[...] Soon, Ruck was seeing mushrooms everywhere. Moses, he posited, was a psychedelic shaman, his encounter with the burning bush an allegorized mushroom trip. Paul’s conversion, too, was a “shamanic rapture,” his experience mirroring that of a psilocybin trip.
[...] Nor were sacred drugs reserved for pagans and polytheists. Recent archaeological excavations have revealed cannabis and frankincense residues at a 2,700-year-old Jewish temple in Tel Arad. The Torah names dozens of psychoactive substances, from wormwood to opium to datura. Danny Nemu, a psychedelics researcher, theorizes that the Holy Ointment mentioned throughout the Old Testament contained complicated mixes of substances that could induce religious experiences. The Tabernacle or Tent of the Congregation, used by the Israelites in exile, appears to be deliberately constructed as a smoke chamber for the Holy Incense, which shares properties with substances burned for the oracle at Delphi; Nemu calls it “the holy hotbox.”
[...] Even among the world’s oldest collections of neolithic cave art, deep in the highlands of the Algerian desert, there is evidence of what appears to be psychedelic sacraments. In the caves of Tassili n’Ajjer, you can find human figures engaged in a ritualistic dance, with strange mushroom heads and mushrooms in their hands. Even more striking is the figure known as Matalem-Amazar: a towering mushroom god, a humanoid figure encircled by — consumed by, constituted by — dozens of tiny mushrooms, emanating from their skin. The engravings are estimated to be more than 9,000 years old.
[...] All this evidence adds up to a simple conclusion: “What is becoming clearer is that the use of mind-altering materials… is not relegated to a shallow period of time,” Fitzpatrick writes, “but goes deep into the ancient past.”
[...] That has given rise to a controversial thesis that our capacity for religious sentiment may actually derive from our habitual use of drugs. After all, our species began as forest-floor foragers, in regions where psychedelic mushrooms grew plentifully in the dung of the very cattle they later domesticated. Like many other animals, we also seem to possess what the psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel calls an “intoxication drive” — an impulse to seek inebriation in order to alter or expand our consciousness, equal to “the basic drives of hunger, thirst, or sex.” “Drug-induced alteration of consciousness preceded the origin of humans,” psychedelics researcher Giorgio Samorini writes. “It is an impulse that manifests itself in human society without distinction of race or culture; it is completely cross-cultural.”
[...] A single fungal organism can live for thousands of years and span over miles. Their vast underground webs are largely invisible to us but communicate impossibly complex information we barely know how to decode. They are among the oldest life forms on earth, predating plants by more than 300 million years. Just what have they been up to?"¹