/mckennafood

Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution

THE TECHNIQUES OF ECSTASY shamanic practises towards ecstasy

A WORLD MADE OF LANGUAGE "The twentieth-century linguistic revolution," says Boston University anthropologist Misia Landau, "is the recognition that language is not merely a device for communicating ideas about the world, but rather a tool for bringing the world into existence in the first place. Reality is not simply `experienced' or `reflected' in language, but instead is actually produced by language. " For the shaman, the cosmos is a tale that becomes true as it is told, and as it tells itself the shaman is the remote ancestor of the poet and artist.

Our need to feel part of the world seems to demand that we express ourselves through creative activity. The ultimate wellsprings of this creativity are hidden in the mystery of language The grammars of languages-their internal rules-have been carefully studied. Yet too little attention has been devoted to examining how language creates and defines the limits of reality. Perhaps language is more properly understood when thought of as magic, for it is the implicit position of magic that the world is made of language. If language is accepted as the primary datum of knowing, then we in the West have been sadly misled.

THE MAGIC IN FOOD The ways in which humans use plants, foods, and drugs cause the values of individuals and, ultimately, whole societies to shift. Human symbol formation, linguistic facility, and sensitivity to community values may also shift under the influence of psychoactive and physiologically active metabolites.When thinking about drugs, we tend to focus on episodes of intoxication, but many drugs are normally used in subthreshold or maintenance doses; coffee and tobacco are obvious examples in our culture. The result of this is a kind of "ambience of intoxication." Like fish in water, people in a culture swim in the virtually invisible medium of culturally sanctioned yet artificial states of mind.Languages appear invisible to the people who speak them, yet they create the fabric of reality for their users. The problem of mistaking language for reality in the everyday world is only too well known. Plant use is an example of a complex language of chemical and social interactions. Yet most of us are unaware of the effects of plants on ourselves and our reality, partly because we have forgotten that plants have always mediated the human cultural relationship to the world at large.