This article was published in Entheogenesis Australis Journal 6, commemorating 21 years of Australian ethnobotanical research and community. The journal is available from the EGA website: www.entheogenesis.org/shop
“The national symbol of Australia is the wattle. It’s an acacia. The acacia ecology of Australia is jammed with DMT.”1 This is Terence McKenna speaking in 1997 during his two week tour of Australia.
In this essay, we squeeze into the back seat of McKenna’s “Archaic Revival” tour, his first and only visit to the country. Encouraged by a small community of plant medicine enthusiasts and facilitated by promoter Dillon Hicks, for a brief moment, McKenna served as alien frontman for the Australian experimental music underground.
In our journey, we’ll explore the visitor’s enigmatic stature as a cult figure, novelty theorist, and psychedelic prophet with an untiring vision: that the clock is running down on history. His message about the end was magnified by McKenna’s own abrupt departure within three years of his visit—putting paid to the return trip envisioned. But if time was disappearing, and the “transcendental object at the end of time” was fast approaching, as his audience learned during his whirlwind Aussie adventure, McKenna was laughing all the way to the eschaton.
Terry was obsessed with time from an early age. A precocious kid and an old soul, he was an avid collector of fossils, insects, and strange ideas. Childhood in Paonia, a small town in Colorado, set the stage for a life of questing. At an early age, obsessions with “drugs, magic, and the more obscure backwaters of natural history and theology” offer the profile, in McKenna’s own words, of “an eccentric Florentine prince,” rather than a kid growing up in the heartland of the late fifties United States (McKenna 1994: 4).
At an early age, obsessions with drugs, magic, and the more obscure backwaters of natural history and theology offerthe profile, in McKenna’s own words, of an “eccentric Florentine prince,” rather than a kid growing up in the heartland of the late fifties United States.
As apparent in the fields of study to which he gravitated—art history, shamanism, ethnobotany, psychedelics, consciousness—McKenna possessed an open receptivity toward the Other. He shared with the world his love of the anomalous, the gnomic, and the iridescent. In the 1970s and into the 1980s, McKenna’s “small mouth noises” grew into towering waveforms on stoner radio. He ran ideas at the margins of academia, delivered seminars at private retreats, lectured to independent research societies, and led experiential sessions with the assistance of botanical “allies.” And as he did so he became a salubrious savant of the edge, upon which he firmly kept one sandaled foot. Given his rare commerce with the anomalous, by the 1990s, the figure once introduced in High Frontiers as a “scholar and a wizard” (Noffke 1984: 7) became the veritable face and inimitable voice—a medium no less—of the weird.
So below, as above. McKenna may have been the strange attractor, but the strange was attracted to him in equivalent proportion. He never had difficulty locating the person sent to meet him upon his arrival in a strange town. “I’d just look for the most insane person,” he told Esquire. “I knew they were waiting for me” (Jacobson, 1992: 136).
By 1997, only a few years before his stage exit in 2000—aged 53, from the aggressive brain cancer glioblastoma multiforme—the maestro of what Erik Davis (2019) has named “high weirdness” was making the most of his opportunities. Financially dependent on a morphing fanbase who needed satiation, McKenna’s annual touring schedule grew increasingly crowded. The lengths to which he ventured, and the hours committed to maintaining his public visage, were consistent with his growing celebrity. In the previous years, expanding beyond routine appearances on Something’s Happening (on LA’s KPFK radio) and at venues like Berkeley’s Shared Visions bookstore, the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California, and the New York Open Centre, McKenna became resident raver at clubs in London and San Francisco. Additionally, he had become a much-vaunted speaker at conferences and festivals. By this time, there were already signs that his nasally sing-song voice would become the most sampled in the history of electronic music. Collaborations with the Shamen (a #18 hit on the UK Singles chart in 1992: “Re:Evolution”) and Rose X (Alien Dreamtime, 1994) earned him cultural cachet in the psychedelic underground (see St John 2023, 2024). With several books now under his belt and countless hours of spoken word “raps” delivered in a variety of locations, the figure who had dared to make hope cool had grown magnetic to a population for whom he was mentor, life coach, and guerrilla ontologist.
Photo courtesy of Kathleen Harrison | Image by Timothy Parish of Undergrowth Productions
As McKenna styled himself as a spokesperson for the weird, through the eighties, moving his myth to wider markets and niche demographics became a round-the-clock gig. It was no easy slog. Selling himself proved challenging for a man who’d rather roll a joint in the company of his books. As he quipped to his friends: “the worst part of being Terence McKenna is being Terence McKenna.” For his fans, McKenna was received as an amiable and wickedly good-humored conversationalist. He talked directly to his fans, and as understood by Dillon Hicks, his fans wanted to participate in the dialogue. Hicks contrasts McKenna with Mick Jagger. If Stones fans hear “Can’t Get No Satisfaction” or “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” they’re happy, but for those who live in the world of ideas (and before ChatGPT), their “pound of flesh” amounts to wanting to have a conversation with the source himself. “And that’s very difficult to facilitate when there’s a thousand people trying to get at one guy” (Hicks 2023).
By the time he arrived in Australia, in late February of 1997, McKenna was a scene beacon. There was little time for leisure. Among his dozen appearances there were private seminars, bookstore signing events, student pub gigs, a psytrance festival, a live experimental improv evening under the auspices of Clan Analogue, and a quirky cabaret named Diablo Musica at Sydney’s Harbourside Brasserie.
But the headline event, and the first port of call, was Beyond the Brain, the legendary three-day extravaganza (21-23 February) at the Byron Bay Epicentre, an ex-whaling station transformed by an underground network into a “crucible of creativity.” The eighth in a series of Beyond the Brain events, “Forward the Future” was a conflux of rave, visionary art exhibition, and performance theater created by the intrepid web of creatives who had migrated to the region (Chambers 2023a).
Appearing at what became the most popular, and most notorious, Beyond the Brain, McKenna assumed the stage on Saturday night headlining a show with a cast of thousands. Beyond the Brain events were known for dissolving the boundary separating audience from performer. But as McKenna mounted the mushroom dais in the Cycad Garden and sat cross-legged before an audience of over 750 people, the boundary was unambiguous. Sat between paintings of Egyptian gods Thoth & Anubis, quietening the crowd, McKenna became the epicentre of the spectacle, his delivery slow and deliberate. “I think you have to be humble enough to eat what grows in shit to pass through the gateway.”
Layered with Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, and a full recital of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” it was a spellbinding performance, the recording of which lay in limbo for a quarter century—that is, until 2023, when Beyond the Brain with Terence McKenna was finally released. The film is a remarkable salvage operation on the part of producer and Beyond the Brain co-organiser, Paul Chambers. Remastering and remixing recovered footage shot by Jenny Lusk, the film is framed around McKenna’s rap in three acts. With the visitor serving as narrator, the film furnishes a tripartite passage from interstellar spores, through DMT breakthrough, to “where we might be going,” each act corresponding with edited footage: event setup, dance party, and morning aftermath. The film faithfully conveys each of McKenna’s acts, separated as they were by short musical interludes performed by Pangalacticspermia.2 At the same time, it opens a window on a lost moment in the techno-feral efflorescence of the late-nineties Byron Bay and Northern Rivers region (Chambers 2023b).
Beyond the Brain with Terence McKenna exists among a vast archive of McKenna raps, including previously unknown, lost, or neglected recordings, some of which have been remastered and edited as videographies.3 Many of these offerings have been subject to rigorous transcription.4 As seen in these and other raps unearthed during the writing of my biography of McKenna that is due for publication with MIT Press in October 2025, it is a boon for McKennaphiles that mediated and transcribed spoken word content continues to emerge. This vast and growing archive of mediated output represents a curious achievement for a figure who adopted the practice (and cyberpunk lexicon) of “edge-running,” who embraced life as a quest, and who frequently endorsed what he called “the felt presence of immediate experience.”
Affording the visitor an elevated position at a peak moment in Australian freaklore, Beyond the Brain was an extraordinary occasion for a figure who had never before set foot on the continent. But if psychedelic royalty exists, McKenna is both crown prince and funny bugger for whom the red carpet was unfurled. Throughout his Aussie interlude, the visitor was received more like an alien ambassador, or a visitor from another dimension, than a celebrity from the United States. In fact, his stature as an American was not a leading consideration among his hosts. More than simply a foreigner, McKenna enjoyed the privileged status of freak-in-chief, a veritable magnet for participants in the freak diaspora. During his tour, and as the outcome of dialogue with local botany boffins and tryptamine tweakers, the visitor shared the wisdom that DMT could be extracted from species of local acacia. Some of those present at Beyond had long extracted DMT from species of acacia, potentiated with MAO-inhibiting harmala alkaloids. These botanical cognoscenti understood that a trove of DMT-bearing plants grew in their own backyard. As Neil Pike from the band Pagan Love Cult reminisced, “big joints of wattle” were passed through the audience at Beyond the Brain.5 As researcher Des Tramachi explained in his insightful thesis “Vapours and Visions,” the event was an early sweet spot for the transmission of DMT lore in Australia (Tramacchi 2006: 72).
By the beginning of his second act, the visitor was suitably impressed when noting an unmistakable aroma in the night air. “It was as though the air had suddenly been pumped out of the room, and everything stood out in stark relief,” McKenna related of the first time he smoked DMT (in February 1966). The otherwise raucous audience grew so engrossed with the visitor’s description of his novice DMT event you could have heard a septum pin drop to the floor. The bard’s parting comments upon “a new dispensation for language through sound conceived of as a union of poetry and music” provides the perfect incantation for the heavily edited and sometimes haunting vision of an ecstatic ensemble of local artists—emerging for a final encore a quarter century after their captured appearances.6
For a couple of days following Beyond the Brain, Terence met with members of a study group which had been meeting frequently to discuss the phenomenology of ayahuasca. Core group members included Nick Spacetree, Talon, Vayu, and Sahajo, a Vietnam War vet and former member of the Osho International Commune in Pune, India, who had met McKenna at Esalen some years before and remained in contact. Another group member was Darpan who McKenna visited in Goonengerry, a meeting pivotal to the future neo-shaman’s access to Amazonian ayahuasca. Darpan was fortunate to be on the receving end of McKenna’s “Rolls Royce” brew, which was subsequently shipped from Hawaii. “Terence became my Primer Maestro,” said Darpan.7
Scheduled as “The Inner and Outer WWW: Ethnobotany, Psychedelics and the New Communications Technology,” soon after, Terence appeared at a private seminar at Samasati, a multiple occupancy spiritual community in Upper Wilsons Creek. Around this time, he spent a day in the bush with Nick Spacetree who led him on a walk to locate the highly secreted local DMT source Acacia obtusifolia (commonly known as “stiff-leaf wattle”). Nick says he “passed on some insight from my Indigenous elder teachers,” gifting Terence obtusifolia and maidenii seeds.8
But there was little time for bushwhacking. Hicks soon shuttled McKenna to a series of gigs down the coast in a rental so tiny it could have been a clown car. The Nissan Micra that the 6.3 foot McKenna occupied for two weeks on the road was remote from the mode of transport he had declined in South Africa only a few months before. In October 1996, filmmaker Mike Kawitzky had invited McKenna to ride from Rustlers Valley to Cape Town in his 1967 Pontiac GTO, a journey on which Kawitzky had intended to interview Terence (in the Karoo). McKenna had been informed about how his prospective driver had recently survived a busted gasket, carbon monoxide poisoning, and a high-speed tire blowout in the same vehicle. Learning about the death trap that might have passed for Stephen King’s “Christine” he thought better of the idea and took a flight instead (Kawitzky 2012b: 21).
Not chauffeured in Christine, in Australia McKenna had to settle for a dodgem car. Riding blunderbuss and mobbed by locals gifting prized home grown consumables, he delivered his greatest hits in measured, albeit fatigued, cadence at a variety of venues, including Lismore’s Star Court Theatre, the Zoo in Brisbane, the University of Newcastle, and Polyester bookstore in Melbourne. The extremity of this southern exposure was a psychedelic trance festival near Apollo Bay, Victoria, where ambient backing tunes were spun by Psyharmonics Records legend Ollie Olsen.
By this stage in McKenna’s career, it had become a badge of honour to curate sounds backing the Magister Ludi of Language. In front of an intimate audience at the Zoo, the live music venue in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley, he was backed by the ambient sounds of DJ Zippy, who recorded the occasion. It may have been among the headier performances in the venue’s history: if there were motivational speakers for artists, Terence was top billing. Inhabitants of the Zoo were informed that they were participants in an “archaic revival,” which had roots in paleolithic mushroom cults, and later the Orphic tradition, with more recent expressions in surrealism, abstract expressionists, and the aesthetic responses characteristic of the 1960s through to the present.
There were favourable similarities between the sixties and the nineties, the carnival barker of consciousness reckoned, but in conformity with what McKenna saw as the acceleration of novelty effecting new generations, “you people have reached the level of alienation with the false values of the culture that my generation didn’t reach until it was forty or forty-five.” In this premillennial moment of anticipation, he claimed, “we can shorten the loop.” And what ought to be the appropriate response of alienated people in the psychedelic community to the conundrum in which they now dwelt? “I think it can only be to produce art. To put the art pedal to the floor” (McKenna 1997a).
And what ought to be the appropriate response of alienated people in the psychedelic community to the conundrum in which they now dwelt? “I think it can only be to … put the art pedal to the floor.”
And so it was toward the psychedelic festal in which sonic and visionary art flourishes that McKenna was drawn like a butterfly to nectar. And with Hicks pressing his foot flat to the floor of their dinky shitbox, Terence materialized near Cape Otway for a doof called TrancElements 2.
McKenna’s rap was typically an occasion for field-testing the stand-up philosopher’s latest obsessions, and for addressing recent discoveries that showcased the novelty theory integral to his Timewave opus. In the past couple of years, among the head-turning entrants in the zeitgeist was Salvia divinorum. Associated with the Mazatec of the mountains of northern Oaxaca, Mexico, Salvia had been hyped throughout the tour. At TrancElements 2, Sally D was boosted as “a dream come true”—the first psychedelic discovered since LSD, active in the microgram range, and completely legal. Its appearance was interpreted as a significant event in the novelty chart. The “undulating colored receptional labyrinth of moving light and sound” induced when consuming S. divinorum was felt to be as profound as any DMT flash he had known. Among its virtues was that it comprised “something new” to the Mazatec. “Nobody had their brand on this thing,” he insisted (McKenna 1997b).
The gloss that Salvia was an unclaimed psychedelic—literally a novelty —that members of the newly evolving culture could occupy, as if inhabiting an empty house, was contentious. And it is unsurprising that Kathleen Harrison—McKenna’s ex-wife—had a different perspective. Having grown and experimented with the herb since the mid-eighties, Harrison (2000) reports being healed after consuming it in a Mazatec ritual in 1995. For her, the mountains of Oaxaca are a centre of diversity for Salvia species; and they are just as much a source of lost cultural heritage. While the Mazatec have informed Harrison that S. divinorum has “always been there,” the uncertain roots of the herb betray a complex history of conquest and migration.9
But this is not the intel shared with the psychedelic community on the southern coast of Victoria in 1997. If well managed, the magic mint’s main active psychotropic molecule, salvinorin A, could, McKenna thought, be extracted, purified, and consumed. “This could be the wedge that opens the door to a complete reexamination of the proper role of these psychedelics in society,” proclaimed the super-spruiker (McKenna 1997b). Within five years, Australia became the first country to ban Salvia divinorum.
It is not unlikely that federal police took an interest in this intel. That McKenna had appeared in Victoria at all was a small miracle given that local police had walked back a permit for the festival, originally scheduled for Moonlight Head, on the Great Ocean Road to the west of Cape Otway. The festival eventually went ahead further down the road on private property “owned by some farmer with a beef with the local Colac Otway Shire licensing sergeant,” Hicks recollected.
What is clearer is that the avuncular enthusiast of magic plants was received as a kindred spirit. Their odyssean effort to leave the event is lodged in Hicks’ memory. During their exodus, a young man with a Flintstones style bone through his nose wider than his head leaned into the passenger window and delivered ad-lib poetry, Kerouac style, for what seemed like ten minutes. “I think I need to give you the James Joyce award for bush poetry,” Terence said as the wide grinning feral wrinkled his bone and waved them off.10
. . . a young man with a Flintstones style bone through his nose wider than his head leaned into the passenger window and delivered ad-lib poetry, Kerouac style, for what seemed like ten minutes. “I think I need to give you the James Joyce award for bush poetry,” Terence said as the wide grinning feral wrinkled his bone and waved them off.
A few days later and 1,000 km north, McKenna popped up at the University of Wollongong, where a question from the audience prompts an hour-long response. “This is the interesting thing about psychedelics,” he exhorted the feraliens and old dreamtimers in attendance. As “training wheels for true being” they reveal all ideologies as “crap games.” As this freshly uncovered rap demonstrates, the shamanarchist entered into a flow state in which the mushroom-munching, trance-dancing, tattooed, sexually diverse, and higher-dimensionally curious learn that they are themselves an expression of the “impulse towards the archaic” (McKenna, in Hicks 2023).
Throughout this sojourn through the cultural undergrowth of the southern land, echoes of a unique patois attracted outliers like blowflies to a barbie. And as rogue chroniclers stumbled over themselves to capture McKenna’s offroad show, they recorded lost raves that continue to be unearthed in the present day: from DJ Krusty’s interview at TrancElements 2 for Channel 31 community TV, to Sean Healy’s interview for the University of Newcastle student newspaper Opus, to a conversation taped by Seb Chan walking with Terence on the streets of Central Sydney. “The city is not a viable option now,” McKenna informed Chan, then of Sub Bass Snarl and today Director & CEO of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Commenting on neo-archaism and the transhumanist promises of VR in the cloyingly naive tones of the protean Web era, the fantasy was that virtual reality will “de-emphasize the physical possessing of things.”11
Psychedelics were a subject laden with risk for any public spokesperson in Australia in 1997. After all, the country was (and remains), another front of the War on Drugs. But free from any professional body or affiliation, McKenna was, as his old friend Ron Curry once remarked, a “free agent radical.”12 In a sensibility somewhat at odds with Psychedelics 2.0—i.e. today’s world of assisted therapy, Psychedelic Pharma, and microdosing—McKenna was a standard bearer for cognitive liberty. Psychedelics, or what he knew as “hallucinogens”—by which he meant psilocybin, DMT, ayahuasca, Salvia, Iboga, among other “magic plants” and decoctions—were integral to the transformation of the human condition. And they were essential since they dissolve boundaries: “between the individual and the species, between the species and the surrounding ecosystem, between the Earth and the surrounding extraterrestrial environment of the solar system” (McKenna 1997a).
But, as he also regaled Zoo patrons, psychedelics cannot dissolve boundaries without attention to dosage. Adopting a perspective from Aldous Huxley, against the delusions of modern life, psychedelics were like solvents. “The houses, the boats, the furs, the cars, the jewels, the degrees, the social esteem,” he sung to the choir, are all “false currency compared to the authenticity of your own experience” (McKenna 1997a).
If culture is “a provisional form of infantalism” that is “not your friend,” the visitor invited his antipodean audience to join a “cult of direct feeling.” But if the path promoted was cultic, it was not paved with fealty. There would be no gospel, no moral judgement, no certificate of awareness. Rather than providing the keys to the ultimate truth, psychedelics were promoted with the potential to liberate users of the conceit common to religion: that there exists a divine truth to which the pious and observant are privileged.
In this “cult of direct feeling,” an individual accesses the tools for direct contact with the source, an enterprise said to dispense with priests, gurus, and other meddling mediators of mystery. An “admission of ignorance is not an admission of stupidity,” McKenna said of the fruits of this gnosis. “It’s an admission of intelligence.”
Exposing the wiring under the board, psychedelics endow the tripper with the understanding that “the true nature of being is found to be too complex to be linguistically or culturally caged” (McKenna 1997a). It was this unknowing that was long reckoned to be a basic birthright.
And so it was that McKenna, the enigmatic mediator or immediacy, deployed language to convey the view that language fell short of conveying Mystery. Throughout his Australian tour, the visitor articulated an ambivalence toward religion. It was a subject in which he maintained a steep personal connection. Once an altar boy and a long recovering Catholic, McKenna was a self-taught comparative religionist with an abiding interest in alchemy informed by Jung, shamanism by way of Mircea Eliade, eschatology shaped by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, novelty theory care of the process philosophy of A. N. Whitehead, and the Other inspired by experiments with powerful tryptamines. He had been motivated by Mandaeism, fascinated with John Dee, and at the behest of his mushroom “teacher” he had, in the wake of an epic encounter in the Colombian Amazon in March 1971, decoded the I Ching to discover what he believed was an ancient Taoist calendrical artifact. And, upon his long exposure to Psilocybe mushrooms and DMT, he felt that the War on Drugs amounted to “the repression of a legitimate religious sensibility”—a travesty routinely broached as a civil rights issue (McKenna 1992: xix).
At the same time, the cognitive libertarian was incredulous about his own role as a mystic or prophet. It was his conviction that people are not vessels of divinity warranting rank and privilege. Divinely ordained power and authority was anathema to his “shamanarchist” style. Such pretensions were roasted at every opportunity. The idea that he may have been blessed with superior spiritual intelligence himself—that he was a “guru”—was greeted with derision that formed in peals of laughter that routinely emanated from his own cakehole. Such responses met with approval among the ratbags and rogues inhabiting the Aussie cultural undergrowth.
And yet, as a figure promoted with epithets like “cosmic triggerman,” who was held to be a “maestro,” and behaving like one chosen to transmit a prophecy about the end of history and the accompanying transformation of the imagination, McKenna was a living enigma. Paradox, it seemed, served as something like an organising principal for a figure who was, and remains, among the most beloved 20th century iconoclasts.
McKenna was a living enigma. Paradox, it seemed, served as something like an organising principal for a figure who was, and remains, among the most beloved 20th century iconoclasts.
It was Rupert Sheldrake who likened his old friend to an unconventional holy man.13 Not unlike a sadhu, thought Sheldrake—with whom McKenna often appeared (with Ralph Abraham) in “trialogues”—McKenna had a charismatic oratory capacity, operated independent from institutions (religious or otherwise), and toured among followers upon whom he relied for his livelihood. While we might rightly question whether McKenna renounced worldly life in the fashion typical of sadhus, as his Australian tour demonstrated, he was received not unlike a holy person, a figure whose virtue was amplified the more he rebuked religious authorities, scorned hierarchies, and laid into institutions, whether religious, scientific, or financial. In the rebellious metaphysics of the psychedelic sadhu and celebrity anarchist, humans were venerated as cosmic players. But of his role in the “archaic revival” McKenna repeatedly declared his own humdrum ordinariness.
And this is a striking response, for amid the self-mocking tones, here was a figure coming over like an end-of-times prophet. During the tour and echoing the conviction expressed throughout his career, McKenna insisted that we are staring down the barrel of a fast-approaching “Eschaton.” What he named the Timewave was a mushroom-inspired vision that represented a hobby, theory, prophecy, and commercial software with an oracular application all rolled into one. The Timewave was also a map of history which possessed a specified “zero” date: 21/12/2012.14
This is where his audience may have been given to laugh at rather than with the visitor. Since we are now over a dozen years from history’s forecasted used-by-date, we should rightly regard the McEschaton with suspicion, if not simply as a kind of failed futurism. But if the Timewave represents a failed future, it is one that haunts us in our present. Ought we to dismiss so readily the mythopoetics of the end—as delivered in countless recorded raps within a catacomb of audio-visual content that today streams 24/7?
Psychedelics are vital to this story not because they are a “sure thing,” McKenna’s audience learned, but because “everything else will certainly fail.” This was the fatalistic idea implicit to his manifesto Food of the Gods; that if there is an answer—a panacea even—it is to be found in “magic plants,” and primarily Psilocybe mushrooms. As a cultivator—of P. cubensis, and of ideas—this prospect was a motivating force throughout McKenna’s life. “If hortatory preaching could carry the day,” he announced, “we would have turned the bend at the sermon on the mount.” It was routinely remarked that, with the discovery of indole hallucinogens, a direct means for self-transcendence, as well as a path to an “authentically civilized and human world,” had been found. The search was over, and the seeker now required courage and dedication to integrate the answers into their everyday lives.
And yet, rarely deviating from the script, the stand-up eschatologist knew that . . . “the clock is ticking” (McKenna 1997a).
Speaking in Austin, Texas, later that year, our altered statesman reflected on Australians as a “very eccentric population of hard driving folks who are lovely to party with and know how to barbecue.” Had he known what he then knew about Australia thirty years before, he was “sure my life would be very different” (McKenna 1997c).
. . . our altered statesman reflected on Australians as a “very eccentric population of hard driving folks who are lovely to party with and know how to barbecue.” Had he known what he then knew about Australia thirty years before, he was “sure my life would be very different.”
McKenna’s adventures in the antipodes also demonstrated the hectic reality of life on the road for the recent quinquagenarian, a man who had in the previous years recovered from a bitter divorce. With barely a moment for pause, the trip was an exhausting reminder that McKenna would rather appear non-locally when addressing crowds in far-flung locations about the significance of the “non-local universe of information.” Celebrityhood had exacted a toll. A demanding public life proved torturous for a figure with hermit-like aspirations. A life dedicated to growing an audience conflicted with a basic desire for solitude.
But change was in the wind. By the mid-nineties, McKenna’s newly built Hawaiian home coincided with the emergence of the World Wide Web. The plan was to dispense with jet-setting and broadcast the rap from home. Retiring from physical travel while increasing his virtual traffic, the vision was ideal. He needn’t any longer truck his rap to the world. The world would come to him. With a website, a high-speed wireless modem, and a satellite dish, he could become the “telepresence” long fantasized: a “zone ghost of cyberspace.”15
It is a wish that was soon granted.
Terence McKenna’s future was nothing short of spectral. At his final Australian gig, he was accompanied by an assortment of artists associated with experimental electronic music collective Clan Analogue. In Manning Bar at the University of Sydney (the event was called Transdimensional Vehicle) Ian Andrews (performing as Dormative Hypothesis) curated the sonic backdrop to the rap. “When you look into the future,” Terence states in the foreground, “you see a storm of spacetime vectors and probability matrices that have not yet undergone the formality of actually occurring” (McKenna 1997d).16 Within a few short years, apparently undetected in his own timecharts, McKenna’s personal end-time underwent the formality of actually occurring. And as that occurrence coincided with his electronic efflorescence, he has haunted the Net thereafter.
While assuming a shepherd-like role, McKenna made a lifelong commitment to getting out of the way. Instead of serving as an intermediary between the gnosis and the gnostic, he encouraged access, distribution, and the decentralising of the means of perception. Just three years after departing Australia he was fated to be removed from the algorithm. And yet, no ordinary departure, his stage exit corresponded with his launch into cyberspace where he has been reanimated in ways that he would surely have found alarming.17
With accelerated advancements in machine learning and large language models, today an emergent galaxy of AI “Terence McKennas” compete for your attention—in a fashion not far removed, strangely enough, from the attention-seeking “machine elves” endogenous to his adventures in DMT hyperspace. It is a strange outcome for a figure ambivalent about his role as a leader, and as a man repeatedly drawn to solitude. As he has proliferated across virtual, digital, and neural networks over the past three decades, what are we to make of McKenna’s entreaty towards a “cult of direct feeling”?
Our notorious recluse and distributed avatar appealed to Zoo punters in Brisbane in 1997: “it’s the mushroom, not the messenger, that is the object of reverence.” As this paeon to immediacy relies upon mediation at ever further removes in the data-oceans of cyberspace—where McKenna is long past possessing control over his own reception—death amplifies the gnomic contours charted in life.
Copies of Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna (MIT Press, Oct 7 2025) by Graham St John are available for preorder from MIT Press. For praise, excerpts, launch info and announcements see edgecentral.
Graham St John, PhD, will be giving a lecture introducing content from the recently published book Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna, at this year’s Garden States: Regeneration Conference, being held in Victoria, Australia, from 28th November to 1st December. Squeezing into the back seat of McKenna’s 1997 tour of Australia, the lecture will explore the visitor’s enigmatic stature as a cult figure, novelty theorist, and psychedelic prophet with an untiring vision: that the clock is running down on history.
Information on Graham St John’s lecture can be found here: www.gardenstates.org/allpresentations/terence-mckennas-australian-adventure
References
Bergmann, P. 2014. The Transcendental Object at the End of Time. We Plants Are Happy Plants, YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=aAlaRdrcQcY&t=152s.
Bergmann, P. 2016. Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations. We Plants Are Happy Plants YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MG5gFtZ3U8.
Chambers, P. 2023a. “Beyond the Brain: Happening at East Edge.” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 15, no. 1 (2023), https://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/dancecult/article/view/1234/1066.
Chambers, P. 2023b. Beyond the Brain with Terence McKenna, recorded at Beyond the Brain, Epicenter, Byron Bay, 22 February 1997 (produced by Paul Chambers; photography by Jenny Lusk). Available at pauledge23, YouTube, 23 September 2023, https://youtu.be/igKsd3uNgHY.
Davis, E. 2019. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Harrison, K. 2000. “The Leaves of the Shepherdess,” in Cynthia Palmer and Michael Horowitz eds, Sisters of the Extreme: Women Writing on the Drug Experience (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press): 302-305.
Hicks, D. Interview by CeeJay Barnaby about Terence McKenna Live at University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia, 5 March 1997. Supernormalized, S2E13 (29 March 2023), https://supernormalized.com/podcast/dillon-hicks-interview-on-terence-mckenna-live-at-wollongong-university-s2e13/.
Jacobson, M. 1992. “Is Terence McKenna the Brave New Prophet of the Next Psychedelic Revolution, or is His Cosmic Egg Just a Little Bit Cracked?” Esquire, 1 June, 107-109, 133-138.
Kawitzky, M. 2012a. The Terence McKenna Omnibus 2012. Mike Kawitzky, YouTube, 13 February 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gNO1OGgagQ&list=PLF7C7C99A3E5FC148.
Kawitzky, M. 2012b. Journey to Everywhere (Cape Town: Headspace Studios, 2012, revised in 2018).
McKenna, T. 1992. Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge. New York: Bantam Books.
McKenna, T. 1994. True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise. New York, HarperCollins.
McKenna, T. 1997a. “Live at The Zoo” with DJ Zippy. The Zoo, Brisbane, QLD, 26 February. Audio available on Soundcloud (Goognostic): https://soundcloud.com/goognostic/terence-mckenna-with-dj-zippy.
McKenna, T. 1997b. Live at TransElements 2, Victoria, Australia, 28 February, audio available at SpokieTech, “Terence McKenna—Spoken Word Tour,” YouTube, 21 February 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLdLMBeOwq0.
McKenna, T. 1997c. “Light of the Third Millennium.” Whole Life Expo, Palmer Auditorium, Austin, TX, 4 October 1997, The Library of Consciousness, https://www.organism.earth/library/document/light-of-the-third-millennium.
McKenna, T. 1997d. “Transdimensional Vehicle,” Manning Bar, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 7 March. Video available at Collectively Conscious, YouTube, 18 February 2013 (video edit by Sam De Silva), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiFpGwh4iP4.
Noffke, W. 1984. “Terence McKenna: The Monkey is Being Shed,” High Frontiers 1: 7, 28-29.
Rose X. 1994. Alien Dreamtime (Spacetime Continuum, featuring Terence McKenna and Stephen Kent). Released on VHS in 1993 by Rose X Media House and City of Tribes Communications, and subsequently on DVD (by Magic Carpet Media) in 2003.
St John, G. 2015. Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT. Berkeley, CA, North Atlantic Books.
St John, G. 2023. “The Voice of the Apocalypse: Terence McKenna as Raving Medium.” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 15(1): 61-91, https://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/dancecult/article/view/1242/1060.
St John, G. 2024. “Terence McKenna’s Alien Dreamtime.” MAPS Bulletin 24(1), 15 November, https://maps.org/news/bulletin/terence-mckenna-alien-dreamtime.
St John, G. 2025a. Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna. MIT Press.
St John, G. 2025b. “Zone Ghost in the Machine: Terence McKenna’s Cyberdelic Reanimation.” Institute for Network Cultures https://networkcultures.org/longform/2025/05/28/zone-ghost-in-the-machine
Tramacchi, D. 2006. “Vapours and Visions: Religious Dimensions of DMT Use.” PhD thesis, The University of Queensland.
Footnotes
- Terence McKenna, sampled on the collaboration “Geometric Patterns” by Australian psychedelic trance artists Dark Nebula and Scatterbrain (Psionic Earth, Digital Psionics, 2004). The sample also features on “Burning Point” (Sun Control Species—Unreleased, 2004).
↩︎ - Pangalacticspermia were a one-time ensemble comprising Kavi, Tone, AB Didgeridoo Oblivion (Sean Candy), Skai Talon, Steve Berry, Nick Spacetree, and Matt Ledger, with Andrew Richards on mixing duties (Chambers 2023a). ↩︎
- Including projects by Peter Bergmann, notably The Transcendental Object at the End of Time (Bergmann 2014) and Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations (Bergmann 2016), and by Mike Kawitzky, notably the 12-part web series The Terence McKenna Omnibus 2012 (Kawitzky 2012a). ↩︎
- Transcriptions have been produced by McKennaphiles at AskTMK (https://www.asktmk.com) and its AI-augmented upgrade at uutter (https://uutter.com/c/terence-mckenna), and are also found in the Terence McKenna collection at The Library of Consciousness: https://www.organism.earth/library/author/terence-mckenna. ↩︎
- Neil Pike, email to author, 8 December 2014. For further discussion of “ayahuasca analogues” in Australia, see St John (2015: 157–165). Legend had it that McKenna’s cutting of B. caapi was the first import of the ayahuasca vine in Australia. ↩︎
- Including Olli Wisdom, Pete Strong, John Jacobs, Chin Bindi, and Nick Taylor, among others. Serving as the event’s other main headline act, besides McKenna, was psytrance legend Tsuyoshi Suzuki. ↩︎
- Darpan, email to author, 9 May 2025. ↩︎
- Nick Spacetree (aka Nick Tree), email to author, 21 December 2024. ↩︎
- Kathleen Harrison, email to author, 10 January 2024. ↩︎
- Dillon Hicks, interview by author, 16 December 2024. ↩︎
- Terence McKenna interview by DJ Krusty, “The Lost Rave,” in Rak Razam and Tim Parish eds., The Journeybook: Travels on the Frontiers of Consciousness (Undergrowth Inc, 2008: 28-23); Sean Healy interviews McKenna for Opus, transcript at Skynoise, 13 March 2025, https://www.skynoise.net/2025/03/13/terence-mckenna-interview/; Seb Chan privately shared an edited transcript of the 8 March 1997 Sydney recording which was the basis for a subsequent article in Oyster Magazine (the transcription is available at: https://medium.com/cyclicdefrost/interview-with-terence-mckenna-in-sydney-1997-cc6b2d830530). ↩︎
- Ron Curry, interview by author, 7 September 2020. ↩︎
- Rupert Sheldrake, interview by author, 16 February 2021. ↩︎
- See St John (2025a, Chapter 9) for an exposé of the Timewave. ↩︎
- Terence McKenna, letter to Peter Meyer, 1 July 1995. ↩︎
- Transdimensional Vehicle featured performances from SuperCute, Dark Network with B(if)tek and Genlevel, Dormative Hypothesis, and a super group combining Nerve Agent, Kazumichi Grime, and Jeremy Greenwood. From Clan Analogue, https://www.clananalogue.org/about/clan-analogue-history-the-middle-years/. ↩︎
- For a discussion of McKenna’s cybernetic spectrality, see St John (2025b). ↩︎
- Florentine Prince and Funny Bugger: Terence McKenna in Australia - September 2, 2025
