Terence McKenna in Embryo: Amazon Psychotropical Quest (Part II)

By Graham St John (author of Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna, MIT Press, Oct 7, 2025)

Continues the story (started in Part 1) of the Nov 1972 recording of Terence McKenna, "Amazon Psychotropical Quest."

Putumayo Sunset. Courtesy of Sara Hartley.

La Chorrera

As a recording, Amazon Psychotropical Quest (APQ) has immediate appeal to McKennaphiles as it illuminates the much-vaunted “experiment” the year prior.[i] The experiment at La Chorrera lives large in the psychedelic folk imaginary as an archetypal “trip”—the journey that is remote, geographically and ontologically. Among the most storied adventure in 1970s freaklore, the event holds central importance in McKenna’s biography. The episode at La Chorrera mission in the Amazon basin, in February-March 1971 prompted a two-decade autobiographical project (True Hallucinations). 

In early 1971, Terence, then twenty-four, led an expedition deep into the Amazon. The freak task force mounted a quest for the “philosopher’s stone,” the alchemical “grail,” a boon in the form of a botanical source of DMT. Terence was on course for an epic plateau event in the remotest Amazon. Fresh out of UC Berkeley’s Experimental College, and evading authorities after his US hash smuggling network was busted in August 1969, for the past 18 months he’d been trekking India, Nepal, Indonesia, teaching English in Tokyo, before going into exile in Victoria B.C. Additionally, their dear mother had recently succumbed to cancer. The party included Terence’s younger brother Dennis (twenty), a keen student of botany, recently a sophomore at the University of Colorado, Boulder,[ii] along with four other young American anti-ideologues and iconoclasts.

Among the outliers was Sara Hartley (aka “Vanessa” in the brothers’ memoirs) who Terence met in the mid-sixties as a fellow UC Berkeley “Ex College” student, the two had since shared adventures in Berkeley, New York, India, and Victoria, British Colombia. Hartley had built an impressive track record as an archaeological field assistant and photographer. “The A. R. Wallace Memorial Expedition”—i.e. what the pair named their trip to Colombia, inspired by McKenna’s idol—was the first (and only) manifestation of the duo’s plans to collaborate on “travel films” that would exploit newly portable video gear and McKenna’s oratory. Shlepping her Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder and Rolleiflex and Nikons into the jungle to record the expedition, the trek was an “experiment” in more ways than usually understood. As possibly the first person to record McKenna, Hartley considers it a personal travesty that mould degraded the gelatin on her colour slides and recording tape, effectively destroying many hours of recorded conversations, alongside a great many of the images she captured.

Not all of Hartley’s photographs were destroyed, however. Reproduced as the frontispiece in True Hallucinations, one surviving plate, for example, captured McKenna in the jungle with telescopic butterfly net (see Part 1). Several of her preserved and newly salvaged colour slides are reproduced in this essay. Hartley’s testimonial complicates the apocryphal wisdom on the La Chorrera expedition. In her account of La Chorrera, Hartley, who made a successful career in psychiatry, paints a portrait of a boy’s own adventure characterised by messianism, shroomic bravado, and ungrounded speculation. The La Chorrera expedition was a source of estrangement between the two friends, who came to grief over the status of Dennis, who grew increasingly unhinged, and, egged on by Terence, had become a danger to himself.[iii]

Figure 3. Beneath the big sky outside San Augustin, Colombia, February 1971. Left to right. Sara, Dennis, Terry, Kume, and Michael. Photo courtesy of Sara Hartley.

Other members of the party were: Michael Lasky (aka “Dave” in the memoirs), who Terry describes as “a New York gay meditator,” and a “chronic worrier” who had “no business being in the Amazon Basin”; Terry’s new lover Kume (Erica Nietfeld, aka “Ev,” present at the time of the recording), who had been living in South America for several years, and who served as their Spanish translator; and “Cia” (pronounced “SeeAh”) (aka “Solo Dark”), a mysterious fruitarian and a leader of a sect named New Jerusalem, who, rather awkwardly, also happened to be the now dejected lover of Kume.

Riding down the Rio Putumayo, onboard a dugout pulled by the small trading vessel Fabiolita, the freak troupe fitted out in loose white garb voyaged into the “devil’s paradise,” so named with respect to the horrifying legacy of latex extraction in the region.[iv] But Terence was less interested in the colonial history of the Putumayo, and its geography of terror, a la Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, than its privileged position in the “geography of the secret.”[v] 

Figure 4. Terence and Kume, onboard dugout, pulled by The Fabiolita, Putumayo. Courtesy of Sara Hartley.

We’ll Try It!

As the joint circulates at Dodge Place, McKenna’s friends are exposed to the sojourn to “the centre of the Amazon.” A slew of characters and themes recognisable to those familiar with the story are present. As mentioned, there’s Terry’s archrival, Cia. Members of New Jerusalem believed they were reincarnated figures of note, such as the Rasputin named Robin, another who was a Hari Krishnaite refugee who wore white robes and white rubber boots and was the incarnation of Irwin Romel, and of course Cia, the “central mystery of this whole group,” who believed he had been several prominent people. In constant communion with invisible “beings of light,” and with an entourage of vegetarian animals that included a sickly monkey, a Christ-identified Collie, and a Buddhist kitten with scurvy, Cia is regarded as a wretched nutjob. He is also a serious source of paranoia for Terence, not simply because it was assumed “he was probably going to kill me” (on account of Kume’s new allegiance), but in part due to the spelling of his handle (which was not divulged in the memoir, where “Cia” is only named “Solo Dark”).

There’s the Colombian anthropologist Dr Horacio Calle (named Alfredo Guzman in True Hallucinations), a Mr Kurtz type figure who is located among “his people” at the tiny village of San Jose, up the Cara Paraná enroute to La Chorrera. Regarded as “a Marxist, a woman hater, and a coke addict,” the paranoid Calle is the only non-Indian reported to have taken the oo-koo-hé (a paste thought to contain DMT from species of Virola). Suspected of being on a “noble savage” trip, Calle is at pains to “protect his Indians from these crazy hippies.” An ethnologist-gatekeeper, a role presumed to be a front for his own exploitative interests, Calle is aghast at the arrival of a troupe of freaks who sought the most revered material in the Witoto universe.

There are the cattle pastures outside the mission of La Chorrera, the site of “the perfect dope” that manifests in the form of the mushroom P. cubensis, which grew to the size of “dinner plates.”

And there is the unsettling impact of Dennis, whose behaviour grows more unhinged with each passing day. They had trekked to a remote corner of the Amazon on a quest that Hartley came suitably equipped to document. But instead of the plant-collecting expedition expected they encounter Terry’s younger brother raving about superconductivity, harmonic cancellation, and “the gnosis from beyond the Crab Nebula.”

Figure 5. Dennis McKenna, Terence McKenna, and animals. Colombia, February 1971. Courtesy of Sara Hartley

Such are narrative elements of the infamous “experiment” of March 4-5, 1971. The date was identified by the brothers as “March Forth” —i.e. their childhood pun in response to the question: “What date of the year is a command?” In the phrase abused by young men appropriating science to their cause, it was “hypothesised” that the metabolizing of P. cubensis and harmala-containing B. caapi vine would initiate what Dennis named “hyper-carbolation,” a process that would alter their neural DNA effectively “changing man into an eternal hyper-dimensional being.”[vi] 

Though deemed an “experiment,” the much-vaunted episode is among the most gnomic exercises in freakdom. By the time the uproarious and self-effacing True Hallucinations appeared, its author conceded that this remote research frontier was about as far removed from scientific protocol as could be imagined. Experimental in a ludic sense, La Chorrera was a site of improvisation: bricolage over precision, surreality over conjecture, play before method. The scene was archetypically liminal, as spatially remote as it was temporally in-between, the context for a psychotropic passage rite whose chief participants literally went out of their minds. After two decades of silence, Dennis reported that the protocols that had filled the pages of their The Invisible Landscape were “rich material for the student of pathology.”[vii] In High Weirdness, amid a valiant effort to parse this material, Erik Davis regarded this episode as a high watermark of seventies wyrd, leaning on the “resonance” between scientific, fictional, magical, mythological, and personal ingredients.[viii]

But back in November 1972, a couple of days after his 26^th birthday, and a year-and-a-half downstream from La Chorrera, Terence was adamant that “something had happened” to him in the Amazon. In an incident that may have occasioned the strangest case of “DNA activation” on record, an inner switch had been flipped, and “some kind of peculiar principle had been manipulated.”

As the APQ rap disclosed, March 4 arrived after a week or so of preliminary exercises in which the party dosed on the mushrooms in bloom in the region, including on one occasion each eating 25 specimens. On other occasions, chasing the mushrooms, they smoke ground Banisteriopsis caapi, 16 to 20 feet of which they had acquired from a local “witch doctor,” this alchemy effecting “a 15-minute cartoon-like hallucination.” The outcome is described as “vegetable television.” On another occasion, they pulverise and insufflate ground mushroom and yage, creating the “perfect dope.” But as pleasant as it was, jungle TV was not that for which they had trekked in this Vernian journey to the end of time mid-Amazonas.

Steeped in anticipation, the sojourn was evocative of the outer and inner worlds they occupied at the turn of the seventies. The party inhabited a turbulent historical juncture, what with the volatile climate of Nixon’s America, the ongoing Vietnam War, and the ever-present threat of nuclear Amageddon. In February 1971, integral to the objective of conquering the “final frontier,” NASA had launched its third successful moon landing. At the same time, Terence was a fugitive from federal authorities. A bench warrant had been issued in his name by the US District Court, Southern District of New York, on November 6, 1970. A Berkeley Hills brush fire destroyed his library in the summer of 1970. Most tellingly, the brothers were mourning their dear recently departed mother. They were bereaved edgemen roaming the highly charged frontiers of their imaginations.

Figure 6. Cattle pasture at La Chorrera mission. Courtesy of Sara Hartley.

What the brothers named their “harmine-psilocybin-DNA bond”[ix] was a hodgepodge of post-adolescent enthusiasms. As we learn in High Weirdness, the March Forth experiment was a mutant bricolage of Jungian symbology, millenarianism, hermetic alchemy, the ethnography of Michael Harner, and the fiction of, among others, Arthur C. Clarke and H. P. Lovecraft, flush with an amateur passion for organic chemistry, molecular biology, quantum physics, acoustic resonance, all washed down with tryptamines + harmine. And, as the Dodge Place visitor divulges, the proceedings were also informed by Carlos Castaneda.

Terence had read Harner’s work on Jívaro ayahuasca shamanism, and grew fascinated with the regurgitated “purple goo” that held divinatory purposes. Inn, Starr, and friends received the download. In Terry’s understanding,

. . . you can look at this stuff and you can see other times and other places in it. It's made out of something completely transnormal. It's made out of space time. Or it's made out of mind. Or it's pure hallucination objectively expressed but always keeping itself within the confines of this liquid. I don't know if you've read The Teachings of Don Juan, but there's an instance in there where this entity, Mescalito, holds up his hand and Castaneda sees his whole past, a past incident in his life in the hand. And supposedly, if this stuff has an empirical validity, what's happening is a very thin film of this projective trans-dimensional goo is there.  And when you look at it, it's like feedback. You know, it's a mirror, not of your physical reflection, but of who you are.[x]

We’ll return to Castaneda later. But at the turn of March 1971, high on shrooms and vine, Dennis descends into a “furious” rap. And like a precocious athlete receiving the baton from his influential older brother, he is transfixed by a buzzing tone. Overwhelmed by an intense vibratory humming sound that he had a strong compulsion to imitate, and with his mind filled with biochemistry, fourth dimensional objects, and sci-fi, Dennis struck upon the idea that he was hearing the amplified electronic spin resonance (ESR) of metabolising tryptamine /tryptophan (from the mushroom) + harmine (from the yage). And as he suggested by a circuitous route that I am no authority to judge (let alone comprehend), by imitating this sound, and causing high frequency harmonic resonance, he could ostensibly modify the ESR of his neural DNA. And from that point forward, literally anything was possible.

As his “word pictures caused reality to shimmer and crinkle at the edges,” Den had, in the visitor’s account, made contact with an “obsidian bubbling 4-D fluid,” a metalinguistic substance to which the party was tasked to, he said, now burlesquing his brother’s manic propositions, “bond into a usable tool, and end history, and go to the stars, and explode the sun, and end it all.” What did they have to lose? After a pregnant pause, the scraggly bearded beanpole makes a well-timed gesture that causes the room to explode with glee: “So we said, fine. So we’ll try it!”

The party moved to an isolated hut in the forest which looked like “a lunar module.” Up on stilts, the forest house had a little ladder that its occupants (Terry, Den and Kume) could pull up behind them. Aborting a mission that had wildly deviated from its advance parameters, Sara and Michael hung their hammocks at a residence in the village. Having already made hours of audio recordings of the brothers in conversation, Hartley had by now modified her documentation efforts.

The three remaining crew members decided to take it easy with the mushroom + yage combo. Terence boiled the yage, adding tryptamine plants that might have included Banisteriopsis ruysbana.[xi] On the evening of the 4^th, Dennis ingests one mushroom “so he could hear the tone come on.” Given his understanding that the voice-triggered ESR of neural DNA could bring about a fatal drop in temperature local to the metabolising/bonding tryptamine/harmine, rather than munching shrooms pal mal as they’d done in the preceding days, the “metabolising” would instead be performed by a freshly picked P. cubensis specimen that they positioned in their forest module in the afternoon of March 4. “We thought the absolute zero phenomenon might kill you if it happened in a human being,” Terence relates. And to reinforce the gravity of the moment, “there was even talk about the possibility of triggering fusion process by mistake.”

According to Dennis’s speculation, if “hyper-carbolation” worked, “the mushroom would be obliterated,” leaving “a standing waveform, a violet ring of light approximately the size of the mushroom.” Symbolising “the stone,” the mushroom became an iconic placeholder for the ultimate transform anticipated. Their “lunar module” became a stage for an experiment hedged with the lustre of science, yet thoroughly imbued with magic. The anticipated outcome is what Davis identifies as an “eschatological-pharmacological-science-fictional object.”^[xii] Perhaps the most poignant addition to the ritual was the blue morpho chrysalis that Terence (the amateur lepidopterist) positioned inside the hut—the butterfly cocoon signaling the expected metamorphosis. 

The young psychonauts knocked back the home-made brew and lay in their hammocks. The liquid was “sharp and astringent, like a sauce of leather and mole,” and faded quickly before it churned through their guts. The night was long. Eventually, dawn approached. Dennis howled thrice—like an “electric siren wailing over the still, jungle night.” Each mechanical yodel was louder than the last. In the absolute darkness of the hut, there was silence.[xiii]

A cock crowed, thrice. A long time passed, but the mushroom was unmoved. The stone did not appear. The fourth dimension did not manifest. Their module had not made landfall on the surface of an alien planet. The brothers remained unchanged. And as the quietly spoken Kume reflects in the parlour, “nothing happened to me at all.”

While the anticipated transformation did not come to pass, to his own end, Terence believed that March Forth triggered a quantum shift in his being. In the immediate aftermath of the experiment, there is an “overpowering presence,” an omniscient entity they understood to be “the teacher,” originally said to be like “an insect 160 feet tall.” While “you met it in hallucination, and you could feel it day and night,” this Lovecraftian presence “wouldn’t let you see it. But its presence was just so overwhelming that it kept popping into your subliminal vision.” Terry informs his friends that he did not sleep for 14 nights (later revised to 11 or 9, depending on the telling) in the wake of March Forth, during which time he and his fellow trippers faced the stark reality of coming face-to-face with “the ectoplasmic unimaginable.”[xiv]

The La Chorrera episode culminated when Dennis, manic in the aftermath of the experiment, and intent on attracting attention to their discovery (in True Hallucinations, it is repeatedly stated that he sought a “press conference”), lays his hands on the rope attached to the mission tower bell, a rude awakening that brings their La Chorreran interlude to a clamorous end.[xv] In a slap to Terence’s pride, and at Hartley’s expense, they are evacuated by bush floatplane, but not before Terence encounters an “arial vehicle of non-human origin.”

The episode with the “flying saucer” is both astonishing and disappointing, for Terence is not taken as anticipated. Crestfallen to have been left behind, his senses were abducted all the same by a confounding hallucination preoccupying him for years to come. Terry’s March Saucer was radically orthogonal to the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” typical to ufologists and saucerian societies forging the “flying saucer” mythos to which he was exposed in his youth. Asked by Starr what he thinks the “flying saucer” really represents, the response encapsulates the preoccupation of his remaining days. “It's the ingression of a higher dimensional epoch, which reverberates through three-dimensional history. It's a shockwave being generated by an eschatological event at the end of time.”

Continued in Part III.

Preorder Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna by Graham St John (MIT Press, Oct 7, 2025). For praise, launch events, excerpts etc, see further information

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] Unless otherwise stated, the narrative on La Chorrera used in this essay derives from APQ. While this exercise was not designed to make granular comparisons between this “raw” material and that eventually published in True Hallucinations (in audiobook and print editions), there is occasion to draw attention to distinctions.

[ii] Dennis later produced a memoir that offered further details on La Chorrera. Dennis J. McKenna, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna (St. Cloud, MN: North Star Press of St. Cloud, 2012), 216–299.

[iii] Hartley relates her story in Strange Attractor, with a fuller treatment of her account to be included in a forthcoming study by the author.

[iv] In APQ, the visitor does not mention the white “quest” apparel that he insisted all expedition members wear, as depicted in Hartley’s photos.

[v] Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 23.

[vi] T. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 94.

[vii] D. McKenna, Brotherhood, 255.

[viii] Davis, High Weirdness, 111–114.

[ix] T. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 93.

[x] The idea found expression in Terence’s notion of the violet ejaculate he called “luv,” as explained in the chapter “Kathmandu Interlude” of True Hallucinations (61).

[xi] The admixture plants used are never properly verified. Later it was thought to be Justicia pectoralis var. stenophylla.

[xii] Davis, High Weirdness, 100.

[xiii] T. McKenna, True Hallucinations, 111.

[xiv] Further downstream from La Chorrera, Terence behaved as if a shroomic logos had been installed in his psyche—an “inner voice” conjured when “heroically dosed” on psilocybin, which was successfully grown in the United States with spores from their La Chorreran bloom, using a technique the brothers promoted in their wildly successful pseudonymous underground manual: O. T. Oss and O. N. Oeric, Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide (Berkeley: And/Or Press, 1976).

[xv] Canonical to the mythos conveyed in the brothers’ memoirs, the mission bell anecdote was not related in APQ.