The Stoned Ape Hypothesis: Language as Synesthesia
Far Out, Man
Ethnobotanist Terence McKenna imagined a far-out remix of the primal father myth and called it the stoned ape hypothesis. For McKenna, the great mystery of evolution is ourselves. While the theory of evolution does great work accounting for the mutagenic flux of general speciation, it fails to account for how humans became, well, so dang human. The fossil record indicates that human brain size doubled in size in a relatively short amount of time. What could have brought about this radical and unprecedented change in early hominids? You guessed it: by repeatedly getting just absolutely face-meltingly zonked on high doses of psychoactive flora.
The Hypothesis
Some hundreds of thousands of years ago, in that same primal dawn that Freud spoke of, in the canopy of the African rainforest lived small bands of early hominids who lived as apes do, and who were ruled by a super-agro manosphere-type-dude ape. A period of climate upheaval and desertification, not unlike what we are now experiencing, caused the rainforest to collapse and change over into the savanna grasslands that you’ll recognize in east Africa today. Forced into new habitat, the early hominids began to explore new diets. What they found on the grasslands, growing from the dung of the ruminant cattle, was the magic mushroom. They began to eat these magic mushrooms in great quantities.
Now the hominids, who up to this point had no language beyond grunting and shrieking, were so overcome by the synesthetic effects of the psilocybin that they began to practice glossolalia, to experiment with new mouth noises that in turn produced various synesthetic sensations, and which in turn lead to yet more mouth noises. And thus acute mushroom induced synesthesia became language as we know it today, slowly at first, then all at once.
In the meantime the senses were enhanced; imagination exploded; social cohesion was improved; empathy expanded, meanings metastasized, brains grew in volume and general good vibes were on the rise. The erstwhile homo-erectus, who could merely stand up, had now become homo sapiens, whose thoughts grew to size of the universe. What had once been the toxic alpha male/primal father dissolved in the psychedelic solvent into the spaced-out, easy-going dad of a groovy new era. A lunar cult was formed to worship a horned goddess; lots of dancing ensued, and it was generally a pretty good party, at least until the invention of alcohol and agriculture. Then the mushroom was driven out of use, and the primal-father, that long-fanged alpha primate, emerged once more to rule society, as he does to this day.
2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
First as Fantasy, then as History
The biggest problem with this theory is that Joe Rogan likes it so much. For anyone who has been to there as many times as Joe Rogan has, such a theory must have irresistible appeal.
I will neither confirm nor deny the stoned ape hypothesis but rather suspend it as an elegant fantasy, a kind of colorful hanging Miro mobile to turn at will.
If I had said last week that what begins as historical fact ends up as contemporary fantasy, I might just as well have said that what begins as contemporary fantasy ends up as historical fact. The fantasies of the present age are projected into the primordial abyss of history and there find ready facts to snap to. Whereas Freud had projected his own father into the dawn of time, McKenna projects his mushroom epiphany. And yet the similarities between the Freud’s myth and McKenna’s hypothesis are striking. They both include a primal father and a primal hoard, and how eating a certain something kickstarted the advent of civilization—the eucharist is reflected here too. The main difference is the incest taboo: in Freud’s version the murder of the primal father begets the oldest and most universal of all laws. In McKenna’s version, however, the dawn of civilization is a giant substance induced orgy. This is a telling reversal on McKenna’s part and only increases the fantasy element of his hypothesis.
A Primordial Conversion
As with so many persons who have undergone the psychedelic event, McKenna recounts his as an extraordinary conversion, almost as if he were Paul on the road to Damascus. Where he once had been a rational materialist, following his epiphany, he would forever after proclaim a kind of weird ecological and gnostic idealism in which joining with the planet would eventually produce the ability to “hatch from the chrysalis of matter” and journey into the stars as pure idea. So it’s only natural that he would project this radical transformation into the beginnings of time, where the brute animal was converted to humanity by the mushroom revelation. In McKenna’s cosmology the advent of language some hundred thousand years ago is an event that is still happening now, accelerating in the eddies of a cataract pulling us towards the Transcendental Object at the End of Time. Which is just his zonked way of saying that we are involved in a vast linguistic process being worked out, whose end result is unimaginable.
Language as Synesthesia
Mushrooms aside, what I find most creditable in McKenna’s hypothesis is the idea that language is a form of synesthesia. Synesthesia, you’ll recall, is the confusion of sensations; where words produce flavors, or musical notes make visual color. While many people experience this phenomena naturally, it can likewise be turned on by psychedelic substances.
I really only came across the idea of synesthesia causing language, like, yesterday so I hardly understand its full implications. The idea, as I see it, is that not only does language develop from synesthesia, but that language is itself a kind of synesthesia; and which is not so far off from the idea of a psychoactive metaphor. I think that this theory has legs and preliminary research finds that brain science is likewise invested in it and is turning up positive results.
Suffice to say that, to stick with the Freudian maneuver, any theory regarding language acquisition at the dawn of time, should apply equally well to the child learning language today. This after all is the first and oldest conversion and that happens all the time—the transition from being infans, and totally without language, to being immersed in words to the point where there is, as they say, nothing outside of the text. As it turns out recent research has shown that babies are universally born into a state of high synesthesia due to the underdeveloped partitions between brain functions; this symphonic state can last for up to the first six to eight months…
Some years back I had imagined that babies emerged from out of rainbows. Together with early hominids, this perhaps may not be far from the truth…
Monolith at the dawn of time, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
