Obituaries: Terence McKenna Remembered

Another pioneer from the “expanded consciousness” movement of the 1960s died last year. Terrence McKenna, a passionate promoter of the power of hallucinogenic drugs for mind-expansion, died of brain cancer at the age of 53. The announcement came in the form of a simple statement on McKenna’s web site: “Terence McKenna relinquished his body at 2:15 a.m. Pacific time today, April 3, 2000. He died at peace and with people whom he loved and who loved him.”

There is an unwritten rule of synchronicity that related deaths happen in threes. With the relatively recent passing of psychedelic gurus Timothy Leary and Carlos Castaneda, McKenna’s death would seem to complete a cycle. Unfortunately, his death would also seem to herald the end of the era that was defined by Leary‘s admonishment to “turn-on, tune-in and drop-out.” There are no popular torch bearers left to light the way into the world of forbidden mystical experiences.

In many ways, Leary, Castaneda and McKenna were like three brothers. Dr. Tim would be the oldest, the overachiever, who headed Harvard’s psychology department until his experiments with LSD “got out of hand” and he was fired. Castaneda would be the middle child, who rejected his older brother’s materialism while embracing his belief in the usefulness of mind-altering drugs to tap into latent inner potential. In this scenario, McKenna would be the youngest child, who had aspects of both older brothers. Like Leary, he was possessed with a scientific mind. Like Castaneda, he had a sense of history and adventure which led him to travel to foreign lands in search of the sacred mind-altering plants of the vanishing indigenous peoples.

While Leary and Castaneda received greater fame and became household names throughout the world, McKenna was noticed mostly by the intellectuals, first in the drug culture and then in the New Age movement. A student of both shamanism and the botany of the Amazon, he believed that civilization rose after early hunter-gatherers ingested natural hallucinogenic drugs and that warfare developed after their psychedelic plants began to disappear due to a change in climate. “Our dilemma is that halfway on the way to becoming angels, we stopped taking our medicine,'' he once said.

McKenna was very much a part of the Eastern influenced spiritual movement that was part and parcel with 60s hippiedom. When he and his brother Dennis wrote The Invisible Landscape in 1975, Gerry Garcia called it, “One of the most mind boggling books I've ever read.” The next year, the two McKenna’s collaborated on Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Growers Guide, which is still a must for the serious backyard or basement botanist. When the hippie movement finally faded away in the late 70s, McKenna didn’t trade-in his love beads for a Brooks Brothers suit and the yuppie life, but continued his research, founding “Botanical Dimensions,” a nonprofit group to investigate “ethnomedical” and sacred plants. Ever the environmentalist, under his guidance the group established a gene bank of rare species in Hawaii.

In 1988, when the hippie spirituality of “we-are-all-one” and “it’s-your-karma, man” was revived and revised as the New Age movement, McKenna was there. He developed some interesting new theories around the calendar system of the ancient Mayans which led to his “Novelty Theory,” a complex, mathematically derived wave form that described “the ebb and flow of novelty on planet Earth.” Another related development, “Timewave Zero,” claimed to prove that time moves both forward and backward, that the future effects the past. From these theories, he claimed to be able to mathematically prove that the Mayans had been correct when they predicted that the end of the world would come in the year 2012.

The early 1990s, when McKenna published at least five new books, were his most prolific years. During this time he didn’t seem to have lost his old Haight Ashbury flair, launching the book True Hallucinations with an all night dance party, proving that the spirit of the “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests” still lived. In 1992, when Bantam Books published Food of the Gods, best selling novelist Tom Robbins was inspired to write, “Terence McKenna is the most important, and most entertaining, visionary scholar in America. To be uninformed of his ethnobotanical discoveries is to be oblivious to the central thrust of human consciousness, which is not to survive with the dung beetles but to soar with the gods."

Terrence McKenna is survived by his longtime partner, Christy Silness, and two children. You can learn more about him by visiting his web site at http://www.levity.com/eschaton/tm.html.

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