As one of the foremost public thinkers of the 1990s, Terence McKenna has made a lasting impact on the world, especially within the psychedelic community and the sphere of psilocybin legalization. Known for his fascinating, often winding lectures, McKenna made complicated, profound ideas accessible to the public.
Terence McKenna’s quotes and ideas, from Stoned Ape Theory, to Time Wave Zero, are still prevalent today in many esoteric circles. Among his numerous explorations of consciousness, culture, and what it means to be human, McKenna literally wrote the book on how to grow psilocybe cubensis mushrooms. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at McKenna’s life and his lasting contributions to the psychedelic community as well as the broader cultural landscape.
McKenna argued that psychedelics have the power to heal society by bringing about an era he coined, borrowing from Milton, as “Paradise Regained.” We think McKenna’s legacy can teach us something valuable for our collective healing and relationship with nature.
Terence McKenna: Early Life and Education
McKenna was born in Colorado in 1946, and was raised on influential esoteric thinkers like Carl Jung. He also took an early interest in science fiction, fossils, and the natural world. As a teenager, he learned about psychedelics through literature. Notably, he read Gordon Wasson’s article “ Seeking the Magic Mushroom” about his time in Huautla de Jiménez with Maria Sabina.
In 1965, McKenna attended UC Berkeley, driven by an interdisciplinary interest in psychedelics, shamanism, and ecology. Throughout his college experience and gap years, McKenna immersed himself in the study of Jewish mysticism, Tibetan Shamanism, and the ancient Chinese divination text, I Ching. All the while, Terence McKenna experimented with hallucinogenic substances, with these rich cultural texts scaffolding his experience.
Terence McKenna Travels and Amazon Adventures
In 1970, McKenna travelled to the Colombian Amazon rainforest with his brother Dennis McKenna. Though they were in search of a plant containing DMT, they ended up discovering vast pastures filled with cubensis mushrooms growing in cow dung, and shifted gears significantly. Though he didn’t know it at the time, this discovery of foraged mushrooms turned out to be a pivotal moment for his legacy and career.
The McKenna’s had never tried mushrooms before, but quickly discovered their potential for mind-expanding experiences. They thought the experience would be comparable to LSD but realized it was entirely different. McKenna described the mushroom as a “transcendental doorway” that opened up a connection to profound teachings and even the divine. McKenna left Colombia with a changed perspective: the spiritual experience and teachings he gained from those mushrooms led him to pursue an interest in magic mushrooms with more fervor.
Psilocybin, Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide
The brothers saved mushroom spores from that initial discovery in the Amazon, and used them to conduct a series of experiments on how to grow mushrooms. Together with his brother Dennis, under pseudonyms O. N. Oeric and O. T. Oss, McKenna wrote Psilocybin, Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide: A Handbook for Psilocybin Enthusiasts. This highly influential volume provided one of the first widely accessible books on the subject, providing simple techniques on mushroom cultivation. The book’s charmingly mystical and philosophical tone and themes make it entertaining as well as highly informative.
Most people today use spore syringes and have lots of equipment at their disposal because of big box stores and online shopping. In the beginning, mushroom cultivation was much more rudimentary. Still, the main tenets of the book ring true, and the book has been absolutely foundational to mushroom cultivation techniques. McKenna even circulated many of the most famous magic mushroom strains that are still well-known today. For example, our Syzygy cubensis isolated spore syringes are rumored to have originated from McKenna’s own collection. Today, many people continue to do their genetic research in McKenna’s honor. One resulting strain is McKennaii Cubensis, which was named in his honor.
Terence McKenna Books and Writing
McKenna immersed himself in rich intellectual traditions from around the world, synthesizing his psychedelic experiences into profound wisdom and revelation. McKenna engaged with timeless metaphysical questions in extensive lectures and notable books. With such an expansive body of work, it can be intimidating to decide where to start with Terence Mckenna books, but here are a couple of his most notable works.
The Invisible Landscape (1975)
Terence and Dennis wrote the Invisible Landscape together after their experience in the Amazon. It’s one of his earliest works, and contains many of the ideas that make up McKenna’s lasting legacy. Stoned Ape Theory, which was introduced in The Invisible Landscape, posits that psilocybin mushrooms were the driving force behind the advanced brain development of early humans, setting them apart from other primates like apes. By ingesting psilocybin, early humans triggered higher levels of consciousness and cognitive abilities, which drove cultural development and made humanity what it is today.
The Archaic Revival (1991)
This book explores McKenna’s critiques of modern society, in contrast to the religious practices of early human history during the Paleolithic era. He posits psychedelics and revived shamanistic practices as a potential antidote for some of the ills of modernity.
Food of the Gods (1992)
McKenna’s Food of the Gods book is an expansive exploration of mind-altering substances: their history, and how they’ve shaped our world, starting with psilocybin mushrooms, which he posits as the first drug and major catalyst for human development. Terence McKenna’s Food of the Gods shows how psychedelics were a part of early human history, and considers how far we’ve fallen today, even considering fixations like sugar and television to be modern day drugs. In his final section, Paradise Regained, he suggests how a renewed relationship with psychedelics in the modern day can help heal our broken world and relationship with nature.
True Hallucinations (1993)
This account of the McKenna brothers’ time in the Amazon provides a more in-depth look into their encounters with shamanism. While the stories themselves took place during the 1970’s this book provides a thought-provoking reflection on it after years had passed. It’s metaphysical, entertaining, and humorous while touching on philosophical ideas that stuck with Terence throughout his life.
Terence McKenna Philosophy and Ideas
McKenna put out many novel ideas throughout his career, but most of his books tend to focus on the same recurring themes.
Psychedelics as tools for consciousness expansion
McKenna’s views on psychedelics as a tool for consciousness expansion come from his personal psychedelic experiences as well as his theory about human evolution, known as the Stoned Ape Theory. Within his theory of evolution, early humans and primates in Africa began exploring grasslands and ‘testing’ the foods there, including the psilocybin mushroom Psilocybe Cubensis commonly found in the region.
In small doses, psilocybin mushrooms improved the visual acuity of the primates that consumed them, which improved their adaptation to their environment both as predators and prey. McKenna argues this advantage led to a sort of behavioral evolution in which those primates which consumed mushrooms survived longer and were able to reproduce better.
The main thing that sets Homo Sapiens and other early human species apart from other primates, is our remarkable brain size. McKenna argues that human evolution was a remarkable shift in brain size and cognition, at least in part, due to mind altering substances that expanded our consciousness. He suggested that higher doses would have led to spiritual, transcendental experiences and the development of advanced language and spirituality as we know it today.
Critique of materialism, consumerism, and ecological destruction and Shamanism and archaic revival
McKenna argued that early humans experienced deep connections with nature and one another, facilitated by their social structures and psychedelic rituals.
For him, the rise of “dominator culture,” in other words, modernity, Western colonial and neoliberal ideology, has severed people from core aspects of their humanity. A materialistic focus on hoarding and consumption causes ecological destruction, and drives a wedge between us and our fundamental connection with nature. McKenna argued that mainstream society has lost sight of the things that really matter, but reinvesting ourselves in the rituals of the past, also known as Archaic Revival, can help our society be reborn into a more balanced one.
Timewave Zero & 2012 prediction: I Ching and Novelty Theory
Timewave Zero is a complex theory about how time works as a fractal structure rather than in a linear fashion. In his Timewave Zero theory, McKenna thought of time as a “resonance created by other times” consisting of an “interference pattern” resulting in different moments.
McKenna theorized that ‘waves’ of time shape the complexity of events and forces in the world, or novelty. In his reading of the I Ching, McKenna was greatly inspired by the idea that one could predict or divine the future by thinking of moments as unique essences. When McKenna put his own ideas in conversation with the ancient Chinese divination text, the I Ching, he found that not only did this ancient text corroborate his ideas about the ebbs and flow of time, it also suggested the year 2012 was the year when all the world’s contradictions would reach a climax.
Interestingly, McKenna’s claims about 2012 aligned with the Mayan calendar which famously predicted the end of the world in 2012. He made this prediction in his 1967 book, The Invisible Landscape, long before popular theories about that Mayan calendar and the end of the world circulated.
“The felt presence of direct experience”
McKenna thought of mass media as a tool for brainwashing and cultural programming. Thoroughly addicted to television—and if McKenna were alive today, he would probably extend this to social media—the general population becomes infected with a learned helplessness, a loss of agency and a failure to engage with culture beyond mindless consumption. With no creativity or ability to think freely, mass media homogenizes each individual with similar desires and beliefs based on cultural programming.
He encouraged people to create, and actively participate in culture, rather than passively consuming or allowing culture to be spoon fed to them. McKenna stressed the value of subjectivity and ‘direct experience’, that is thinking and creating for oneself rather than passively consuming.
Terence McKenna Lectures and Influence on Counterculture
Like the notable figures that came before him, be it Maria Sabina, Timothy Leary, or Albert Hoffman, Terence McKenna made waves in the psychedelic community and counterculture movement at large. Many still listen to his discursive lectures today, and find that they ring just as true today as they did decades ago when they were first recorded. His captivating skills as a public speaker has allowed his message to move beyond the medium of the lecture format, and into realms of art and music. Today, his lectures are widely sampled throughout many genres of electronic music, creating a lasting legacy in circles like the electronic dance music culture.
Terence McKenna passed away in April of 2000 but his legacy as a thinker and spiritual leader lives on throughout the psychedelic community. At Inoculate The World, we frequently find ourselves returning to his books and lectures for creative inspiration and comfort in our chaotic world, and we hope you’ll check out some of his work for yourself.