In ths interview, adaped from his book Twilight of the Clockwork God, John David Ebert explores the important role of psychedelics in the lifework of renowned ethnobotanist Terence McKenna.

In what amounts to a kind of psychedelic in-joke authors William Gibson and Bruce Sterling resurrect T. H. Huxley, grandfather of the famous Aldous, for a scene in their novel The Difference Engine. A paleontologist who has just returned from America gives to Huxley a few buttons of peyote which he has received from a Native American shaman. Huxley, receiving the gift, responds, "Certain vegetable toxins have the quality of producing visions." Then he places the buttons in a desk drawer and remarks, "I'll see they're properly catalogued later.''

The joke is, of course, that Huxley will do precisely nothing with the peyote buttons, and not until the mescaline experiments of his grandson Aldous in the middle of the twentieth century will Westerners discover their value. In 1955 Aldous Huxley ingested four-tenths of a gram of mescaline—thepsychoactive content of peyote—and discovered that, in the words of James Joyce, "any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods." Huxley's book The Doors of Perception, in which he writes of this experience, would eventually drift into the hands of fourteen-year-old Terence McKenna, who would spend his career exploring depths of human consciousness.

T. H. Huxley's attitude, however—as Gibson and Sterling have imagined it—typifies that of the scholar toward such matters: knowledge fit for the yellowed pages of decaying volumes onlibrary shelves, but unrelated to the world of lived experience. It is most ironic, by contrast, that the scientific method envisioned by men such as Leonardo da Vinci and Francis Bacon emphasizes precisely the validity of individual experience. It is thisWestern mythology of personal experience that, for example, impelled the transatlantic migrations of Columbus—intent upon discovering for himself whether the Indies could be reached by sailing beyond the sunset. Right down to the Apollo space flights and our current explorations of Mars, the myth has remained essentially unchanged.

The major task before them upon their return from the Amazonian shamanic underworld was, in the words of Joseph Campbell, "how to render back into lightworld language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark." They responded to this challenge with a book entitled The Invisible Landscape (1975). In this strange and poetic work, the authors attempt through a synthesis of science, philosophy, and history to fathom the implications of their experiences in the Amazon. In the general resonance theory of nature which they spin out like some exotic helix of cultural DNA, the microcosm of the shamanic journey to the interiors of human and cosmic consciousness is mapped onto the macrocosm of time and space through a philosophy of history which McKenna terms "The Timewave." In this theory, the events of history are described as an accelerated, nonlinear mathematical fractal wave in which distant epochs, correlated across time, influence epochs separated by time and space through resonances in their structural similarity.

"I think that the key point to understand about the psychedelic experience, whether you love it or hate it, is that it dissolves boundaries."

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John David Ebert: You've mentioned that psilocybin facilitates contact with what appears to be an alien mind or intelligence of some sort. You have a theory about UFOs that suggests they somehow may be projections of this intelligence out of the psyche. Could you discuss that?

Terence McKenna: Psyche, or consciousness, is a very slippery concept. One researcher, Julian Jaynes, has suggested that human consciousness has changed its character even in historical times. Jaynes felt that in Homeric times, the ego as we know it was really not in existence, except under extreme stress. And then it presented itself almost as an exterior intrusion into consciousness, like the voice of a god. I think that the major difference between modern materialistic consciousness and archaic shamanic consciousness is that the archaic shamanic consciousness interprets much of its perception as coming from an organized and intelligent Other. And I, after having gone through the extraterrestrial interpretation for a number of years, have come to the opinion that this Other that we contact through these things is nothing more or less than a kind of integrated intelligence that pervades the entire planet. For want of a better tag, let's just call it the Gaian Overmind.

I think for a long time through history, people were fully conscious, fully at home with language and theater and ritual and magic, but they were cradled, if you like, or embedded in an almost continuous dialogue with the rest of reality, experienced as of a seamless consciousness which they called the Great Spirit or the Ancestors or simply God. The Western cultural and linguistic heritage has been largely a building of defenses against this Other and of humanity.

So when we go into the wilderness and ingest psychedelic plants and perform ancient paradigmatic rituals, if we are successful in dissolving the conditioning and the expectations of modernity and materialism, we discover that this mystery is still there, still alive, still capable of dialoguing with us. And it's absolutely confounding to people. They react to it either with ecstasy or fear, or tales of religious conversion or alien abduction. It entirely depends upon how it hits you. In this case, one man's revelation is another man's nightmare. But, I believe, the thing that lies behind all of this is a living intelligent natural mind of some sort that is simply an extension of the biosphere, of Gaia.

Ebert: In your book Food of the Gods, you deal with some of the historical dimensions of the use of hallucinogens. You envision the history of culture as a steady decline in the use of plant-based hallucinogens and their gradual replacement with such unsatisfying substitutes as alcohol, opium, tobacco, cocaine, and so forth. Is it possible that if people used hallucinogens in a more ritualized and controlled way, it might significantly reduce the abuse of some of these other drugs?

McKenna: I think people without this helping hand from the Gaian intelligence we were talking about previously are simply clueless. They have Marxism, and modern advertising, and whatever cultural values they're born into to guide them, but inevitably, as Freud pointed out in Civilization and Its Discontents, these things lead to neurosis.

I think that the key point to understand about the psychedelic experience, whether you love it or hate it, is that it dissolves boundaries. It dissolves cultural programming and replaces it with a much more basic kind of programming that is in the human animal. All culture steers us away from this original source of self-authentication. And in that sense, Freud was right: All culture is neurotic.

So in the book you mentioned, and also in another book of mine called The Archaic Revival, I simply pointed out that when civilizations become massively neurotic, they seem to have an instinctual reflex to go back in time looking for a model. This is why the Renaissance created classicism as a response to the failure of the Medieval church. It's why in the twentieth century we've seen outbreaks of phenomena that range from cubism and surrealism to rock and roll. These are impulses toward an archaic state of mind. At the center of this impulse toward the archaic state of mind is the boundary dissolution of cultural values that takes place under psychedelics. If we could find some way to bring this to people on a yearly basis perhaps, and in a powerful manner, that might be sufficient to keep people operating in the light of the certain knowledge that there are value structures larger than that of the knowledge being handed down to them through the mass media and cultural conventions.

People are being absolutely starved for authenticity, and in the meantime they're offered an endless selection of German automobiles and hair-care products and ice cream flavors and witless entertainment, and none of it satisfies because what people really feel deprived of is an authentic sense of their own being and their own importance in the natural scheme of things. Culture cannot respond to that unless it makes a place for the transcendence of itself.

Ebert: In Food of the Gods you suggest that human consciousness may have evolved from that of its hominid forebears as a result of hominids having incorporated hallucinogenic mushrooms into their diet. What is the earliest evidence that we have for the use of mushrooms in human history?

McKenna: I think probably the earliest evidence that I would consider having any weight is a group of rock-chipped images in the Tassili Plateau of southern Algeria. They keep dating these things older and older, and I think they've got them pushed back now to about 12,000 years ago. There we see shamans with mushrooms sprouting out of their bodies and fistfuls of mushrooms. This kind of evidence, though, has never been sought, and in the areas where I think you're most likely to find this no digging has ever been done—specifically, in southern Algeria. You could do pollenological studies looking for mushroom spores. You could try to find yet more remote and older rock art representations of these mushroom-using shamans.

The great embarrassment of ordinary evolutionary theory, you see, is the very dramatic explosion in human brain size over a very short period of evolutionary time. One evolutionary biologist, Carl Lumholtz, calls it the most dramatic transformation of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record. Well, it's a great embarrassment to evolution when you notice that the brain is the organ that created the theory of evolution. So if we can't account for its origin we've run up a ladder that has no resting place.

Something extraordinary was impinging on the hominid situation, let's say from 125,000 to 25,000 years ago. All other theories have failed. I've concentrated on psilocybin but really when I talk to my peers in this field, what I'm saying is that what we need to look at is diet. Diet is one of the major factors affecting rates of mutation in any species. The reason most species of animals have very defined and specialized diets is that it's a conservative evolutionary strategy to limit exposure to mutagenic compounds, and hence to mutation. When a species gets under nutritional pressure and starts trying food previously considered marginal or unacceptable, why naturally that means the genome is going to be exposed to new chemical stress through the food chain, and you're going to get more birth deformities, blindness, low IQ, low birth rate. But you're also going to get the very rare positive mutation, and the rate of those positive mutations will also be concomitantly kicked upward a little.

So I think that the place to look to understand the breakout in human evolution is that period when we changed from a canopy-dwelling grassland creature. The subsequent shift in diet and the upheavals in the exposure to various chemicals made many changes in human beings. Psilocybin is simply one of the most dramatic. We can construct a scenario with psilocybin that I think is very appealing to evolutionary biologists because it shows how psilocybin, by incrementally contributing slight advantages, could have worked its way toward being a major chemical influence on the evolution of brain architecture and consciousness.

Ebert: In Food of the Gods you trace an arc of historical diffusion of an originally mushroom-using goddess society—the Tassili people in Paleolithic North Africa—and follow it across Asia Minor as it travels into Anatolian Catal Huyuk, from which it migrates to Minoan Crete. Finally, the Greeks take up this goddess culture in the much reduced form of the Eleusinian mysteries, in which the hallucinogenic ergot may have been used, just as the Cretans used opium. My question, then, is, do you have any idea exactly where along this path, or why it was that mushroom usage died out?

McKenna: Yes, I link it entirely to slow changes in climate. In other words, probably 100,000 to 123,000 years ago was the optimum in terms of size and extent of rainfall, and the optimum overlap, as well, of mushroom ecosystems and human habitats. All of North Africa was vast grassland with evolving ungulate animals and many streams flowing out of the highlands. And that grassland had itself arisen out of a climatic change. Before that, at an even earlier time, there had been forest. But as the grassland over millennia gave way to desert, the mushrooms—their range, availability, and potency—all underwent retraction and diminution. As that process continued, the human population either went without or began to seek substitutes. And no substitute really has the same effect as the original, and so you get beer cults, the fermenting of fruit juices into wine, experimentation with hemp and opium. But it was simply a series of climatological disasters, and the thing that put the kibosh on the whole thing—which was also a response to this climatological change—was the invention of agriculture. I think Frazer in The Golden Bough says something about when the gods turned into food the great orgies and celebrations became marginalized, because the cultural values that became important at that time were the ability to get up early in the morning and pick up your hoe and go to work.

Ebert: Can you discuss what, in your experience, are the differences in the visionary contents of the LSD versus the psilocybin experience?

McKenna: Well, yes, to some degree. Each one of these things, being chemically unique, is like a lens made of a slightly different colored glass. LSD goes directly to the structure of the personality, the structures that have arisen through the experiences in the life of the individual, so that it's very good for working through what I think of as normal psychoanalytical issues. It is reluctantly a hallucinogen. In other words, it transforms the quality of thought, but it doesn't transform the input in the visual cortex as dramatically as some of these other things do.

Those compounds that are plant-based, on the other hand—psilocybin or DMT—seem to be full of their own information they wish to impart. Often one does not come away with deep insight into one's relationship or one's parental situation. Instead one comes away with a much deeper sense of connection to the dynamics of nature or, you could almost say, the world of spirit or magical energy. Now, why this difference should obtain between psilocybin and LSD . . . It may be structural or it may be something deeper.

For example, it may involve something like Rupert Sheldrake's notion of morphogenetic fields. LSD, after all, was invented in the twentieth century, in the late thirties, and is entirely characterized by twentieth century Europeans and Americans. Compounds like psilocybin, on the other hand, used for millennia by tribal peoples in the mountains of Mexico, would then, of course, have a completely different kind of morphogenetic field.

Ebert: Some scholars have said that the consumption of hallucinogens is a poor substitute for the long hard road of spiritual discipline that it takes, they claim, to become truly enlightened. How do you respond to this point of view?

McKenna: Well, I don't know, I guess they're truly enlightened. That's a tough thing to knock. This is an ongoing and endless argument at every level in anthropology. The great proponent of it that I'm familiar with is Mircea Eliade, who took the position that what he called "narcotic shamanism" was somehow decadent, and that the real shamanism was running on ordeals and wilderness abandonment and that sort of thing. I don't think aboriginal people were any more fond of discomfort and unpleasantness than we are. Faced with a number of methods to get to the same goal, most of us would choose the most effective and nondestructive method. I really think that when direct access to the mystery or to the spirit becomes problematic for any reason, then that's when you get codification of dogma, appointment of special classes of people to interpret for the rest of us the wishes of the invisible world. Then you get moral laundry lists of dos and don'ts. And the whole thing turns into organized religion. The phobia that most of these organized religions exhibit toward the psychedelic experience is simply that they sense in it a very powerful competitor for their customers.

Ebert: In your first book, The Invisible Landscape, you and your brother Dennis evolve what seems to be a kind of general resonance theory of nature that encompasses the visionary experience of shamanism as well as larger epochs of historical time. Your resonance theory suggests that distant events in history can influence present events through a kind of "resonance of their structural similarity." For example, you compare the end of the Roman Empire with the events of the present day. Can you discuss how that resonance works?

McKenna: First of all, recall what ordinary historical theory assumes: that the most important moment in terms of shaping this moment is the moment that immediately preceded it. I took a different view, and felt that a given historical moment in time is a kind of standing wave of interference patterns set up by other moments in time that may or may not have immediately preceded it. So, for example, the Greek Golden Age, though it now lies 2,500 years in the past, nevertheless continues to shape our ideas about law and society. And in any given situation there are many of these influences impinging, some of them trivially, to give us clawed bathtub legs and things like this; and some very profoundly, to give us the endurability of democracy, for example. (See "Timewave Zero,")

Ebert: Do you think virtual reality technology will play an important part in the future, or will it just turn out to be a novelty?

McKenna: I think it has a tremendous potential because it's really a technology that will allow us to show each other the inside of our heads. This is something we have never been able to do. You and I are having this conversation and the polite assumption is that we have identical dictionaries open in front of us, and therefore you understand what I mean. But nothing brings conversation to a screeching halt than for somebody to say to someone else, "Could you explain to me what I just said?" And you know, in the face of that challenge, the assumption of communication is exposed as pretty thin stuff.

If we could actually show each other what we mean by building 3-D sculptural environments of our intentionality, we would be able to eliminate the maddening ambiguity that attends low-bandwidth, small-mouth-noise-style conversation. It's amazing to me that we can have a global civilization based on small-mouth-noise communication, given that there are 500 languages and nobody has the same dictionary and nobody has had the same education and everybody has a different set of experiences. So, I think we've done an amazing job with the blunt instrument we've been given, but the future of communication is the future of the evolution of the human soul, and as we communicate with each other with greater facility, the boundaries and the illusion of difference will just evanesce and disappear.