Food of the Gods Chapter 6. THE HIGH PLAINS OF EDEN
Author: Terence McKenna Publisher: New York, NY: Bantam Books. Publish Date: 1992 Review Date: Status:💥
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Archaeological evidence for these speculative ideas can be found in the Sahara Desert of southern Algeria in an area called the Tassili-n-Ajjer Plateau. A curious geological formation, the plateau is like a labyrinth, a vast badlands of stone escarpments that have been cut by the wind into many perpendicular narrow corridors. Aerial photographs give the eerie impression of an abandoned city (Figure 2).
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In the Tassili-n-Ajjer, rock paintings date from the late Neolithic to as recently as two thousand years ago. Here are the earliest known depictions of shamans with large numbers of grazing cattle. The shamans are dancing with fists full of mushrooms and also have mushrooms sprouting out of their bodies (Figure 3).
In one instance they are shown running joyfully, surrounded by the geometric structures of their hallucinations’ (Figure 4). The pictorial evidence seems incontrovertible.
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Images similar to those of the Tassili occur in pre-Columbian Peruvian textiles. In these textiles the shamans hold objects that may be mushrooms but may also be chopping tools. With the Tassili frescoes, however, the case is clear. At Matalen-Amazar and Ti-nTazarift on the Tassili, the dancing shamans clearly have mushrooms in their hands and sprouting from their bodies.
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FIGURE 3. The bee-faced mushroom shaman of Tassili-n-Ajjer. Drawing by Kat Harrison-McKenna. From O. T. Oss and O. N. Oeric, Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide, 1986, p. 71. From the original in Jean-Dominique Lajoux, The Rock Paintings of the Tassili (New York: World Publishing, 1963), p. 71.
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FIGURE 4. Mushroom runners from Tassili. Drawing by Kat Harrison-McKenna. From O. T. Oss and O. N., Oeric, Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide, 1986, p. 6. From the original in Jean-Dominique Lajoux, The Rock Paintings of the Tassili, 1963, pp. 72-73.
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The pastoral peoples who produced the Tassili paintings gradually moved out of Africa over a long period of time, from twenty thou sand to seven thousand years ago. Wherever they went, their pastoral lifestyle went with them.’ The Red Sea was landlocked during much of this time. Lowered sea levels meant that the boot of Arabia was backed up against the African continent. Land bridges at both ends of the Red Sea were utilized by some of these African pastoralists to enter the Fertile Crescent and Asia Minor, where they intermingled with hunter-gatherer populations already present. The pastoral mode had been well established across the ancient Near East by twelve thousand years ago. These pastoral people brought with them a cult of cattle and a cult of the Great Goddess. The evidence that they had such cults comes from rock paintings in the Tassili-n-Ajjer that are from what scholars have named the Round Head Period. This period is named for the style of depiction of the human figure in these paintings-a style not known from any other site.
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The Round Head Period is believed to have begun very early and probably ended before the seventh millennium B.P. Henri Lhote estimates that the Round Head Period lasted several thousand years, placing its beginning somewhere near the start of the ninth millennium. That the Great Goddess was part of the world view of the Round Head-style painters is beyond dispute. A painting from Inaouanrhat in the Tassili includes a wonderful image of a dancing woman (Figure 5). With her outstretched arms and horns extended horizontally on either side of her head, she is the embodiment of the Great Horned Goddess. Her discoverers saw her as having a relationship with the Egyptian Great Goddess Isis, mythical protector of the cultivation of grain.
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This impressive figure highlights one of the many problems raised by the Tassili finds. Why, if done at a time when the stratigraphy of the Nile valley shows it to have been nearly deserted, do many of the paintings of the Round Head Period show an unmistakable Egyptian influence in content and style? The logical conclusion is that these motifs and stylistic conceits that we associate with ancient Egypt were first introduced into Egypt by the dwellers of the Western Desert. If proven, this suggestion would indicate the central Sahara as the source of what later became the high civilization of preDynastic Egypt.
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FIGURE 5. Late Round Head Period painting at Inaouanrhat in the Tassili includes a wonderful image of a dancing Horned Goddess. From The Search for the Tassili Frescoes by Henri Lhote, 1959, plate 35, opposite p. 88.
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The Tassili-n-Ajjer of 12,000 B.C. may well have been the partnership paradise whose loss has created one of the most persistent and poignant of our mythological motifs-the nostalgia for paradise, the idea of a lost golden age of plenty, partnership, and social balance. The contention here is that the rise of language, partnership society, and complex religious ideas may have occurred not far from the area where humans emerged-the game-filled, mushroom-dotted grasslands and savannahs of tropical and subtropical Africa. There the partnership society arose and flourished; there huntergatherer culture slowly gave way to domestication of animals and plants. In this milieu the psilocybin-containing mushrooms were encountered, consumed, and deified. Language, poetry, ritual, and thought emerged from the darkness of the hominid mind. Eden was not a myth-for the prehistoric peoples of the high plateau of the Tassili-n-Ajjer, Eden was home.
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The end of that story may well be the beginning of our own. Is it mere coincidence that at the beginning of the source code of Western civilization, in the Book of Genesis, we read an account of history’s first drug bust:
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3.6. When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good to eat, and that it was pleasing to the eye and pleasing to contemplate, she took some and ate it. She also gave her husband some and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they discovered that they were naked; so they stitched fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
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3.22. The Lord God made tunics of skins for Adam and his wife and clothed them. He said “The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; what if he now reaches out his hand and takes fruit from the tree of life also, eats it and lives forever?” So the Lord God drove him out of the Garden of Eden to till the ground from which he had been taken. He cast him out, and to the east of the Garden of Eden he stationed the cherubim and a sword whirling and flashing to guard the way to the tree of life.
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The story of Genesis is the story of a woman who is mistress of the magical plants (Figure 6). She eats and shares the fruits of the Tree of Life or the Tree of Knowledge, fruits which are “pleasing to the eye and pleasing to contemplate.” Note that “the eyes of both of them were opened and they discovered that they were naked.” At the metaphorical level, they had attained consciousness of themselves as individuals and of each other as “Other.” So the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge gave accurate insights, or perhaps it enhanced their appreciation of sensuality. Whichever the case, this ancient story of our ancestors being cast out of a garden by a spiteful and insecure Jehovah, a storm god, is the story of a Goddess-oriented, partnership society thrown into disequilibrium by successive episodes of drought that affected the carrying capacity and climate of the pastoralists’ Saharan Eden. The angel with flashing sword who guards the return to Eden seems an obvious symbol of the unforgiving harshness of the desert sun and the severe drought conditions that accompany it.
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Tension between male and female is close to the surface in this story and indicates that at the time the story was first recorded the change from partnership- to dominator-style cultures was already well advanced. The woman ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; this mysterious fruit is the psilocybin-containing mushroom Stropharia cubensis that catalyzed the Tassili partnership Eden and then maintained it through a religion that placed a premium on frequent dissolution of personal boundaries into the oceanic presence of the Great Goddess, who is also called Gala, Geo, Ge, the Earth.
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John Pfeiffer, in discussing the Upper Paleolithic cave art of Europe, makes a number of observations that are important for these ideas. He believes that the placement of art within the caves in often nearly inaccessible spots is related to the use of the sites for initiation ceremonies that involved quite complex theatrical effects. He further suggests that what he calls “twilight-state thinking” is a precondition to having great culturally sanctioned truths revealed. Twilight-state thinking is characterized by a loss of objectivity, temporal distortion, and a tendency to experience mild hallucinations, and is nothing more than a gloss for egoless and unbounded psychedelic arousal:
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’The prevalence of twilight-state thinking, our very susceptibility to the condition, argues for its evolutionary importance. In extreme cases it results in pathology, derangements and delusions, persisting hallucinations and fanaticism. But it is also the driving force behind efforts to see things whole, to achieve a variety of syntheses from unified field theories in physics to blueprints for utopias in which people will live together in peace. There must have been an enormous selective premium on the twilight state during prehistoric times. If the pressures of the Upper Paleolithic demanded fervid belief and the following of leaders for survival’s sake, then individuals endowed with such qualities, with a capacity to fall readily into trances, would out-reproduce more resistant individuals.‘
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Pfeiffer neglects to discuss psychoactive plants and any role they might have played in bringing about twilight thought, and he limits his discussion to Europe. However, the placement of the Tassili rock paintings is similar to that of paintings in many of the European sites, and so it can be presumed that the paintings were used for generally similar purposes; most likely similar religious rites were practiced across southern Europe and North Africa.
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The retreat of the glaciers from the Eurasian landmass and the simultaneous acceleration of aridity in the African grasslands eventually brought the “casting out of Eden” allegorically conveyed in Genesis. The mushroom peoples of Tassili-n-Ajjer began to move “east of Eden.” And in fact it is possible to trace this migration in the archaeological record.
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In the middle of the tenth millennium B.C., Palestine, which had been only lightly populated, was the site of the sudden appearance of a remarkably advanced culture that brought with it an explosion in the size of settlements, and in arts, crafts, and technologies, such as had never before been seen in the Near East or, for that matter, anywhere on this planet. This is the Natufian culture, whose crescent-moon flints and elegantly naturalistic carved bonework are unrivaled by anything contemporary found in Europe. As James Mellaart writes, “There is in the Early Natufian a love of art, sometimes naturalistic, sometimes more schematized. The crouching limestone figurine from the cave of Umm ez Zuweitina, or the handle of a sickle from El Wad showing a fawn, are superb examples of naturalistic art, worthy of Upper Paleolithic France.”4 (See Figure 7. )
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In spite of the assumption of European academic archaeology that such a culture must have had links with the settlements of Old Europe, the skeletal evidence from Jericho, where the Natufian culture reached its peak, shows clearly that the inhabitants were of Eurafrican stock, fairly robust with long skulls. The ceramic evidence also favors the notion of an African origin: occurring in the Natufian sites is dark, burnished monochrome pottery that is known as Sahara-Sudanese ware. Pottery of this type has been found near the Egyptian-Sudanese border in a situation that suggests that domesticated cattle were present. And it has been found in and near the Tassili-n-Ajjer, evidently having appeared at the end of the Round Head Period. Mary Settegast wrote, “The origin of these African ceramics is unknown. Very recent excavations of Ti-n-Torha in the Libyan Sahara have uncovered Sahara-Sudanese type pottery with one carbon-14 reading of 7100 B.C., which, if a reliable date, would suggest a western seniority.”5
Such statements support the notion that a high culture to the west of the Nile was the source of the new advanced culture appearing in the Nile valley and Palestine.
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Of interest in this context is the Natufian culture’s particularly close and intense involvement with plants:
Inquiry into the relationship of environmental and behavioral systems from 10,000-8,000 B.C. reveals that the subsistence base of Natufian populations did not differ appreciably from the local Upper Paleolithic tradition. However, the emphases on plant resources, in the Natufian, allowed for a storable surplus which, in turn, had an effect on the Natufian behavioral patterns. Much of the Natufian material culture (architecture, grinding stones) and settlement pattern were influenced by an intensive exploitation of plant resources.‘
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William Blake.