God is a Mushroom

  Chapter II     Robert Graves' The White Goddess  proposes an alphabetic calendar of magical trees that was developed at Crete or Cypress and secretly transmitted to the Druids in Britain, as well as the ancient Israelites.     Moses, our greatest writer of Antiquity, has given us the most sophisticated shamanic recipe in all of literature in the book of Exodus , to which we shall return, once sufficiently baptized with Holy Spirit, and a knowledge of the Two Trees:     In Genesis ( Bereshit in Hebrew) after Elohim creates the World and Man, the first incident of any drama is Man ( adam  in Hebrew) eating of the Tree of Knowledge and suffering The Fall---until Christ should redeem him. Cast out, wandering, eternally restless and unsatisfied, he can no longer eat of the Tree of Life.    Terrence McKenna, in The Food of the Gods,  makes a strong case that the Tree of Knowledge, forbidden by modern, monotheistic, iconoclastic re...

 Chapter I     Like many now in this godless age, I grew up without religion. Aside from a couple of weddings or funerals I never stepped in a Church, and I didn't crack open a Bible until I was a teenager. I was always enthusiastic for Myth, Legend, Fantasy and Fairy Tales...that red mushroom spotted white was always lurking around---the Tchaikovsky sequence in Disney's Fantasia---pretty much every early Disney movie in fact, one of my favorites was in Alice in Wonderland, my mother used to read the book to me when I's a kid, & Through the Looking Glass ; later I would re-read it in highschool, inspired by Grace Slick---my Mom who tricked me into drinking cough syrup when I was young by calling it "lollipop syrup" which would come back to haunt me---and my favorite video game franchise, to this day (early on the morning of my 40th birthday I sip coffee, smoke a bowl of Jack Herer  and write this outline while waiting for my wife to get up so we can play eithe...

Prologue     God is a mushroom!     "But what kind of mushroom?" the discerning soul will ask, oblivious to the shock arising from our theological assertion in lesser minds, unfamiliar with paradox and wonderment, the living fount of all wisdom.     In the twentieth century, two unlikely prophets, R. Gordon Wasson and Terrence McKenna, penned conflicting monotheistic scriptures. One claimed that our religious and mythological heritage originates in a barbaric cult of toadstool and urine consumption in Siberia; the other that our ancestors literally became human after they first encountered the cosmic mind in Africa by eating mushrooms growing on cow dung, which taught them abstract reasoning and symbolism, catalyzing the birth of language. Which is right?     While allowing that the creative intelligence is One, whomever She or He is; and ecumenically appreciating the myriad gods and goddesses amongst the plants (and amphibians!) we nevertheless h...