Terence McKenna

Publisher: Bantam Books (1993)

141

The ecstatic and orgiastic, visionary and boundary‑dissolving experiences, the central mysteries of the mushroom religion, were the very factors in the human situation acting to keep our ancestors human. The commonality of feeling generated by the mushroom held the community together. The divine, inspiring power of the mushroom spoke through the bards and singers. The indwelling spirit of the mushroom moved the hand that carved bone and painted stone. Such things were a commonplace of the Edenic world of the Goddess. Life was lived not as we have chosen to imagine it, on the edge of mute bestiality, but rather, close to a dimension of spontaneous magical and linguistic expression that now shines only briefly in each of us at the pinnacle of experimental intoxication but that then was the empowered and enveloping reality: the presence of the Great Goddess. History is the story of our unfocused agony over the loss of this perfect human world, and then of our forgetting it altogether, denying it and in so doing, denying a part of ourselves. It is a story of relationships, quasi‑symbiotic compacts, with plants that were made and broken. The consequence of not seeing ourselves as a part of the green engine of vegetable nature is the alienation and despair that surrounds us and threatens to make the future unbearable.