Graham St. John: Terence McKenna's Hallucinatory Life
Cultural anthropologist Graham St. John spent ten years assembling McKenna's story, documenting the rogue scholar who argued that interfacing with tryptamines was evolution's missing link and that rave was its modern revival.
Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Graham St John, a cultural anthropologist and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield in the UK.
Graham has spent decades studying transformational events, psychedelic culture, and electronic dance music scenes. He's written ten books, and his latest is Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna, published by MIT Press. McKenna was the 20th century's psychedelic renaissance man, a stand-up philosopher who became a sampled voice on rave tracks and a herald of consciousness expansion.
Graham spent years tracking down letters, interviewing over 80 people, and sifting through archives to capture McKenna's life, not to canonize or condemn him, but to understand how this rogue scholar became both hero and controversy in equal measure.
We talk about the challenge of writing a biography when your subject was known for embellishing stories, and why distinguishing fact from fiction in McKenna's "hallucinatory life" matters.
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Dig Deeper
- Visit Graham St. John's website at Edgecentral
- Graham St. John - Senior Research Fellow at University of Huddersfield
- Purchase Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna from MIT Press or Bookshop
- Los Angeles Review of Books review of Strange Attractor
- Lucid News review - "Genius and Delusion in Terence McKenna's Life"
- McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy - Founded and led by Dennis McKenna
- Purdue University - Betsy Gordon Psychoactive Substances Research Collection - Contains McKenna archive materials donated by Dennis McKenna in 2013
- Klea McKenna's archival project at TerenceMcKenna.com
- Dig into this episode's complete show notes at podcast.thetonearm.com
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