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.
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”
Academic Work and Journals:
• Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture — Graham is founding Executive Editor
• Dancecult Research Network
• Graham St. John’s article: “The Voice of the Apocalypse: Terence McKenna as Raving Medium” (Dancecult, 2023)
Terence McKenna Resources:
• McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy — Founded and led by Dennis McKenna
• Brainforest Café Podcast with Dennis McKenna and Graham St. John discussing Strange Attractor
• Terence McKenna’s memoir True Hallucinations
• The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching by Terence and Dennis McKenna (1975)
• Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna
• Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide by O.T. Oss and O.N. Oeric (pseudonyms for Terence and Dennis McKenna, 1976)
Dennis McKenna:
• Dennis McKenna — Ethnopharmacologist, brother of Terence
• Dennis McKenna bio at McKenna Academy
• The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna by Dennis McKenna (2012)
Electronic Music and Psytrance:
• Shpongle — Psychedelic electronic music duo formed 1996 by Simon Posford and Raja Ram
• Shpongle Official
• MAPS Interview with Simon Posford about electronic music and psychedelics
• The Shamen — UK act whose track “Re:Evolution” (1993) sampled McKenna and reached #18 on UK charts
• Psytrance history and Goa trance origins
Related Graham St. John Books:
• Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT (North Atlantic Books, 2015)
• Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance (Equinox, 2012)
• Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures (Equinox, 2009)
• Weekend Societies: Electronic Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures (Bloomsbury, 2017)
• Rave Culture and Religion (Routledge, 2004)
Key Figures and Concepts Mentioned:
• Erik Davis — Author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
• Burning Man — Annual event in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert
• Robert Anton Wilson — Author and philosopher
• Timothy Leary — Psychologist and psychedelics advocate
• DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) — Powerful psychedelic compound
• La Chorrera — Colombian mission site of 1971 McKenna experiment
• UC Berkeley — Where Terence studied 1965–1975
Archives and Research:
• 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
Cultural and Historical Context:
• Grateful Dead — Band whose community embraced McKenna’s ideas in the 1970s
• San Francisco Cacophony Society — Influenced Burning Man’s Dadaist aesthetic
• Dada movement — Early 20th century avant-garde art movement
• Alfred Jarry — French Symbolist writer and puppeteer
• I Ching — Ancient Chinese divination text
• Hermeticism — Western esoteric tradition
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: The subtitle for the book is The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna—"hallucinatory" rather than "visionary" or "psychedelic" or any other variety of words one might choose. Tell me about that specific word choice. What does that capture about his life, and how did it shape how you had to approach his life?
Graham St. John: It's an interesting question. I guess I could have gone with "visionary," and I could have gone with "psychedelic"—it was six of one, half a dozen of the other, really. But his memoir True Hallucinations was his life project, certainly through the seventies and eighties. It's a two-decade-long project. It's been a challenge for any biographer—it's one of the many challenges over the twenty-five years since McKenna died to produce a biography. And one of those reasons is because it's difficult to know where the hallucination ends and the truth begins with McKenna.
Graham: His brother Dennis McKenna, who's still around and a well-known ethnopharmacologist, would often say that his brother was someone who minced facts. In other words, he was a major bullshit artist. And I emphasized the word "artist" because over the significant part of his life, Terence developed the whole Terence McKenna act, performed for wider and wider audiences. He embellished content and became a very unique roadshow—the Terence McKenna show. He stepped into no one's shoes, and no one has stepped into his shoes. A fascinating character. I don't know if that really answers your question. I don't think there's any significant motive behind using the word "hallucinatory" as opposed to "psychedelic" or "visionary."
Lawrence: It certainly works in this context. There's a lot in there that you're introducing that I hope to get to throughout our time together. But one of the things that strikes me, or one of the elements that strikes me, about you assembling this work—and you've mentioned it elsewhere—is the idea that there's a lot of detective work that has gone into this. And I think about that in the context of the fires you described, the loss of his archives and material. Yet your book—I was talking to somebody about a week or so ago when I was still reading it. He asked me what I was reading, and I told him. I said it's incredible how by the time I got to 1970, I felt like I had a day-to-day sense of what was happening in a period of McKenna's life. And I know it's not quite that specific, but you do have such a rich set of detail for someone whose material was lost. I'm just so curious—it does feel a little bit miraculous, and I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Pulling all that together—was it Rick Watson? What was it?
Graham: The whole process seems like a miracle. I was so fortunate to meet and interact with over eighty people over a long period of time. You mentioned Rick Watson, his buddy from high school—the guy who gave him the DMT when he got the machine elves, visiting him in February 1966. He was instrumental, in fact. He's no longer with us, unfortunately—he passed on eighteen months ago. The book is dedicated to his memory. Without him, I don't think it would've happened. I mean, initially the project went through various phases. As you know from the first part of the book, there's quite a lot of biographical detail about Rick and his interactions and his correspondence with Terence. We're really fortunate to have those letters that he shared with me—Terence's letters, over about twenty-five letters from 1968 onwards, which is just a small portion of the surviving letters. Also Rick's unpublished short stories, which are quite fabulous, including a short story called "Morning Glory," which details their first trip together on morning glory seeds in 1964 in San Francisco. This kind of stuff enables the richness of the story.
But I should add that this is not the final word on Terence. There's so much more accurate—and in fact, his daughter Klea McKenna is right now essentially excavating her archives and storage, retrieving all these boxes. She has a website called, I think, TerenceMcKenna.com, where she's seeking donations to archive these materials, including apparently journals—which, when I heard about this stuff, made my shoulders slump. But I woke up excited about the prospect of there being further work that I'm engaged in as well. I'm sure others will further excavate the life of a fascinating figure who is still one of the most well-known yet well-loved, yet little-known psychedelic intellectuals—but intellectuals and philosophers, if not just standout philosophers of the twentieth century who, despite moving to the next level twenty-five years ago, continues to haunt the present.
Lawrence: I want to come back to some of that potential future work a little bit later in our discussion. But I also wanted to circle back to your quote about Terence being a bullshit artist. You refer to him as a master bullshitter, but also as someone who contributed so much to science, humanism, the hidden arts. I wonder what's the reconciliation process among those—I don't want to say contradictory aspects of his persona, but how do you arrive at a consistent whole of somebody who seemed very—you talked about his ability to use fact liberally in the creation of a good rap. (laughter) That wasn't something he acquired later in life. The first quarter or so of your book really establishes early on that that was one of his true gifts—this oratory and this ability. People didn't even care if he was being fabulous; in fact, it was probably part of the draw for his raps. I'm just curious, how do we, for lack of a better way to say it, take his contribution seriously, knowing there is this trickster element to what's going on with him?
Graham: I suppose that he was so consistent and persistent with—paradox was such a guiding principle for the way he thought. I mean, he's a guy who in the same sentence would promote saving the planet and leaving the planet at the same time. But he would do that in such a way that was entertaining and mesmerizing. I mean, he was the standup philosopher, standup eschatologist. There's no parallels with that. A fascinating figure. I suppose I've conducted myself somewhere between being something of Sherlock Holmes and Captain Willard chasing Kurtz up the river. But ultimately I'm no assassin, and this is largely sympathetic work. It tends to be balanced, nuanced. I've had the great fortune to communicate with so many people. There may be others who will arrive like they have with Leary and Leonard Pickard and so many figures who have agendas that are less sympathetic and who may in fact mine my work to fit their agendas. But no, this is not a character assassination. It's an attempt to—I suppose it's up to the reader to determine, but it's an attempt to understand the fullness of this figure who's one of the most loved yet little known, and still enigmatic. I imagine that this book hasn't resolved the enigma.
Lawrence: He often said that the universe is stranger than we can suppose. You've spent so much time thinking about, immersed in, researching, talking about McKenna. How do you find that sentiment manifesting in him?
Graham: I suppose that points up a figure who is so enigmatic while being at the same time a guy who's basically a heroic phenomenon in the psychedelic underground through his life and into the present, essentially a cult figure. But at the same time, something of a persona non grata in the world of psychedelic science, including contemporary psychedelic science, where he's regarded as a preposterous anomaly. I mean, these divergent viewpoints really drive my interest in him. And I think he just represents such a unique paradox in his own right.
Lawrence: I was speaking with someone who was a few years ahead of him at Berkeley and wasn't familiar with who he was. This person was somewhat of a head but just missed him generationally. I was trying to explain in a sentence or two who he was, and I said, I don't know, I guess you could think about him—if you want some shorthand, think about him as like the Timothy Leary of plant medicine. And I knew how much disservice there was in that, but I couldn't think of another way. I couldn't think of another connection to make that would help somebody understand. And hearing what you said there, I wonder is there some truth in that analogy in their mixture of science and philosophy and, to just say it plainly, sort of recreation and finding the joy and the mystery in these different medicines, but still trying to contextualize them with some semblance of science?
Graham: Because we're talking about someone who wore so many hats and masks and personas, often simultaneously. I mean, we can talk about a guy being at the same time a freak, an exile, an outlaw, an anarchist, a heretic, an agnostic, a prophet, a bard, a surrealist—and we can go on. All of these things all at once. And this is one of the reasons why it's been so challenging. I mean, there's a number of potential challenges that have faced anyone attempting a biography of Terence McKenna—that multiplicity, that heterogeneous persona. A guy who was wearing so many different personas and would wear them at various times. Because we were so fortunate—and this is one of the reasons why it's so fascinating—from the mid-eighties onwards, and also going back as far as 1972, we have all these recordings of his voice. It's one of the most remarkable—as a biographer, you can trace the course of his ideas. Over 500 hours of content, and I can't claim that I've heard every word of it, and I'm not sure that anyone can claim that. But you can trace the course of his ideas. Over from week to week, month to month, over a couple of decades, you can see that he's a guy who was just riding this intellectual rollercoaster because every one of those raps is remarkably unique. I guess he prided himself on not repeating himself. He also had no props or notes. He had this remarkable capacity, sort of polymathic capacity, to retrieve and synthesize information in ways that is remarkable also in the sense that he was hilarious. So people would come away from those raps as they still do today, listening to him and watching him on YouTube, with a sense of being entertained as well as being exposed to insights. So there's this sort of levity and gravity in a balancing act in his rap that's so unique.
Lawrence: I know there are different styles of orators, but those are very similar attributes or impressions one gets, or at least this one gets, from Robert Anton Wilson—this combination of mind-blowing, heavy content wrapped in such a charismatic and funny and accessible delivery mechanism.
Graham: And with the good fortune of having communicated with a lot of his friends, including Rick Watson but other folks from high school and from UC Berkeley, where he was between 1965 and 1975—and he ended up getting a bachelor of science with about seven years in between, on the run, on the lam for some of that time—we're privileged to get insight into some of the context of the development of his ideas. A lot of people found interest in the chapter that deals with Berkeley and the so-called Telegraph House on Telegraph Avenue, where he would hold court in his room and then other abodes in Berkeley. But going back to school in Paonia, in Colorado, he developed this capacity to entertain folks and, like a jester, to keep the jocks on his side by standing up in class and just stipulating with language where he would squeeze expletives into a fast-running narrative just to entertain people who might otherwise beat him up on his way home from school.
Lawrence: How would you describe and even potentially assess his attitudes and relationship with traditional shamanic practices and Indigenous traditions? Because I think this is a realm where these weren't necessarily sacred cows for him, but I'd love to hear how you would articulate where you arrived at with that.
Graham: He had an ambivalent, I suppose, relationship with Indigenous authorities, which is really an echo of his relationship with authorities in general and tribalism in general. I mean, he certainly had his differences, as I begin to relate in the book, with his wife and muse of sixteen, seventeen years, Kat Harrison—very different relationships to Indigenous leadership and knowledge, especially over ethnobotany. I'm hopeful that Kat Harrison does produce a memoir, and I think this is a good introduction to hearing more from her. But I think he saved his best vitriol for academic authorities and academic tribalism. He just repudiated academic careerism, certainly was averse to being a member of any club or tribe. I think he said that he wouldn't trust any organization that would accept him as a member, which he may have been paraphrasing something from Groucho Marx there. But his response to authorities, whether religious, scientific, or cultural—I mean, he just rejected all authority. This was a fact throughout his life. And it's also a source of fascination for me because he became and is an authority of sorts for many folks, especially within the psychedelic community. He became a leader of cognitive or a figurehead of cognitive libertarianism.
Lawrence: You introduced this idea earlier, and it's something I'd like to probe a little bit with you, which is this split reception or esteem or how he's viewed between the psychedelic science world and the underground culture world. There seems to be a pretty significant difference, if not gap, between how those two scenes dig on him. I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about that. How do we arrive at these two very different embraces or rejections of him amongst those two different communities?
Graham: I mean, I don't know that there's any resolution. It's certainly a division that fascinates me. I think much more could be said about it than I've written in the book. I'm working on another project that attempts to go deeper into his iconoclastic metaphysics, which is, I guess, studies in religion oriented—more sort of popular readership, which this is. I don't know. I suppose the approach made evident by his brother, who is a scientist, and their differences and some of their differences that I attempt to convey in the book—differences that were evident. I mean, as you know, one of the pivotal moments in his life or in their life was an event called, an event that's been known as, the Experiment at La Chorrera, where the brothers and their friends ventured into the Amazon in 1971 in search of an organic form of DMT, a paste that was known to be used by the Witoto. And it was a paste—there was indication that these people were having visions of the little people. And this was something that, with the brothers having exposure to DMT in the Bay Area in the mid-sixties, they were very intrigued about. I'm not sure this is answering your question, but they ended up finding—they didn't find so much DMT there. They found mushrooms instead. In fact, they found...
Lawrence: ...all the mushrooms. (laughter)
Graham: Yeah. Fields of bounty, a supply of Psilocybe cubensis. And so the page turned, and a whole new development happened. I attempt to convey how significant that moment was. This was a place called La Chorrera, which was a mission in Colombia, which essentially became Terence's—I mean, he never came down from that trip. It became something of a sacred temenos for him. He sought to return—in fact, he did return there once again in 1981. He figured that something he called the Great Compression, which was essentially the end of the world, would transpire on his twenty-fifth birthday. Of course, that never happened, but it was something of a rehearsal for later thoughts about the eschaton and the end of the world, which for him coincided with December 21, 2012. Now this is going right off the charts here. I'm not really answering your question. I'm just rambling.
Lawrence: Please, please. That's what you're here for. (laughter)
Graham: So this was, of course, integral to what he called the Timewave, which was partly his decoding of the I Ching, which he became quite obsessed with at the turn of the seventies. So one of my key chapters in the book attempts to configure what the Timewave was. And as a writer and not an oratory artist, it would be very difficult for me to attempt to condense that for you. But I would suggest that your listeners strap a plank to their back before they dive down that well.
Lawrence: It's interesting. I think we struggle, or audiences specifically struggle with him, because we have—unless we've done some work to counteract the conditioning—we have this point of view about this divide between science and hidden wisdom. We haven't, at a societal level, remembered what we used to know about the connections between these different ways of making sense of reality. And I think he presents a specific or a particular challenge to that because he is smack dab in the middle of that vortex of the meeting of the mystical and the practical. And to me, that was the work he was doing, right? Trying to maintain some semblance of scientific language while venturing into this incredibly ambiguous—and I'm sure different people have different opinions as to how rigorous he was around that, I'm sure he did. But that seems to me to be the central challenge of making sense with McKenna—like, how much rope are you willing to give him when it comes to his theories? And even questioning how, like, what he believed of what he was saying.
Graham: I suppose among the many dozens of people whose stories have been layered into the book and countless others who I've chatted with over the years, the chief admonition has been that it better not suck. In other words, I mean, there's been a lot of pressure on the prospect of producing a serious biography of Terence. And I think that is largely because he spoke to so many people directly through his life and subsequently. Ultimately, I mean, this book is—I couldn't claim that this book is going to provide anyone with the ultimate reveal. I think that Terence is a phenomenon, and just like all phenomena, there are just a multitude of opinions and investments, a multitude of authorities. So rather than claiming that I could be anything like some sort of authority on McKenna, the best I can do is provide people with material that will augment and enhance their own existing views. And that's up to others to decide whether that's been achieved.
Lawrence: You seem ideally suited, if you don't mind me saying, to have been the one to take this pass at this book at this time. I say that because of your work in these sort of music and cultural tribal communities around dance music and this liminal world where music and technology and consciousness are all wrapped together. I wonder if we could backtrack a little bit and if you could tell me a little bit about—do you have an understanding of what accounts for your attraction to these realms?
Graham: You mentioned the word "liminal" there. I suppose that's probably the key word. I mean, I never met Terence, but I suppose that I first met him when his voice was whispering into my ears in various states of discombobulation on dance floors in Australia and around the world, because we're talking about a figure who has been massively sampled by electronic musicians, especially psychedelic electronica. And in fact, I think the case can be made that we're talking about the most sampled individual in the history of electronic music. So he was already a disembodied voice from the early nineties during his own life. And so he courted the rave and acid house scene at the turn of the nineties. He quite extraordinarily became a figurehead of that scene, kind of like a raving frontman, and ended up being sampled by, for instance, a UK act called the Shamen on a track called "Re:Evolution" that ended up becoming number eighteen on the UK singles charts in 1993. A completely extraordinary circumstance that no one would've predicted. And I do attempt to convey his role in the emergence of Goa trance and psytrance, which was completely unintentional in terms of the DMT that found its way from him into the hands of the founders of Shpongle, which was an act that formed essentially as an elegy for McKenna around the time that he left the building. So in 2000, we're talking about a figure who is like the net era exemplar of a figure who's in a constant state of arrival whilst always departing—in that when he did depart in 2000, just in the wake of the emergence of the internet, which he had presentiments about, and virtual reality, which he had presentiments toward from the 1960s onwards, and spent his life imagining the emergence of—just as he departed, he'd arrived and has continued to arrive over the last twenty-five years, such that there are more links than a sausage factory.
Lawrence: And he seems to be such a fascinating manifestation of this story that Erik Davis and others have talked about over the years of this really deep connection—to me, it's such a California story. He's such a Californian. This occult insight and awareness matched with really the bleeding edge of technology. And there were these visionaries who, it seemed, had to straddle both of those worlds to make some of these fantastical things that we take for granted every day appear. And he seems to be more on the theoretical end of that spectrum as a seer. Some people were a little bit further on the other end and were leaning towards the engineering side or what have you, but they were in the same cauldron. It's a fascinating universe that way.
Graham: There's been very little—I mean, there has in recent times been more scholarly attention. I mean, you mentioned Erik Davis. His book High Weirdness is one of the first real efforts to excavate and triangulate his contributions and the roots of his work. And I think this must be said for the uniqueness of McKenna's role as a psychedelic occultist and his role and position in the history of the American occult, which is kind of interesting because he disparaged the occult, notably theosophy and magic practitioners like Crowley and figures like Ouspensky. He thought that they were all charlatans. But ultimately their problem for him was that they were just not stoned enough. So he's a guy who was disparaging the occult but at the same time had a deep fascination with Hermeticism and alchemy, and notably coming from Jung, collected Hermetic works and was really into the I Ching. So his efforts to distance himself from the occult were kind of ludicrous in the end. But ultimately his vision is quite dogmatic about any effort to enter hyperspace and travel in the astral realms and so forth that wasn't metabolically orchestrated by one's interfacing with tryptamines, notably DMT and psilocybin—wasn't real, wasn't as alien as it can get. He was persistent about that and hilarious about that too. We can't forget we're talking about the standup philosopher, and that's a pretty unique role in the history of both standup and philosophy.
Lawrence: Given again the unique place you sit in your interests and your work, what do you make of the archaic revival concept? How does that resonate for you, and how do you see the lowercase-T truth behind that concept? Because you live and work and recreate in a world that seems to manifest the principles that he was talking about there. Could you unpack the archaic revival concept a little bit for listeners and then talk about how you see it in the real world?
Graham: Of course, he claimed that he got all of his best ideas from the mushroom, from his interfacing with the mushroom. And he always emphasized the heroic dose of mushrooms, which was the five dry grams in silent darkness, which was a ritual that he pursued for fifteen, twenty years. One of those ideas was the so-called Stoned Ape theory, which—it's actually not a phrase I don't think he ever really used, but it was a concept that was applied to his iconic idea, his novum—that our hominid ancestors' interfacing with hallucinogenic mushrooms was the missing link in human evolution, just to boil that down. The idea of the archaic revival, which I guess is most known in his book Food of the Gods rather than the collection called The Archaic Revival, was that our return to using mushrooms was, or will be, the main thrust of a revival. Yet there's so many aspects of this revival that fascinated him. I mean, he was really into the surrealists and Alfred Jarry and the whole of many developments within the twentieth century. For him, they were evidence of this revival. And ultimately his temporary, for several years anyway, immersion in the rave scene was evocative of his understanding that rave culture represented this revival and was one of the key thrusts in front of that revival.
Lawrence: This is something that has always been curious to me, and you touched on it a little bit earlier with the use of his voice in the music. Before I read your book, I thought of it one way. After reading the book and now sitting here talking with you, his interactions with that world were more multifaceted, I think, than I realized, because I wasn't previously aware of the extent of his role as a supplier and thus being one form of inspiration for the community and the scene and individuals. I think I always just wrote it off as, oh, it's a trippy voice saying trippy things that people want to put in trippy music. And that's one level that it could be, for sure. That's not all. And I'm curious about how does he fit into the larger story of that culture as it moved from the eighties into the nineties? And I'm not going to ask it to you with more articulation than that. I see you nodding, like perhaps you're grokking what I'm struggling for. So I would love to hear you unpack that a little bit for me.
Graham: Certainly a case can be made for McKenna's role as a psychopomp, as someone who, having been exposed to the Eleusinian mysteries and notably from that February 1966 moment onwards, when he first smoked DMT, something that he was not prepared for, and had a conversion-type experience that he spent the rest of his life trying to understand—and through sharing DMT, firstly with his friends and then wider community and then global community, essentially was attempting to, which I'm not sure was as altruistic as it might be suggested to be, because I mean he was on this mission, this quest to find others who replicated his own experiences. I'm not sure he ever actually did. But the case can be made for his role as a mysteries initiate who then throughout his life and in his afterlife initiated untold others into the mystery, such as that. Given we're talking about, in this context, a figure who certainly ten years after he departed was just being massively sampled within certain electronic music subcultures and event cultures, he served the role as a kind of meta-trip-sitter for people in transported states of consciousness at events or in the comfort and safety of their own home, serving as this kind of psychopomp—not in any official sense, almost like an accidental psychopomp, like an accidental cult system. I mean, he was a guy who rejected any sense that he was special or a guru or had any special spiritual facets and features to him, which also makes him, to me, all the more fascinating because I think that resistance to being—the ambivalence that he had towards leadership—only attracted people all the more.
Lawrence: Very similar to somebody like Garcia or other people who were clearly de facto heads of their scenes but would not ever admit to it. It's interesting too—the intelligence or perceived intelligence inside, behind, or accessed through the DMT. Whether it's the elves, whether it's the effects people claim it would have on things like electrical systems. I was just reading a book about the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound, and there was a section where they talked about—the writer talked about how they banned DMT from anywhere near their sound system because whenever somebody smoked DMT near it, something went wrong. It became a superstition for them to the point where they literally banned it from being near the sound system. And I'm curious what you are—do you have a working theory or a fun idea about what's going on there?
Graham: Actually that's the first I've heard of that particular case. But maybe that's because I wouldn't regard myself as a Deadhead, although I did recently read Dennis McNally's awesome 900-page biography of the Grateful Dead, and I was fascinated to learn that Terence had an impact on them in the seventies. I mean, their—the brothers' book The Invisible Landscape was being distributed at a band meeting, probably within a year or two after that was released in 1975. Jerry had this sort of well-known take on their book and their ideas, which was fascinating. And what's also fascinating is that around that time, mushrooms were becoming prevalent among users in the Dead community at shows. And I doubt that in '77, well thereabouts, the same people like Jerry, who was promoting Terence's ideas, actually knew that the brothers also synonymously produced their underground cultivation guide, which sold 200,000 copies—Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide. And that the same guys were responsible for this sudden flourishing of this domestic cultivation revolution that enabled people to take control of the means of perception. I don't think that answers your question, but I did throw a Grateful Dead reference in there. (laughter)
Lawrence: Pretty good. Pretty good. You mentioned earlier that you hope and sort of suspect that this is the beginning of scholarship and insight into McKenna and his life and his work. I'm wondering what questions do you hope to pursue or hope others might pursue around him? What other contributions are you looking for to fill in blanks or flesh out the story or what have you?
Graham: Well, I think there's so many, and I'm excited by the prospect of people completely throwing spanners in the works as well. And I'm sure that once Klea McKenna's mission is fulfilled and she makes these materials that will be archived and cataloged available institutionally, that there will be a kind of Terence McKenna Research Center or something like that, as close to that as possible. I mean, at the moment there is an archive at Purdue University in the Betsy Gordon Psychoactive Substances research collection, where Dennis McKenna donated content in 2013. And that was visited by me in 2019, and it is currently the best resource in a public, in a secure public facility, of Terence's material. And that's important because of, you know, as you mentioned, the library fires. And I do refer to, tell the story of the three fires that have been licking out his legacy. As for questions, I'm really fascinated—the role that he, his place in the history of Western esotericism. Whether that's agnostic surrealism or surreal agnosticism, I'm not sure. But both of those things, it's his surrealist bent and his gnostic bent and the combination thereof is fascinating.
Lawrence: Some people seem so of their time to the point where it doesn't seem they could have either lived in any other time or that their life could be duplicated in our current time. And I wonder, does Terence strike you as one of those people? There's no Terence McKenna of the twenty-first century, I take it?
Graham: No, not that I'm aware of. I don't think that we're, that we'll ever—certainly not in our lifetime—likely to see a replication, and possibly never. I mean, I think that it will take scores of biographers. I mean, as I said before, even though I've finished this biography that I've spent ten years working on, I haven't heard all of his recorded content, and I know that there's so much material out there that hasn't even been digitized. And so I do hope that this work encourages folks who have stuff in their archives, tapes and materials that has not been digitized, to go about doing so. I'm quite sure that we'll provoke, as the first serious biography of Terence, that it will provoke others to join the conversation and to excavate their own archives.
Graham St John, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist, historian, and vibeologist with an interest in transformational events, movements, and figures. He is author of ten books, including the recent biography Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna (MIT Press, 2025). His other books include Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT (North Atlantic Books 2015), and Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance (Equinox 2012). Graham is Senior Research Fellow in the Dept of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Huddersfield, UK, and Executive Editor of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture.
