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

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

Takes up the story (in Part I and continued in Part II) of the November 1972 recording of Terence McKenna's "Amazon Psychotropical Quest."

Figure 7. Terence pondering the journey ahead. San Augustin, Colombia, 1971. Courtesy of Sara Hartley.

Maker of Myth and Mirth

As the Dodge Place visit demonstrated, McKenna’s friends recognised his ability as an engaging raconteur. Outrageous and captivating, an entertainer-prophet hybrid, part comic and part eschatologist, his capacity to amuse was matched by a proclivity to charm. In recall, tone, and rhythm, he was, at the very least, an extremely talented bullshit artist.

His reputation was such that, even then, Tama Starr was prepared to record a man she had neither seen nor heard before. She caught wind of McKenna’s exploits from her friend Dhyana Languedoc, who doubtlessly shared tales of her adventurous affair with McKenna through Nepal, India, SE Asia, and Tokyo in 1969 and 1970. An old flame of Terry's, beautiful, and known, among other things, for her belly dancing, Languedoc had been the connecting rod linking participants in the Dodge Place scene. For Starr, who today is writing a novel based on Languedoc, Dhyana was like the omphalos of a matrix whose central characters were “Web-people,” people like McKenna.[i]

Starr had also been briefed by Martin Inn, who had been struck by the “vision, genius, and eloquence” of McKenna fresh from Colombia the year before. Inn received Terry during the Spring/Summer of 1971, just then returned from the Amazon (and before his return sojourn to La Chorrera just a few months later). Inn taped his friend during one of those visits, a recording that has not likely survived. These tapes, Inn suggests, were pivotal to the production of an early manuscript of the McKenna brothers’ first book, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens and the I Ching. With his audio-taped record deployed to such success, the visitor had returned to repeat the dose, only now with attention to bottling his adventure narrative genie.

McKenna recognised the value of the audio-recordings to his intellectual and literary aspirations. The estrangement with Hartley post Colombia had unfortunately placed her material record of La Chorrera beyond reach. Though he could not have guessed his own future, as Starr explains, her recording, "Amazon Psychotropical Quest" (APQ), “doubtless served as model and inspiration for Terry’s later performances.” The spoken word rap amounted, she added, to “his real art.”[ii]

Since the third grade, McKenna had proven his chops as a philosophical entertainer. His ambition, however, was beyond that of village idiot. In November 1972, he held receipts. He had arrived with a 300-page “book”: an early xeroxed version of the co-authored The Invisible Landscape, then likely titled “Shamanic Investigations.” The existence of this manuscript sans a publishing contract offered signs of progress. Just the year prior, when fresh out of La Chorrera, Terence’s Berkeley cohort contemplated having him committed—at least that is his speculation, and a story seized upon in later raps. He had left Berkeley in January 1969 a revolutionary and returned an apocalyptic prophet, a circumstance ill-received among friends and colleagues. In an unsent letter penned in Colombia, Hartley warned their mutual friend and UC Berkeley alumnus Michael Malcolm of the pending arrival in Berkeley of his old pal who was poised to “spread the Gospel according to Saint Turyi.”[iii] Having climbed down from the immediate heights of the La Chorreran sublime, by November 1972, he had his sights firmly set on the recognition that could only derive from a publishing contract.

Kudos was eventually achieved as the manuscript evolved into The Invisible Landscape, the treatise that found a route to press with The Seabury Press in 1975. Amid speculation on quantum mechanics, cybernetics, genetics, the “holographic mind,” tryptamines, and an alternative model of time, the work alluded to an experiment with scientific, shamanic, and millenarian implications. The Invisible Landscape would not inaugurate the paradigm shift desired. A difficult to read, and for two-decades before its 1993 HarperCollins reprint, a difficult to find, text, it introduced readers to Terence’s eschatological obsession, a “wave of time” map charting the “end of history” that had resulted from his decoding of the I Ching. The book presented early signs of what Terence later came to identify as “Timewave Zero”—a prophecy with algorithmic and mythopoetic components. That is, it would acquire an end date with the assigned “zero” value of 21 December 2012—the ultimate rebirth event in which humanity goes nova and metamorphoses into something unimaginable.

As the text that became The Invisible Landscape purposefully omitted Terence’s experience and personal anecdotes, its lead author sought to produce a work of his own that did not skimp on the outrageous details of the escapade “on the lam” through India, Nepal, and Asia in the late sixties; that did not ignore “the phenomenon” that shadowed the trek to the remote Amazon at the turn of the seventies; and that did not fail to capture the co(s)mic cavalcade into which he’d plunged. He sought to publish what he regarded in his mid-seventies communications with his buddy Rick Watson as a science-fiction adventure novel, which he would also imagine as the basis for a film treatment (a long-held fantasy). Eventually published as True Hallucinations, the new text was to be a thrilling transposition of his chief medium: his voice. It was anticipated that the work would divulge the backstory to the I Ching’s decoding, that this exercise had been upon instruction from the mushroom muse, an “interior guiding voice with a higher level of knowledge”[iv]—the very same Psilocybean inner voice that provided an animating personal oracle for the next couple of decades.

The memoir that he sought to produce gave voice too to an overwhelming sensation. It was animated by the impression that it’s author’s life was not unlike a novel. Before we return to the front parlour at 6 Dodge Place on that fall afternoon in 1972, it is worth contemplating this detail as it aids clarification of the role and valence of the rap in McKenna’s biography.

Smoked for the first time in mid-sixties Berkeley, inaugurating his exposure to the “little people”—or, as they were often designated, the “machine elves of hyperspace”—DMT became the chief plot device that had aided the conversion of Terry from an adolescent atheistic existentialist into a “true believer,” fuelling speculations on the divine purpose that made being human the greatest novelty in the universe.

That he saw himself as a lead protagonist in an epic adventure is an underlying motif in his travel memoir. “More and more I have this intuition that the world is like a literary construction of some sort,” he later divulged to his Esalen base, “that this is much more like a novel than it is like the world of physics and entropy and equilibrium.”

At the same time, La Chorrera was analogous to the principal location in a film production—the locale retaining stature as a kind of sacred site in McKenna’s imaginary. A rebirth place in a life quest, La Chorrera was the site of a plot twist, with P. cubensis steering the narrative on a new course with directives from a shroomic “teacher.” “What we feel in our own lives,” he continued at Esalen, “is the invisible hand of an author moving us to this affair, this decision to move, this career choice, this drug trip, so forth and so on. I mean, it is a very authored feeling to reality.”[v] 

At La Chorrera, and in other of life’s peak moments, McKenna was compelled to “strike through the mask,” alluding to Melville’s Ahab; to expose the spirit behind the façade. In the same rap it was divulged that Robert A. Heinlein’s Job: A Comedy of Justice inspired the aptitude of paying attention to the details that illuminate kinks on the surface of reality and reveal underlying patterns.[vi] While science fiction was a primary means to achieve such perspicacity, psychedelics—and specifically powerful tryptamines—were the ultimate tools to gain access to a “way in,” to bear witness to the “cosmic giggle.”

Showcasing McKenna’s eidetic memory combined with the artifice of the bricoleur, Esalen became a crucial stage for the rap. He established summer residencies at the Institute, curating his own events in the eighties and nineties. In his foreword to True Hallucinations, he states that it was at Esalen in December 1982 where he realized his “innate Irish ability to rave had been turbo-charged” by years of eating Psilocybe mushrooms. At Esalen, McKenna speculated upon his maturation into “a sort of mouthpiece for the incarnate Logos,” describing his performances as a form of channelling by which his everyday AM persona suddenly dialled to an FM frequency. “It was as though my ordinary, rather humdrum personality had simply been turned off and speaking through me was the voice of another, a voice that was steady, unhesitating, and articulate—a voice seeking to inform others about the power and the promise of psychedelic dimensions.”[vii] The description conjures a vision of McKenna as a Julius Kelp type character who, having knocked back the experimental serum, transformed from a bookish nerd into the Buddy Love of psychedelia, a kooky charmer who repeatedly wowed crowds down at Esalen’s Purple Pit.

Converting verbal communications into written word was an abiding source of frustration. In the unpublished late-sixties manuscript, “Crypto-Rap: Meta-Electrical Speculations on Culture,” McKenna notes his struggle to establish in text the authority that he commanded with the spoken word. The "rap" occasioned immediacy. In a “stylenote” in the manuscript, its author indulges in the merits of the spirited monologue, the ample, fleeting arts of the rap performed before a live audience. “Conversation,” he asserts, “is an honest art form.”

It is mercurial and elusive, yet illuminating. Instantaneously there and gone it is thus humble and electric. Its audience is a matter of synchronicity, being chosen by the constituents of the moment. Having no theory of action it is the Tao. In its occurring form it has no perseverance, printed or electric. I would much rather be talking to you than having you read me.[viii]

Throughout his career, McKenna favoured what he identified as “the felt presence of immediate experience.” The transposition of his rap (complete with tone, timing, rhythm) into text was imagined to be like handling the petrified remains of a charged experience. His rap wasn’t free-wheeling association Neal Cassady style, for McKenna’s “small mouth noises” formed impassioned entreaties on recurring motifs. And yet, with tight syntax improvised from a remarkably diverse internal repository, the eloquently presented rap was valued foremost as an event to be experienced.

McKenna recognised the authenticity of the spoken word performance, and recording his voice became something of an industry. But he was not himself an assiduous record keeper. Recording was invariably the motivation of others. As Tama Starr explained: “the recordings weren’t Terry’s priority. He was more like a performance artist or an improvisatory musician: it happens in the now.”[ix] While McKenna would break into the world of publishing, eventually witnessing his work inside the “great glass boxes along Fifth Avenue in Gotham,”[x] it was his spoken word rap that remained his “honest art form” and truest medium.

Figure 8. True Hallucinations "talking book" front cover. Sound Photosynthesis / Lux Natura, 1984. Photo courtesy of Kevin Whitesides.

Of all the writing projects, True Hallucinations became the vehicle for McKenna’s long rumble with language. In its early manuscript, when titled “Down to Earth: Psilocybin and the UFO,” the project amounted to a confessional on the UFO enigma. It was a means to further its author’s enthusiastic proposition that hallucinogens are “windows into higher dimensions.” For its first decade, the project was a composite of scholarly treatise and adventure narrative—an incongruity that made for a tough sell to prospective publishers, who showed no interest until its thesis-like chrysalis was shed.

At the roots of his memoir is “Amazon Psychotropical Quest,” which demonstrates that its gifted orator was audience-testing tropes implicit to the “Down to Earth” manuscript at least five years before the first (or oldest known - to this author) “Down to Earth” script was completed (in 1977). The recording moreover served its purpose as an aide-mémoire. While a passage in a letter to Watson in May 1979 suggests that the existence of the recording may have slipped McKenna’s mind, the letter demonstrates an intent to transpose his recorded oratory into the manuscript that became True Hallucinations. “I wrote Tama, and she very graciously sent me the tapes that you mentioned,” Terence had informed Watson. “I transcribed them and then worked what was usable into existing material.”[xi] 

Figure 9. True Hallucinations "talking book" inside. Lux Natura, 1987.

Under the creative direction and marketing acumen of Faustin Bray and Brian Wallace (Sound Photosynthesis), True Hallucinations eventually appeared in 1984 as a “talking book” consisting of a set of eight cassettes in a custom-designed clam-shell box (then priced at $80). McKenna narrated the entire 9.5 hour audio-theatrical release himself, accompanied by sound effects and the music of Nomadband. The title “True Hallucinations” was the idea of McKenna’s muse and spouse of 16 years, Kathleen Harrison, who thought “Down to Earth” sounded too much like “organic farming.”[xii] The “talking book” was later distributed by their Lux Natura concern.

Segments of the production were aired through the eighties on Roy Tuckman’s (aka Roy of Hollywood) Something's Happening program on LA’s KPFK FM, broadcasts pivotal to McKenna’s breakthrough to wider media attention. While a sensation on stoner radio and in the broader underground, the transition to print took another decade. The challenge of converting the audiobook into a bound title may have been more related to form (i.e. speech as opposed to text) than content and structural design. The story was already available and had been widely aired in its native medium, the spoken word performance. As the German language audience could not have been satisfied with the audiobook (published in English language only), a print version was published in German (Wahre Halluzinationen) by Sphinx Verlag as early as 1989. The HarperCollins, San Francisco, English hardback edition appeared in 1993, with subsequent editions in at least six languages, including most recently, Polish (2016).

Figure 10. True Hallucinations, front cover, HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1993.

Continued in the fourth and final part.

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] Over the years, McKenna shared early drafts of his memoir project with many of his friends, including Starr, who recalls performing a line edit on an early draft.

[ii] Tama Starr, email to author, May 29, 2025.

[iii] Sara Hartley, unsent letter to Michael Malcolm, La Chorrera, Colombia, March 12, 1971.

[iv] Will Nofke, “Terence McKenna: The Monkey is Being Shed,” High Frontiers, 1984, #1: 7, 28-29 [7].

[v] Terence McKenna, “Countdown Into Complexity,” Esalen Institute, California, March 1996, The Library of Consciousness, https://www.organism.earth/library/document/countdown-into-complexity.

[vi] T. McKenna, “Countdown Into Complexity.”

[vii] T. McKenna, True Hallucinations, xi.

[viii] Terence McKenna, “Crypto-Rap: Meta-Electrical Speculations on Culture.” Unpublished manuscript, 1968, i.

[ix] Tama Starr, email to author, June 19, 2025.

[x]  T. McKenna, True Hallucinations, xii.

[xi] Terence McKenna, letter to Rick Watson, May 27, 1979.

[xii] Kathleen Harrison, interview by author, September 25, 2019.