It’s just before 4 a.m., and we’re nearing the full point of the lunar eclipse on the lush, mystical Pacific Northwest atoll of Orcas Island. The night before, my friend and I had prepared our altar, adorning it with protective talismans and offerings to the spirits of the land. We also prepared, under the advisement of healers, our ritual sacrament, which may or may not have been an assortment of fungi collected from our inner circle. As the eclipse point passed, we might have chewed the coarse stems and rubbery caps, tasting of soil and bark with a hint of black pepper; put on a playlist designed for psilocybin; and spent the next eight hours journeying into the story of our individual and collective trauma, emerging from it wiser.
These practices resemble those followed for millennia by ancient and Indigenous people who sought to transcend, adapted to the concept of set and setting that was popularized in the 1960s by psychonaut Timothy Leary. It states that the conditions in which a drug is consumed—from the music, lighting, decor, and crowd to the user’s personal intention—fundamentally shape the experience.
Practicing rituals and ceremonies that involve altered states of consciousness is part of what it means to be human. That’s been true since at least the Stone Age, when alcohol (and more potent substances) brought our early ancestors together, shaping the structures of human societies and even our brains in the process, according to scholars.
In today’s Western cultures, the occasional psychedelic experience aside, our tendency to seek communion through substances tends to look more like meeting at a bar on a Friday night than it does a transcendent ritual. But as mundane as a round with friends might seem, you’re never just drinking beer—you’re taking part in a continuum that stretches back to the dawn of human history and will continue into the future, all in a quest to expand our connections to each other, ourselves, and what’s beyond.
Across years and communities, life’s most valuable moments are the ones that remind us we’re part of something more: when time loses meaning and the membrane between you and me dissolves to make a we. Often, these experiences are achieved through altered states, whether it’s sharing pints, gnawing a mushroom, sipping a cup of coffee, or even taking a yoga class.
That consciousness-altering impulse has long been key to who we are. The question of whether beer or bread is humankind’s oldest biotechnology has been debated since the early 1950s, and advances in DNA studies, mass spectrometry, and other scientific technology now provide the first hard evidence of what our ancient ancestors were consuming. Dr. Patrick McGovern, who directs the Biomolecular Archaeology Project at the Penn Museum and is known as the “Indiana Jones of Extreme Beverages,” has found proof of ancient alcohol production through archaeochemical testing, which can detect the presence of organic residues on ancient vessels, tools, and fossils—and such testing reveals that booze is much older than was once believed.
In fact, the Agricultural Revolution may very well have been the Beer Revolution, says Brian Muraresku, author of The Immortality Key. He references Göbekli Tepe, a 12,000-year-old archaeological site that features the world’s earliest monumental depictions of gods, towering above massive limestone troughs that could accommodate 42 gallons of liquid.
“Göbekli Tepe stands as this grand cipher for the engine of civilization,” Muraresku explains. The site is 6,000 years older than Stonehenge and 7,000 years older than the Egyptian pyramids, and equally mysterious. It was a pilgrimage site that drew nomads from across Anatolia, the region in modern-day Turkey that some scholars hypothesize was the route by which the European continent was settled. The builders of Göbekli Tepe, he says, “need[ed] to entice people into this endeavor that would become civilization.”
But why? To participate in the “ecstatic communion with the ancestors,” says Muraresku.
All over the ancient world, people gathered at their ancestors’ graves to share alcohol and food in rituals that transcended life and death: from a 9,000-year-old site in Jiahu, China to Sub-Saharan Africa, Mesoamerica, and ancient Greece and Rome. While it may sound morbid to contemporary, Western minds, “It’s how [ancient people] celebrate, come together, and honor their dead,” says Sarah Linn, a Mediterranean archaeologist and research liaison at the Penn Museum. In Crete, for example, dozens of Bronze Age empties were found scattered outside tombs where people interacted with their ancestors’ skeletons, rearranging femurs and borrowing bones.
While still inconclusive, one archaeochemical test found traces of calcium oxalate, the chemical marker for beer, in those massive troughs at Göbekli Tepe, along with evidence for funerary ritual practices. Should further testing support this, Muraresku writes, “The world’s first temple might also have been the world’s first bar.”
If alcohol played a foundational role in our earliest rituals, it also had its practical uses. Early humans imbibed naturally fermented substances like overripe fruits for their quick calories and bacteria-fighting properties (something which other primates and even elephants and birds do today). After all, it doesn’t take much to make an alcoholic drink, which is why it could have begun as early as Göbekli Tepe, before humans settled down into agrarian societies.
“Primitive beer is [as simple as] ripping grains out of the ground, taking them in your hand, and throwing that grain into water,” Muraresku says, wisdom imparted to him by a prominent beer scientist. “The microbiome on the hand could have been responsible for those early yeasts. Aside from not having to dehusk it or heat it, you’re creating a beverage that ... is safer than water. And if the right grain was sitting in the right water over time, it would have naturally started to ferment with whatever yeast and fungi were on the grains.”
It helps that the enzyme that converts alcohol to energy is naturally present in our mouths, throats, and stomachs, says McGovern. His “Homo imbibens” theory claims ancient alcohol helped shape the evolution of humans and societies, from language, religion, and art to economics, science, and pharmaceuticals. It’s affirmed by the research of Dr. Mark Plotkin, an ethnobotanist who has spent decades learning from Amazonian shamans about the relationship between people and plants. Of nature’s vast pharmacopeia, Plotkin says, the cereal grain and the wine grape are the most crucial plants to human development. After all, ancient alcohol was the “universal medicine,” used as everything from an antiseptic to a pain reliever and sedative.
But these early alcoholic drinks had little relation to modern Ales or glasses of red. Instead, they were “extreme beverages”: highly intoxicating admixtures of strong beer, wine, and mead, sometimes all at once. They were also a solution for mixing an array of native herbs, plants, and fungi to create elixirs for not only the mind and body but also the soul, used in rituals that were medical, mystical, or both. In other words: If the human hand was the petri dish for some of our earliest beers, those yeasts could have mixed with some pretty funky fungi.
One fungus that commonly infects grain is ergot—the same fungus Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann accidentally used to synthesize lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, in 1938. Forty years later, he posed a theory, along with mycologist R. Gordon Wasson (who popularized “magic” psilocybin mushrooms in a 1957 Life Magazine article) and historian Carl Ruck. They claimed a psychoactive beer, made from ergotized grains, was the mysterious potion consumed in initiations as part of the Mysteries of Eleusis: an ancient Greek spiritual tradition of death-and-rebirth rituals that had long vexed scholars. Both the rituals and the potion, Muraresku’s book finds, may be descended from the tradition of funerary feasting that stretches back into prehistory.
“One of the most interesting parts about feasting in general, but alcohol creation and consumption generally, is how it unites people,” Linn says. Alcohol had an important early role as a social lubricant, necessary as people began living in larger groups. At Ur in Mesopotamia, one of humanity’s first cities, “Beer was really important to city-dwelling life,” she notes. “It eased the living together.”
This idea is found elsewhere. Ancient texts such as the Gilgamesh epic talk about beer as a “civilizing agent.” That was echoed by Cicero thousands of years later when he wrote that “by means of [the Mysteries of Eleusis] we have been transformed from a rough and savage way of life … and been civilized.” And yet, it wasn’t alcohol alone that helped ancient people build early societies. It was the sense of connection, both to each other and to something larger than themselves, that these substances occasioned: what’s known in both spiritual traditions and psychedelic science as a “mystical experience.”
Indeed, new breakthroughs are revealing that our ancestors were a lot more psychedelic than we might have believed. In 2020, traces of cannabis were found at an ancient Jewish shrine in Tel Arad, Israel: the first chemical evidence for the ritual use of mind-altering substances in the Kingdom of Judah. And Muraresku found evidence to support Ruck’s claim that the Mysteries of Eleusis laid the basis for early Christianity, which means the original Eucharist could have been a psychedelic beer.
“We don’t like this part of our history,” says Plotkin, who discusses similar themes on his “Plants of the Gods” podcast. “But the idea that Jews didn’t [use] marijuana and Romans didn’t drink opium in ancient days—well, they did. [It] doesn’t mean Moses was on Mount Sinai with a bong. But it means that some people in some parts of the religion were using mind-altering substances some of the time.”
Maybe we shouldn’t find this information so jarring. “The use of mind-altering substances is, for all intents and purposes, a universal human trait … [practiced] by every culture that’s ever been observed in the present and into the past,” says Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist whose teams discovered two new species of human ancestor. He’s found evidence that rituals involving death and the afterlife may predate modern humans, and speculates that substance use could have originated in similarly deep time.
After all, clues for ritual use of the Amanita muscaria mushroom appear everywhere from Aboriginal Australia to Vedic India and the Aztec and Mayan civilizations. Indigenous cultures across the Americas have used peyote, a psychoactive cactus; yopo, a hallucinogenic snuff; and ayahuasca, a visionary brew of a leaf and vine that contains the powerful psychedelic dimethyltryptamine (DMT), for millennia. As for pre-industrial booze, it often blurred the lines. There isn’t even a word for “alcohol” in ancient Greek, Muraresku notes; instead, texts use the word pharmakon, meaning “drugs.”
“These were mind-altering substances,” says Plotkin. “It wasn’t like, ‘I’m going to drink wine on Thursday, and on Friday, I’m going to smoke opium.’ It was like in college, when everyone dumps everything in the cooler and you drink it.”
These substances might also have been literally mind-altering. Whether it was psilocybin, psychedelic beer, or something else that brought people together, building the settlements that would become humanity’s largest civilizations required forging kinship bonds with other people. That meant we needed to understand and predict their thoughts and behaviors; that is, we needed a model.
“Brains needed to evolve from being simply things that experience sensations and thoughts to becoming their observer. To do this, they needed to build a model of a mind,” the New Scientist reported. “Once the biological machinery for such model-building evolved, it could be used to represent not only the minds of others, but also one’s own mind.”
Over the course of human evolution, the brain has tripled in size. The most intense growth happened between 80,000 and 20,000 years ago, just before agriculture exploded. The part that grew is the cerebral cortex: the wrinkly outer layer of the brain where high-level cognitive functions are housed, including the model-building function, which constructs your reality based on prior experience and social consensus. But as this capacity developed, it was also used to map our own minds—and this is where things get interesting.
In the hierarchy of your brain, the high-level, newer brain areas restrict the low-level, older regions that receive basic sensory data from your environment and generate primitive feeling-states. For the sake of efficiency, your brain takes shortcuts, limiting the information coming in and falling back on data from the model to make predictions about what you’re experiencing and to tell you how to react. Predictive data is sent “top-down,” from the higher levels to the lower ones, by the Default Mode Network (DMN), which functions as your brain’s traffic conductor. The only time data is sent “bottom up” is when the model’s predictions are wrong, and actual sensory data is allowed in to correct it.
The DMN coordinates signals across different brain areas, such as vision and motor functions, but it’s most active when these other areas aren’t demanding your attention—because it’s also the part of your brain that thinks about you. According to Robin Carhart-Harris, head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, it’s where consciousness lives, and where the ego is encoded. Within the DMN, it seems, the brain builds your social identity just like it builds the rest of your model of the world: by making distinctions (self versus others, human versus nature, life versus death); restricting sensory input; and falling back on old, predictable information, experiences, and reactions. Meanwhile, the ego is the voice that narrates that experience.
This, says consciousness guide Trace Bell, is the inner monologue we’re endlessly trying to quiet: the voice that plans and worries, reflects and ruminates; the one that situates you in time and tells you that you’re going to die. It’s no wonder, then, that transcending the ego is at the heart of nearly every spiritual tradition—and that our deep desire to alter consciousness has driven human rituals since the dawn of civilization, and likely even earlier.
“A lot of teachings use the terms ‘consciousness’ and ‘awareness’ interchangeably, but that can get tricky,” Bell says. He proposes that “awareness is the part of you that wasn’t born and doesn’t die. It’s what your consciousness occurs within, and is the unitive force behind all the distinctions and separations.” That theme is echoed widely, from Buddhist teachings and some indigenous worldviews to the Bible, but such concepts are no longer limited to philosophers and spiritual teachers—they’re now being explored by scientists and clinicians, too.
Some psychologists describe a larger “awareness” akin to what Bell names, which is distinct from our physical and mental experience. Since separation from this awareness, which extends to others and the natural world, is the source of much of the trauma people experience, they say, restoring a sense of interconnection is key to both spiritual awakening and psychological well-being. Carhart-Harris’ team found the experience of connectedness essential to transformation in psychedelic therapy, while the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research measures the success of trials by the intensity of the “mystical experience” participants have—which involves the feeling of merging with something greater than oneself.
“What we think of as the ‘I,’ all of our memories, experiences, and identities, are basically constructs,” says Cody Swift, a licensed psychotherapist and director of the Riverstyx Foundation, which supports projects outside the reach of conventional funding. “These constructs help us function in society, but we cling to them so closely that the end of life threatens that attachment and creates a lot of fear.” That’s why psychedelic treatments have proven effective in trials with terminal cancer patients, he adds: It connects them to something more eternal.
After all, psychedelics are also known as “entheogens,” or “that which creates the experience of the divine indwelling.” But there’s more than one way to reach that altered state.
In many ways, psychedelics and alcohol seem to offer similar experiences. Either can induce childlike wonder and feelings of oneness, dislodge us from time, or produce wildly fluctuating emotions. In ancient times, there was little distinction between these two substances and their use. Chemically, however, they couldn’t be more different.
At a high level, these molecules mimic different neurotransmitters in the brain, activating and inhibiting a variety of chemical reactions. The classic psychedelic molecules—such as psilocybin, LSD, and DMT—primarily mimic serotonin, the neurotransmitter that modulates mood, learning, memory, and well-being. As a result, psychedelic and serotonin molecules bind to the same receptor.
When serotonin binds to and activates this receptor, it influences your happiness and social behavior. Generally speaking, however, your ego remains intact, because serotonin doesn’t impact the DMN. Since most modern pharmaceutical treatments for depression are serotonin-based, they may help you feel more positive, but in the background, your inner monologue is still chattering away.
Psychedelics, on the other hand, do more than impact mood and well-being. According to the research of Carhart-Harris and his team, they also disable the DMN—quieting the ego and all the anxious self-talk that comes along with it. With the DMN diminished, new sensory information floods in; that’s why many say the psychedelic state feels “more real than reality.” This also allows parts of the brain that don’t normally communicate to “talk” with one another, activating new neural pathways and enabling fresh insights and behaviors. By releasing the brain’s natural inhibitory functions, Carhart-Harris says, psychedelics cause the mind to expand.
The alcohol molecule, by contrast, is a tricky one. Alcohol molecules can mimic a number of different neurotransmitters, says Dr. Antony Abraham, neuroscientist at the University of Washington, and the ones they impact vary according to dosage and a person’s genetic factors.
At low doses, alcohol molecules mimic a neurotransmitter called GABA (Gamma-aminobutyric acid). Normally, GABA molecules restrict the amount of dopamine that is released when you do something pleasurable, keeping your body’s natural reward-seeking behaviors in check. When alcohol molecules bind to GABA receptors, however, they limit their ability to constrict this function, just like psychedelics constrict the DMN. This “releases the reins on dopamine,” Abraham says.
The result? The chemical reactions caused by those first sips of alcohol flood your brain with a “pleasure cascade,” says Dr. John Harkness, co-founder and CEO of Rewire Neuro, Inc. At first, he says, this can feel pretty psychedelic: Your inhibitions loosen and your mood lightens; this is the stage where you’re singing shanties and buying rounds for the bar. But with your reward-modulating mechanism diminished, you’re encouraged to keep seeking more of the same pleasurable behavior, and that’s where it gets dangerous.
At higher doses, Harkness and Abraham say, alcohol molecules start to constrict all kinds of chemical reactions—the ones that control functions such as coordination, speech, vision, memory, and even breathing. If this behavior is repeated over time, the body’s dopamine systems become unable to respond appropriately to pleasure and reward, promoting addiction.
Still, it’s wrong to frame alcohol as objectively harmful and psychedelics as a universal panacea. On the contrary, in certain people, psychedelics can exacerbate mental and emotional issues and provoke traumatic reactions. I cannot emphasize enough that psychedelics are not for everyone, and therapeutic work should never, ever be attempted without the guidance of a reputable, experienced healing practitioner.
Just like both can be harmful, both can be beneficial, too. In the end, the most important thing isn’t what you do, it’s how you do it—and why. Many substances can awaken the indwelling divine; the key is to involve the proper ritual.
Throughout human history, rituals have been designed to answer the big questions, such as why we’re here and what happens when we die, “and the way that typically happens is through altered states of consciousness,” says Muraresku.
This doesn’t have to be attained through substances. Global coming-of-age practices, for example, involve fasting, scarification, tattooing, sleep deprivation, and even amputation. What matters most is that the ritual is accompanied by two key elements: guidance and integration, which Muraresku describes as “some kind of deep insight into where [the participant fits] inside the communal and cosmic structure.”
And this isn’t just metaphorical. From ayahuasca-induced hunting divinations to frenetic yopo practices and the Mysteries of Eleusis, the rituals of both ancient cultures and many contemporary indigenous societies involve not only group participation, but knowledge of cultural myths and stories. Shamans and other practitioners enter into the altered state along with participants while performing necessary rites; as Plotkin says, entheogens are “the only medicine where the doctor takes it with you.”
A proper ritual also involves some kind of exertion—physical, mental, emotional, or all of the above—as well as time and preparation, Muraresku says. Eleusis initiates, for example, traveled from distant lands to reach an amphitheater where they would communally partake in the potion along with the priestesses, who led the rituals and enacted the stories of figures such as Demeter, Persephone, and Dionysus. The end result was a return to awareness, or what they saw as an inherent connection to the immortal divine within all living things.
While ritual is still an aspect of present-day, Western society, in many cases, it has lost this communal and cosmic container. What remains are ceremonial vestiges, and the tendency to mark key life events with mind-altering substances is one of them. “Turning 21 in America … shares some of the same characteristics as rites of passage from antiquity, which is leaving one station in life and entering into another,” Muraresku says. “But we’ve lost the ‘why’ that undergirds all that. There’s a difference between a ritual and mere ceremony.”
And the West is all about ceremony. From birthdays and weddings to college graduations, our most important occasions “reify the individual identity and [reinforce] attachment as much as possible,” says Swift.
Even the growing field of psychedelic-assisted therapy is individualized, with participants in clinical trials typically wearing eye shades and listening to music. In contrast to communal rites, Western practitioners tend to coach participants from outside the experience, asking them to describe what they encounter and offering suggestions. Afterwards, they may help the participant interpret their journey, but there is no cohesive cultural narrative in which to place them. This can leave some people feeling adrift.
In addition to the ritual-specific backdrop, there is also a collective set and setting, encompassing things like social stigma and cultural prejudice. If you grow up believing certain substances and settings are aberrant, it’s hard to separate that guilt and shame from your experience, whether it’s a psychedelic trip or drinking at a brewery.
“I think that as a society, we just don’t deserve to have nice things, because we’re not mature enough to really take care of them and try to engage in them maturely and responsibly,” Swift says. “We lack the embrace of our collective desire to shift consciousness.”
Reclaiming the concept of ritual in the contemporary moment could help us reframe our relationships to substance use, each other, and ourselves, says Swift, because “all these compounds … have their place and they all have benefits. There is a need and desire to be free of pain, to stimulate ourselves, [and for] recreation.”
“There are different sacraments for different people, different places, and different times in your life,” Muraresku sums up. “Part of why I haven’t done psychedelics is because I do find God in a glass of beer.”
When it comes to rituals, your intention matters. As Swift says, psychedelics don’t turn you into a different person—they simply amplify what’s already there.
I can vouch for this. Every ritual I joined in love and wonder returned this experience to me multifold, and the opposite has also been true. I may or may not have seen my ex-partner’s face transform into a vampire’s; had my flesh seared with hot metal to produce physical and emotional scars; and watched my body disintegrate like the villain in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” when I, too, had chosen poorly. But those experiences were counterbalanced by the times when I saw pink hearts written in the sky and melted into loving awareness.
I would argue that all this primed the experience, yet my most meaningful moment of awakening involved drinking a beer on top of a mountain. Like any true ritual, it began with exertion: In this case, a comedy of errors where I was repeatedly locked out of my Gig Car, followed by a harrowing drive and several hours of steep, cold-weather climbing to the top of a peak. I was rewarded with a breathtaking view; while there, I cracked my journal and an AP One Thousand, a kveik-fermented Farmhouse Ale from The Ale Apothecary, and reflected upon the events of 2020. On the way down, I was late. I quickly picked my way across the dirt path, the ritual beverage humming inside me, until I was stopped in my tracks by a scenic view.
And then something happened. Everything else in my consciousness fuzzed out, and there was nothing but the gentle lapping of the waves and chirping of the birds, which I could not only hear, but see and feel. I merged into my surroundings and they merged into me. A tiny squirrel appeared on top of a log, and I didn’t just see the squirrel, I was the squirrel, just like I was the water and the trees and the dirt underfoot.
It was like tasting the fruit of knowledge. Maybe this is what we’ve been pursuing ever since our ancestors gazed up at the stars at Göbekli Tepe. After all, Bell says with a knowing smile, “Consciousness is what you’re altering to realize the awareness that has been here the whole time.”
Words by Holly ReganIllustrations by Colette Holston
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