Discover the Best Books Written by Terence McKenna

Terence Kemp McKenna was an American ethnobotanist and mystic who advocated the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. 

He was called the "Timothy Leary of the '90s", "one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism," and the "intellectual voice of rave culture." McKenna formulated a concept about the nature of time based on fractal patterns he claimed to have discovered in the I Ching, which he called novelty theory, proposing that this predicted the end of time and a transition of consciousness in the year 2012. 

His promotion of novelty theory and its connection to the Maya calendar is credited as one of the factors leading to the widespread beliefs about the 2012 phenomenon. Novelty theory is considered pseudoscience. Terence McKenna was born and raised in Paonia, Colorado, with Irish ancestry on his father's side of the family. McKenna developed a hobby of fossil hunting in his youth, and from this, he acquired a deep scientific appreciation of nature.

He also became interested in psychology at a young age, reading Carl Jung's book Psychology and Alchemy at the age of 14. This was the same age McKenna first became aware of magic mushrooms when reading an essay titled "Seeking the Magic Mushroom," which appeared in the May 13, 1957 edition of LIFE magazine. At age 16, McKenna moved to Los Altos, California, to live with family and friends for a year. 

He finished high school in Lancaster, California. In 1963, he was introduced to the literary world of psychedelics through The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley and certain issues of The Village Voice, which published articles on psychedelics. McKenna said that one of his early psychedelic experiences with morning glory seeds showed him "that there was something there worth pursuing," and in interviews, he claimed to have smoked cannabis daily since his teens.

In 1965, McKenna enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, and was accepted into the Tussman Experimental College. While in college in 1967, he began studying shamanism through the study of Tibetan folk religion. That same year, which he called his "opium and kabbala phase," he traveled to Jerusalem, where he met Kathleen Harrison, an ethnobotanist who later became his wife.

In 1969, McKenna traveled to Nepal, led by his interest in Tibetan painting and hallucinogenic shamanism. He sought out shamans of the Tibetan Bon tradition, trying to learn more about the shamanic use of visionary plants. During his time there, he also studied the Tibetan language. He worked as a hashish smuggler until "one of his Bombay-to-Aspen shipments fell into the hands of U. S. Customs." He then wandered through southeast Asia, viewing ruins. He spent time as a professional butterfly collector in Indonesia.

After his mother's death from cancer in 1970, McKenna, his brother Dennis, and three friends traveled to the Colombian Amazon in search of oo-koo-hé, a plant preparation containing dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Instead of oo-koo-hé they found fields full of gigantic Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms, which became the new focus of the expedition. In La Chorrera, at the urging of his brother, McKenna was the subject of a psychedelic experiment in which the brothers attempted to bond harmine (harmine is another psychedelic compound they used synergistically with the mushrooms) with their own neural DNA through the use of a set specific vocal techniques.