The Archaic Revival
Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon,
Virtual Reality, UFO’s, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess and the End of History
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1992.
ISBN: 0062506137
Short editorial note
This book is a collection of essays by and interviews with Terence
McKenna, productions that span over many years of his life and research. It’s a quite heteroclite kind of book, hard to classify. I think in order to avoid making up something that it is not, best is to see it as a collection of earlier works under a new name like in music for example the volume ‘Bunte Blätter’ by Robert Schumann (Op. 99)
– that contains many short oeuvres from his younger years, but the volume is one of the best, and most genial of his entire musical life.
Some of the little pieces, says the anecdote, Schumann even had thrown in the garbage bin already and took them out again, to conserve them for later ‘revision’ because he thought they were not up to his standard. As for me, better the whole Schumann destroyed and this single volume conserved, than vice versa. And perhaps the same is true for the oeuvre of McKenna and this particular part of it,
Archaic Revival. And if one day, which I do not believe, McKenna’s findings were all found not true, there is one truth that goes beyond all this – and this is equally valid for Carlos Castaneda and his oeuvre
– it is the truth that McKenna was one of the greatest poets of our time and a truly genial creator of his own peculiar, fantastic and highly interesting universe, his own particular reality. And at the same time a teacher of the technique to get there, for all of us!
- In addition to choosing to repress the strange abilities of the shaman and the psychic potential of contact with the Other, Western tradition has a built-in bias against self-experimentation with hallucinogens. One of the consequences of this is that not enough has been written about the phenomenology of personal experiences with the visionary hallucinogens. 3
- And I think what’s really happening is that a dialogue opens up between the ego and these larger, more integrated parts of the psyche that are normally hidden from view. Ego may be a fairly modern invention – meaning the last one or two thousand years – a fairly modern adaptation of the psyche to its environment. One of the things happening in the Amazon is that forest people say they enter into a group mind when they take ayahuasca, and on it they make decisions for the tribe – where to hunt, who to make war on, where to move to, these kinds of things. 10
- So the issue finally comes down to the citizen versus the self.
The citizen is an extremely limited definition of human potential. The self is a definition of human potential so broad that it threatens the obligations of the citizen. 12
- I am a political activist, but I think that the first duty of a political activist is to become psychedelic. Otherwise you’re not making your moves cognizant of the entire field of action. 13
- Shamanism is use of the archaic techniques of ecstasy that were developed independent of any religious philosophy – the empirically validated, experientially operable techniques that produce ecstasy. Ecstasy is the contemplation of wholeness. That’s why when you experience ecstasy – when you contemplate wholeness – you come down remade in terms of the political and social arena because you have seen the larger picture. 13
- So it is the
