Psilocybin Summer (excerpt from Strange Attractor)

Recently appearing on Psychedelic Press, this excerpt is taken from Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna (MIT Press, Sept 30, 2025) by Graham St John. It takes up the story of the breakthrough in Berkeley in 1975, when the McKenna brothers discovered a method to cultivate the Psilocybe cubensis spores they had retrieved from La Chorrera, in the Amazon basin, in 1971. For Terence, who is completing his BSc degree at UC Berkeley and is in the immediate wake of a relationship fall out, the discovery marked a new era of transmissions from the mushroom muse and coincided with a new romance. The long-fantasised return to the Amazon is revealed as a driving mid-seventies motif.

Lately of broken heart, Terence threw himself into a state of hypermanic activity centered on trying out methods of cultivating P. cubensis in a greenhouse he built from disused windows in the bottom of his yard at Carleton Street, Berkeley. It is a lonely period of self-examination and mounting financial pressure, worsened by persistent migraines and a long series of failed trials. (Continued at Psychedelic Press)