Indigenous Plant and Healing Knowledge with James Tunney (4K Reboot)

Summary

Irish barrister and poet James Tunney joins Jeffrey Mishlove to explore how indigenous peoples, not Western scientists, discovered many of the world's most powerful plant medicines, from ayahuasca to peyote. He argues that shamans who say the plants speak to them may be accessing a real, mystical form of knowledge, while Western science and patent law have engaged in biopiracy by claiming credit for these discoveries. The conversation also warns that psychedelics and consciousness research could be co-opted by a militaristic, transhumanist industrial culture.

Key takeaways

• 1Irishman James Mooney attended a peyote ceremony with Comanche leader Quanah Parker in 1891 and brought peyote back to Washington, leading to the isolation of mescaline in Berlin in 1897.
• 2Irish physician William Brooke O'Shaughnessy presented a paper in Bengal in 1839 on medicinal cannabis, after which cannabis tinctures were sold in London.
• 3Vandana Shiva led legal challenges against Western patents on neem and turmeric extracts, calling the practice biopiracy.
• 4Tunney links the slang term 'pookies' for magic mushrooms to the Celtic 'pooka' and the Scottish phrase 'away with the fairies', suggesting unbroken European psilocybin traditions.
• 5In 1956-57, the term 'psychedelic' (Humphry Osmond to Aldous Huxley), 'artificial intelligence' (John McCarthy) and 'transhumanism' (Julian Huxley) all emerged, which Tunney sees as a suspicious convergence.
• 6Tunney criticizes Terence McKenna and Timothy Leary for embracing technology in a way he sees as opening the door to transhumanism, and cites Manly P. Hall's claim that Egyptian elite spirituality decayed into black magic.

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

But of course, we have traditions, unbroken traditions of use of psilocybin in Europe, in the Celtic countries. And there's a link as well, I believe, with certain phenomenon. There's a slang name I see used for magic mushrooms called pukis, which is related to the word puka, I think, which we've discussed before and you've discussed, of course, in your great interviews with Robert Anton Wilson before. And sometimes in Scotland, they talk about people who are not really there as being away with the fairies. So we have a little cross over there. But if we think about the fact that ethnobotanists may get credit for the origin of these things, we have to remember that it was the Native Americans in that context that discovered these uses. It was the Native Americans that had the genius in some way to put together two distinct plants in the context of ayahuasca, the shrub and the vine, and to get them to interact in a very complex way that couldn't have been easily determined in a scientific way. Keep watching to learn more. You can now download all nine copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org. New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body, and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs.edu. Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogue Series is Charles T. Tartt, 70 Years of Exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology Now available on Amazon. ...

Excerpt from New Thinking Allowed, Aug 16, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.