Since the dawn of time, humanity has felt driven to alter its consciousness in some pretty extreme ways. How else do you explain the fact that, in evolutionary terms, the development of our minds has far outstripped that of our bodies? It’s not called ‘higher intelligence’ for nothing, you know.

Let's face it, once our ancient forebears had satisfied their need for food, shelter and made their small contribution to the continuation of the species, there wasn’t a lot left for them to do on this planet except get high and expand their minds.

‘Primitive man,’ wrote the novelist and intellectual Aldous Huxley in 1931, ‘explored the pharmacological avenues of escape from the world with astounding thoroughness. Our ancestors left almost no natural stimulant, hallucinogen or stupefacient undiscovered.’ How else were they to reach up and touch the distant stars, boldly confront the vastness of Creation or, perhaps, one day even sit face to face with the Creator?

Physicians in Ancient Egypt treated their patients with opium, its use later spreading throughout the Greek and Roman Empires. ‘Helen’s nepenthe’, the drug that brought oblivion from grief, according to Homer, is also thought to have come from Egypt. The Rites of Eleusis, the oldest religion in the West, centred around the hallucinogenic properties of ‘kykeon’, a mysterious substance symbolically linked to the opium poppy.

The ancient Aztecs had peyote and ololiuqui, a seed containing a natural form of LSD. The Aborigines of Australia chewed pituri. The natives of the Upper Amazon used yagé, a vine said to have telepathic properties. In Persia, the militant Ismaili sect of Hashishim propagated their faith by violent means under the leadership of legendary ‘Old Man of the Mountains’, Hasan-e Sabbah. The modern term ‘assassin’ is derived from the sect’s name, which means ‘users of hashish’ in Arabic.

Shamans throughout Eurasia and beyond used hallucinogenic mushrooms and fungi to transport themselves into spiritual frenzies. While the witches of Europe concocted similarly heady brews out of belladonna, thorn apple, henbane and bufotenine, derived from the sweat glands of toads. So much for eye of newt and toe of frog.

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