Terence McKenna: Shamanic Ecstacy

Terence McKenna wore many hats but was perhaps remembered best for his work as an activist and spokesperson for the use of psychedelics as well as voice for the rave culture. Born in 1946, McKenna was a skilled author, ethnobotanist, lecturer, and a practicing shaman.

Although he had always had a hobby for fossil-hunting and a passion for nature as a child, it was really in college that McKenna found his true path. Two years into his undergrad studies, McKenna began studying shamanism after being enrolled in a Tibetan folk religion class. He then started a series of adventures from traveling and learning about new cultures.

McKenna first travelled to Jerusalem where he read about the Kabbala and dabbled with Opium. It was during this first trip, that Terence met Kathleen Harrison, an ethnobotanist who would go on to become his wife.

One thing Terence was particularly known for was his travel, especially in the 1960s. In his twenties, McKenna would go to San Francisco and experiment with acid, then smuggle hashish in India and go magic mushroom hunting in the jungles of the Amazon.

In the late 1960s, Terence decided to travel to Nepal in order to pursue his study of shamanism and the use of visionary plants. McKenna ended up studying the Tibetan language as well as spending some time as a professional butterfly collector in Indonesia.

After his travel to the Amazon with his brother Denis McKenna to hunt for ayahuasca, Terence returned to Berkeley to complete a self-tailored degree in ecology, resource recovery, and shamanism.

Mushroom Cultivation
The effects of mushrooms had been a long-time interest of McKenna’s, as he had first become interested at the age of 10 when he read an essay about magic mushrooms in Life Magazine. His fascination for mushrooms never left. He finally put his passion into practice in the mid-1970s.

With the help of his brother, Dennis McKenna, who is still working as an ethnopharmacologist, Terence developed a new technique for cultivating psilocybin mushrooms. Both brothers were the first to create a reliable method for cultivating these type of mushrooms, using spores that they had brought back from their trip to the Amazon.

This method was a groundbreaking technique, which enabled at-home cultivation of psilocybin mushrooms. Terence and Denis published their new technique’s development in a book entitled Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide.

McKenna had a theory many saw as a way to glamorize drug abuse. Terence wanted to prove psychedelic mushrooms were the missing link in the history of human evolution.

Terence McKenna has been arguably the person to raise the most awareness about psychedelics, and more specifically, DMT. As a matter of fact, McKenna was one of the ardent supporters of introducing DMT into society.

Along with psilocybin mushrooms and ayahuasca, McKenna believed that DMT was the ultimate deification of existence.

McKenna would often smoke DMT. Throughout these years, he would acquire many revelations. One of them emerged from a hallucination in which he realized the entity many psychedelics enthusiasts would later become familiar with: “machine elves“. McKenna described these intelligent entities as being self-transforming machine elves.

The magic mushroom advocate was able to conclude through his own personal psychedelic experiences that these entities’ aim was to show people how to create using language. Machine elves are now, often reported by individuals using DMT.

Psychedelics allowed for McKenna to blend his spirituality of shamanism with his understanding of the world. McKenna used his multiple experiences with psychedelics to educate others and often recorded public talks.

On April 3, 2000, Terence passed away from glioblastoma multiforma, a rare form of brain cancer. While he followed a medical treatment, McKenna also let his friends help with esoteric remedies.

According to an article published in The New York Times, a self-styled ”grand kahuna of Polynesia” biked up the mountain to meditate at his bedside, While a Nevada disk jockey, Art Bell, asked his 13 million listeners to send good vibrations.

McKenna had been suffering from migraines for many years. However, on his return to his home, he was hit with ferocious headaches that differed from what he had experienced before.

McKenna suffered a terrible episode where he vomited, hallucinated, and had a distorted sense of smell and taste. His agonizing headache was followed by a severe blood pressure drop before collapsing from a brain seizure.

As he was brought at the hospital, mistakingly suffering from a drug overdose, it was later discovered he had a walnut-sized tumour in his right frontal cortex. McKenna was given six months to live with medical treatment.

Through his studies and beliefs, McKenna coped with the idea of death the best that he could. He stated, “Taking shamanic drugs and spending your life studying esoteric philosophy is basically a meditation on death.”