Terrence McKenna - His Life & Ideas - Explorer, Philosopher and Wordweaver Extraordinaire!

[Peter Lemkin]

Terence McKenna

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[TH="colspan: 2, align: center"]Terence McKenna[/TH]
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[TD="colspan: 2, align: center"][/TD]
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[TH]Born[/TH]
[TD]November 16, 1946
Paonia, Colorado, United States[/TD]
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[TH]Died[/TH]
[TD]April 3, 2000 (aged 53)
San Rafael, California, United States[/TD]
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[TH]Occupation[/TH]
[TD="class: role"]Author, lecturer[/TD]
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[TH]Language[/TH]
[TD]English[/TD]
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[TH]Nationality[/TH]
[TD="class: category"]American[/TD]
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[TH]Education[/TH]
[TD]B.S. in ecology, resource conservation and shamanism[/TD]
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[TH]Alma mater[/TH]
[TD]University of California, Berkeley[/TD]
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[TH]Period[/TH]
[TD]20th[/TD]
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[TH]Subjects[/TH]
[TD]Shamanism, ethnobotany,metaphysics, psychedelic drugs,alchemy[/TD]
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[TH]Notable work(s)[/TH]
[TD]The Archaic Revival, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge - A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise,The Invisible Landscape[/TD]
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[TH]Spouse(s)[/TH]
[TD]Kathleen Harrison[/TD]
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[TH]Children[/TH]
[TD]Finn McKenna & Klea McKenna[/TD]
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[TH]Relative(s)[/TH]
[TD]Dennis McKenna[/TD]
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Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 April 3, 2000) was an American philosopher, psychonaut, ethnobotanist, lecturer, and author. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, culture, technology and the theoretical origins of human consciousness.
He was called the "Timothy Leary of the 90's",[SUP][1][/SUP][SUP][2][/SUP] "one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism"[SUP][3][/SUP] and the "intellectual voice of Rave culture".[SUP][4][/SUP] He also formulated a concept about the nature of time based on fractal patterns he claimed to have discovered in the I Ching, which he called novelty theory,[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][5][/SUP] proposing this predicted the end of time in the year 2012.[SUP][6][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP][SUP][5][/SUP][SUP][8][/SUP] His promotion of novelty theory and its connection to the Mayan calendar is credited as one of the factors leading to the widespread beliefs about 2012 eschatology.[SUP][9][/SUP] Novelty theory is considered pseudoscience.[SUP][10][/SUP][SUP][11][/SUP]

Contents

• 1 Biography
  • 1.1 Early life
    
  • 1.2 Studying and traveling
    
  • 1.3 Psilocybin mushroom cultivation
    
  • 1.4 Mid- to later life
    • 1.4.1 Public speaking
      
    • 1.4.2 Botanical dimensions
      
    
    
  • 1.5 Death
    
  • 1.6 Library fire
    
  
  
• 2 Thought
  • 2.1 Psychedelics
    • 2.1.1 Machine elves
      
    
    
  • 2.2 "Stoned ape" theory of human evolution
    
  • 2.3 The archaic revival
    
  • 2.4 Novelty theory and Timewave Zero
    
  
  
• 3 Critical reception
  
• 4 Bibliography
  
• 5 Spoken word
  
• 6 Discography
  
• 7 Filmography
  
• 8 See also
  
• 9 Notes
  
• 10 References
  
• 11 External links
  

Biography

Early life

Born and raised in Paonia, Colorado,[SUP][12][/SUP][SUP][5][/SUP][SUP][13][/SUP] Terence McKenna had Irish ancestry on his father's side and Welsh forebears on his mother's.[SUP][14][/SUP] Introduced togeology through his uncle, he developed a hobby of solitary fossil-hunting in the arroyos near his home.[SUP][15][/SUP] From this he developed a deep artistic and scientific appreciation of nature. He also became interested in human psychology at a young age, reading Carl Jung's book Psychology and Alchemy at the age of 10.[SUP][6][/SUP]
At age 16 McKenna moved to Los Altos, California to live with family friends for a year. He finished high school in Lancaster, CA.[SUP][13][/SUP] In 1963, McKenna was introduced to the literary world of psychedelics through The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley and certain issues of The Village Voicethat talked about psychedelics.[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][13][/SUP]
McKenna said that one of his early psychedelic experiences with morning-glory seeds showed him "that there was something there worth pursuing",[SUP][13][/SUP] and in interviews McKenna claimed to have smokedcannabis daily since his teens.[SUP][16][/SUP]

Studying and traveling

In 1965, McKenna enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley and was accepted into the Tussman Experimental College.[SUP][16][/SUP] In 1967, while in college, he discovered and began studying shamanism through the study of Tibetan folk religion.[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][17][/SUP][SUP][18][/SUP] That same year, which he called his "opium and kabbala phase"[SUP][19][/SUP][SUP][6][/SUP] he traveled to Jerusalem, where he met Kathleen Harrison, who would later become his wife.[SUP][6][/SUP][SUP][16][/SUP][SUP][19][/SUP]
In 1969, McKenna traveled to Nepal led by his interest in Tibetan painting and hallucinogenic shamanism.[SUP][20][/SUP] He sought out shaman of the Bon tradition, which predated Tibetan Buddhism, trying to learn more about the shamanic use of visionary plants.[SUP][12][/SUP] During his time there, he also studied the Tibetan language[SUP][20][/SUP] and worked as a hashish smuggler,[SUP][6][/SUP] until "one of his Bombay-to-Aspen shipments fell into the hands of U. S. Customs."[SUP][21][/SUP] He then wandered through southeast Asia viewing ruins,[SUP][21][/SUP] spent time as a professional butterfly collector in Indonesia,[SUP][6][/SUP][SUP][22][/SUP][SUP][23][/SUP] and worked as an English teacher inTokyo, before finally returning to Berkeley to continue studying biology, which he called "his first love".[SUP][24][/SUP]
After the partial completion of his studies, and his mother's death[SUP][25][/SUP] from cancer in 1971,[SUP][26][/SUP] McKenna, his brother Dennis, and three friends traveled to the Colombian Amazon in search of oo-koo-hé, a plant preparation containing dimethyltryptamine (DMT).[SUP][5][/SUP][SUP][25][/SUP] Instead of oo-koo-hé they found various forms of ayahuasca, or yagé,[SUP][27][/SUP] and fields full of gigantic Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms, which became the new focus of the expedition.[SUP][6][/SUP][SUP][12][/SUP][SUP][5][/SUP][SUP][28][/SUP][SUP][25][/SUP] In La Chorrera, at the urging of his brother, he was the subject of a psychedelic experiment[SUP][5][/SUP] which he claimed put him in contact with "Logos": an informative, divine voice he believed was universal to visionary religious experience.[SUP][29][/SUP] The voice's reputed revelations and his brother's simultaneous peculiar experience prompted him to explore the structure of an early form of the I Ching, which led to his "Novelty Theory".[SUP][5][/SUP][SUP][8][/SUP][SUP][30][/SUP] During their stay in the Amazon, McKenna also became romantically involved with his interpreter, Ev.[SUP][31][/SUP]
In 1972, McKenna returned to U.C. Berkeley to finish his studies[SUP][16][/SUP] and in 1975, he graduated with a degree in ecology, shamanism and conservation of natural resources.[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][22][/SUP][SUP][23][/SUP] In the autumn of 1975, after parting with his girlfriend Ev earlier in the year,[SUP][32][/SUP] McKenna began a relationship with his future wife and the mother of his two children Kathleen Harrison.[SUP][16][/SUP][SUP][8][/SUP][SUP][19][/SUP]
Soon after graduating, McKenna and Dennis published a book inspired by their Amazon experiences, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens and the I Ching.[SUP][16][/SUP][SUP][33][/SUP][SUP][5][/SUP] The brothers' experiences in the Amazon would later be the main focus of McKenna's book True Hallucinations, published in 1993.[SUP][12][/SUP] McKenna also began lecturing[SUP][16][/SUP] locally around Berkeley and started appearing on some underground Radio stations.[SUP][6][/SUP]

Psilocybin mushroom cultivation

During McKenna's studies, he also developed a technique for cultivating psilocybin mushrooms with Dennis[SUP][32][/SUP][SUP][28][/SUP] and in 1976, the brothers published what they had learned in a book entitled Psilocybin - Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, under the pseudonyms "OT Oss" and "ON Oeric".[SUP][12][/SUP] McKenna and his brother were the first to come up with a reliable method for cultivating psilocybin mushrooms at home.[SUP][12][/SUP][SUP][28][/SUP][SUP][16][/SUP] As ethnobiologist Jonathan Ott explains, "[the] authors adapted San Antonio's technique (for producing edible mushrooms by casing mycelial cultures on a rye grain substrate; San Antonio 1971) to the production of Psilocybe [Stropharia] cubensis. The new technique involved the use of ordinary kitchen implements, and for the first time the layperson was able to produce a potent entheogen in his own home, without access to sophisticated technology, equipment or chemical supplies."[SUP][34][/SUP] When the 1986 revised edition was published the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide had sold over 100,000 copies.[SUP][35][/SUP][SUP][12][/SUP]

Mid- to later life

Public speaking

In the early 1980s, McKenna began to speak publicly on the topic of psychedelic drugs, becoming one of the pioneers of the psychedelic movement in the west.[SUP][36][/SUP] His main focus was on the plant based psychedelics like; psilocybin mushrooms (which were the catalyst for his career),[SUP][12][/SUP] ayahuasca, cannabis and the plant derivative DMT.[SUP][6][/SUP] He conducted lecture tours and workshops[SUP][6][/SUP] promoting natural psychedelics as a way to explore universal mysteries, stimulate the imagination and re-establish a harmonious relationship with nature.[SUP][37][/SUP] Though associated with the New Age and human potential movements, McKenna himself had little patience for New Age sensibilities.[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][8][/SUP][SUP][38][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP] He repeatedly stressed the importance and primacy of the "felt presence of direct experience", as opposed todogma.[SUP][39][/SUP]
In addition to psychedelic drugs, McKenna spoke on a wide array of subjects including; shamanism; metaphysics; alchemy; language; culture; self-empowerment; techno-paganism; artificial intelligence;evolution; extraterrestrials; science and scientism; the web; virtual reality (which he saw as a way to artistically communicate the experience of psychedelics); and aesthetic theory, specifically about art/visual experience as information representing the significance of hallucinatory visions experienced under the influence of psychedelics.
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[TD]"[/TD]
[TD]It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These are the two things that the psychedelics attack. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.[/TD]
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Terence McKenna, "This World...and Its Double", [SUP][40][/SUP]

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McKenna soon became a fixture of popular counterculture[SUP][6][/SUP][SUP][37][/SUP][SUP][5][/SUP] with Timothy Leary once introducing him as "one of the five or six most important people on the planet"[SUP][41][/SUP] and with comedian Bill Hicks' referencing him in his stand-up act.[SUP][42][/SUP] He published several books in the early-to-mid-1990s including: The Archaic Revival; Food of the Gods; and True Hallucinations (relating the tale of his 1971 La Chorrera experience).[SUP][6][/SUP][SUP][12][/SUP][SUP][22][/SUP]
He also became a popular personality in the psychedelic rave/dance scene of the early 1990s,[SUP][22][/SUP][SUP][43][/SUP] with frequent spoken word performances at raves and contributions to psychedelic and goa trance albums by The Shamen,[SUP][37][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP] Spacetime Continuum, Alien Project, Capsula, Entheogenic, Zuvuya, Shpongle, and Shakti Twins. His speeches were, and are, sampled by many.[SUP][4][/SUP] In 1994 he appeared as a speaker at the Starwood Festival, documented in the book Tripping by Charles Hayes. His lectures were produced on both cassette tape and CD.[SUP][44][/SUP]
McKenna was colleagues and close friends with chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham, and author and biologist Rupert Sheldrake. He conducted several public and many private debates with them from 1982 until his death.[SUP][45][/SUP][SUP][46][/SUP][SUP][47][/SUP] These debates were known as trialogues and some of the discussions were later published in the books: Trialogues at the Edge of the West and The Evolutionary Mind.[SUP][45][/SUP][SUP][3][/SUP]

Botanical dimensions

In 1985, McKenna founded Botanical Dimensions with his then-wife Kathleen Harrison.[SUP][22][/SUP][SUP][48][/SUP] Botanical Dimensions is a nonprofit ethnobotanical preserve on the big island of Hawaii.[SUP][3][/SUP] It was set up to collect, protect, propagate and understand plants of ethno-medical significance and their lore and appreciate, study, and educate others about plants and mushrooms felt to be significant to cultural integrity and spiritual well-being.[SUP][49][/SUP] The 19 acre botanical garden[SUP][3][/SUP] is a repository containing thousands of plants, which have been used by indigenous people of the tropical regions and includes adatabase of information related to purported healing properties of plants.[SUP][50][/SUP] McKenna was involved until 1992 when he retired from the project,[SUP][48][/SUP] following Kathleen and his divorce earlier in the year.[SUP][16][/SUP]Kathleen still manages Botanical Dimensions as its president & projects director.[SUP][49][/SUP] After their divorce, McKenna moved to Hawaii permanently, where he built a modernist house[SUP][16][/SUP] and created a gene bank of rare plants near his home.[SUP][22][/SUP] Previously, he had split his time between Hawaii and Occidental, CA.

Death

Terence McKenna during a panel discussion at the 1999 AllChemical Arts Conference, held at Kona, Hawaii.

In mid-1999, after a long lecturing tour, McKenna returned to his home on the big island of Hawaii. A longtime sufferer of migraines, McKenna had begun to have increasingly painful headaches. His condition culminated in three brain seizures in one night, which he claimed were the most powerful psychedelic experiences he had ever known. McKenna was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer.[SUP][12][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP][SUP][28][/SUP] For the next several months he underwent various treatments, including experimental gamma knife radiation treatment. According to Wired magazine, McKenna was worried that his tumor was caused by his 35 years ofsmoking cannabis, although his doctors assured him there was no causal relation.[SUP][28][/SUP]
In late 1999, Erik Davis conducted what would be the last interview with McKenna.[SUP][28][/SUP] During the interview McKenna also talked about the announcement of his death:
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[TD]"[/TD]
[TD]I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you'd have no time to sort it out. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and talk to people and hear what they have to say, it's a kind of blessing. It's certainly an opportunity to grow up and get a grip and sort it all out. Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you're going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights. ... It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, a la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears.[SUP][51][/SUP]
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McKenna died on April 3, 2000, at the age of 53.[SUP][16][/SUP][SUP][8][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP]

Library fire

On February 7, 2007, McKenna's library of books and personal notes was destroyed in a fire that burned offices belonging to Big Sur's Esalen Institute, which was storing the collection. An indexmaintained by his brother Dennis survives, though little else.[SUP][52][/SUP]

Thought

Psychedelics

Terence McKenna advocated the exploration of altered states of mind via the ingestion of naturally occurring psychedelic substances.[SUP][33][/SUP][SUP][43][/SUP][SUP][5][/SUP] For example, and in particular, as facilitated by the ingestion of high doses of psychedelic mushrooms,[SUP][53][/SUP] ayahuasca and DMT,[SUP][6][/SUP] which he believed was the apotheosis of the psychedelic experience. However he was less enthralled with the synthetic drugs[SUP][6][/SUP]stating that "I think drugs should come from the natural world and be use-tested by shmanically orientated cultures...one cannot predict the long term effects of a drug produced in a Laboratory."[SUP][3][/SUP]McKenna always stressed the responsible use of psychedelic plants saying: "Experimenters should be very careful. One must build up to the experience. These are bizarre dimensions of extraordinary power and beauty. There is no set rule to avoid being overwhelmed, but move carefully, reflect a great deal, and always try to map experiences back onto the history of the race and the philosophical and religious accomplishments of the species. All the compounds are potentially dangerous, and all compounds, at sufficient doses or repeated over time, involve risks. The library is the first place to go when looking into taking a new compound."[SUP][54][/SUP] He also recommended and often spoke of taking, what he called, 'heroic doses,'[SUP][33][/SUP] which he defined as five dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms[SUP][6][/SUP] taken in silent darkness.[SUP][28][/SUP] Believing that it is only when you are slain with the power of the mushroom that the message becomes clear.[SUP][53][/SUP]
Although he avoided giving his allegiance to any one interpretation (part of his rejection of monotheism), he was open to the idea of psychedelics as being "trans-dimensional travel"; proposing that DMT sent one to a "parallel dimension"[SUP][8][/SUP] and psychedelics literally, enabled an individual to encounter 'higher dimensional entities'[SUP][55][/SUP] or what could be ancestors, or spirits of the Earth,[SUP][56][/SUP] saying that if you can trust your own perceptions it appears that you are entering an "ecology of souls."[SUP][57][/SUP] McKenna also put forward the idea that psychedelics were "doorways into the Gaian mind"[SUP][43][/SUP][SUP][58][/SUP] suggesting that "the planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being" and that the psychedelic plants were the facilitators of this communication.[SUP][59][/SUP][SUP][60][/SUP] In a more radical version of biophysicist Francis Crick's hypothesis of directed panspermia; another idea McKenna speculated on, was that, psilocybin mushrooms are a species of high intelligence,[SUP][3][/SUP] which may have arrived on this planet as spores migrating through space[SUP][8][/SUP][SUP][61][/SUP] and are attempting to establish a symbiotic relationship with human beings. He postulated that "intelligence, not life, but intelligence may have come here [to Earth] in this spore-bearing life form" pointing out that "I think that theory will probably be vindicated. I think in a hundred years if people do biology they will think it quite silly that people once thought that spores could not be blown from one star system to another by cosmic radiation pressure" and believed that "Few people are in a position to judge its extraterrestrial potential, because few people in the orthodox sciences have ever experienced the full spectrum of psychedelic effects that are unleashed."[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][17][/SUP][SUP][18][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP]
McKenna was opposed to Christianity[SUP][62][/SUP] and most forms of organized religion or guru-based forms of spiritual awakening, favouring shamanism, which he believed was the broadest spiritual paradigm available, stating that:

"What I think happened is that in the world of prehistory all religion was experiential, and it was based on the pursuit of ecstasy through plants. And at some time, very early, a group interposed itself between people and direct experience of the 'Other.' This created hierarchies, priesthoods, theological systems, castes, ritual, taboos. Shamanism, on the other hand, is an experiential science that deals with an area where we know nothing. It is important to remember that our epistemological tools have developed very unevenly in the West. We know a tremendous amount about what is going on in the heart of the atom, but we know absolutely nothing about the nature of the mind."[SUP][63][/SUP]

Either philosophically or religiously, he expressed admiration for: Marshall McLuhan, Alfred North Whitehead, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Carl Jung, Plato, Gnostic Christianity and Alchemy, while regarding the Greek philosopher Heraclitus as his favorite philosopher.[SUP][64][/SUP]
He also expressed admiration for the works of Aldous Huxley,[SUP][3][/SUP] James Joyce; calling Finnegans Wake "the quintessential work of art, or at least work of literature of the 20th century,"[SUP][65][/SUP] the science fictionwriter Philip K. Dick who he described as an "incredible genius,"[SUP][66][/SUP] fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, with whom McKenna shared the belief that; "scattered through the ordinary world there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms, of impossible and contradictory truth"[SUP][8][/SUP] and Vladimir Nabokov: McKenna once said that he would have become a Nabokov lecturer if he had never encountered psychedelics.
During the final years of his life and career, McKenna became very engaged in the theoretical realm of technology. He was an early proponent of the technological singularity[SUP][8][/SUP] and in his last recorded public talk, Psychedelics in The Age of Intelligent Machines, he outlined ties between psychedelics, computation technology, and humans.[SUP][67][/SUP] He also became very enamored with the Internet saying it was "the birth of [the] global mind",[SUP][16][/SUP] believing it to be a place where psychedelic culture could flourish.[SUP][28][/SUP]

Machine elves

McKenna spoke of hallucinations while on DMT in which he claims he met intelligent entities he described as "self-transforming machine elves".[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][8][/SUP][SUP][68][/SUP][SUP][69][/SUP]

"So I did it and...there was a something, like a flower, like a chrysanthemum in orange and yellow that was sort of spinning, spinning, and then it was like I was pushed from behind and I fell through the chrysanthemum into another place that didn't seem like a state of mind, it seemed like another place. And what was going on in this place aside from the tastefully soffited indirect lighting, and the crawling geometric hallucinations along the domed walls, what was happening was that there were a lot of beings in there, what I call self-transforming machine elves. Sort of like jewelled basketballs all dribbling their way toward me. And if they'd had faces they would have been grinning, but they didn't have faces. And they assured me that they loved me and they told me not to be amazed; not to give way to astonishment."[SUP][70][/SUP]
Terence McKenna, Alien Dreamtime

"Stoned ape" theory of human evolution

In his book Food of the Gods, McKenna proposed that the transformation from humans' early ancestors Homo erectus to the species Homo sapiens mainly had to do with the addition of the mushroompsilocybe cubensis in its diet,[SUP][71][/SUP] an event which according to his theory took place in about 100,000 BC (this is when he believed that the species diverged from the Homo genus).[SUP][22][/SUP][SUP][72][/SUP] McKenna based his theory on the main effects, or alleged effects, produced by the mushroom[SUP][3][/SUP] while citing studies by Roland Fischer et al. from the late 1960s to early 1970s.[SUP][73][/SUP][SUP][74][/SUP]
McKenna stated that due to the desertification of the African continent at that time, man's forerunners were forced from the increasingly shrinking tropical canopy in search of new food sources.[SUP][6][/SUP] He believed they would have been following the large herds of wild cattle whose dung harbored the insects that, he proposed, were undoubtedly part of their new diet and in turn would have spotted and started eating psilocybe cubensis, a dung loving mushroom often found growing out of cowpat.[SUP][6][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP][SUP][43][/SUP]

Psilocybe cubensis: the psilocybin containing mushroom central to McKenna's "stoned ape" theory of human evolution.

McKenna's hypothesis was that low doses of psilocybin improves visual acuity. Meaning that the presence of psilocybin in the diet of early pack hunting primates caused the individuals who were consuming psilocybin mushrooms to be better hunters than those who were not, resulting in an increased food supply and in turn a higher rate ofreproductive success.[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP][SUP][43][/SUP] Then at slightly higher doses, he contended, the mushroom acts to sexually arouse. This leads to a higher level of attention, a certain level of energy in the organism and can lead to erection in the males,[SUP][3][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP] claiming this would make it even more evolutionarily beneficial as it would result in more offspring.[SUP][43][/SUP][SUP][71][/SUP]At even higher doses, McKenna proposed that the mushroom would have acted to "dissolve boundaries," promoting community-bonding and group sexual activities.[SUP][12][/SUP][SUP][43][/SUP]Consequently there would be a mixing of genes, greater genetic diversity and a communal sense of responsibility for the group offspring.[SUP][75][/SUP] At these higher doses McKenna also argued that psilocybin would be triggering activity in the "language forming region of the brain" which manifests as music and visions[SUP][3][/SUP] thus catalysing the emergence of language in early hominids by expanding "their arboreally evolved repertoire of troop signals."[SUP][7][/SUP] Also pointing out that it would dissolve the ego and "religiousconcerns would be at the forefront of the tribe's consciousness, simply because of the power and strangeness of the experience itself."[SUP][75][/SUP][SUP][43][/SUP]
Therefore according to McKenna, access to and ingestion of mushrooms was an evolutionary advantage to humans' omnivorous hunter-gatherer ancestors,[SUP][76][/SUP] also providing the first religious impulse in man.[SUP][77][/SUP] He believed psilocybin mushrooms were the "evolutionary catalyst"[SUP][3][/SUP] from which language, projective imagination, the arts, religion, philosophy, science and all of human culture sprang.[SUP][8][/SUP][SUP][7][/SUP][SUP][28][/SUP]
Later on this idea was given the name "The 'Stoned Ape' Hypothesis."[SUP][43][/SUP]
McKenna's "stoned ape" theory has not received attention from the scientific community and has been criticized on several fronts. His ideas regarding psilocybin and visual acuity have been criticized for lacking evidence and for misrepresenting Fischer et al., who studied medium doses (not low doses) of psilocybin and found that perception (not visual acuity) was changed. Fischer et al. further state that psilocybin "may not be conducive to the survival of the organism". There is also a lack of evidence that psilocybin increases sexual arousal, and even if this were true, it does not necessarily entail an evolutionary advantage. It may even be a disadvantage in the context of the presumed higher sexual competition in Homo Erectus as indicated by its higher sexual dimorphism relative to Homo sapiens.[SUP][78][/SUP] Others have pointed to civilisations, like the Aztecs, who used psychedelic mushrooms (at least among the Priestly class) and they didn't reflect McKenna's model of how psychedelic using cultures would behave, for example, by carrying out horrendous acts of aggression such as human sacrifice.[SUP][12][/SUP] Although, it has been noted that, the usage by the Azec civilisation is far removed from the type of usage McKenna was speculating on.[SUP][43][/SUP] There are also examples of Amazonian tribes such as; the Jivaro and the Yanomami who use ayahuasca ceremoniously and who are known for theirviolence. This, it has been argued, suggests the use of psychedelic plants does not necessarily suppress the ego and create harmonious societies.[SUP][43][/SUP]

The archaic revival

One of the main themes running through McKenna's work, and the title of his second book, was the idea that western civilization was undergoing what he called an "archaic revival".[SUP][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna#cite_note-Maveri...