The homo-sapiens has two things that are important to them: spreading their seed, according to evolutionary theory, and preserving their life, which is also a kind of evolutionary theory, because if they don’t preserve their life, they can’t spread their seed. To preserve your life, you need to avoid dangers, but mainly to find food. Therefore, your primary interest, your most basic need, is food. Physiological needs are even more important than safety needs in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Thus, humans began to search for food. The search for food was the first thing humans knew about the world, and was essentially the first “science” developed through trial and error. Religion is primitive science, and one could say that religion is a set of beliefs and rules of thumb that developed based on the body of scientific knowledge accumulated by humans at various times. And because the body of human knowledge is constantly developing and growing, religion also evolves according to the knowledge it encompasses.
Human existence is religion, and on the altar of this religion, the first martyrs fell—the gatherers who tried and erred, eating poisonous plants. And also the first saints, the gatherers who tried and survived, managing to overcome the danger of the poison and derive benefit from it. Some of these poisons affected these people, making them either crazy or enlightened—this is the holy war and the plant-based mysterium tremendum. These saints are the first shamans, who are essentially experimenters or guides of experimentation. In Greece, they were called hierophants.
These people are qualified individuals, not in the sense of authority. Although authority will indeed develop in the future within the framework of religious institutionalization. These people are simply authoritative due to their expertise; their reputation preceded them, and because the knowledge they held was power, people respected them for their strength.
Since their tools depended on availability and randomness, their great advantage was not only in knowing how to use them but also in knowing how to find them. The domestication of plants (and animals) solved the problem of availability and randomness, as there was always a reserve of tools. And once that was the case, authority was based solely on expertise. To call someone an expert, it must be ensured that there are no gaps in their education and that what they know, they truly know and not just pretend to. In these schools, institutionalized religion developed.
There is such a thing called “symbolic interaction”. By analogy, any input into the human body is considered food, whether it is physical food or spiritual food, and any output that later returns as feedback to become input again is considered sowing, whether it is the birth of a child and the spreading of seeds, teaching and learning, or the original meaning of sowing, producing the next generation of plants until their germination, flowering, and fruit production. These output actions were considered, again by analogy, the action with which the world was created, what we would call “creation”. Early human worship was essentially what is called “sympathetic magic”, an attempt to create a simulation that would allow this output, feedback, and the next input.
What did the ancient gatherers eat that drew them so much to poisonous plants? It can of course be inferred that what excited them so much were the psychedelic hallucinations they experienced from eating foods like various nightshades or fermented wheat. This is very logical, and indeed religious scholars attribute the fact that these plants caused hallucinations to their becoming entheogens. But there is no need to go too far, because it could be that it was not about the deliberate search for plants that are actual poisons. Even edible and healthy plants tend to ferment by yeasts that appear randomly from the air and acquire an alcoholic value. Various animals still “consume alcohol” in nature, like the tree shrew that eats fermented fruits from the bertam palm.
Robert Dudley argues that our ancestors were also such, hunters of fermented fruits, or more accurately signal catchers from fermented fruits that emit substances into the air signaling to fruit eaters “eat me”. A fermented fruit is a fruit that has reached its peak nutritional value, humans benefited greatly from consuming a lot of energy from a small bite. This is also an evolutionary advantage, so to speak, that the fruit achieves by sending out signals and thereby “tempting” the consumer to eat it, causing the consumer to seek it, gather it, spread its seeds (from the eaten fruits) and thus essentially reproduce. This is a symbiotic co-evolution of both the fruit and the human, the human develops the nutritional capabilities of the fruit and thus its energetic capabilities, it both takes and gives, and so does the fruit, it takes the human by tempting it with its fruits and thereby gets what it asked for, dissemination.
In this process, fruit fermentation produces alcohol, and a person who consumes alcohol gets drunk and is affected in a psychotropic manner. When it comes to modest quantities, which is what a person could afford while being a wild gatherer, the intoxicating effect does not go beyond euphoria and relaxation. Only when a person overindulges do they get drunk. Robert Dudley called this theory “the drunken monkey”. While the theory that humans consumed hallucinogenic plants is called the “stoned ape” theory. As we explained, the stoned ape is sometimes four steps too far ahead.
Entheogens and sacred herbs 