Terence McKenna's book Food of the Gods attempts to rewrite human evolution around hallucinogenic-mushroom consumption, arguing that liberated use of natural drugs would reconnect humanity to the Gaian mind of the planet and solve most of the world's ills by restoring harmony with a feminized nature. Although McKenna's commitment to drug use as a solution reveals its 1960s countercultural roots, the reinvention of tradition his work entails is characteristic of the proliferation of reinvented traditions defining post-traditional society. McKenna's vision misrecognizes both the character of the sacred and the nature of the unconscious, but read symptomatically it reveals contemporary culture's New Age beliefs as a tale of lost innocence underlying searches for arcane knowledge.
Georges Bataille and Ludwig Wittgenstein, despite their different intellectual traditions, share parallels in how they understand language and mystical experience. Both thinkers argue that mystical experience pushes beyond conventional discourse, expressing antiphilosophical, spiritual visions. However, Wittgenstein's deeply private and agnostic Christianity contrasts sharply with Bataille's atheological experience of the death of God. Where Wittgenstein advocates clarity of expression or silence, Bataille uses transgressive, poetic syntax and erotic imagery to press against the impossibility of words. For Bataille, silence is active and imperative to communication, opening against the closure of reason. Paradoxically, Bataille's atheological writings approach a new summit of communication attainable only in the absence of God.