“Tassili-n-Ajjer Plateau in Sahara Desert of southern Algeria where rock paintings date from the late Neolithic to as recently as two thousand years ago. Here are the earliest known depictions of shamans, dancing with fists full of mushrooms and also have mushrooms sprouting out of their bodies, surrounded by the geometric structures of their hallucinations”
“When our remote ancestors moved out of the trees and on to the grasslands, they increasingly encountered hooved beasts who ate vegetation. These beasts became a major source of potential sustenance. Our ancestors also encountered the manure of these same wild cattle and the mushrooms that grow in it. Several of these grassland mushrooms contain psilocybin: Panaeolus species and Stropharia cubensis, also called Psilocybe cubensis (see Figure 1). This latter is the familiar “magic mushroom,” now grown by enthusiasts worldwide.’ Of these mushroom species, only Stropharia cubensis contains psilocybin in concentrated amounts and is free of nausea-producing compounds. It alone is pandemic-it occurs throughout the tropical regions, at least wherever cattle of the zebu (Bos indicus) type graze.
At an archaeological dig in Thailand at a place called Non Nak Tha, which has been dated to 15,000 B.P., the bones of zebu cattle have been found coincident with human graves. Stropharia cubensis is common in the Non Nak Tha area today. The Non Nak Tha site suggests mushroom use was a human trait that emerged wherever human populations and cattle evolved together. Ample evidence supports the notion that Stropharia cubensis is the Ur plant, our umbilicus to the feminine mind of the planet, which, when its cult, the Paleolithic cult of the Great Horned Goddess, was intact, conveyed to us such knowledge that we were able to live in a dynamic equilibrium with nature, with each other, and within ourselves. Hallucinogenic mushroom use evolved as a kind of natural habit with behavioral and evolutionary consequences.
Whatever we call the human interaction with the mushroom Stropharia cubensis, it has not been a static relationship, but rather a dynamic through which we have been bootstrapped to higher and higher cultural levels and levels of individual self-awareness. I believe that the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the grasslands of Africa gave us the model for all religions to follow. And when, after long centuries of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, the knowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish traded partnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape of nature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, we traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis, and-if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament - planetary catastrophe.”
From “Foods of the Gods” by Terence McKenna
