NONFICTION - Feb. 23, 1992

FOOD OF THE GODS: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge--A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution by Terence McKenna (Bantam: $21.50; 336 pp.). “Plant hallucinogens,” ethnobotanist Terence McKenna writes in these pages, “can reliably and repeatedly open the floodgates of the reducing valve of consciousness and expose the individual to the full force of the howling Tao.” It is a sentence, we can safely surmise, that Nancy Reagan would “just say no” to. But while this book is rife with easy targets (e.g., paeans to “the insight of vegetables”), there is a logic to McKenna’s two principal arguments that is difficult to dismiss.

McKenna’s first argument is one the recreational-drug culture has been making for decades: Hallucinogens such as psilocybin (the “magic” behind those special mushrooms) do not deserve to be clumped in the same ignominious category as drugs such as alcohol or cocaine, for there is scant evidence that the former incite violence, self-harm and other problems attributed to the latter.

McKenna’s second argument is more remarkable. Nostalgically looking back not to the ‘60s but to 4500 BC, he shows how archaic man used drugs not as ends in themselves but as means toward an end. For humans of the Upper Paleolithic era, he writes, drugs were tools, like obsidian arrows, that could be used for “bursts of energy . . . immunity against pathogens . . . (and) cognitive activities.” McKenna contends that most people of this period took drugs not to communicate with spirits or ancestors, as the stereotype goes, but to accomplish practical goals like hunting game (psilocybin helped by sharpening visual acuity) and to enter a world of the imagination, which they believed to be as real as the physical world.

These are plausible arguments, and McKenna should have left them at that. But apparently believing that he cannot adequately defend his hallucinogens until he proves their utter centrality to Western civilization, McKenna often enters the realm of wild speculation, arguing, for instance, that plant alkaloids first made self-reflection possible. “Tears were running down his cheeks,” he says of one primitive man on drugs. “He had said the words before, but he had never said and understood them in this way before. ‘ Ta vodos! Ta vodos! ‘ ‘I am! I am!’ ”