Mushroom Bard & Psychedelic Talker
Ex-hashish smuggler who co-wrote the guide to growing magic mushrooms at home, smoked cannabis daily for 35 years and lectured ravers toward a 2012 end of history that never came.
Psychedelic Talker, Mushroom Grower & Ethnobotanist
Terence McKenna smuggled hashish, co-wrote the manual that put psilocybin mushrooms in American closets, smoked cannabis every day for thirty-five years, and became the most quoted psychedelic speaker of the late twentieth century. He told audiences to take five dried grams in silent darkness, described the “self-transforming machine elves” he met on DMT, and argued that mushrooms turned apes into talkers. Some of it was serious ethnobotany, much of it was superb performance, and two of his grandest ideas, the stoned ape and the 2012 Timewave, failed the tests they invited. This page keeps all three in view.
Terence McKenna was born on 16 November 1946 in Paonia, a small town on what he called “the west slope of Colorado”, where the Fourth of July was Cherry Day and the visiting carnival was the nearest thing to the uncanny. He hunted fossils and collected beetles and butterflies. Looking back in 1989 he called it “this pursuit of iridescence” and said, “I was psychedelic long before I knew anything about psychedelics.”
The reading came early and strange: Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy at fourteen, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, and the 1957 Life magazine article in which R. Gordon Wasson described eating sacred mushrooms in Mexico. At sixteen he left Colorado to finish school in California. He was, he liked to say, born in Colorado and raised in California.
In 1965 he went to the University of California at Berkeley and joined Joseph Tussman’s Experimental Program, a two-year course where, as he remembered it, everyone was made to read Plato, Hobbes, Mill and Voltaire. Tussman’s claim that intelligence can be taught stayed with him for life. He first smoked cannabis that Easter vacation; it took “a couple or three exposures” before he understood what it did for him. At nineteen, by his own description, he was into Sartre, Camus, Marxism and Freud (“I was a jerk!”) until a friend offered him a new psychedelic that lasted three minutes. “We’re acid-heads. We can handle three minutes of anything!” he answered, and smoked his first DMT. “It’s never been the same since.”
He left Berkeley in 1968 and went east: Tibetan studies in Nepal, art dealing, the back streets of Bombay, and hashish smuggling. In his own later telling he was indicted while he was in India. The journalist Erik Davis, who interviewed him at length in 1999, wrote that “a stateside bust forced him into hiding in the wilds of Indonesia”, where McKenna worked as a professional butterfly collector supplying Japanese collectors. “When I hit the mushroom at La Chorrera in 1971, Interpol was looking for me,” he told a 1993 workshop. “I had a price on my head, I had no money, I had blown my college education.” The case, he said in 1998, was “all settled by the mid-1970s.”
In early 1971 Terence, his younger brother Dennis and three friends went into the Colombian Amazon looking for the region’s DMT-bearing shamanic preparations. At the village of La Chorrera that spring they found fields thick with the magic mushroom Psilocybe cubensis, then called Stropharia cubensis. The trail in, Terence later said, was 110 kilometres, and the second time he walked it he could not believe they had managed the first.
On their third mushroom night, sitting in hammocks in a dark hut, Dennis made what Terence called “a very strange noise… like a metallic” sound, and by morning he had a theory. Memory, Dennis reasoned, must be stored in the DNA of neurons, perhaps by room-temperature superconductivity. Saturate the body with harmine and related β-carbolines from the ayahuasca vine, then make a sound with the mouth tuned to an overtone of the molecules’ electron spin resonance, and a few correctly oriented drug molecules would be “canceled”, bond into the DNA of neurons and fix the trip in place for life, producing a “translinguistic matter”, an obsidian fluid “obedient to your own imagination”. Dennis called the procedure hypercarbolation.
Terence said he would have bet “dollars to doughnuts” against it and told his brother to go ahead. What happened was, in his words, “not what he predicted, but not nothing”. Terence stopped sleeping for eleven days and felt “filled to overflowing with gnosis”. Dennis went through “what would be conventionally called a psychotic episode” of about two weeks, identifying first with the universe and then with ever smaller wholes, down to “all the McKennas there ever were”, before he came back “shaken, but fine”. That is Terence’s version, told to Esalen audiences and written up as True Hallucinations (1993). Dennis, who became an ethnopharmacologist with a doctorate, told his own side four decades later in The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (2012; new edition 2023). Read the two together.
Back at Berkeley in 1972 he studied ecology and botany with what he called “a self-directed major in shamanism”, and graduated in 1975. That year he and Dennis published The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching, which tried to turn La Chorrera into theory: the tryptamine and DNA speculation, and the first version of the Timewave.
The book that changed behaviour was smaller. Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide came out from And/Or Press in Berkeley in 1976 under the pseudonyms O. T. Oss and O. N. Oeric, with drawings credited to “Kat”: Kathleen Harrison, an ethnobotanist and Terence’s partner. It taught readers to grow Psilocybe cubensis at home on sterilised rye grain. Dennis, looking back in 2023, admitted “the mercenary motivation” but said the point was to let people “confirm – or not – all this crazy stuff”, to show it was “not just the delusion of two brothers”. The guide, he judged, “did make mushrooms the major psychedelic of the latter part of the 20th century.”
Terence grew commercially himself. Erik Davis reported in Wired that he farmed mushrooms into the 1980s, turning out 70 pounds every six weeks, a trade that “financed the middle-class existence of a relatively settled man”, until a friend who made LSD was busted. “They fucked him so terrifyingly that I saw I couldn’t do this anymore,” McKenna said. What he built instead was a career as a speaker.
The most lasting thing he helped start is a forest garden. Kat Harrison owns five acres in upland South Kona on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, where a small house and a shade-house for plant propagation went up in 1979. In the early 1980s a clearing there was enlarged for a repository of Amazonian plants, brought over to protect their genetic heritage together with notes on their traditional use and mythology. In 1985, in Botanical Dimensions’ own history, “the concept dawned on Kat” to make this a nonprofit, and in 1986 the new organisation bought the neighbouring eight acres of former native forest, at 2,200 feet on the flank of Mauna Loa.
The method was a trail. A wide, winding path was cut through the forest and rare medicinal plants were set along it “just as they often grow in their native habitat”. Until the mid-1990s collectors in Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, Costa Rica, Belize, Kenya and Thailand, some Indigenous or mestizo and some graduate students, sent or carried plants, with traditional lore gathered alongside where possible. Terence paid in lectures. At a 1990 benefit talk he explained the doubled ticket price and said that he and Kat had “conceived it together”, but Kat had “put it on its official feet”. In June 1991 he told a Los Angeles audience that a $51,000 balloon payment on the land was “paid off”: “It’s Kat who fashioned Botanical Dimensions into the functioning entity that it is… that credit all goes to Kat.”
Kat Harrison edited the newsletter PlantWise from 1990 to 1996, funded an Indigenous ethnobotanical garden near Iquitos, Peru, which became the Sachamama Garden directed by Francisco Montes Shuña, and has led Botanical Dimensions ever since. Terence retired from it in 1992, the year their marriage ended; they had two children, Finn and Klea. After he left, Botanical Dimensions was a major funder of the 1993 Hoasca Project, the first detailed biomedical study of long-term ayahuasca drinkers, led by Charles Grob and Dennis McKenna. The garden is now a private reserve fighting invasive species, drought and feral pigs, and its stewards are looking for a new owner.
In December 1983, according to The Archaic Revival, he spoke at a consciousness-and-physics conference at Esalen, the retreat on the Big Sur coast: “the first of many lectures at Esalen”. The Institute counts nearly a hundred. There he perfected the act that made him famous: nasal, funny, erudite, endlessly digressive and completely frank about drugs. The DMT flash, he said, put you where, in the Heraclitus fragment he loved to quote, “the Aeon is a child at play with colored balls”, among entities he called “self-transforming machine elves”, “dynamically contorting topological modules”. Elsewhere they were “self-dribbling jeweled basketballs” whose songs “condense as objects in three-dimensional space”.
His prescription was just as specific. The “heroic dose” was five dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms taken alone, in the dark: “the hard work on five grams in silent darkness,” as he put it at Esalen. He understood his role clearly: “My real function for people was permission… ‘Go ahead, you’ll live through it, get loaded, you don’t have to be afraid.’” Not everyone in the psychedelic world welcomed that. Earth, who ran the Vaults of Erowid drug-information site, told Wired his ideas were “at their best, controversial and, at their worst, confused and delusional”.
The Archaic Revival (1991) collects seventeen pieces from these years, among them the 1983 Esalen talk, “Plan/Plant/Planet” (Whole Earth Review, 1989) and “Mushrooms and Evolution”, first printed in ReVision in spring 1988, which already sets out the stoned-ape idea.
Food of the Gods (1992) is two books in one. One is a revisionist history of the substances humans crave, from spice, sugar and rum to tobacco, opium, cannabis, cocaine and television, arguing that a culture is shaped by the drugs it permits and forbids. He was not neutral. He smoked cannabis daily for decades, and in a 1991 trialogue with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham he argued for decriminalisation, ten plants a person, on the grounds that small amounts for personal use “pose no threat to society”. The other book is the stoned-ape hypothesis, which he had sketched in print by 1988 and laid out step by step to the Los Angeles Mycological Society in September 1991.
As African forests shrank, he argued, hungry early hominids followed herds of hoofed animals across the grasslands, and the herds’ dung grew mushrooms. At small doses, citing the psychologist Roland Fischer’s tests in which lightly dosed subjects noticed sooner when two bars stopped being parallel, he claimed psilocybin sharpened “visual acuity”, so the hunting improved. At somewhat higher doses came “CNS arousal… Horniness is another way of putting this”, so there was more sex and more offspring. At higher doses still came hallucination, stimulation of the brain’s language areas and glossolalia, which he took to be the seed of language, shamanism and “the ability to weave story”.
He called Fischer’s result “Incontrovertible proof. Scientific experiment beyond argument.” Hardly anyone agreed. Erik Davis noted that anthropologists simply ignored the argument. The critique most often cited, by Patricia Helvenston in Rock Art Research (2015), is that McKenna misread Fischer’s studies. And the theory offers no fossil, chemical or genetic evidence that early humans ate mushrooms at all. It remains an untested story rather than a finding, which makes Food of the Gods most valuable as a polemic about which plants a society chooses to criminalise.
In the early 1990s the rave scene adopted him. He performed at raves with techno acts such as the Shamen, spoke at the opening night of the London club Megatripolis in May 1994, giving a talk on salvia divinorum and accelerating novelty, and was hailed by Timothy Leary as “the Timothy Leary of the 1990s”. The Archaic Revival became, in Davis’s words, “particularly influential, especially among ravers”.
The idea he carried onto those stages was the Timewave. He took the King Wen sequence, the traditional order of the I Ching’s 64 hexagrams, and counted how many lines change between each hexagram and the next. He combined those 64 numbers into 384 data points through forward- and backward-running copies of the sequence at three scales, then folded the result into a fractal that supposedly measured the “novelty” of any moment in history. With the programmer Peter Meyer he turned it into software, Timewave Zero. The wave ended, with novelty going to infinity, on 21 December 2012, the end of a cycle in the Maya Long Count calendar.
In January 1996 the mathematician Matthew Watkins met him at Palenque in Chiapas and took the construction apart. Working from the source code in the software manual, Watkins found an unexplained “half twist” that reverses the sign of half the values, footnoted as “not well understood at present”. Without it the wave comes out differently. He also found that the 2012 date “was in no way calculated”; it had been chosen for the best fit with McKenna’s sense of history. By Watkins’s account McKenna conceded that the theory appeared to have “no basis in rational thought” and proposed they write it up together as “Autopsy for a Mathematical Hallucination”. McKenna introduced the critique himself as the strongest yet made, and went on lecturing about the Timewave. On 21 December 2012, twelve years after his death, nothing out of the ordinary happened. The prediction failed.
By the late 1990s he lived mostly in an off-grid house on Mauna Loa in South Kona, built from 1993, with more than 3,000 books, a satellite dish, drawers of Indonesian butterflies and four or five hours a day online. In May 1999, home from six weeks on the road, he was hit by violent headaches, and on 22 May he had a seizure. A CT scan in Kona found a walnut-sized glioblastoma multiforme deep in his right frontal cortex. His doctor described it as a “fruiting body” sending “mycelia” through the surrounding tissue; Davis noted that the language came straight out of the grower’s guide.
He had gamma-knife radiation. When his doctors told him his drug use had not caused the tumour, he pressed them: “So what about 35 years of daily dope smoking?” They pointed to studies suggesting cannabis might shrink tumours. “Listen,” he said, “if cannabis shrinks tumors, we would not be having this conversation.” In October 1999 surgeons at UC San Francisco removed most of the tumour and treated the cavity with an experimental p53 gene therapy. In February 2000 it came back, inoperable. He went to a friend’s house in Marin County and died on 3 April 2000, aged 53.
In his last months he told Davis he had grown “much more in tune with the Buddhist demand for compassion”, and that “taking shamanic drugs and spending your life studying esoteric philosophy is basically a meditation on death.” His family keeps the archive of papers and recordings. Botanical Dimensions continues under Kat Harrison, and Dennis went on to work on preserving the herbarium collections of Iquitos. The fairest way to read McKenna is to take the mushrooms, the elves and the garden as real parts of a real life, and the stoned ape and the Timewave as brilliant performances that failed their own tests.
1997 · 1:24:40
Recorded at Esalen · Free streamingListen to the talk
1982 · 1:14:24
Recorded at Esalen (archive date December 1982) · Free streaming. The same talk, machine elves and all, is chapter 3 of The Archaic Revival.Listen to the talk1999 · Terence McKenna · Recorded talk
A late Esalen performance of McKenna’s suspicion that inherited cultural scripts narrow possible experience.Listen & read1994 · Terence McKenna · Recorded lecture
A 1994 lecture joining desire, novelty and apocalyptic expectation; useful for hearing the architecture of his grand synthesis.Listen & readTerence McKenna · Recorded talk & transcript
A recorded talk with transcript, allowing McKenna’s performed cadence to be checked against the actual words.Listen & read1991 · Terence McKenna · Lecture & transcript
A 1991 lecture to the Los Angeles Mycological Society setting out the stoned-ape hypothesis stage by stage; pair it with “Mushrooms and Evolution” in The Archaic Revival.Listen & read
1998 · Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake & Ralph Abraham · Discussion
The 1998 recorded discussion preserves Sheldrake, McKenna and Abraham responding in real time rather than presenting the later shaped book text.Listen & read
Terence McKenna · Recorded talk
McKenna argues from biological variety toward cultural and technological novelty; listen for where analogy becomes prediction.Listen & read
Terence McKenna · Recorded talk
An early attempt to connect networked technology with altered consciousness and collective imagination.Listen & read
Terence McKenna · Recorded talk
A compact example of McKenna using speculative possibility as an antidote to cultural fatalism.Listen & read
Terence McKenna · Recorded talk
Technology appears here as an extension of nature’s novelty rather than its opposite.Listen & read
1998 · Terence McKenna & Ralph Abraham · Workshop
McKenna and Ralph Abraham encounter the early web as both practical medium and millennial symbol.Listen & read
Alan WattsLanguage, consciousness and the sense of self
Marshall McLuhanThe media through which we perceive the world
