We Are the Alien

Forest Lewis ponders Graham St John’s “Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna.”

By Forest LewisOctober 18, 2025

• Biography & Autobiography

ONE OF THE MORE transformative events of Terence McKenna’s meteoric life happened in a house on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley in the winter of 1966—or 1965 or 1967. The facts are inconclusive as to its exact date: time flows backward and forward toward the event. Time, in fact, is a bit squirrelly in the life and work of Terence McKenna, either accelerating in a line toward an overwhelming conclusion or making hellacious nosedives into the psychedelic epiphany. The epiphany—a conversion experience if ever there was one—happened on that fateful winter evening in Berkeley when McKenna smoked DMT and was psychically ejected into an alien realm.

The potent psychedelic compound DMT (or N,N-dimethyltryptamine)—a plant-based alkaloid, the main psychoactive ingredient in ayahuasca, endogenous to the body but found just about everywhere in the organic world—tends to have this effect on people. When smoked, it can transport one into an entirely other world, complete with fey entities and the brightest colors you’ve ever seen, all taking place in a wildly strange non-Euclidian hyperspace. In fact, the DMT experience can be rather reality-shredding. For the young McKenna, born after the atomic bomb, steeped in science fiction, and a child of the Space Race, the DMT flash was like having his wildest dreams come true. It was if the alien worlds of the furthest reaches of SF had been discovered—inside of a common shrub.

“I’ve never actually gotten over it,” McKenna would later say, describing in literary detail his encounters with the “self-transforming machine-elf creatures,” the native residents of DMT space. He would call the experience “death by astonishment,” and the rest of his life would be a kind of messianic integration of this elf-event. It was “N,N-unspeakable,” the “secret that can’t be told,” but one that he would try to tell and tell and tell again.

Speaking the unspeakable before rapt audiences of ever-increasing size and devotion throughout the 1980s and ’90s, in and out of the various New Age venues of California such as Esalen and the Ojai Foundation, McKenna became a cultic figure of the mystic underground. A gonzo ethnobotanist and mushroom evangelist, he would inherit Timothy Leary’s mantle of counterculture bandleader, but would add to it an intellectual ballast of startling reach and vision, locating the psychedelic revolution within the larger historical context that he called the “archaic revival”—a cultural renaissance that included the discovery of the unconscious, the invention of surrealism, the rise of abstraction in art, and the newfound fascination in shamanism and the pre-Christian worlds of the pagan and the Indigenous. For McKenna, the archaic revival was nothing less than modernity itself. Together with the advance of information technology, this revival constituted a radical increase in novelty culminating in the various crises of the latter half of the 20th century. McKenna predicted that these crises would continue to accelerate until they brought about the end of history, or what he called the “transcendental object at the end of time,” infamously scheduled for December 21, 2012—yes, that 2012.

It is helpful to situate the high weirdness of McKenna’s life in history and biography, and lo, a biographer has arrived on the scene. Graham St John, anthropologist of rave culture and author of the pretty good Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT (2015), has now written the first stand-alone McKenna biography, Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna. (Erik Davis, who wrote the introduction to this book, has also written biographically about McKenna in his 2019 study High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, but there McKenna shares the stage with Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick.) The “strange attractor” is at once a magical object from chaos theory, the inescapable pull of the future, and McKenna himself. Due to St John’s intellectual reach, the book has, like a dark planet, drawn an entire menagerie of late 20th-century weirdness into its oblique orbit. With two appendices and 75 pages of notes, it is comprehensive and reference-heavy and seems to have left nothing unexamined in the labyrinth of the McKennaverse. The McKenna persona, familiar today from countless audio recordings strewn across the internet, is not so much invalidated here as given a merely human quality; the book is nothing if not the biography of a mortal. And for this we can be grateful, given the near-deification of McKenna that is well underway in some corners of the internet.

That a rave anthropologist should write McKenna’s biography is fitting, for though McKenna was not known to dance, he was nevertheless integral to the emergence of the rave scene, as the biography covers in detail: his voice is one of the most sampled voices in electronic music. I first came across McKenna myself from a raver friend of mine who had just been deported from Australia, where he had been rendering DMT from acacia bark, supplying the beach-rave scene in Fremantle. Since then, McKenna has always retained for me the aura of the far-flung and the illicit. “Culture is not your friend,” McKenna would say, a statement that seems to become truer by the hour in the United States today.

Incredulous of religion, unable to accept the prevailing ideologies, McKenna, a radical empiricist, was relentless in his attempts to transgress the realm of the possible and report back on what he had found. Following his hero Aldous Huxley, he was convinced—and convincing—that the other world of the mystics was only a toke away. The escape from the mundane world of ideology is the boundary dissolution afforded by the psychedelic experience; this dissolution is not some new fad but rather what humans have been doing since time immemorial—it is the birthright of humanity. To that end, McKenna became the chief evangelist of the psychedelic lightning path, all the while reminding his audience not to take him at his word but to find out for themselves. He refused to become a guru; because the secret can’t be told, one must go there and find out for oneself. He remained insistent on the technique of how to do so, and it is not for the faint of heart: five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness.

Hopping among the hundreds of recordings of McKenna’s “raps” available on YouTube, one encounters a glittering universe of the weird, all banged together with bits of science, history, biology, ethnobotany, anarchy, hermeticism, and zonked ontology, the mixture thrumming with humor and his own gregarious reports from the psychedelic beyond. This is science fiction as stand-up performance, the very limits of speculative metaphysics, but one supported by history, science fact, and real (though highly unusual) experience. Should you fall down enough of the rabbit holes in these talks, they can function as a veritable education in the underground and the esoteric.

St John is not shy about describing the megalomania that propelled such high-wire speech acts. McKenna knew he had a gift shared by few others, and from a very young age he made the gift known: he could talk so that other people listened. “If the truth can be told so as to be understood,” he would say, paraphrasing William Blake, “it will be believed.” Being the center of attention was a lifelong habit, and those with whom he had close relationships—such as the ethnobotanist Kat Harrison, his wife of 16 years—found out the hard way that his growing audience held precedence over more private commitments. As St John notes, McKenna was somewhat aware of this; part of what makes him so listenable is his self-deprecating humor. He would request that his audience accept his message but ignore his life: “[P]lease don’t look at my life because I’m a fallible human being and I’m constantly fucking up.”

St John provides a gripping account of McKenna’s “terror trip.” Long rumored on psychedelic forums, this was a bad trip McKenna took in 1988, which, in St John’s view, brought about the end of his marriage to Harrison, and may have caused the end of McKenna’s journeys with the heroic dose. In short, it appears that he got scared off the mushroom, as if the mushroom had betrayed him, presenting him with the loss of all meaning. McKenna was always candid about the emotional difficulty of the psychedelic journey, saying that if you didn’t experience the fear, you were doing it wrong. Such a blunt message is clarifying and honest compared to all the sweetness and light one finds in today’s psychedelic renaissance. Unlike this renaissance, McKenna was not so much interested in the therapeutic potential of psychedelics as in their ability to totally upend everything you thought you ever knew. The drug was a means of interdimensional travel for the intrepid psychonaut into the far reaches of inner space and the imagination.

The other transformative event in McKenna’s life, filled out by this biography, is the 1971 experiment at La Chorrera. Described in thrilling detail in McKenna’s exceptional psychedelic travelogue True Hallucinations (1993), this was a trek into the Amazon undertaken by Terence, his brother Dennis, and others, hot on the trail of edible DMT, which was rumored to exist among the Indigenous shamans of the rainforest. Their search failed, but what they did find were fields of Stropharia cubensis mushrooms, which they subsequently began to eat in great quantities until things became, well, very weird. Dennis, basically losing his mind, feared that he was transforming into an insect, and Terence, at the climactic top-end of this apocalypse-in-a-teacup, encountered an alien spacecraft of the flying saucer variety. This event, pulling time toward it and expelling it outward again, functions as a kind of dynamo out of which the near-entirety of McKenna’s intellectual project seems to arise: the mushroom logos had spoken, and McKenna would travel to the very apex of his imagination in order to transcribe the message.

As St John demonstrates, there is probably too much that could be said about this whole scene; one takeaway that sticks with me is McKenna’s subsequent conviction that the UFO is not extraterrestrial but rather superterrestrial, of the earth, of the mushroom and our innermost selves. Here is McKenna from True Hallucinations:

This mushroom is a transdimensional doorway which sly fairies have left slightly ajar for anyone to enter into who can find the key and who wishes to use this power—the power of vision […]

We are closing distance with the most profound event
a planetary ecology can encounter.
The emergence of life
from the dark chrysalis of matter.

While McKenna conceives of an intelligent alien force—the mushroom logos, or Gaian mind—drawing us onward into ever more elaborate transformations, it is likewise true that this alien intelligence is also human. One of his big ideas, the “stoned ape” hypothesis, explored in his book Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (1992), holds that, in the deep past, Homo sapiens developed language and became human through the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms. In some weird sense, then, McKenna’s coming singularity, “the most profound event,” has already happened in his vision of the primordial dawn of humankind.

That the psychedelic epiphany both emanates from the past and drags us into the future is but one contradiction in a life full of them, and it is a virtue of St John’s biography that he lets McKenna’s contradictions remain suspended without attempting to resolve them. For McKenna, contradiction was even a kind of goal, or at least a sign of intellectual honesty. The second part of the biography is a valiant attempt to lay out the various components of McKenna’s theoretical project, in what may constitute a groundwork for McKenna studies.

Speaking as someone who has grown bored of the apocalypse, I found the McKenna depicted in this book rather too interested in the end of the world—symptomatically interested, I might add. Chaos theorist Ralph Abraham pointed out to McKenna the Freudian interpretation that such dedicated passion for the end-times reveals a fixation on one’s own imminent demise. Abraham’s critique is like putting a twist on that old statement that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of your own world.

But while McKenna would harp on the apocalypse until his own death, he remained rather enigmatic regarding just what the advancing cataclysm would entail. As St John notes, the end of the world is more “pataphysical than metaphysical”; it is a ruse, a red herring offered by the wandering trickster and stand-up philosopher. When asked for details about the object at the end of time, McKenna offered few hints, “1,000 micrograms of LSD” being the most forthcoming. It was a singularity, indescribable but also pure unadulterated metaphor, as well as “the greatest unlikelyhood.” McKenna’s more gnostic musings are a bit less abstract, his goal being to free the mind from the chains of matter, to leave behind the cradle of earth and enter the cosmos of adolescence. This kind of talk is repeated today by the millenarian transhumanists of Silicon Valley, those sad billionaire crackpots trying to live forever. McKenna, to his credit, was never that literal, and as a result, his rave at the end of history could not be more different from the terminal point imagined by neoliberal prophets like Francis Fukuyama. If Fukuyama’s “end of history” is a mere continuation of global free-market liberalism, McKenna’s involves radical transformation, the emergence of something we cannot currently imagine but that is nevertheless born from our imagination. The object at the end of history is a transcendental rave mirror ball, it is the greatest party of all time, it is the zero point of the psychedelic epiphany, and it is one’s own death.

McKenna died in 2000 at age 53, from brain cancer. The biography describes this tragic passage in devastating detail. McKenna seems to have been prepared for it (as much as one can be). Erik Davis, in his introduction, claims that each excursion into the psychedelic hinterland is, in effect, a trial run for one’s own final transition: the psychedelic experience is a near-death experience. The world “ended” every time McKenna took his five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness.

A statement McKenna would repeat often is that reality is not stranger than we suppose; it is stranger than we can suppose. While this puts a limit on knowledge, it is likewise an invitation toward the most theoretical of speculations. McKenna’s SF stand-up, as far out as it was, was always located here on this planet, even while he gestured toward the stars. Though 2012 failed to deliver the global apocalypse, the world nevertheless has become more precarious by the year. For all McKenna’s emphasis on the end-times, he was always an optimist. The cataracts of time pulling us into unimaginable crisis was, for McKenna, an opportunity for becoming something other than what we already are, a chance to shed habit and undergo radical transformation. We do not need to seek the truth, he would say; rather, we need to face the truth. Half of the psychedelic epiphany is realizing that we are the alien.