Mushrooms in Post-traditional Culture: Apropos of a Book by Terence McKenna

Abstract

Terence McKenna’s Food of the Gods exemplifies the reanimation of tradition characterizing an increasingly anxiety-ridden consumer culture. McKenna attempts no less than rewriting human evolution in terms of hallucinogenic-mushroom consumption. On this basis, he contends that the liberated use of such natural drugs today would reconnect humanity to the Gaian mind of the planet, solving most of the world’s ills by restoring a harmonious relationship with a feminized nature. Although McKenna’s commitment to drug use as a means of resolving society’s most pressing concerns reveals its 1960s countercultural provenance, the reinvention of tradition his work entails is characteristic of the proliferation of reinvented traditions that – paradoxically – define “post-traditional” society. Ultimately, McKenna’s vision of an intoxicated planet misrecognizes both the character of the sacred and the nature of the unconscious. Yet, read symptomatically, it is capable of revealing particularly clearly the contours of contemporary culture: the New Age beliefs that McKenna’s work encompasses amount to a tale of lost innocence, which underlies the search for arcane knowledge such work so often involves.