BOOKREVIEW:

THE LONG TRIP: - A Prehistory of Psychedelia
By Paul Devereux Arkana,
£7.99 (Non-Fiction)
ISBN 0 140 19540 8

Never mind William Straw, the Home Secretary's ancestors were getting
blitzed out of their gourds thousands of years ago. So were mine. So were
yours. Since pre-Neolithic times, it seems, our European forebears liked
nothing better than to get righteously ripped on opium, cannabis, magic
mushrooms, henbane, nutmeg or thorn apple seeds. They would then, according
to Herodotus, "roar with pleasure". Mind you, it was legal then.

Paul Devereux, whose specialism is "consciousness", contends that our
modern failure to recognise this psychedelic heritage means we "are out of
step with the entire record of human experience". So, to remind us, he
takes us on a jaunt. Archaeological findings, witchcraft, rock paintings,
oral traditions, all are grist to the windmills of his mind, although,
probably wisely, he avoids the question of whether Jesus was a mushroom.

This is ground that was explored to fascinating effect by Brian Inglis in
The Forbidden Game some 25 years ago, but, unlike Inglis, Devereux belongs
to the spiritual-enlightenment, communion-with-the-ineffable, "high church"
of the psychedelic votary. Not for him a handful of Es and a weekend with a
Prodigy album on infinite replay. His purpose is an altogether more earnest
examination of higher consciousness and he informatively includes the
psychoactive compounds of the 150 or more mind-altering plants that Mother
Nature has bestowed upon her children.

This is not to say that he ignores the "hey, far-out" factor - Father
Christmas and Mother Goose as relics of the Siberian shamanistic tradition
- - and some of the conclusions are engagingly loopy. So nature's bountiful
pharmacopoeia was placed there expressly to nurture the development of
human consciousness, spirituality and "interspecies communication"; ley
lines are topographical representations of the trance state (though people
who are stoned do not usually walk in straight lines).

Nevertheless it's a good read, if only because claiming kinship with our
psychedelic forebears - those proto-Straws, so to speak - confers
ethnological respectability on the age-old human desire to get zonked. By
the way, are there any evening classes in "ethnobotany"? Just to help with
the tomatoes, you understand.