Terence McKenna in Embryo: Amazon Psychotropical Quest (Part IV)
- gstjohn
- Oct 8
- 10 min read
By Graham St John (author of Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna)
Concludes the story (see Part I and continued in Part II & Part III) of the November 1972 recording of Terence McKenna's "Amazon Psychotropical Quest."
The Final Crisis
While True Hallucinations, the 1993 English language title, appeared a decade after its “talking book” version, even in print, McKenna’s memoir essentially retained its oratory foundations. The roots of that endeavour lay in “Amazon Psychotropical Quest,” currently his earliest surviving recorded rap, which ultimately served as an instrument in the production of his memoir. And yet while that was true, McKenna’s private salon at Dodge Place, San Francisco, November 1972, demonstrated that the visitor had bigger fish to fry. For, some 20.5 months from the crest of March Forth—i.e. the “experiment at La Chorrera”—McKenna toyed with a terminal theme that shadowed his life. A vibe-killing show-stopper.
The afternoon transits from uproarious knee-slapping to sober contemplation of the apocalypse. “We have unleashed some kind of process that is inimical to the planet, and very very final,” said the visitor. With the session closing on three hours, the laughter subsides as the speaker is at home inside a narrative of mounting tragedy, a turbulent story as familiar to him as it surely is to us. “We’ve triggered the final crisis for the planet. . . . We are trapped in history that gets more and more unimaginable, as the information piles up about the situation we find ourselves in.”
Displaying an early instance of the Socratic Q&A style signature to his public rap, the visitor advances views on the complexification and acceleration of life through dimension shifts that would become central to McKenna’s model of novelty: “. . . a planet swings through space two billion years before life appears. And the instant life appears this mad scramble is on and species appear and disappear. And this goes on for a billion years. And then suddenly thinking species appear and from the dumb confrontation with the stone to the Starship is 20,000 years tops. . . . What could that be but the ingression into a new set of laws that are causing certain kinds of biodynamic aggregates to manifest very, very peculiar properties?”
As the visitor winds down, remarks on cosmic purpose are embryonic to those adopted as a future saloneer. “We threaten every species on the planet, because we have built atomic bombs and . . . every species on the planet can feel that.” And yet, the perspective is beguiling, in tension with developments in environmental philosophy implicating humankind’s alienation from nature. “The planet as an ecological entity can react to that kind of pressure,” he remarked with a conviction that might alarm deep ecologists and critical theorists alike. “It's three billion years old. It can deal. I mean, all the stuff about man is not natural, man opposes nature, ecocide. It's ridiculous. We couldn't have arisen unless there was a purpose of ours which fit into the planetary ecology. And it isn't clear what it is.” The perspective remained integral to an enigmatic mythos maintained in modified form over the next decades. “We're just simply a tool-building species that is itself the tool of a planetary ecology that . . . is organizing life to transform itself.”
The Dodge Place circle is apprised of the philosopher who, in the last six months, had guided McKenna’s musings on the question of divine purpose. In his “mad chase after gurus” he had overlooked one of our “most powerful thinkers,” Alfred North Whitehead. Having become immersed in Whitehead’s process philosophy, recruiting him in the understanding that “the overthrow of a dictator, the explosion of a star, the fertilization of a nova,” are all connected, he is convinced that the English mathematician had done it. “His cosmology is real.”
In the last hour of his visit, McKenna offers a defense of the “book” he came to show off. While the manuscript is imbued with “a metaphysics with mathematical rigor,” and comprises the basis for a “teaching,” its co-author struggles to clarify a method. The afternoon grew long by the time Linda Underhill inquired: “What are the advantages of this knowledge?” She might as well have asked, he quips, “what is the advantage of knowing?” The knowledge to be gained has, the storyteller explains, “a peculiarly liberating quality,” since it approximates “perfect knowledge of the contents of eternity.”
As the room rustles with scepticism, the defendant reaches for Castaneda. The controversial anthropologist’s “teacher,” Yaqui “Man of Knowledge” Don Juan Matus, had talked about a “way of seeing.” McKenna held in high regard Castaneda’s early volumes on his initiation into Native American sorcery, and attributed the modern practice of finding one’s psychedelic plant “ally” to Castaneda.[i] So far as the neoshamanic sensibility that would be adopted by McKenna goes, Castaneda exerted a strong shaping influence.[ii] And yet, Castaneda does not rate a mention in The Invisible Landscape, and is rarely invoked in the True Hallucinations project. The absence is likely due in part to specious claims of Castaneda’s experience with hallucinogenic plants, including smoking Psilocybe Mexicana, as reported in his A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan (1971). McKenna grew disdainful of Castaneda’s subsequent work in which he is thought to have succumbed to pressures from his publisher and agent, excising plant-inspired journeying from narratives that are substituted with “New Age spiritualism and mumbo jumbo.”[iii]
Distancing himself from what he imagined to be counterfeit paths to enlightenment (e.g. crystal healing, yoga, etc), by the time he became a public figure, McKenna was firmly committed to the “magic plant” path, an avowedly independent neoshamanic trajectory crank-started in the Amazon. There, the way discovered is what he imagined “enlightenment” must be like, albeit sans a cultural authority to which one must be apprenticed. This caveat appears to be behind his assertion that, at La Chorrera, they had uncovered an understanding that was more than just a hallucination, or “an ability to zap people, or . . . lev-i-tate”—the word is inhaled as he tokes from the circulating blunt.
The early salon in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district is an illuminating snapshot of McKenna five years before his first public radio appearance. The Dodge Place audience presages those drawn to McKenna’s orbit in later years: curious albeit sceptical. The intimate rap demonstrates the frank self-evaluation that garnered appeal in the decades to come, including among many who followed his advice (i.e. to question everything he said). It is a testament to an open-minded approach that many of McKenna’s friends and colleagues kept their doubts handy and their powder dry. In his candid artifice we experience the trait of the comic who publicly concedes their faults and failings before strangers with disarming honesty. “It’s just this phenomenon of all kinds of mental illness that you have a vision of some kind of fantastically complicated thing, which just happens to put you in the centre of everything,” he remarks in closing. “It’s clinically pathological.”
But while readily conceding that his views could be pathological, McKenna consciously associates his zeal with that of other outliers in an era of seismic change. After all, his chief objective was not fashioning a masterful punchline, but forging an idea about time designed to trigger a paradigm shift. “That's why you have to have recourse to scientific method,” he fantasises, clutching his manuscript. “Because if it's real, it can be proven in the calm confines of the laboratory. And if it isn't real, it should be dropped like a hot potato.” And by heavens, he’d tried. Quantum physics, hierarchical structures, the mathematics of general systems, holography, etc—he had been compelled to assimilate “all this shit” over the past eighteen months, and “it hasn't been possible to find a glaring technical error in the method.”
The Wrap on the Rap
There is an essential ephemerality to the output of Terence McKenna—a perplexing circumstance for a confident figure who was compelled to contribute to scientific knowledge and intellectual thought. Immediate, situationally potent, improvisatory, the Dodge Place salon evokes an approach that the stand-up eschatologist took to his grave. It was a one-of-a-kind artifice that replicated none, leaving shoes that no one has filled. It might be argued that McKenna’s perspective had little weight, and even lacked real meaning, beyond the context of the performance. This caveat approximates his own attitude towards text. He knew implicitly that his favourite work, Finnigans Wake, was designed to be read (and heard), out loud. If the purpose of the inscribed rap is dubious beyond its live delivery, what is the significance of the McKennan rap as it is replayed today, twenty-five years after his passing?
His recorded voice was almost as dead to McKenna as the textual entombment of immediate experience. After all, the future audience playing back a recorded voice remains as removed from the original context as the reader interfacing with written language. While these things may be true, from an early period, Terence’s friends and supporters understood that his voice had range, was durable, and retained resonance, in the present. They recognised that his rap had an epic afterlife, a resonation enjoyed from repeated playback, perhaps not unlike taped Grateful Dead shows, the collecting of which is oddly comparable from the seventies through nineties. While McKenna left the building before the advent of YouTube, the digital video-sharing platform became an ideal playback medium for his voice, today a labyrinthine source of streamed meaning for a vast networked underground.
The Amazon may be known as the lungs of the Earth, but in March 1971 the remote mission was the navel of the strange. Out there in the remote wilds no one could surveil, digitise, and stream your screams. Even Sara Hartley’s cumbersome analog efforts to record her friend failed. La Chorrera was a great height from which McKenna never quite descended. Like a fantastic natural temenos, the hamlet’s roaring chorro was a romantic power-source that retained gravitas in the ever after. There's an Irish saying, he announced to his companions before parting: “poetry is made by the edge of running water.” The chorro, he explained, was a thunderous rock chute which transformed the rapid Igara Paraná into towering plumes of mist. In the days after the experiment, “I could make rhyme. And the closer I got to the water, the more intense the rhyming became, until there was nothing left but rhyme.”
The numinous outpost of Terence McKenna’s universe is the native terrain of an enduring enigma. Having tracked “the secret” to its source deep in the Amazon, the explorer discovered a hidden hand forging a story in which he recognised himself as a chief protagonist. Striking through the mask like Ahab, he bore witness to the “cosmic giggle.” Yet while declaring to have been exposed to the authored timbre of reality (design in the universe) at La Chorrera, the cognitive libertarian would advocate that his audience take the reins to become authors of their own experience. Reclaiming the means of perception, and assuming control of the narrative, was, after all, central to the rap. And yet, almost in the same breath, in “Amazon Psychedelic Quest,” we are privy to a persistent recourse to divine purpose, whether in the form of the mushroom “teacher” (an entity with a Castanedan influence), or shaped by his reading of Whitehead’s process philosophy. As a master of ambiguity, and a partisan of paradox, McKenna would freely navigate between these paths for his remaining days.
Such observations are from the vantage of more than a decade of biographical research. But if McKenna was more an event to be experienced than a record to be played back and scrutinised after the performance, his study remains a fraught and vexing exercise. At the dawn of March 5, 1971, “very strange ideas forced their way into my mind,” Terry related in this proto-recording. There he remained for the remainder of his life, a place amenable to the immediacy of the rap while forever eluding the grasp of the historian.
Dodge Place today (photos by the author, Oct 6, 2025).
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.
[i] Terence McKenna, “Rap Dancing into the 3rd Millennium,” Starwood Festival XIV, Brushwood Folklore Center, Sherman, New York, July 23, 1994, The Library of Consciousness, https://www.organism.earth/library/document/rap-dancing-into-the-third-millennium
[ii] Though McKenna’s familiarity with the dissensus around Castaneda is unknown at this time, it is curious that the controversial anthropologist and sorcerer is raised at a moment when his credibility as either was being challenged. In a review published in September 1972, the nonfictional status of Castaneda’s work was questioned (Joyce Carol Oates, “The Allegory of Carlos Castaneda,” The New York Review of Books, vol. 19, no. 15, September 21, 1972, 3–6.). While McKenna’s Castanedan resonance is speculated by Partridge, for whom McKenna is the “philosophical Shaman of the third phase” of the “psychedelic revolution” (Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West, Vol 2, 113), APQ offers evidence of Castaneda’s early influence on McKenna. This influence is expressed in a moment before public sentiment toward Castaneda shifted, notably in the wake of Sandra Burton’s, “Don Juan and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Time Magazine, vol. 101, no. 10, March 5, 1973: 62–67.
[iii] Terence McKenna, interviewed on GenderTalk radio program # 162, July 15, 1998, uploaded to YouTube on July 14 2011, Deus Ex McKenna ~ Terence McKenna Archive, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1cv5OLmpls&t=1s.
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