Mushrooms as Metaphors

The earliest works of art were interspecies collaborations. Or, at least, this is what the controversial ethnobotanist Terence McKenna argues in his 1992 book The Food of the Gods. Over the course of three million years, he writes, human brain size tripled, outpacing the growth of any other complex organ ever recorded in the history of life. The exact cause of this growth remains a mystery. McKenna promoted a theory that eventually gained him a cult following: that psilocybin—a hallucinoge