Terence McKenna

McKenna is the principal twentieth-century philosopher-popularizer of the psychedelic-entheogenic tradition; the late-twentieth-century reappraisal of psychedelics drew substantially on his lectures and writings.

"Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored." (The Archaic Revival)

McKenna's "archaic revival" was an explicit call to recover indigenous-animist relational ontologies through psychedelic practice; he drew on Amazonian and Mesoamerican shamanic traditions.

"The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the artist, and the priest." (Food of the Gods)

McKenna's timewave-zero eschatological forecasting of a singularity-like 2012 transformation has strong structural affinities with transhumanist millennialism.

"History is the shock wave of eschatology; we are approaching the end of history." (The Archaic Revival)

McKenna's late work synthesizes psychedelic experience with Hermetic-alchemical categories of imaginal worlds; the lineage is explicit.

"The alchemists understood that the imagination was an organ of perception of higher worlds." (The Archaic Revival)

McKenna's stoned-ape hypothesis is, despite the speculative-mystical register of much of his work, a naturalistic theory of human evolution that locates psychedelics within standard ethnobotanical-evolutionary categories.

"Psilocybin mushrooms were a major catalyst in the rapid evolution of the human brain." (Food of the Gods)