Terence McKenna in Embryo: Amazon Psychotropical Quest [Part 1]
- gstjohn
- Sep 13
- 11 min read
Updated: Oct 4
by Graham St John (author of Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna, MIT Press, Oct 7, 2025)
“From that dawn moment when we piled out of our hammocks to look at the mushroom, something was very, very bizarre about me. Something had happened to me. And it was true. I mean . . . I was, and am, in a very strange place.” Such are the musings of Terence McKenna upon his condition in the aftermath of a much-vaunted “experiment” at the mission of La Chorrera deep in the Colombian Amazonas in March 1971.
On a quest altogether alchemical, shamanic, and millenarian, Terence, his younger brother Dennis, and several friends, had gone in search of a botanical source of the powerful hallucinogen N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a chemical tool imagined as the sharpest metabolic machete for hacking the ontological frontiers. They had followed the scent of William Burroughs who, in a desperate effort to beat his opioid addiction, searched for yage (ayahuasca) in the Upper Amazon Basin in the early 1950s.[i] Seeking the DMT-containing paste oo-koo-hé, said to derive from Virola theiodora and the ashes of admixture plants, the McKenna party instead stumbled upon Psilocybe cubensis (then identified as Stropharia cubensis) at peak bloom in the region’s cattle pastures.
Terence’s condition report expressed in the wake of the storied “experiment at La Chorrera” was recounted to a small audience in a weed-smoke engulfed apartment in Dodge Place, San Francisco, on 18 November 1972. Recorded by Tama Starr more than twenty months in the wake of the events described, “Amazon Psychotropical Quest” (APQ)[ii] showcases a protean moment in the production of McKenna’s memoir True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise, which was eventually published in audiobook (1984) and text (1993) formats.
As an introduction to one of McKenna’s oldest known recordings (which, as explained below, is now released to the accompaniment of a video-sync), this essay explores the artform at the foundation of his notoriety: the rap. Spoken word performance renders McKenna an outstanding, and peerlessly weird, figure in intellectual history. Since the twenty-year production history of True Hallucinations is a story of its creator’s distinction as a gifted orator, this newly uncovered rap is a rich resource for the biographer. An exploration of the content of APQ, and more generally of McKenna’s oratory artifice, serves to mediate the immediacy of his principal instrument (i.e. his voice)—by no means a trivial endeavour, given the oracular appeal of McKenna’s rap 25 years after his death in 2000, when aged 53.
By contrast to the rap that developed through the eighties and nineties when trialled before patrons of the bard of hyperspace, APQ is riotous, absurd, Terry in the raw, more than a decade before he became “Terence McKenna.” At the foundations of his oratory record, the recording served the orator’s goal to convert speech into text—a life-long challenge. The True Hallucinations project is a tale of its creator’s talent as a raconteur. The rap not only features figurative constructs that would become canonical to the adventure memoir, it has elements of eloquence, tone, gesture, and timing that served to captivate audiences, maximize levity, and compel attention—all difficult if not impossible to replicate in the dry and detached act of reading text.
Besides serving as a live social context to beta-test the contents of his future memoir, the recording that is the subject of this essay was also an opportunity for McKenna to air his convictions on cosmic purpose that were retained until his untimely end. While much of the recording features an unvarnished recounting of what would become the classic rap on La Chorrera, the Dodge Place salon plunges deep into the apocalyptic surreality of its creator’s Timewave mythos. The intimate occasion combined wild anecdotes and cracked protocol with the kernel of what grew into a “wave” with an implicit end date.
This essay accompanies a video-sync of Amazon Psychotropical Quest produced in September 2025 by Peter Bergmann and released on his YouTube channel. The collaboration has been released with the kind permission of Tama Starr. Expanding the ledger on one of the most loved yet misunderstood figures in psychedelic folklore, this essay serves not only as an adjunct to the video-synched recording (which the reader is encouraged to view) but as an entrée to Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna, the first major output of my decade-long biographical sojourn chronicling McKenna’s life and work.[iii]
Dodge Place
Charismatic, spontaneous, a master of wordplay, Terence Kemp McKenna (1946-2000) was a captivating storyteller. His rap has been a source of fascination for fans through the course of his life, and in his afterlife. In so much as he fashioned an ability to charm an audience, McKenna was, and has remained, the “bard” of the psychedelic underground. As demonstrated by an oratory exerting an influence on the curious like nectar on butterflies, McKenna was a folk hero of cognitive liberty throughout the dark ages of the global War on Drugs. As equally outspoken as he was outlandish, the eloquent raver was destined for an ambivalent reception. The bold and unapologetic output that appealed to an international network of supporters is at the same time a source of its creator’s stature as a vexing anomaly in today’s world of Psychedelics 2.0 (i.e. the psychedelic health industry, shroom cartels, microdosing). While his output saw McKenna become the éminence grise of the psychedelic underground, where today he retains status as an occult figure, for those holding the reins of the “psychedelic renaissance,” he effectively became persona non grata. As a result, besides some noteworthy exceptions,[iv] McKenna’s output has met with antipathy, if not silence, in the intellectual community.
This mute reception is symptomatic of a figure who became a voice to be heard more than a hand to be read. While eventually enjoying success as an author, McKenna’s distinct artifice is evident in his archive of spoken word material, an oratory record that has not received due recognition. Paying attention to this vociferous output, this essay approaches its subject’s oratory with the respect it merits. For McKenna cannot be adequately countenanced without considering his primary media: his “small mouth noises” (as he regarded spoken language) comprising hundreds of “raps” delivered (and recorded) over three decades. In doing so, the essay echoes the respect McKenna’s rap is afforded in Strange Attractor.
The rap is a thoroughly unique medium of the Terence McKenna show, where the audience became—and today, with the aid of recordings digitised and uploaded in countless YouTube videos, become—passengers aboard an epistemic carnival ride. The preferred method of knowledge transmission—extraordinary oratory cavalcades with lucid Q&A sessions often longer than the scheduled lecture—invites audiences to witness a spectacle of speculation. Having embarked on these novelties under the tutelage of the P. T. Barnum of the psychedelics milieu, patrons recall performances for their howling vibe as much as their intellectual substance. There is a strange math to the McKenna rap in which the gravity of understanding is coefficient to the scale of levity attained. His performances display what today remains evident among a vast population privy to a catacomb of video streams: a depth of understanding abiding in inverse proportion to the accomplished heights. An acute eschatological sensibility coinciding with an outrageous sense of humor, he is surely among the rarest albeit still remarkably under-examined “militants” in the history of what J. Christian Greer calls “hip psychedelicism.”[v]
With the assistance of various collaborators throughout his career, Terence McKenna produced a body of spoken word content so profusive that even today, a quarter century following his death, we’re still picking up the pieces. No one knows exactly how many recordings exist, although it is likely somewhere in the region of 500+ hours across 250-300 separate recordings (in audio and video formats).[vi] Public lectures, private seminars, conference appearances, club gigs, festival keynotes, trialogues, emcee duties, radio interviews, multiday workshops for specialist audiences, McKenna’s spoken output was prodigious. Since the early seventies, a distributed network of friends and fans, archivists and anarchists, and hunters and collectors, have recorded and digitised, assembled and preserved, podcasted and videographed this vast content. A great many raps performed at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, were diligently recorded by Peter Herbert (Dolphin Tapes). Operated by Faustin Bray and Brian Wallace, Sound Photosynthesis produced dozens of films of McKenna’s appearances through the eighties. A multitude of recordings were made by countless others, including journalists, filmmakers, musicians, and those making personal recordings.[vii] Today, spearheaded by his daughter, Klea McKenna, McKenna’s family pursue the daunting task of archiving their father’s output, an endeavour building on the efforts of bibliographers, archivists, and private collectors.[viii]
The most prolific McKenna videographer is Peter Bergmann. Diligently excavating the archive to create documentaries faithful to McKenna’s philosophy, boldness, and humour, Bergmann has produced hundreds of videos synchronized with audio recordings. A fascination with McKenna, and with La Chorrera in particular, spawned Bergmann’s film Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations (2016), and inspired his McKenna brothers meets Mario Bros 16-bit video game.[ix] In more recent times, the archive of oral content generated through collected recordings (together with McKenna’s textual output) has become the source material for large language models built to serve as cybernetic oracles (including a Terence McKenna app).[x]
Into the present day, previously unknown cassette tape and film recordings continue to be uncovered and salvaged from the private archives of collectors. Newly digitised and remastered recordings (video and audio) have emerged throughout the timeline of my biographical project, adding new shape and tone to the endeavour. One of the most interesting salvage operations is Beyond the Brain with Terence McKenna (2023), a remastered edit of deteriorating footage shot over 25 years earlier at Beyond the Brain, Byron Bay, a three-day event at which McKenna headlined at the acme of his 1997 Australian tour.[xi]
Possibly the most significant, if not simply the most curious, of the little-known TM recordings forms the subject of this essay. “Amazon Psychotropical Quest” was recorded at the Tenderloin apartment of Martin Inn, whose second-floor parlour overlooked a mews called Dodge Place.[xii] McKenna met Inn in Taipei in mid-1970. In the following year, Inn founded the Inner Research Institute in Hayes St, today the longest operating T’ai Chi Ch’uan school in San Francisco. Previously exposed to, and inspired by, Terry’s fantastic disquisitions, Inn invited a small group of friends, all serious students of T’ai Chi, to be regaled by McKenna, and his girlfriend Erica Neitfeld (aka Kume), who had a tale to share about their extraordinary adventures in the Amazon from which they had returned a year earlier.[xiii]
We are indebted to Tama Starr for the recording. Then living in the apartment directly above Inn and meeting McKenna for the first time on the day of the recording, Starr recorded her subject on a Sony TC-110 (on both sides of two cassette tapes).[xiv] An author and businesswoman (later president of Manhattan sign design and consulting company Artkraft Strauss), Starr hosted McKenna when he later toured New York.
The recording and preservation of this material is a masterstroke by Starr whose superior sound recording makes a fine addition to the TM archive. A trove for McKenna trainspotters, among the outstanding features of APQ (and enhanced by Bergmann’s treatment) is its superb capture of background sound effects that places the listener in the room. The recording features the distant bustle of the city (Market St is a few blocks away), and the more immediate impact of hits from passing joints on the tenor of the visitor’s voice. At one point, McKenna appears to be operating a bong.
Continued in Part 2 (an essay in four instalments).
Acknowledgements
My gratitude to many for their assistance with this essay which draws on extensive and ongoing biographical research. Huge credit to Tama Starr for her presence of mind to record Terence McKenna in November 1972, for preserving the recording, and for graciously sharing it. Both Tama and Martin Inn were thoughtful in their reflections about the recording which was taped at Inn’s home in San Francisco at a gathering he organised with McKenna and Starr over half-a-century ago. Both Inn and Starr have contributed photographs and Tama permitted the videography, and on that subject I commend filmmaker and musician Peter Bergmann (We Plants Are Happy Plants) for producing the rap-accompanying video. Big shout out to Sara Hartley for relating her story and for graciously sharing photographs, including some newly uncovered colour slides, as seen in the essay and in the video. Dennis McKenna has been of great assistance from the inception. I thank him for his patience, responsiveness, and kindness. Other helpful folks include Rick Watson, Elizabeth Hansen, Kat Harrison, Erik Davis, Kevin Whitesides, and not least of all Stephanie Schmitz, archivist at the Betsy Gordon Psychoactive Substances Research Archives at Purdue University, the repository for the Dennis and Terence McKenna papers which has been pivotal to my research. Thanks are also due to Rob Dickins for his thoughtful reflections on an earlier draft.
Notes
[i] Graham St John, Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT (Berkeley, North Atlantic Books, 2015), 28–29.
[ii] Terence McKenna. “Amazon Psychotropical Quest.” Private apartment, 6 Dodge Place, San Francisco, 18 November 1972. Audio recording by Tama Starr. [LINK] This serves as an erratum to the APQ reference in Strange Attractor, where the recording is incorrectly attributed to Martin Inn and the Dodge Place residence is stated as “4A.”
[iii] Graham St John, Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna (MITP, 30 September 2025), https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049573/strange-attractor.
[iv] Noteworthy is mycologist Paul Stamets, who has recognised the general valence of McKenna’s “stoned ape” speculation, e.g. Paul Stamets, “Revisiting the McKenna Stoned Ape Theory: The Ever Evolving Case for its Plausibility,” forthcoming in Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs (ESPD55) (Synergetic Press, 2025). There are notable exceptions in the field of studies in religion. See, for example, Christopher H. Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture, Vol. 2 (London: T&T Clark International, 2006), 113–119; Christopher H. Partridge, High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 318–334; Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “‘And End History. And Go to the Stars’: Terence McKenna and 2012,” in Religion and Retributive Logic: Essays in Honour of Professor Garry W. Trompf, edited by Carole M. Cusack and Christopher Hartney (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2010), 291–312; and Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (London: Strange Attractor Press/MIT, 2019), 88–173.
[v] J. Christian Greer, “Angel-Headed Hipsters: Psychedelic Militancy in Nineteen Eighties North America,” PhD dissertation, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2020.
[vi] A major contributing factor to the confusion around the content of the TM Archive that today permeates the Net in countless YouTube uploads are copyright infringement concerns (and associated intellectual property disputes) prompting uploaders, podcasters, and videographers to publish content using unique titles. The resultant digital haystack of material makes for an onerous task for the historian.
[vii] For McKenna’s influence among electronic musicians, see Graham St John, “The Voice of the Apocalypse: Terence McKenna as Raving Medium," Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 15(1) (2023): 61-91, https://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/dancecult/article/view/1242/1060.
[ix] See Peter Bergmann, Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations, We Plants Are Happy Plants, YouTube, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MG5gFtZ3U8. Bergmann’s True Hallucinations video game (2018), is available to Bergmann’s patreon members at
https://www.patreon.com/wpahp (MacOS version does not run on latest OS). A virtual catacomb of hundreds of themed shorts and composites of McKennan audiovisual material is available at Bergmann’s YouTube channel We Plants Are Happy Plants, and listed at “Terence McKenna Shorts”: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwOcdj091QTYtd402vSKDJOpr0b8NnSDq. Bergmann’s films feature music from his project We Plants Are Happy Plants.
[x] For a discussion of McKenna’s cybernetic spectrality, see Graham St John, "Zone Ghost in the Machine: Terence McKenna’s Cyberdelic Reanimation," Institute for Network Cultures, May 28, 2025, https://networkcultures.org/longform/2025/05/28/zone-ghost-in-the-machine/.
[xi] Paul Chambers, Beyond the Brain with Terence McKenna, recorded at Beyond the Brain, Epicenter, Byron Bay, 22 February 1997 (produced by Paul Chambers, 2023; photography by Jenny Lusk). Available at pauledge23, YouTube, 23 September 2023, https://youtu.be/igKsd3uNgHY. For discussion of McKenna’s 1997 tour of Australia, see Graham St John, “Florentine Prince and Funny Bugger: Terence McKenna in Australia,” Entheogenesis Australis Journal 6, August 2025, 168–180, available on Kahpi.net: https://kahpi.net/florentine-prince-and-funny-bugger-terence-mckenna-in-australia/
[xii] The recordings were later digitised by composer Paul Lloyd Warner.
[xiii] Assisting in the story’s telling, Nietfeld and McKenna met in Colombia in the weeks prior to the events related. While she seems to have been regarded by McKenna as a witness to the strange occurrences in the Amazon, Kume appears less witness than bemused bystander.
[xiv] Two other individuals present for the Dodge Place rap were resident Linda Underhill and (arriving late) Bob Amacker, who among other attributes was a nephew of Joe K. Adams, the psychiatrist who gave LSD to Allen Ginsberg in 1959.
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