Is God a Mushroom?

After all, our species began as forest-floor foragers, in regions where psychedelic mushrooms grew plentifully in the dung of the very cattle they later domesticated. Like many other animals, we also seem to possess what the psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel calls an “intoxication drive” — an impulse to seek inebriation in order to alter or expand our consciousness, equal to “the basic drives of hunger, thirst, or sex.” 

“Drug-induced alteration of consciousness preceded the origin of humans,” psychedelics researcher Giorgio Samorini writes. “It is an impulse that manifests itself in human society without distinction of race or culture; it is completely cross-cultural.”

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In the cognitive science of religion, the dominant explanation for the origin of the belief in gods has long been to blame a “hyperactive agency detection device”: in other words, an inclination, coded into our brain, to imagine threats where there are none — to imagine an active threat behind a rustling bush or bubbling water. But recent studies have challenged the viability of this explanation. 

Hyperactive agency detection is not correlated with religious belief, they say. Besides, our cognitive models are, ultimately, based on our embodied experiences. Why would we presume agency behind every undetermined stimulus, they ask, without past experience to inform our caution? And just how could our god-belief be so universally, cross-culturally encoded, if it is based on something we have never, in any capacity, experienced?

But what if God had already shown his face to us, had been here from the very beginning? What if God wasn't a man, or a power, or a hidden threat — what if God was, this whole time, a mushroom?

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One of the weird things about the mystical experiences occasioned by psychedelics is how universal and non-sectarian they tend to be. “It’s not uncommon for subjects to report encounters with symbols or deities that have not been part of their process of enculturation,” the pioneering psychiatrist William Richards writes in Sacred Knowledge, his book on psychedelic research. Midwestern atheists report seeing visions of Islamic architecture; Baptist priests hear Sanskrit liturgies in their ears. “When you get into the symbolic, archetypal realm… good agnostics are seeing images of the Christ,” he told me.

This goes some way to justifying the theory that our religious impulses may be born of these fungi, rather than simply activated by them. But such a conclusion, for the theologically inclined, would be revolutionary. What if our revelations — our relics, temples, and testaments — came not from God, but from an evolutionary dance with fungi? Can God still be said to exist if we accept that as true?

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