the Acid Anarchists.” But while radical politics certainly fuelled his ideals, his practice – while more informed by scientific empiricism than by cosmic hippydom – was firmly in the smaller-scale and larger-pupilled world of psychedelic research. Following his mother’s death in 1971, he, his brother Dennis, and a few other friends, set off for the heart of the Amazon. While the initial draw had been the indigenous shamanic use of DMT-containing plants, it was the plentiful golden psilocybin mushrooms they found luxuriating in the Zebu cattle shit that really fired their alchemical furnaces. Dennis went off the rails with his fantastical theories about altering their DNA with ‘shrooms and harmonic chanting, convinced that their world was being engineered by a post-mortem James Joyce. Terence briefly become a “psychedelic bliss bunny”, and then had his ontology severely rattled by a close encounter with an honestto-god flying saucer that condensed out of a group of lenticular clouds. Out of this heady mixture of gnostic curiosities, Terence distilled a theory of time. He extracted a waveform from the internal structure of the I Ching, using some highly dubious reasoning, and mapped the wave’s peaks and troughs onto history. Deeply idiosyncratic events and synchronicities in his own life formed initial anchor-points, but then he extended his correlations to our collective
history. He became intrigued by the fact that the wave – which he took as revealing the influx of novelty into the universe – seemed to reach an end, a climactic zero-point. After fudging it around a little, the end-point seemed to fall somewhere in 2012. Later, discovering that the Mayan ‘Long Count’ calendar seemed to reach the end of a cycle on December 21st of the same year, he shifted his wave to match this. What is omitted from ‘True Hallucinations’, his otherwise in-depth account of the formation