Terence Mckenna – The Archaic Revival

Alien Dreamtime – Live in San Francisco in 1993

In 1993, at an evening of performance and music in San Francisco, musician Jonah Sharp, producing under the name Spacetime Continuum, and renowned psychonaut Terence Mckenna (1946-2000) joined forces to create a fascinating event: a lecture recited to a musical backdrop.

Terence Mckenna, at the helm of this conference speaks on his great reflections from his book: The Archaic Revival. For nearly an hour and accompanied by soft electronic music and the excellent didgeridoo player Stephen Kent, Terence speaks with great insight about his psychedelic-induced “dreams”.

At the time I remember being so impressed by the depth of Terence’s thinking that I decided to make a transcript of his speech. I humbly offer it to you in the hope that this speech will touch you too.

Although more than 30 years old, this speech is nonetheless timeless. It offers the world an alternative to the current paradigm of what Terence calls dominator culture. He advocates establishing a society based on genuine human values rather than products. But he also goes much further…

Feel free to download the transcript to find out!

Thank you and good luck

Here’s an excerpt from YouTube, also available in full on Spotify.

Download the transcript of The Archaic Revival in PDF

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The Archaic Revival

words and ideas by Terence Mckenna

RAP 1 – The Archaic Revival

History is ending. Because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable “chaostrophe” approaches, people look for metaphors and answers.

Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past, looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa, 15,000 years ago. Rocked in the cradle of the great horned mushroom Goddess; before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and
phonetic alphabets and monotheism.

Before, before, before, and this is where the future is taking us, because the secret faith of the 20th century is not modernism, the secret faith of the 20th century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic. And that gives us: body piercing, abstract, expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock’n roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa. Where the plant / human symbiosis occured that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool using, culture making, imagination exploring creature that we are.

And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back. And that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means, it’s a doorway out of history and into the wiring, under the board in eternity. And I tell you this, because if the community understands what it is that holds it together, the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace.

Because what we need is a new myth. What we need is a new true story that tells us where we’re going in the universe. And that true story is: that the ego is a product of pathology and that when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience, the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers.

Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience. And nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience. But that’s what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace, what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that : in the body, in the body, there are “Niagaras” of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life.

I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it was all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature. What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstasy, orgiastic sexuality and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are: hegemony, monogamy and monotony.

And if you get them on the run, you have the dominators sweating, folks. Because that means that you’re getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self definition through thing fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind and the Gaian mind is what we’re calling the psychedelic experience. It’s an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet, and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set. And that’s the idea that we’re figuring out how to reset the compass of the self. Through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality. Intelligence, intelligence, this is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.

RAP 2 – Alien Love & Speaking in Tongues

Hello. So that was like an introduction. Now for some preaching to the choir on the subject of: how come it is that the further in you go, the bigger it gets?

I remember the very very first time I smoked DMT. It was sort of a benchmark, you might say! And I remember that this friend of mine who always got there first, visited me with this little glass pipe and this stuff which looked like orange mothballs. And since I was a graduate of Doctor Hoffman’s, I figured there were no surprises, so the only question I asked was: how long does it last? And he said about five minutes. So I did it.

And… There was something like a flower, like a chrysanthemum in orange and yellow that was sort of spinning, spinning; and then it was like I was pushed from behind and I fell through the chrysanthemum into another place. That didn’t seem like a state of mind, it seemed like another place. And what was going on in this place, aside from the tasfully softened indirect lighting and the crawling geometric hallucinations along the domed walls; what was happening was that there were a lot of beings in there. A lot of what I call self transforming machine elves, sort of like jewel basketballs all dribbling their way toward me. And if they’d had faces they’d have been grinning but they didn’t have faces.

And they assured me that they loved me and they told me not to be amazed, not to give way to astonishment. And so I watched them, even though I wondered if maybe I hadn’t really done it this time. And what they were doing was they were making objects coming to existence by singing them into existence. Objects which looked like Faberge eggs from Mars morphing themselves with Mandaean alphabetical structures.

They looked like the concrescence of linguistic intentionality put through a kind of hyper-dimensional transformed into three dimensional space. And these little machines offered themselves to me and I realized when I looked at them that if I could bring just one of these little trinkets back, nothing would ever be quite the same again.

And I wondered: where am I? And what is going on? And it occured to me that these must be holographic viral projections from an autonomous continuum that was somehow intersecting my own. And then I thought, a more elegant explaination would be to take it at face value and realize that I had broken into an ecology of souls. And that somehow I was getting a peep over the other side. Somehow I was finding out that thing that you cheerfully assume you can’t find out. But it felt like I was finding out, and it felt… And then I can’t remember what it felt like because the little self transforming tykes interrupted me and said: don’t think about it. Don’t think about who we are, think about doing what we’re doing, do it, do it now, do it!

And what they meant was: use your voice to make an object. And as I understood, I felt a bubble kind of grow inside of me. And I watched these little elf-tykes jumping in and out of my chest; they like to do that to reassure you. And they said: do it! And I felt language rise up in me that was unhooked from english and I began to speak like this…

(here Terence Mckenna starts speaking in another language. According to his brother Dennis, Terence is probably speaking “Glossalalia“, a language he ‘discovered‘ while in a deep psilocybin trance – personnal communication 22-04-2007)

…or words to that effect. And I wondered then what it all meant and why it felt so good, if it didn’t mean anything. And I thought about it a few years actually. And I decided, you know, that meaning and language are two different things, and that what the alien voice in the psychedelic experience wants to reveal is the syntactical nature of reality. That the real secret of magic is that the world is made of words and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it what ever you wish…

(again Terence Mckenna speaks in “Glossalalia“)

And one of the things that I learned about DMT was that if you’ve ever had it, even just once, then you can have a dream. And in this dream, somebody will pull out a little glass pipe and then, it will happen. It will happen just like the real thing. Because there’s a button somewhere inside each and everyone of us that gives you a look into the other side. And that’s the button that resets the compass that tells you where you want to sail.

Good luck!

RAP 3 – Timewave Zero

Hello. Alright. Have you ever noticed how there’s this quality to reality which comes and goes and kind of ebbs and flows. And nobody ever mentions it or has a name for it except some people call it a bad hair day or some people say: things are really weird recently. And I think we never notice it and we never talk about it because we’re imbedded in a culture that expects us to believe that all times are the same. And that your bank account doesn’t fluctuate, except according to the vicissitudes of your own existence.

In other words: every moment is expected to be the same and yet this isn’t what we experience. And so what I noticed was: that running through reality is the ebb and flow of novelty and some days, and some years, and some centuries are very novel indeed; and some ain’t. And they come and go on all scales, differently, interweaving, resonantly. And this is what time seems to be. And science has overlooked this, this most salient of facts about nature: that nature is a novelty conserving engine. And that from the very first moments of that most improbable big bang, novelty has been conserved because in the very beginning, there was only an ocean of energy pouring into the universe. There were no planets, no stars, no molecules, no atoms, no magnetic fields. There was only an ocean of free electrons.

And then, time passed and the universe cooled, and novel structures crystallized out of disorder. First: atoms, atoms of hydrogen and helium, aggregating into stars. And that the center of those stars, the temperature and the pressure created something which had never been seen before which was fusion. And fusion cooking in the hearts of stars brought forth more novelty: heavy elements, ion, carbon, fore-valent carbon. And as time passed, there were not only then elemental systems but because of the presence of carbon and the lower temperatures in the universe : molecular structures. And out of molecules come simple subsets of organisms, the genetic machinery for transcripting information; aggregating into membranes, always binding novelty, always condensing time, always building and conserving upon complexity and always faster and faster and faster.

And then we come to ourselves. And where do we fit in to all of this? Five millions years ago, we were an animal of some sort. Where will we be five millions years from tonight? What we represent is not a sideshow, or an epiphenomenon, or an ancillary something or other on the edge of nowhere. What we represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in / upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified and complexified structure in the known universe. We are the cutting edge of organismic transformation of matter in this cosmos. And this has been going on for a while, since the discovery of fire, since the discovery of language. But now, and by now I mean for the last 10,000 years, we’ve been into something new. Not genetic information, not genetic mutation, not natural selection but epigenetic activity, writing, theatre, poetry, dance, art, tattooing, body piercing and philosophy. And these things have accelerated the ingression into novelty so that we have become an idea excreting force in nature: that builds temples, builds cities, builds machines, social engines; plans and spreads over the earth, into space.

Into the micro physical domain, into the micro physical domain, we, who five millions years ago were animals, can kindle in our deserts and if necessary upon the cities of our enemies the very energy which lights the stars at night. Now something peculiar is going on here. Something is calling us out of nature and sculpting us in its own image. And the confrontation with this something is now not so far away. This is what the impending apparent end of everything actually means. It means that the “denoma” (here, Terence Mckenna probably uses the french word : “dénouement” which means : “outcome”) of human history is about to occur and is about to be revealed as a universal process of concrescing and expressing novelty that is now going to become so intensified that it is going to flow over into another dimension.

You can feel it. You can feel it in your own dreams, you can feel it in your own trips. You can feel that we’re approaching the cusp of a catastrophe and that beyond that cusp we are unrecognizable to ourselves. The wave of novelty that has rolled unbroken since the birth of the universe has now focused and coalesced itself in our species. And if it seems unlikely to you that the world is about to transform itself, then think of it this way: think of a pond, and think of how, if the surface of the pond begins to boil; that’s the signal that some enormous protean form is about to break the surface of the pond and reveals itself. Human history is the boiling of the pond surface of ordinary biology. We are flesh which has been caught in the grip of some kind of an attractor that lies ahead of us in time and that is sculpting us to its ends; speaking to us through psychedelics, through visions, through culture and technology.

Consciousness, the language forming capacity in our species is propelling itself forward as though it we’re going to shed the monkey body and leap into some extra surreal space that surrounds us but that we cannot currently see. Even the people who run the planet: the world bank, the IMF – you name it – they know that the history is ending, they know, by the reports which cross their desk … -The disappearance of the ozone hole, the toxification of the ocean, the clearing of the rain forest – What this means is: that the womb of the planet has reach it finite limits and that the human species has now, without choice, begun the descent down the birth canal of collective transformation toward something right around the corner and nearly, completely unimaginable.

And this is where the psychedelic shaman comes in because I beleive that what we really contact through psychedelics is a kind of hyperspace. And from that hyperspace we look down on both the past and the future, and we anticipate the end. And a shaman is someone who has seen the end and therefore is a trickster because you don’t worry if you’ve seen the end. If you know how it comes out, you go back and you take your place in the play and you let it all roll on without anxiety. This is what boundary dissolution means, it means nothing less than the anticipation of the end state of human history: a return to the archaic mode, a rediscovery of the orgiastic freedom of the African grasslands of 20,000 years ago, a techno escape forward into a future that looks more like the past than the future. Because materialism, consumerism, product fetishism, all of these things will be eliminated and technology will become nanotechnology and disappear from our physical presence.

If, if we have the dream, if we allow the wave of novelty to propel us toward the creativity that is inimical to the human condition. This is what we’re talking about here: psychedelics as a catalyst to the human imagination, psychedelics as a catalyst for language because what cannot be said cannot be created by the community. So what we need then is the forced evolution of language and the way to do that is to go back to the agents that created language in the very first place. And that means the psychedelic plants, the gaian logos, and the mysterious beckoning extraterrestrial minds beyond; hooking ourselves back up into the chakras of the hierarchy of nature; turning ourselves over to the mind of the totally other that created us and brought us forth out of animal organization. We are somehow part of the planetary destiny: how well we do determines how well the experiment of life on earth does. Because we have become the cutting edge of that experiment.

We define it and we hold in our hands the power to make or to break it. This is not a dressed rehearsal for the apocalypse. This is not a pseudo-millenium. This is the real thing folks, this is not a test. This is the last chance before things become so dissipated that there is no chance for cohesiveness. We can use the calendar as a club, we can make the millenium an occasion for establishing an authentic human civilisation, overcoming the dominator paradigm, dissolving boundaries through psychedelics, recreating a sexuality not based on monotheism, monogamy and monotony. All these things are possible if we can understand the overarching metaphor which holds it all together, which is the celebration of mind as play, the celebration of love as a genuine social value in the community. This is what they have suppressed so long, This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics because they understand that once you’ve touched the inner core of your own and someone else’s being, you can’t be led into thing fetishism and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news. And if we are able to make this point, then we can pull back, we can pull back and we can transcend.

Nine times in the last million years the ice has ground south from the poles, pushing human population ahead of it. And those people didn’t fuck up! Why should we then? We are all survivors. We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable and now with the engines of technology in our hands we ought to be able to reach out and actually exteriorize the human soul at the end of time. Invoked it into existence like a UFO, and open the violet doorway into hyperspace and walk through it, out of profane history and into the world beyond the grave, beyond shamanism, beyond the end of history; into the galactic millenium that has beckoned to us for millions of years across space and time. This is the moment. A planet brings forth an opportunity like this only once in its lifetime. And we are ready, and we are poised. And as a community we are ready to move into it, to claim it, to make it our own. It’s there, go for it. And thank you.

Recorded Live In San Francico on FEB 27th 1993

available on CD on Astralwerks – ASW6107-2