THE DEATH OF
TERENCE MCKENNA On the 3rd of April 2000, the world lost a great champion of freedom, creativity, and our inalienable right to increase both of these by partaking of nature’s rich pharmacy. Terence McKenna was a thinker, explorer, writer and raconteur obsessed with the role of drugs in human evolution and culture, with our modern failure to truly take on board the invisible alien landscapes that substances such as dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and psilocybin unravel, and with a bizarre model of the nature of time that, for him, indicated a profound transformation of reality itself in the year 2012. Born in 1946, Terence was raised, alongside his brother Dennis, in the tiny Colorado town of Paonia. They fed each other’s thirst for the strange and fantastical, hunting for fossils and reading H.P. Lovecraft. In 1963, having relocated to California, he became aware of the world of psychedelics through reading Aldous Huxley and the underground press. He began experimenting with morning glory seeds and LSD (imbibing huge doses of pure Sandoz in San Francisco’s summer of ’65), as well as beginning a life-long daily relationship with cannabis.
through Asia, paying his way as a hash smuggler, covering his underworld activities with the engrossing diversion of collecting butterflies, and staying in Nepal to study Tibetan art. He was convinced through his LSD use that some hallucinogenic experience lay behind this tradition’s radiant Buddhas During the Summer of Love he was introduced and enflamed demons. But further DMT to DMT, smoked in its pure synthesized experiments convinced him that here was form – “a benchmark, you might say.” He something way off any known map of mystical was gobsmacked by his encounters with experience. “objects which looked like Fabergé eggs from Besides helming a Magellanic ship into Mars morphing themselves with Mandaean the unchartered realms of our collective alphabetical structures,” and the compass of consciousness, that summer of 1968 also his life, already in the grip of the magnetic found Terence “fighting the police at the pull of psychedelics, began to point in a direction tangential to the realities of even the Berkeley barricades shoulder-to-shoulder with affinity groups like the Persian Fuckers and most arcane literature he knew. He travelled