this grassland
environment. And a whole host of animals were relating to them as the central source of protein. Not only,
uh, the large cat predators, but also the wild dogs of many types up to and including, uh, you know, the
great timber wolf that has been extinct since the last glaciation and down to dingoes, jackals, hyenas, uh,
this sort of thing. So, everybody was interested in these large herds of mammals. Well, a consequence of
large herds of ungulate mammals are plenty of manure. Anybody who has been around cattle knows this.
And here's where we begin to draw the circle of the plot tighter, because manure- food that has passed
through the double stomach of these kinds of animals, is the favorite medium for certain kinds of
mushrooms. Mushrooms which are called coprophilic or coprolytic, meaning dung-loving mushrooms.
This is the preferred medium for them to carry out their life cycle in. And again, based on my observations
of bam- of baboons in Kenya, I've seen them approach, uh, cow pies, is the gentle term for these deposits
of fecal material, approach a cow pie and flip it over. What they're doing is they're looking for grubs,
beetles or immature beetle larva. They understand, then, that the, the manure deposit is a vector for insect
protein in this environment, and having a limited amount of energy, they look for food in the place where
it's likely to be.

However, by a marvelous coincidence or superb planning on the part of the extraterrestrials who rule the
galaxy [laughter], you can sort of, choose your poison. Ah, the, the lunatic fringe is not unrepresented,
good, good- of which I number myself, uh, among them.

Uh, yes, so, these, these coprophitic mushrooms, particularly stropharia cubensis, which is the one that is
pandemic, meaning occurs worldwide. I have seen them in the Amazon the size of dinner plates, I mean,
you can't miss this thing. It is the most astonishing object in the grassland environment, and after a period
of rains to walk out into a grassland environment and see these things by the dozens and then by the
hundreds, and always vectored in on the same cow pies that are of interest to these foraging baboons. You
see then that by design or destiny, the mushroom was placed directly in the path of the foraging
protohominids. Well, uh, and would certainly have been tested for its food value in the same way that, uh,

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uh, I describe baboons testing other, uh, plants. Well, aside from the fact that stropharia cubensis, uh,
contains psilocybin, it is delicious. It is delicious in the fresh form. Well, 'delicious' is just a monkey's way
of saying that it's good food. If you find something delicious you will overrule almost all other signals
coming off of it to chow down on it. So the mushroom is delicious. Well, what then are the possible
consequences of the inclusion in the human diet of a psychoactive compound like psilocybin? Well, it, uh,
has three consequences, and I believe that this simple three stage process answers this supposed
unanswerable question about the origin of human cognition and human value systems and language, and it's
very simple, it's easy to understand, it doesn't require a leap to faith. Let's hope I can remember it.

The first consequence of allowing psilocybin into the diet of a foraging hungry protohominid of that type
is an increase in visual acuity. I don't think this is widely known. Since psilocybin is called a hallucinogen,
people might imagine that, you know, it distorts reality or you can't see what's really in front of you. Well,
that may be true on a dark night on a high dose, but that's not what I'm talking about. i'm talking about an
animal which is foraging, eating insects, eating roots, eating whatever it finds and including in that a small
amount of randomly, uh, contacted psilocybin mushrooms. Roland Fischer, a psychologist, physiologist at
the national institute of health in the early '60s gave psilocybin to thousands and thousands of people and
he studied the effect of low doses on vision, and he built an experimental apparatus which had two, uh,
metal bars which were ordinarily, uh, in parallel. And by turning a crank out of sight of the graduate
student or the person being tested, uh, he could deform the, uh, relationship of the bars so that they would
slowly slip out of their parallelism and into a skewed mode. And this is very straightforward psychology 1
perceptual kind of experiment, and he showed very conclusively with thousands of people that on small
amounts of psilocybin people could pick this up much more quickly. They were asked to push a buzzer
when they thought the two bars were no longer parallel. And the people who were very lightly stoned were
consistently able to do this, to grok this more efficiently than the, uh, people who had been given placebo.
And Fischer, who was kind of a gnome himself, said to me about this, he said, "So you see, here's a case
where taking a drug actually gives you better information about reality than if you hadn't taken a drug."
Incontrivertible proof, scientific experiment, beyond argument, and though it may have no consequence if
you're dealing with a group of 25 graduate students in a class on graduate psychology, visual acuity is the
thread by which life and death are hung if you are foraging primates in a nutrition-poor environment. If
you can't see the food you're looking for, the gentle hand of natural selection is going to quietly move you
toward extinction [audience laughter]. So, uh, to give you an idea of the power of that chemical in that
situation, think of it as chemical binoculars. It doesn't take- you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see
that if you're handed a pair of chemical binoculars in a hunting situation, you're going to be a more
effective hunter. So, on that first level, a level highly unconscious, a level where these protohominids are
simply trying to get enough to eat, those that were willing to accept psilocybin into their diet had a slightly
enhanced probability of survival through an enhanced supply of nutrition than those who didn't. This is the
first level on which the use of psilocybin would tend to outbreed the population that was not, uh, accepting
it into the diet.

Ok. As we all know, there's more to psilocybin than increased visual acuity. At slightly higher levels, still
well below the level of an overt mind-boggling psychedelic experience, uh, psilocybin causes, uh, what's
called CNS arousal. Central nervous system stimulation, horniness is another way of putting this because
what CNS arousal is is a kind of restlessness, a kind of where's-the-action mentality, a kind of desire to go
out and mix it up a little, and the ability to carry through on that in a fairly convincing style to your partner.
[audience laughter] In the, in the dry parlance of primatology we call this 'increased frequency of
copulation' and 'increased frequency of copulation' means, uh, increased frequency of impregnation. I

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don't see how you could have that without the first. I mean, oven-basters aside.

So, uh, increased frequency of impregnation means more offspring are being born to the population which
is accepting the psilocybin into its diet, and more offspring is the key to evolutionary success and to
running your evolutionary competitors right off the road into the ditch. That's the key thing. He who
outreproduces his competitors or she, of course, who out-reproduces competitors is going to find itself, uh,
the dominant species in a given environment. So, there's a two-step process where the first step reinforces
the second step. We have more successful hunting, more frequent sexual activity, more food for the
offspring, and the offspring are being raised by parents who have already accepted the mushroom as an
item of diet and will pass that habit on to their children. So, I'm sure, as you can see, it's beginning to push
in a certain direction. Well, so fine, mushroom-eating increases the success of protohominids, but how
does it account for the emergence of the higher function of the human cerebral cortex, language, dance,
art, poetry, song, symbolic activity of all sorts? What's going on there? Well, it is simply that if we now
advance from the slight dose, we've advanced now to the moderate dose, if we now go on and imagine that
people enjoyed this arousal, this social ambiance that attended upon including this item in the diet. There
surely would have been reckless souls among them who would've followed Dr. Leary's advice that, when in
doubt, double the dose, right?

Well, when you double the dose, uh, uh, profound things happen which are not easily calculated from the
previous state of mind which was just simply a state of uh, sleeplessness and restlessness. Hallucination
and stimulation of the area of the brain that is called Broca's area, and that we now associate with the
formation of language- spontaneous glossolalia is a phenomenon of high-dose psilocybin use. Glossolalia
is, uh, linguistic activity that seems to be not willed by the ego but that is just simply an upwelling from the
dynamics and architecture of the organism. Uh, and in our society, we're familiar with it as a, uh,
phenomenon that has been appropriated by Pentecostal Christianity as a proof of the indwelling of the
spirit. But in fact, uh, this phenomenon occurs in most societies throughout the world and most societies
associate it with an indwelling of spirit, whether they be Christian, Muslim, Animist or what have you, this
spontaneous vocalizing of language-like activity is seen to be, uh, a sign of special characteristics, what
anthropologists call 'election'. Shamanism, in other words, magic, the ability to cast spells, the ability to
weave story. It's all tied in to language, and I- it's just my personal opinion, but I would bet you, I don't
know how we'd ever settle the bet, but I would bet you that language existed a long time before meaning
because it is intrinsically some kind of neurological release of the organism.

And there can be syntax in the absence of language. Uh, as an example, um, me dingwao
huadyavangalpaikec texi me tichiki putong agmo way zambofwa pakti me din dijiki pihut! What this is is
instant art, you see, abstract art [audience laughter] because the human organism is, uh, brilliantly wired
for small mouth noises. This is something that we can do for hours [laughter]with very litle- I'm the living
proof of it [more laughter]. I want to beat you to the punch, uh, before someone points this out.

Small mouth noises are special provence, and with it we weave meaning, we convey emotion, uh, we
convey anger, and eventually we recreate the entire world of our imaginations. I mean, this is culture is, is
a kind of coaxing into reality of the structures of the human imagination through the medium of language,
and it begins as poetry and it ends as, you know, structural engineering on the scale of the Golden Gate
Bridge or something like that. Language. Language, then, sets us apart. And so it seems to me there is a
direct, linear descent through the use of this one particular psychedelic. It has to have been a grassland
plant. It cannot require any preparation, even boiling or something like that, because we're talking about a

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level of human culture that is more naive than these processes that were added late. So it has to be
commonly met with plant, a plant of the grasslands, a plant requiring no, uh, preparation other than that
you eat it, and then it has to put in place a series of self-reinforcing positive feedback loops that lead to
self-reflection.

I think this is it folks. I think this is where humanness came from. And when you realize that the straight
people who've had the field all to themselves since Darwin, their best idea is that it was the coordination of
the throwing arm, that it's the baseball pitcher who is the highest examplar of what it is to be a human
being because, as soft-bodied weak primates it was very important to us to keep our distance from these
large animals as we stoned them to death. You know, you didn't want to get within the sweep of tusk or
claw as you were attacking these things.

Well, you know, I'm as fond as the lump-cheeked hayseed on the mound as anybody else, but I don't see
him as, uh, as the exemplar of humanity's march toward the unspeakable mystery of being. Uh. [clapping]
Not when you think about the truly titanic dimensions that are easily accessible to any one of us on
psilocybin. And we have, you know, 10,000 years of human history, philosophy, art, science and literature
behind us, and when we come up against, uh, 5 dried grams in silent darkness, it's as awesome, as
appalling, as mind-boggling and as impossible to process as it must have been for those folks 25, 35, 55
thousand years ago. It is a true mystery. None of our science, none of our language has given us a leg up on
understanding that phenomenon. So, that was the vector that called us forward. That was the great attractor
that this humble monkey heard the call and set off across the plains of geological time seeking and finding
this tremendous mystery.

And I believe that this story has tremendous implications for our own lives, uh, because we are highly
dysfunctional as a society. Violence, sexism, racism, classism, linear thinking, reductionism, denial of the
spirit, all this messes with our heads and our happiness. And I, I think that it is not necessarily so, but that
we- it was a narrow window that opened for us because I am not suggesting that monkeys make fine
company, uh, back as you look through the geological record the fact of the matter is male dominance
hierarchies occur in primates right back to the squirrel monkey type. The primate style is a style of male
dominance, but some time- let's say a hundred thousand years ago, to, let's say, twelve or ten thousand
years ago- there was a chemical fix. There was an intervention in the ordinary hierarchy-forming tendency
of these evolving primates, and we actually created not a matriarchy, not a shifting of one master for
another, but a partnership society. We were actually able, by forming a kind of quasi-symbiotic
relationship to these mushrooms- and it was a very interesting incipient symbiosis, you see. It was a
symbiosis of protohominids, cattle, grasslands and mushrooms. It was a three-species, at least three-species
symbiosis we were able to create a partnership style of existence which is the, uh, genesis point of our
myths of paradise. This is why we have a nostalgia for paradise, a feeling that we fell into history, that
there was once a golden age of balance and gender, uh, you know, reasonable gender dynamics. And, uh,
community, and, uh, religion that was not simply moral prescriptions that cause neurosis, but an actual
relationship to the living spirit of the planet. And this was achieved, uh, through psilocybin and through the
lifestyle that it reinforced because, recalling my little three-step process, the psychedelic aspect and the
sexual arousal aspect were simply two ends of the same experience.

The style of these early, uh, nomadic pastoralists into cattle was orgiastic, meaning everybody got together
at the new and full moon and flopped in a heap. And these were, these were groups of 70 or 80 people.

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Small human groups. Now what this was doing, this tendency toward group sexual activity and orgy
provided by the psilocybin in the diet. What it was doing was interfering with the tendency to stress male
lines of paternity because you can't know- in a society that has institutionalized, uh, orgiastic sexuality,
men cannot know who their children are. Women know who their children are because they see the
children come out of their bodies, and there's a bonding, but for men the children are community property.
And this, I think, was the link, and in the absence of psilocybin, you get a recursion back to the previous,
uh, mode of primate organization, which is a turf-guarding, territorial, egoistic style. And this is the point I
really want to make, that psilocybin is a kind of innoculation against the formation of ego. It dissolved the
primate ego and it kept it dissolved until factors which I'll discuss in a minute, factors limited the
availability of the psilocybin, and then this atavistic tendency, the existence of the ego, returned with a
tremendous vengence.

So, what I- the implication of what I'm saying is that the ego, which grows like a calcareous tumor or an
abnormal growth in the dynamics of the psyche, can actually be dissolved by repeated exposure to this
boundary-dissolving psychedelic compound. Well, so then if things were so wonderful, why didn't it just
last forever? Why did we fall into history? What happened? ....tape distorts...

patriarchy, turf-consciousness, warfare, city building and so forth and so on. Well, th- it's a no-blame story.
It's that the very dynamic processes which drove the arboreal apes out of the trees and into this paradisical
symbiosis on the grasslands which lasted twenty-five, thirty thousand years. The very forces which created
that ambiance, which were climatological forces, the drying of the planet, destroyed that equilibrium
paradise because the drying process did not halt. It continued, it accelerated. And as we all know, uh, today
the Sahara desert is one of the most inhospitable climates on earth. I mean, it's a land of endless sand and
fantastical high temperatures and no vegetation whatsoever to speak of. Nevertheless, there are
archaeological site out there which are the best evidence for this theory that I am putting forward. Because
in Southern Algeria on the Tasili plateau there are, uh, rock paintings dated from twelve to fifteen
thousand years old that show shamans with mushrooms sprouting out of their bodies. Unambigous,
because they're not simply being held in that hand. In some cases, when a mushroom-like object is held in
the hand, some anthropologists and art historians want to call it a chopper. But what do you do when there
are mushrooms sprouting out of the body by the dozens? I mean, the, it becomes incontravertible. So the
archaeological evidence is there. The, uh, primate behavior provides evidence for this, and what happened
I think is that these orgies which originally, at the heyday of this, uh, partnership society, these, uh, group
get-togethers were probably at the new and full moon. Well then, as the drying accelerated they became
merely lunar, every twenty-eight days instead of fourteen days. And then ultimately seasonal, or associated
with only certain areas. The rainfall became sparser and there became, uh, strategies had to be developed
then to spread fewer and fewer mushrooms over a wider and wider area. And I believe, uh, that we can
even spec- as long as we're loose in the realm of speculation, we might as well go full hog- I think that
what might have happened, based on a careful reading of the archaeological record out there, was that
honey emerged as a very important part of the story. Because you see, if you don't have refrigeration you
can use honey to preserve delicate foods. And to this day, there are parts of Mexico where mushrooms are
mixed into honey and then they, they don't, uh, decay and can be used for many months.

Now, the problem with this is that honey itself has the potential to undergo chemical change and turn itself
into a psychoactive substance. But a psychoactive substance with a very different character than
psilocybin. In, in other words mead, alcohol, crude alcoholic beverages probably began with the

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fermenting of honey and fruit juices. Well, that puts you firmly in the domain of the messed up culture
that we're in because I told you what the qualities of psilocybin were- to promote visual acuity, sexual
activity, religious experience, language. What are the qualities of alcohol? What does it do if viewed as a
psychedelic drug. Well, it does two things. It lowers sensitivity to social cueing and it empowers, uh,
aggressive behavior. In other words, it makes you into a jerk and, uh, you know, time spent in a busy
singles bar on a friday evening will convince you of the truth of this. And in a way it's no joke, I mean I
think probably for a thousand years nobody got laid in Western civilization unless they were swacked
because, uh, you know, people were so uptight on the natch, having imbibed this whole monotheistic moral
trip that unless they took a powerful drug which dissolved social inhibitions and empowered aggressive
behavior, they weren't able to make a move.

How many women, how many women can think back to their first sexual imprinting and realize that it
occured in an atmosphere of aggressive use of alcohol. I mean, this is almost the standard model, maybe
not so much anymore but throughout the first five decades of this century I think that would be a pretty
fair statement. So you see, drugs are like the invisible lenses through which we view reality, and no culture
has been without them, it's just cultures accept some and repress others according to their particular, the
particular cultural values which are trying to be conserved. The reason this is not simply armchair
speculation among anthropologists is because we now are the inheritors of a planet which is dying under
anaesthesia. Our entire cultural crisis is predicated on the fact that we cannot feel or connect with the
consequences of our history, that we have behaved very badly, we of the high-tech societies. We have
trashed gender relationships, we have trashed aboriginal societies, we have cut down the rainforest, uh, we
have robbed our own children of a future as rich as the future that we expect ourselves to enjoy. Uh, there
isn't even a name for this sin, where you destroy the opportunity of your own children, I mean no society
has been that perverse. And we're doing it under a mass infusion of alcohol laced with monotheistic moral
propaganda. [audience clapping]

Well, what is the antidote to this? Well, it's what I call the archaic revival. It's something that's been going
on throughout most of the 20th century but with increasing depth and urgency. It's that we must reach back
into the past to the last sane moment that we ever knew and figure out what was going on then and get with
the program and attempt to recover some amount of cultural equilibrium and balance. And I believe that,
you know, using the broad brush of generalization, we could say all our problems can be traced down to
ego. Ego lies behind private property, it lies behind the domination of women by men, it lies behind dollar
chasing, it lies behind all of the maladaptive behaviors, the arms race, the whole thing, it lies behind all of
the maladaptive behaviors that are pushing us toward planetary toxification and species armageddon. Uh,
I'm not advocating a return to the style- the religious style that includes orgy. I mean, I wish I could
[audience laughter], but we are not, you know, nomadic pastoralists of, uh, 70 individuals. We're a global
society of five million- five billion shot through with epidemic diseases and contagion and so forth and so
on. We can't adapt the orgiastic style on a mass scale without severe social consequences, but we can look
back at the use of psilocybin and at least construct a social alternative where small groups of people are
using this to, um, uh, diminish ego and build community. Build communities of like-minded people and
diminish the almighty sense of ego

and psilocybin does this very effectively in two ways. First of all, it dissolves boundaries between people,
and another way of saying 'ego' is that I strongly distinguish between you and me, you know. That's what
ego tells you, is who you are and how important you are and how you're not her or him or that or that,
you're this! Psilocybin tends to dissolve that language-reinforced misperception. And the other thing it

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does is it shows you that behind your eyebrows is a world richer by far than any of the crap that's being
peddled on Rodeo Drive or 5th avenue in New York City or anywhere else. In other words, it shows you
the pathetic nature of materialism by reintroducing you to the reality of the spirit not as a religious
abstraction that's used to beat you over the head to follow somebody's moral recipe, but as a felt
experience of the indwelling of an extreme power that, a power that connects you to all the life of the past
on this planet, to the planetary future, to the universe at large. So really, it's a rediscovery of our birthright
as human beings. History is a bad deal. It's, uh, it's a mass of potage. It's broken machines and broken
dreams because we have projected our value system out into matter, and matter has not responded in a
satisfying way, and so we're then dysfunctionally neurotic, always seeking, never finding. The answer is to
go within using the classical tools of, uh, self-redefinition, transformation, and ego-diminishment. We can
reinoculate ourselves against the ills of civilization by simply availing ourselves to the shamanic tools that
were available before the fall into history.

And, uh, you know, the fact that this has- poses some problem for the currently constituted constabulary is,
uh, of no concern to anybody who is thinking on a scale of millenia. That's just a kink in the social
machinery brought on by stupidity and anxiety. It isn't sufficient reason to turn away from a reasonable
program that would carry us toward a group psychology that would then allow us to turn toward the real
threats that face us as a species and as a planet and do something about it.

I put this before you this evening because I think in the absence of this theory, the psychedelic community
has no strong argument to lay before society at large as to why these things are so important. But if in fact
these are the catalysts, these psychedelic compounds, are the catalysts for everything that we call
humanness, for the very basis of the notion of caring, altruism, civilization, community, if what lies behind
these notions is a symbiotic relationship to, uh, psychedelic plants present in the environment, then the
sooner we return to that mode, the sooner we can overcome the historical dysfunction that otherwise is a
death sentence upon us.

So, I don't advocate this because I think it's easy or because It has a high probability of being accepted and
implemented. I advocate it because I think it's the only answer. And that it would be gross malfeasance on
my part believing that to not lay the cards on the table. That's all that I can do, and I hope that if you find
this argument convincing, you will find further arguments to buttress it and we can get this phenomenon
out of the closet and in to, uh, the general theater of debate about the fate of global civilization so that we
can begin to make real positive changes because the clock is ticking, folks. This is not a test. I mean, we
have to either create some fantastically brilliant forward escape out of the closing grinding jaws of history,
or we will be history.

Thank you very much. [audience clapping] Thank you.

Well, it's nice to be here. It's great to see so many people turned out for Los Angeles Mycological society
[audience laughter, Terence laughs, audience clapping]. The people who put this thing together worked
very hard at it, uh, putting to death once and for all the rumor that mycologists only do it spore-
atically...so, are there-is that groaning I hear? [laugher]

The organization that I'm associated with, which is Botanical Dimensions, it's a parallel agenda to the LA
Mycological society. What Botanical Dimensions does is collects and preserves plants with a history of
shamanic and medicinal usage worldwide. Not only the plants, but the information about them. As I'm sure

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you're all aware, the rainforests are disappearing at an alarming rate, and with them is disappearing twenty
five or thirty thousand years of very painfully gar-garnered medical information that these aboriginal
peoples have preserved up until the present moment. But unfortunately for these peoples, the present
moment contains, uh, social challenges like nothing they've ever dealt with before and the shamanic gnosis
is not being handed on. Young men and women who would ordinarily have become shamans are learning
outboard motor repair and how to wait tables in tourist traps and this sort of thing, and this medical
information which is the basis of most of the drugs sold as prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs
today, much of that information, uh, will be lost. So, uh, my partner Kat and I run a botanical garden in
Hawaii and, uh, we're a non-profit organization able to accept your donations if you are so inclined.

Well this is a talk that I've wanted to give for a long time, and some of you may wonder why I say that
because you may have heard it before [audience laughter] but you have, you have never heard it under the
auspices of a prestigious scientific organization such as has chosen to sponsor me tonight, and that was my
fantasy, to take this idea, notion, theory, and actually launch it in a venue of great respectability and
scientific veracity, and certainly the Los Angeles mycological society, uh, provides that.

It's obvious that I can only touch a tiny number of these questions, and many of them seem very good, if
not prolix. Um, I see a short one here. How many people here are under 25? Alright! [audience claps]
That's great! That's great. Oh, here's a cheerful question, a troublemaker in the group.

Q: If the mushroom played a large part in the development of the mystical side of man, do you think it also
played a pivotal role in the emergence of human sacrifice? [audience amusement]

T: Um. Well, human sacrifice on a mass scale is something more typical of the Mesoamerican civilization
which certainly used mushrooms: the Maya, and then later the Aztecs. Uh, but this was a much later stage
of cultural development with mathematics and, uh, written language in place and so forth and so on. And
I'm not saying that it didn't, I'm just saying a fair answer would be we don't really understand the genesis of
human sacrifice in the New World civilizations, but it didn't appear to play a major role, uh, in the, in the
evolution of the early civilizations that I'm, uh, that I've been talking about. I don't see why it should have.
There doesn't seem to me an obvious strong connection.

Uh, let's see here [looking through question cards]. Here's a question, um.

I don't claim to have more than a feeble understanding of man's ultimate destiny. I'm unclear of what your
message is. You seem to advocate leaving earth for destinations unknown. [audience cheers] Isn't this
agenda too premature to promulgate as we need very much to focus our human potential on the global
environmental interpersonal interspecies crisis rather than focusing on scenarios which imply the
disposability of the planet.

Good question. [audience laughter] Um, you know, it seems to me the kindest thing we could do at this
moment is sever our connection to the planet, for the planet's sake. I'm less sure what good it would do for
us. Uh, it's certainly true that the planet is the cradle of humanity. The question is, do you remain in the
cradle forever? And I've had a hard time figuring out a scenario that would keep us on this planet and
retain any kind of society that anyone would want to live in simply because of the acceleration of our
population. I, actually I'm loath to get into this subject so late in the evening, but in the interest of fairness
and honesty I put this question to the mushroom: "How can we save the planet?" and without hesitation it

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replied "Every woman should bear only one natural child." That's not my answer, that's, uh, stropharia
cubensis speaking. It would create a demographic collapse that would cut the population of Earth in half
without war, disease, or forced migration in less than 40 years. It would also slice the population in half
again in the next 40 years.

We tend to think that there are no solutions, and yet here's a solution that requires the responsible action of
female individuals, a group that has not yet, uh, waded in to this set of historical problems that we have
inherited from the past. So if there is a tendency for men to stand in the way of solutions, and I'm not
saying they do or they don't, uh, here is a program that can be put in place that would have a radical
impace on, uh, on human destiny on this planet. I discussed this with demographers after the mushroom
made this suggestion, and I learned an amazing fact. Some of you may know this. I certainly had never
thought of it this way. A woman on the upper east side of Sanhattan or in Malibu or in Scottsdale- in other
words, one of these white, upper class, college-educated, wealthy communities, a woman in that situation,
if she has a child, that child will be between 800 and 1000 times more destructive of the resources of the
earth than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh or Pakistan or Zaire. We tend to think of the population
problem as a population problem. It's a resource abuse problem, and the main resource abusers are the
citizens of the high-tech societies. So if you have a house full of kids and you're buying them all $140 pairs
of running shoes, you know, you go on the list of major social criminals.

Uh, I'm guilty, I'm guilty, so I'm not trying to lay a trip on you, but we tend not to think of our problem that
way. We think it's all those beastly little brown people on the other side of the world breeding furiously.
Well, I've got news for you, we have met the enemy and it is us! You know, if we could get the honkies to
slow down their consumption of resources, we wouldn't, uh, have the gun to our head in quite the same
way, but I digress, um. [audience laughter]

Q: Within the last 25 years there has been a quantum increase in the strength of cannabis. Has there been a
corresponding intensification in psilocybin? Is today's insight into the present future more powerful?

TM: Um, probably not, because, uh, fungal genetics is notoriously tricky stuff and as an ex-mushroom
grower and the author of psilocybin mushroom growers guide, I think what we call strain selection for
psilocybin is a pretty rule-of-thumb kind of thing. While the cannabis botanists among us have worked a
miracle on the scale of Luther Burbanks' wilder endeavors. And we should take our hats off to them, uh.
[audience laughter and applause]. The same arguments that I made here tonight for psilocybin, in a slightly
modified form and at a slightly later stage of cultural history, I think cannabis was the major, uh,
pharmacological habit of human beings, retarding, uh, patriarchy, male dominance, urbanization,
propaganda, so forth and so on. Cannabis is really not given its due, uh, it's been a tremendous bulwark
against the values of dominator culture and, uh, I certainly hope it continues to function that way.

Is psilocybin conducive to art activity?

TM: Does the pope live in Rome?

How do you recommend we use this information in an applied way in our personal lives?

Well, and there are other questions which relate to this, like 'how can you tell if mushrooms have been
contaminated by other compounds' and so forth and so on. I think that the most enlightened thing, uh, a

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person can do, or one of the most enlightened things, is to cultivate mushrooms. This completely goes
around the possibility of criminal syndicalism, adulteration, degradation through aging, contamination by
bacterial parasites, and there are all kinds of problems which are overcome by cultivation. Sometimes
people say to me how do you, what can you do to get ready for a big psilocybin trip if you've never had any
psychedelic experience? Well, I think the best advice is grow the mushroom. Those of you who have done
that know that it teaches all the virtues that you will need to have when you get out there in the billows. It
teaches, uh, cleanliness, punctuality, attention to detail, focus, uh, so forth and so on. The things that will
serve you invaluably, not only in the psychedelic experience, but in life. And it's a tremendous- you can
really feel the force of a possible symbiosis if you cultivate mushrooms, because it's so efficient. I mean,
you take a 13 dollar, 25 pound bag of rye and you can turn it into 4 or 5 hundred hits. The conversion rate
is an astonishing 12% dry weight of rye to dry weight of psilocybin. I mean, it's like an industrial process,
it's awesome to see this stuff at work. I mean, it is such a workhorse for humanity. Uh, I used to say that it
was alchemy, and the formula was, uh, uh, rye to mold and mold to gold! So, it's a very short step, and, uh,
teaches you all these values that you may have, uh, overlooked in your own, uh, toilet training.

What do you say when your four-year-old asks if you do drugs?

Well, what you say is, uh, that you do some drugs and then explain which ones. I mean, I have two
children, I've been through this. I think it's really weird, people who say 'oh, we can't get stoned til' the kids
go to bed'. I mean, what kind of malarkey is this? In the first place, the kids know, so then you're exposed
as some kind of half-wit, and, uh, as totally dishonest, totally not at peace with your own habits. I had
habits which'll remain unnamed, which I abandoned because I wasn't comfortable explaining them to my
children, so I just dropped those things out of my life. Mushrooms and cannabis were certainly not
numbered among them. Uh, so, I mean, you...[audience applause]...you have to be honest with your
children.

Hm. If psilocybin promotes language and diminishes ego, also a form of language, don't we then have
something dest-uh, destroying what it creates or creating what it destroys? Is this a contradiction?

Well, I'm not sure I buy in to the notion that ego is a form of language, however there is a- I sense the point
in this question because it's been suggested that language was created to lie, and is that really what we want
to do, uh, with each other. But, um, I think that that's- I don't really take that seriously. I think that truth-
telling and truth-withholding are a very delicate, uh, matter. You know, Winston Churchill said once "the
truth is so precious that she must be accompanied everywhere by a bodyguard of lies" and uh, I, I think
that captures some of the paradoxical nature of language.

Um. Have you read the theoretical work by Julian James, The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown
of the Bicameral Mind. What do you think of it?

For those of you who haven't read it, this is a theory that until very recently what we called the ego was
actually a psychic function that had not yet been integrated in the Jungian sense into consciousness. So that
as recently as 3,000 years ago, if somebody got into a tight spot, suddenly a voice would switch on in their
head and say the equivalent of, you know "get your ass out of there!" and people interpreted this as the
voice of God, or a god. It was a higher function in the psyche that was only triggered by extreme stress.
Well then, we actually assimilated this, um, uh, psychic function that had been evolved to respond to
extreme danger, and we, as it were, layered it in to the lower levels of the personality, and so what had

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been God became ego, and this has happened in James' opinion around 1000 B.C. just at the time when the
last mother religions, the last goddess religions were dying out. And, uh, on the Greek mainland,
Mycenian[?] piracy was taking over from Minoan partnership and mother goddess worship. So yes, I mean
this may definitely, uh, be part of it. What makes James' book so frustrating is here is a book, I think it has
over 630 pages in it, it's a book on the cultural impact of hallucinations, and there is one reference to
psychedelic drugs. It's a reference to mescaline in a footnote. So James either through lack of information
or intellectual queasiness didn't make use of the massive body of information associated with
hallucinogenic shamanism that he might have made use of to make his case.

It's incredible how, how pharmaphobic academic speculation has been. I mean, people just don't want to
get near it, and yet obviously drugs of all sorts have, have shaped every aspect of our lives. I'm doing a
book for Bantam that will be out next spring sometime about the cultural impact of drugs- psychedelic and
non-psychedelic. And one of the things I learned that just had never occured to me was slavery died with
the fall of the Roman Empire. It absolutely died. I mean, during the medieval period, if you owned slaves,
you owned one slave. It was like owning a Duesenberg [?] or something. It was the absolute proof that you
were a person of immense wealth. And then the slave would serve your food or something like that. But
the use of slave labor in agriculture was something that was brought back in the 14th century, uh, by
Christian-the Christian gentlemen of Europe specifically for the production of sugar. No other reason. The
stuff which came later, the tobacco and the cotton and all that, that was simply because there was an over-
supply of slaves, and so there was a need to soak up all this slave labor.

Why sugar? Because it was an addicting drug. Nobody needs white sugar. You can go from birth to the
grave and never get near it and never miss it, but it was, uh- sugar is made in open vats in the primitive,
you know, the way it was done 500 years ago, at a temperature of 135 degrees. No free person will work
sugar. You have to chain people to the machinery. You literally have to chain them to the machinery, and
then they die in short order from, uh, from heat prostration. In 1800, every ounce of sugar entering
England was produced by slave labor, and Western civilization barely had a thing to say about it. And we
don't even think of sugar as a drug unless we're very highly sensitized to these issues. But you know, if you
have small children, you know, you just might as well lay out railers of blow [audience laughter] if you're
gonna turn them loose with cho-those Pepperidge Farm chocolate chip cookies, I mean my god! So, I just
offer that as an example of our naivety about drugs and our naivety about our own cultural history. I mean
people say well slavery, they got rid of it with Lincoln, but it had been going on for thousands of year- uh
uh, no no, not at all. It had been dead for a thousand years, and then it was brought back by the drug trade.
And how many steps backward in the process of trying to define and honor the human spirit have occurred
because of drugs like sugar, opium, tea, coffee. Look at the caffeine drugs, the only drugs on earth that
modern industrialists recognize to the point that they write them into contracts with workers. The coffee
break. This isn't because they love workers, this is because it makes workers work! Caffeine and the
demands of linear industrialism made a marriage in hell which exists right up to this day with untold
consequences in the form of stomach cancer, anxiety, aggressive behavior, you name it.

Well, we're over the time. We have piles of questions. I love you all. Stay happy, take it easy, but take it!
[applause]

Original Transcription by: Eva Petakovic

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 Terence McKenna

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