Cultural anthropologist Graham St. John spent ten years assembling Terence McKenna's story from letters, interviews, and rare recordings, documenting the rogue scholar who argued that interfacing with tryptamines was evolution's missing link and that rave was its modern revival.

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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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[00:01:32] Why "hallucinatory" life?
[00:01:54] The challenge of biography: where hallucination ends and truth begins
[00:02:40] McKenna as master bullshitter and artist
[00:03:35] Dennis McKenna on his brother's embellishments
[00:04:44] Detective work: assembling the life despite lost archives
[00:07:38] Reconciling bullshit artist with serious contributor
[00:08:52] Paradox as guiding principle
[00:10:48] "The universe is stranger than we can suppose"
[00:11:05] McKenna as enigmatic cult figure vs. persona non grata
[00:12:56] McKenna's multiple personas and heterogeneous identity
[00:15:29] Comparison to Robert Anton Wilson
[00:15:52] Berkeley years and Telegraph House
[00:17:18] Attitudes toward shamanic practices and Indigenous traditions
[00:19:41] Split reception: psychedelic science vs. underground culture
[00:20:19] The gap between scientific and cultural communities
[00:22:06] The Experiment at La Chorrera
[00:24:11] The Timewave and decoding the I Ching
[00:25:58] The challenge of science vs. hidden wisdom
[00:27:27] Graham's background in liminal music cultures
[00:28:06] What drew Graham to these realms
[00:30:43] McKenna as most sampled individual in electronic music
[00:31:30] California occult insight meets bleeding-edge technology
[00:33:34] McKenna disparaging the occult while practicing Hermeticism
[00:34:12] The archaic revival concept
[00:36:12] McKenna's multifaceted interactions with rave culture
[00:37:26] McKenna as accidental psychopomp
[00:39:50] DMT intelligence and the machine elves
[00:40:48] Grateful Dead and the mushroom cultivation revolution
[00:43:04] Future scholarship and Klea McKenna's archive project
[00:44:49] McKenna's place in Western esotericism
[00:45:08] Could there be another Terence McKenna?

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Visit Graham St. John's website at Edgecentral → https://www.edgecentral.net

Purchase 'Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna' from MIT Press → https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049573/strange-attractor
or Bookshop → https://bookshop.org/p/books/strange-attractor-the-hallucinatory-life-of-terence-mckenna-graham-st-john/8cc02eeac978f39d

For extensive show notes, links, and podcast information, go to https://podcast.thetonearm.com

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