Terence McKenna

From the Lesson

In Also sprach Zarathustra the prophet descends from his mountain twice: the first time to speak to a market crowd that laughs at him, the second time to gather his own disciples and to demand of them that they break the old tablets and write new ones. "Zerbrecht mir die alten Tafeln!" — Break, for me, the old tablets — is the imperative that closes the third part of Zarathustra and opens onto the question every serious reader of Nietzsche eventually faces: if the old tablets are broken, who writes the new ones?

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, one of the most vivid answers came from a botanist, ethnopharmacologist, and public speaker named Terence McKenna (1946–2000). His Food of the Gods (Bantam, 1992), The Archaic Revival (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), True Hallucinations (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), and the Trialogues at the Edge of the West (with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham) constitute the most systematic modern attempt to write new tablets from inside the exact experience — direct entheogenic gnosis — that our species used to write the first ones.

The Stoned Ape Thesis and the Original Tablets

McKenna's central historical claim (Food of the Gods, chapters 1–5) is that the emergence of symbolic cognition in Homo sapiens — the lightning-strike by which the anatomically modern human became the symbolic-cognitively modern human between roughly 100,000 and 50,000 years ago — was catalysed by regular dietary contact with Psilocybe cubensis and related tryptamine-bearing fungi growing on the dung of the ungulate herds our ancestors followed across the drying African savanna. The thesis remains controversial in academic anthropology (see Fischer, Psychedelic Studies, 2019, for a fair review), but its philosophical importance is independent of its empirical status: it names the possibility that the very capacity for tablet-writing — for language, myth, art, ritual — was itself an entheogenic gift, and it therefore reframes the modern entheogenic revival not as a novelty but as a return to source.

If McKenna is right (or if he is even directionally right), then the traditions catalogued in this Portal — the Eleusinian mysteries with their kykeon, the Vedic soma, the Aztec teonanácatl, the Amazonian ayahuasca, the Bwiti iboga, the West-African tabernanthe, the Rig-Vedic amrita, the eucharistic sacrament in its original meaning — are not decorative folklore. They are the operational technology by which our species has, since the beginning, gained access to the material from which tablets are written.

The Archaic Revival

McKenna's phrase for the current historical moment — the Archaic Revival — is the most Nietzschean phrase produced in twentieth-century American letters. It names, exactly, what Nietzsche called for at the end of Zarathustra: a return, in an entirely new key, to the pre-priestly, pre-Platonic, pre-metaphysical relationship between the human being and the earth. Not a regression to the archaic; a revival of the archaic capacities inside the modern situation. Meditation, entheogenic exploration, ritual, dream-work, art, and the disciplined reception of visionary material are, in this reading, the technologies by which the modern practitioner recovers the tablet-writing capacity that the priestly interregnum has been suppressing for two thousand years.

Novelty Theory and the Eternal Return

McKenna's Novelty Theory (developed most fully in The Invisible Landscape, 1975, co-authored with his brother Dennis, and in True Hallucinations) proposes that the universe is a habit-forming machine biased toward the production of novelty — of new stable forms — and that this bias accelerates, culminating in what McKenna called the Eschaton or Transcendental Object at the End of Time. The specific numerology (the "Timewave," the 2012 date) has not survived contact with history, and McKenna himself in his final interviews walked back the calendrical claim. But the underlying philosophical intuition — that time is biased toward complexity and that the human being's task is to co-operate with that bias — is the mythopoetic key in which Nietzsche's Eternal Return can be heard by a modern ear: live so that your act contributes to the Novelty of the whole, and could be willed as an eternal contribution. This is the ethical test transposed from Alpine solitude to the Amazonian maloca.