Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind by Jamie Wheal

Author:Jamie Wheal [Wheal, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062905499
Google: _VnzDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B08DNT8B9B
Publisher: Harper Wave
Published: 2021-04-26T23:00:00+00:00

The Stoned Ape (or the Horned Ape?)

In the mid-1990s, Terence McKenna, the infamous psychedelic philosopher and heir to Timothy Leary’s throne, took a wild swing at the origins of consciousness. He believed he’d found the answer to the central paradox of human existence—namely, how’d we get so damned smart all of a sudden?

According to McKenna, about one hundred million years ago our ancient African grandparents climbed down from the trees and began to explore the savanna. As they hunted and foraged for food they came across grazing animals like impala, gazelle, and wildebeest. Those massive herds left piles of dung behind them. The droppings hosted millions of insects that were an easy-to-harvest protein source, and well worth picking through to find.

The dung hosted another plentiful food supply—fungi. Among the best-known varieties that sprout on cow pies are Psilocybe cubensis, a.k.a. “magic mushrooms.” Entomologists speculate that these mushrooms first secreted psychedelic compounds as a natural insect repellent. Tripping dung beetles, they theorized, often wandered off and forgot to finish eating the rest of the mushroom. Problem solved.

McKenna, though, saw a much grander role for those humble toadstools. He mused that complex linguistics sprang from the synaptic superconductivity of the psychedelic trip. It was, according to McKenna, the most likely candidate for how we went from grunting and pointing to poetry and song. And the truly heroic, blow-out-the-pipes shamanic adventure—or, as he so memorably put it, “Five grams in silent darkness”? The catalyst for nothing less than the prehistoric birth of awe and the origins of religion.

Serious anthropologists never gave the Stoned Ape theory much credence. Even sympathetic scholars found that McKenna was playing fast and loose with citations and ignoring counterfactual examples in the literature (like bloody Aztec mushroom sacrifices, violent ayahuascan Amazonian tribes, or sociopathic CIA programs). But the theory never disappeared, either. If anything, it’s enjoying a recent resurgence along with all things psychedelic these days. We might not have to stretch as far as McKenna’s ramblings, though, to find what distinguishes us from our nearest primate cousins.

To refine our search for the causes of consciousness we need to ask what else could have provided the neurological boost to transform us from the ape who stands (Homo erectus) to the ape who knows (Homo sapiens)? A plausible alternate candidate to the Stoned Ape hypothesis would have to check three boxes: It would need to be strongly instinctive, feel powerfully rewarding, and enjoy widespread adoption. It would have to meaningfully shift physiology and psychology, and be able to do so repeatedly over time. In sum, the transformative substance or practice would need to be what psychologists call autotelic—meaning it would have to have its own intrinsic reason and reward for doing.

It might not have been the Stoned Ape that tripped us awake, but it could have been his far more widespread cousin, the Horned Ape, the ape who differs from all his primate relatives in the way he engages love and sex. The Horned Ape is a more plausible missing link between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens.

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