BEVERAGES. In addition to their nutritional role, all beverages are invested with a certain amount of symbolic and affectional content, and it seems likely that there is no beverage that has not taken on a profound religious significance somewhere or other in the world. Intoxicants and hallucinogens seem particularly well suited to this role, given the ways in which they open up startling new areas of experience to those who imbibe them, including ecstasy, enthusiasm, and vision. Yet it is not just those drinks that are most extraordinary in their effects that come to be celebrated in myth, ritual, and sacred speculation, for often those drinks that are most ordinary—that is, most commonly used as a part of the normal diet and most unremarkable in their physiological and neurological effect—come to be invested with religious significance. Thus, for instance, among the Maasai and other cattle-herding peoples...