magic plants
and the Logos
TERENCE MCKENNA
in conversation with
ALEXANDER BLAIR‑EWART
Terence McKenna has spent twenty‑five years exploring "the ethnopharmacology of spiritual transformation" and is a
specialist in the ethnomedicine of the Amazon basin. He is
coauthor with his brother Dennis of The Invisible Landscape:
Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching, author of Food of the Gods
(1993), and The Archaic Revival (1992).
After transforming brain cancer for nearly a year,
Terence Mckenna left this level of reality at
2:15 a.m. Pacific time, Monday April 3, 2000.
ALEXANDER BLAIR ‑ EWART : You've suggested that the term new age
consciousness doesn't really describe what is actually happening. And you’ve
replaced it with the term "archaic revival" or "archaic consciousness". I’m
wondering what led you to that.
TERENCE McKENNA : Well, two things.
First of all, the realization that there seems to be a dynamic within
civilizations such that when a civilization finds itself in trouble, when its
first premises no longer seem to make sense, it will search through its past
to find a steadying and revivifying model of some sort. We're all familiar
with the way in which the Renaissance exhumed classical values, classical
aesthetics, legal theory, architecture, theories of polity, etc., even though
they had been dead since before the fall of the Roman Empire. And we are the
heirs, then, of this classical revival which took place in the fifteenth
century. Now our dilemma seems more curious and more global than the dilemma
that Europe faced in the early fourteen hundreds, and consequently our
response, again largely unconscious, has been to go back in time to search for
a revivifying and steadying formula around which we can build some kind of new
social vision. I've called this impulse the "archaic revival" because I really
think that history itself is empty of the kind of model we're looking for, and
that in fact we have to go so far back in time that we actually leave the
domain of history altogether. And I see this as much broader than what is
called the new age. It's been going on at least since Freud and Jung announced
the discovery of the "unconscious." Surrealism, National Socialism, cubism and
its glorification of the primitive, modern anthropology, the rise of
syncopated dance and club music ‑ many disparate phenomena in modern society
point to the archaic revival.
ABE: I was thinking about Arnold
Toynbee's assertion that when societies try to revive an archaic model they
usually end up creating something like National Socialism which was an attempt
to revive a pagan German folk soul. But you're transcending racism by going
far enough backwards to some common human experience that is prehistoric?
TERENCE M: Yes. Prehistoric is a fairly neutral word, although not
necessarily. But it is prehierarchical, pre‑ male dominance, pre‑ the styles of
linear thinking created by the phonetic alphabet and print. It's a style that is
much more fluid and emotion‑based and I suppose you would have to say
Dionysian as opposed to Apollonian. And the centerpiece of this is the
shaman. This is the model personality that dominates any discussion of the
archaic, and what I've done is carry out a detailed deconstructive analysis of
what shamanism is, and reached the conclusion that it is essentially a
reliance on the chemistry of certain plants to dissolve boundaries, to
catalyze the imagination.
ABE: Now you speak of what is called in the native tradition "teacher
plants." You speak of psilocybin, for instance, as being informative and
educative, and you appear to see it as being involved in getting the "naked
ape" to a higher level of consciousness. Can you talk about that?
TERENCE M: Yes. This is what Food of the Gods explores in great detail,
the notion being that what orthodox anthropology and human evolutionary
theory have overlooked (in trying to account for the emergence of human
beings out of the animal substrate) is the impact of our switch from a fruitatarian and highly specialized diet to an omnivorous diet at the very
moment that we were ceasing to be arboreal and were beginning to become
binocular, bipedal animals of the African grassland. And psilocybin would
have been present in those environments, because psilocybin mushrooms of
many species have a preference for the dung of ungulate animals. Now those
mushrooms would surely have been tested for their food value at the same
time that many other potentially mutagenic compounds in foods were being
exposed to the human genome.
The interesting thing about psilocybin is that at very low doses it
increases visual acuity, and to my mind this would tip the evolutionary
scales in a situation of natural selection towards selection of those
individuals and their families that were admitting this exotic item into their
diet. They would be better hunters and consequently better able to supply
food to their children, and raise them to reproductive maturity. At slightly
higher dose levels, psilocybin, like many central nervous system stimulators,
causes arousal and an energizing of the organism. Well, in highly sexed
creatures like primates, this inevitably ends in sexual activity. So that's a
second factor imparted by the psilocybin that would tend to force the
outbreeding of the non‑psilocybin portion of the population.
Finally, and most significantly, at the level of a truly boundary
dissolving intoxication, the psilocybin causes spontaneous outbursts of
glossolalia (speaking in tongues). This may have to do with the elaboration
of language. It creates a flood of hallucinagenic imagery, which may become the
models for inspired members of the community to carve or paint or tattoo, or
whatever. So, in other words, psilocybin looks to me like the chemical
catalyst of the leap out of high primate organization and into human
organization. And the way in which it achieves this effect is by dissolving
dominance hierarchies; specifically it dissolves the construct in the
personality that as moderns we call "the ego.”
ABE: Let me just backtrack a little
bit, because you've just covered a lot of territory. You suggest that
psilocybin increases sexual arousal. At some point in the evolution of
primates their sexuality became freed from the menstrual cycle. And animals,
as you know, only breed at specific times, because they're only in heat at
specific times. I'm wondering if something like psilocybin could have been the
cause of creating what we would think of as " transcendental sexuality" in the
sense that it transcends purely nature based rhythms?
TERENCE M: Well, what it does is it tends to dissolve boundaries, and all
primates, including very primitive primates right back into the squirrel
monkeys, have what are called male‑dominant hierarchies, in which females
are strictly controlled by powerful males and assigned to them. I think what
the exposure to psilocybin in the diet did was that it temporarily intervened
in this tendency to form male‑dominance hierarchies, and instead it was a
catalyst for community, for group mindedness, for a more relativistic
attitude towards ownership and possession of females, and it did this by
promoting orgy, meaning group sexual activity. You know, the nearest
relatives to the human line alive in the world today are the pygmy
chimpanzees, and their sexual behaviors can barely be reported in a family
publication. They are almost entirely bisexual, constantly sexually active in
groups and apart, breaking and making pair bondings very readily, and I
think that this must have happened over a long period of time. The
protohominids, the psilocybin mushrooms, and the ungulate cattle were
probably in association with each other for upwards of two to three million
years, and it was a relationship of increasing closeness and attraction which
ends finally about fifteen to twenty thousand years ago with the
domestication of these ungulate animals and the establishment of the
paleolithic religion of the Great Horned Goddess. I argue in my book, Food
of the Gods, a kind of paradisiacal, quasi‑symbiotic dynamic was involved
there on the grasslands of the Sahara in the wake of the last glaciation. And
what destroyed this was simply further climatological drying when the
Sahara became a desert and we begin to get the institutions which we can
recognize.
ABE: You talk about the relationship of psilocybin to the evolution of art.
We know that totem societies go back an awful long way, and that totemism
is, as Claude Livi‑Strauss pointed out, a sensibility, a culture form, and also
an art form. Everywhere these kinds of substances were used we run across
cave paintings, petroglyphs, that kind of thing. Do you think that psilocybin
was responsible for that, too?
TERENCE M: Well, it has the quality of somehow empowering cognitive
activity. It empowers poetics, dance, artistic productions in the form
of carving and painting. It seems to somehow stimulate the organism to
self‑reflection in combination with self‑expression. And so, yes, I would
argue the evidence for the little scenario on the Saharan grasslands that I
just laid out for you are these magnificent rock carvings in the Tassili
Plateau region of southern Algeria, and they are not greatly different and
certainly no less in quality than the rock work at Lascaux in France.
ABE: Something very significant happened to human consciousness in a
very short period of evolutionary time.
TERENCE M: It's a great puzzle for evolutionary biology how it is that in
a two‑million‑year period the human brain effectively doubled in size.
There are evolutionary biologists ‑ Lumsden being one example‑who call
this the most rapid transformation of a major animal organ in the entire
fossil record, and it happened to us. Short of the intercession of God
Almighty, theories have been thin indeed, and yet this goes to the
existential core of what it is to be human. We stand apart from the general
order of nature. I mean, you can talk about dolphin speech and honey bee
dances, etc., but that's a long way from Milton. Science, in its rush to
exorcise the paranormal, the occult, the inexplicable, has brushed over the
major piece of evidence for something highly unusual going on, on this
planet ‑ ourselves.
ABE: You point out that the Americas are actually richer in consciousness
altering natural substances than anywhere on the rest of the planet. And yet,
due to the experience in the sixties with LSD, we now see on television with
the "Just say no" campaign that LSD and heroin and crack cocaine, speed,
marijuana, psilocybin, and mescaline are all being lumped together as being
the same thing, which makes this kind of investigation and exploration very
difficult right now. Do you feel it likely that the distinctions among these
different substances will again start to be recognized?
TERENCE M: Well, my book is
essentially a plea for this. All the substances that you mention are lumped
together under the category "bad," and then under the category "good" we get
sugar, caffeine, alcohol, tobacco, and television. And what this is really
telling us is that the style of the dominator culture is to suppress inquiry
and to support various forms of sedation, addiction, and so forth.
ABE: Some of these mind‑altering
and addictive substances are bad.
TERENCE M: I certainly don't approve of the morphine‑based drugs
which are currently illegal. But I think the real anxiety about drugs has
nothing to do with heroin use. It has to do with the feeling that was
generated in the American establishment during the 1960s that they were
actually losing control of the society, that such an infusion of psychedelic
questioning threatened the very linchpin of society itself, and I would
actually have to agree with them. I think the egocentric, dominator style
that emerged in the West becomes very uncomfortable when the foundations
of mental life are traced to a material root. This has to do with certain
philosophical biases and the style in which modern science has arisen.
Basically the epistemic bias of Western civilization makes it very restless in
confrontation with the concept of transcendence or boundary dissolution
achieved through drugs.
ABE: And yet we know that these substances, particularly sacred
mushrooms, have been used by shamans of all kinds in all cultures for millenia.
TERENCE M: We know that, if by "we" you mean a vanishingly small
percentage of an academically educated, intellectual elite. And this
information did not even arrive in their understanding until the last century.
Mescaline was discovered in the late 1880s; psilocybin was discovered in
1953 by. Gordon Wasson; LSD did not have any currency until the early
fifties. What we're actually talking about is an extraordinarily narrow
window of opportunity to do research on these compounds before society got
nervous and drove it all underground and made research illegal.
ABE : Still, I don't suppose either you or I would like to see a return to
the excessive and trivialized use of psychoactive substances that went on
in the sixties.
TERENCE M: That's right. What was absent in the sixties was any
awareness of the ethnographic context in which these things had been used,
very little mention of shamanism and so forth. And the other thing is that
LSD is a unique compound in the following sense ‑ that an inspired
undergraduate biochemistry student, who is able to push together about
$50,000 worth of financial backing, can, over a long weekend, produce ten,
twenty, thirty million doses of this drug. With any other drug, psychoactive
or otherwise, if you want to produce thirty million doses, you're talking
about stainless steel vats the size of railroad boxcars and a true industrial
scale of production. But LSD, because it is active in the millionths of a gram,
so that theoretically you could get approximately ten thousand doses of this
drug from a single gram, posed real problems for the establishment. And
these are unique problems not having to do with its power as a psychedelic,
which was considerable, but having to do with its unique characteristics as a
commodity. See, that biochemistry student has automatically transformed
himself into the head of a criminal empire. And there were many such
individuals, which is, of course, unsettling to any agency charged with the maintainence
of social order.
ABE: The responsible use of
psychoactive substances has been going on for an awful long time. You seem to
maintain that there is something unique about psilocybin.
TERENCE M: Well, I outlined for you my assumptions about its role in
early human evolution. No other psychedelic could have had that role
because it had to be a plant of the grasslands; it had to be a plant that
required no preparation, no concentration or extraction, and psilocybin, it
must be said, has this quality of activating a phenomenon for which, without
blushing, we have to go back to the constructs of Hellenistic mysticism and
just call it what it is ‑ the "Logos." The Logos, an informing voice that has
been silent in the mind of Western human beings for 2,500 years, suddenly
comes back into communication with psilocybin. And the people who have
had the most to do with it, Gordon Wasson and so forth, have always
mentioned this in their writing. But I think it's such an extraordinary
assertion that people don't even realize what is being said. In other words, it
isn't that the mushroom allows you to understand things you never
understood before, or that it gives you a new point of view, or anything so
harmless sounding as that. It's actually that the mushroom speaks; it speaks
to you in your native language, and it tells you things that you could never
have figured out on your own, or at least I certainly never could have. And
trying to come to terms with this as a rationalist without going off to cloud
cuckoo‑land is quite daunting. Western science has no place in its pantheon
for talking fungi. We may fund the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by
radio telescope, but if you were to suggest to someone that extraterrestrial
intelligence may actually be spread through the pastures and cowpies
beneath our feet, they don't even hear that as a serious assertion. Yet
shamanism, persistantly, in all times and places, has insisted that it operated
through helping spirits and ancestor spirits and contact with an animate
intelligence resident in nature.
ABE: In Julian Jaynes' book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown
of the Bicameral Mind, he basically defines the bicameral mind as the mind
that is prerational and acts on the basis of hearing a voice. Are you talking
about the same thing?
TERENCE M: To some degree. I mean, I found that book very interesting.
It's over six hundred pages long and I think there's one paragraph on
psychedelic drugs, a discussion of mescaline. He either was not aware, or
or decided to disarm himself of his most powerful argument. I think that the
way to understand what happened back there before history is to think of
the ego as a structure in the psyche analogous to a tumor, and the way to
think of psilocybin is to think of it as a kind of psycholitic compound that
was actually innoculating human beings for a window of several tens of
thousands of years against the formation of ego, and that when the
psilocybin religion died out and new religious forms took its place, ego was
born. And with it came kingship, male dominance, concern for lines of male
paternity, agriculture, accumulation of surplus, class structure, the whole
panoply of institutions of which we are the unhappy inheritors.
ABE: How would psilocybin as a spiritually potent experience fit into the
kind of urban, technologized society that we now have, or would you have to
have one or the other kind of culture?
TERENCE M: No. I think that
psychotherapy has been tremendously weakened and disarmed by allowing
politicians to define what tools were legitimate and what were not. When LSD
was first discovered by a Canadian they were getting 40% cure of chronic
alcoholism with one exposure, and somehow the courage of the psychotherapeutic
community failed at a moment when they should have hurled themselves against
the "know nothing" politicians. They allowed an incredibly powerful set of
tools for understanding the human mind to be placed out of their reach. I
mean, it's as if the establishment of Renaissance science had accepted the
Church's effort to ban the telescope, which means that we would never have
evolved the edifice of modern astronomy and cosmology that we have. The
psychotherapeutic community, perhaps because it always felt itself to be a
poor sister to "real" science, just lay down and went along with that in the
fifties and sixties, and now there is no psychedelically empowered
psychotherapy. This is what shamanism is in the societies where it still is
vital, and by studying those societies I think we could revitalize our own
mental health care and mental health care maintenance systems dramatically.
ABE : You've witnessed some of
those societies haven't you, in the Amazon basin?
TERENCE M: Yes, and in eastern Indonesia and elsewhere.
ABE: Talk to me about the societies that function in this way in the Amazon.
TERENCE M: Over large areas of the upper Amazon basin of Columbia,
Peru, and Ecuador, there is reliance on a psychedelic plant complex called ayahuasca. It's a prepared thing, made by combining two plants and
boiling them together. But when analyzed chemically it is found to be a
very close cousin to psilocybin. And early ethnographers, encountering
these ayahuasca‑using groups, were sufficiently impressed to claim that
this was a telepathic drug of some sort. What they really meant by that
was that incredibly intimate styles of decision‑making had arisen around
these plants, where these tribal societies were actually making decisions
about migration, hunting, warfare, and pair‑bonding based on information
that was being group generated within the context of these shamanic
trances. And this, to my mind, makes the point I was discussing earlier
about the dissolution of ego. What it really means is that they were
recreating this paleolithic style of group integration by using the
psychedelic plants in the paleolithic style, which dissolves boundaries, and
then, in a situation of dissolved boundaries, community concerns, group
values are always given precedence over the wishes of individuals, even
powerfully ranked individuals.
ABE: A lot of the spiritual traditions that have come into the West out of Asia,
for instance, the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist traditions, seem to be saying that
the use of psychoactive substances is really a bad idea, that you should
avoid them and get where you're going through meditation techniques.
TERENCE M: Well, it's a stage in religions. When you study the history of
religion, you find that if something is taboo, that's a clear signal that it was
once very important. And in the case of Hinduism, out of which Buddhism
developed‑it was a reaction and a reformation of a portion of Hinduism
Hinduism rests firmly upon the Rig Vedas, and the Rig Vegas are nothing
more than an enormous number of ecstatic poems dedicated to a mysterious
intoxicant called Soma. And while we don't know what Soma was ‑ this is a
place where scholars labor endlessly ‑ there is no question that it was
physical, it was ecstatically intoxicating. In Western religion and spirituality
an enormous number of our religious and spiritual strains of thought can be
traced back to the Eleusinian mysteries of Greece. These were psychedelic
celebrations of some sort. The evidence is pretty overwhelming. So these
later religions, I think, are simply in the business of promoting priestcraft,
and if that's your game, the first thing you have to do is to cast doubt on the
notion that the individual can directly access "the Mystery."
ABE: What do you see as the future of psilocybin in Western culture?
TERENCE M: As we have circled ever more tightly around the mystery of
the archaic we have seen the figure of the shaman come into view, and now
hopefully the figure of the psychedelically inspired shaman. I think that
this society is in a deep crisis and that first premises are now in question,
and that, if we are allowed to carry out a reasonable inventory of our
cultural tools, we will eventually have to accept the power of these things.
The rise of our respect for the primitive, which has been going on for a
hundred years, is an indication that we are slowly losing faith in our own
methodologies. No one now believes in a leisure‑haunted, electronic utopia.
Most visions of the future are apocalyptic and bleak indeed, and the fact
that the consequences of the Western style of being are to plunge the entire
planetary ecosystem into crisis is going to force us to seriously rethink the
premises of Western civilization. And I think the figure of the shaman is
waiting in the wings. Certainly the youth culture, unconsciously, over the
past thirty or forty years, keeps gravitating back toward that rhythmically
boundary‑dissolving, highly erotically charged dimension. And of course
it's horrifying to the print mentality that is all probity and correctness, but
all that is what got us into the mess we're in and it's pretty terminal now. I
think eventually the depth of the crisis will force us to look outside the
ordinary set of cultural answers for much‑more radical possibilities.
ABE : One of the fascinating things about this whole subject of psilocybin
is, of course, that people can grow it very easily themselves.
TERENCE M: That's right. My brother and I are the authors of one of the
best‑selling books on the subject. We wrote Psilocybin, The Magic Mushroom
Grower's Guide pseudonymously as 0. T. Oss and 0. N. Oeric, and it sold over a
hundred thousand copies, and so did some of our competitors. So, in the short
space of a couple of decades, the psilocybin mushroom has gone from a denizen
of the pastures of the tropical zone to a familiar sight in the attics,
bowers, and basements of high‑tech society.
ABE: Now, this shaman in the
Amazon, he's using the substance that you describe, and there's a certain
culture, a certain society that uses that in a respectful and sacred way. In
your communication with these people, does it emerge that they deliberately
use that substance for psychological healing and other forms of healing, or is
it more of a mystical thing for them?
TERENCE M: No, the primary emphasis for them is healing. The
distinction between physical and psychological is not so clear, but the
incidents of serious mental illness in these societies is strikingly low. The
hallucinations, the cosmic vistas and all that, are in a sense the frosting on
the cake for these people. The shaman functions as an exemplar, a kind of superperson that everyone looks up to, and trusts, believes in, and the
shaman is able to be an exemplar because he actually has a living
connection to the truly sacred, in contrast to, say, Jimmy Swaggart. In our
society that cultural expectation of superhumanness and exemplary behavior
is always disappointed because there is no genuine connection to real
sacrality. Shamans who betray that are pathetic figures indeed and a society
will turn on them with great vehemence.
ABE: You yourself have experimented extensively with psilocybin, and here
we are having this highly intellectual dialogue about the thousand and one
things. So obviously it's been possible for you to experiment with psilocybin
and it hasn't turned your brain into mush. But isn't that one of the primary
fears surrounding its use?
TERENCE M: Well, the brain‑to‑mush issue is one of the reasons that I am
not an advocate of the vast cornucopia of synthetic drugs that keep coming
onto the market. You see, with mushrooms or with ayahuasca or peyote or
something like that, since we're not allowed to do scientific research on
human subjects, we have to look at the ethnographic data and we know that
people have been using mushrooms in central Mexico for at least two
millenia. We can look at these populations, record the incidences of
miscarriage, blindness, fetal deformation, retardation, and so forth. And we
see that these are not factors. So, if you judiciously choose your shamanic
plants with an eye towards the already recorded impact that they have on
well‑studied human populations, the debilitative possibility is easily avoided.
ABE: Now, would you group marijuana and hashish in that group of
positive psychoactive substances?
TERENCE M: It's interesting. Cannabis is a category breaker. All these
psychedelic substances that we've been talking about are chemically what
are called alkaloids. Cannabis is technically what's called a polyhydric
alcohol. Psilocybin occurs in many species of mushrooms; mescaline occurs
in many species of cacti; other psychedelics usually occur in various places
in nature. The tetrahydrocannabinol occurs only in cannabis. In terms of the
social effect, yes, I would say that it functions socially as a minor psychedelic.
In other words, it is boundary dissolving, it promotes introspection, reverie;
it probably does not promote the kind of devotion to industrial social values
that, say, caffeine does. But, nevertheless, caffeine is a serious addictive drug
with demonstrable consequences on the liver, and yet it still is written into
every contract signed between labor and management in any civilized
country in the world as "the coffee break." Cannabis is unwelcome because
it does not fit in with the model of the good worker/good citizen that has
arisen in the wake of the industrial revolution. Nevertheless, its suppression
and the amount of money and anxiety that is spread over that issue is one of
the most bizarre and schizophrenic aspects of our whole approach to this thing.
ABE: Law enforcement agencies can more easily block marijuana and
hashish because it's bulky, it has a distinctive odor, it's easy to track,
whereas the white powder is highly transportable, and we have massive
populations now addicted to cocaine and to crack cocaine. There are some
social studies that point to the fact that people have only taken up those
drugs at a point when they couldn't get marijuana and hashish.
TERENCE M: The only way you can take the profit out of the drugs is by
making them legal, because the exhorbitant profits to be made from drugs
are a consequence of their illegality. As an example ‑ I haven't checked
recently, but I imagine cocaine is still hovering around a hundred and
twenty dollars a gram ‑ airplane glue is a buck seventy‑nine a tube, and can
be purchased everywhere. Now, we do not have a large population of
airplane‑glue abusers in this society, and the reason is there is no glamor in
it, and you cannot ride around in your neighborhood in a Mercedes after six
weeks of dealing airplane glue. So it is absurd to expect these oppressed
ghetto populations in the large cities of the industrialized West not to avail
themselves of a product when there are enormous differentials between the
purchase price and the sales price. If people have no other option and there's
a commodity where they can double and triple and quadruple their initial
investment, they're certainly going to avail themselves of it. Interestingly,
most of the hard‑drug epidemics that have harried the Western world over the
past fifty years have been largely subsidized by government. Governments are
the great culprits in this drug thing, and nobody wants to talk about this
because it's just too horrible to suppose that our own elected, democratic
institutions are somehow co‑opted by the need for vast amounts of clandestine
money, usually on the part of intelligence agencies and that sort of thing.
The drug problem is a problem of the greed of mendacious governments, the
failure of education, and a failure to provide people with other alternatives
for how to better themselves.
