The Doped Monkey: A Journey into Human Evolution Through Psychedelic Mushrooms

We’re going to confess something! When writing, we had never found it so complex yet fascinating to tackle a topic that makes us deeply reflective because of the fine line that must not be crossed between simply thinking about substance use for recreational purposes and the responsible and natural consumption of mushrooms.

To be very honest, something quite unsettling happened to us when we experienced the Sound Therapy with our friends from Templo Fungi—a session we promoted and had the chance to live with 10 FOU beings. Two of them had pretty high expectations about altering their state of consciousness, while the rest were focused on living, discovering, and learning. That’s why we wanted to dive into this topic, in addition to the garment we currently have in our store: Mono Dopado (Doped Monkey). We're touching on several angles that concern us and that we want you to understand clearly—we feel it's our responsibility.

Since we’re on this wavelength, here at Fou we want to present the result of a brief exploration we did into the fascinating and cosmic theory of the “Doped Monkey,” which we fell in love with through philosopher and writer Terence McKenna. This theory unfolds in all its glory in his book Food of the Gods (1992), where mushrooms appear as the main element that gave monkeys the ability to enter altered states that allowed the evolution of the being into what we are today. Now, how good could that have been? Let the facts speak through how we humans have behaved.

What McKenna says is that millions of years ago, our primate ancestors experienced a genetic mutation that made them more receptive to the effects of psilocybin—psychoactive compounds present in certain mushrooms. This sensitivity, triggered by the altered state of "reality," according to McKenna, set off a series of evolutionary changes that led us to become the species we are now.

Who is Terence McKenna?

He was an American writer, speaker, philosopher, ethnobotanist, psychonaut, and art historian, and a defender of the responsible use of psychedelic plants. He is considered one of the most prominent authorities on shamanism.

A drawing of McKenna according to AI:

Now, if this makes sense to you, don’t you think we should also make sense of the possibility that we might not be inhabiting our true reality? Crazy and dazzling at the same time!

According to the theory, psychedelic mushrooms stimulated the development of the cerebral cortex, the capacity for introspection, and intellectual curiosity. These new abilities, in turn, would have fueled the development of culture, language, and technology. Now, we’re talking about this thanks to mushrooms—and the theory itself exists thanks to them.

Although the doped monkey theory hasn’t been fully accepted by the scientific community, it undoubtedly offers an intriguing perspective on our evolution. The idea that psychedelic mushrooms may have played such a fundamental role in our development is an invitation to reflect on the relationship between the human mind and the natural world.

It would’ve been great if those two people from the Sound Therapy session had found this blog before the experience. In fact, if you know someone who hasn’t tried mushrooms and wants to, recommend this reading so they can do it with true consciousness and leave behind the simplistic idea of getting high as the main goal.