From Terence McKenna interviewed by Gracie & Zarkov:

“Here’s the scenario: You have this climax Edenic partnership society based on orgies and mushrooms and herding, and the drying continues. The mushroom becomes less plentiful. It becomes localized. It becomes seasonal. The mushroom festivals become further and further apart. Eventually this is recognized; there is an anxiety to preserve the mushroom. The obvious strategy then is to put it into honey. But honey itself has the capacity to turn into a psycho-active substance, mead, a crude alcohol. So what begins as a mushroom cult, through a sincere effort to preserve the mushroom cult, turns into a mead cult a few thousand years later. Because the mushrooms are spread thinner and thinner, and the honey is more and more the focus. But look at the consequences of an alcohol cult. Alcohol lowers sensitivity to social cueing while it increases a false sense of verbal facility. So, it sets the stage for boorish behavior. From that comes the suppression of women as part of this bronze-tipped spear/grain surplus/city-building kingship/standing armies/turf-defending mentality that we find in the so-called proto-civilizations. “