Pubdate: Sat, 07 Mar 1998 Source: Times The (UK) Reviewed by: Peter Ingham Contact: http://www.the-times.co.uk/ 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.