Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  At the same time, a recurring motif in his bemushroomed visions was of some kind of metaphysical object, a transcendental vortex per­haps, into which we are being irresistibly drawn. Borrowing from chaos theory, he called it the 'attractor' or 'dwell point'; from the pro­cess theology of the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), the 'omega point'; but most commonly, in his own poet­ic way, 'the glittering object in hyperspace' or 'the glittering object at the end of time'. Considering this object, he became convinced that time and history were not being inched forwards by causality, as is ordinarily supposed in classical physics, but were being drawn ineluctably towards this transcendental object lying ahead in the future, like water down a plug hole. Our whole notion of time, in other words, was topsy-turvy.

  He married these two ideas by suggesting that the omega point rep­resented the final, ultimate ingression into novelty, the apocalyptic point after which nothing in the universe would ever be the same again. Furthermore, he believed that these ingressive events occurred at mathematically predictable intervals, which meant that it might be possible to determine when what he wryly called the "Big Surprise' would happen.

  So far (his mushroom visions aside), he was on reasonably stable, if unorthodox, ground, drawing upon ideas of progression and endings that have infused the Western intellectual tradition, in some form or another, from antiquity onwards: in Aristotelian metaphysics. Christian eschatology, Hegelian idealism, Marxism and Darwinism. What tipped him over the edge of epistemological orthodoxy was his belief that the mathematical formula lay encoded in the ancient

  Chinese oracle of the I Ching, and that the end of the world would occur on 22 December 2012.

  The exact way in which he arrived at this date is explained fully in The Invisible Landscape, but the baroque and complex details of his methodology need not concern us here. Suffice it to say that the end result of his calculations, based upon the perceived internal structure of the I Ching divination system, was a complicated fractal wave, the 'timewave', which, he maintained, accurately mapped the ingression of novelty within its ebb and flow. According to his model, time was wrinkled and crenulated, winding itself in ever tighter spirals as it jud­dered towards its abrupt end in 2012. The twentieth century is the shudder that announces the approaching cataracts of time over which our species and the destiny of this planet is about to be swept,' he omi­nously predicted.*4

  What would happen at this ultimate denouement was less clear: like many futurists and prophets, he was somewhat vague on the details. He proposed various scenarios throughout his many works: the laws of physics would be utterly transformed; humanity would leave the planet; we would leave our bodies for a higher dimension; we would discover time travel, at which point time would collapse and have no meaning; language would be transformed into something not heard but seen and beheld (like the language of the machine elves); the archaic revival would be complete, and we would live in harmony in accordance with the will of the planetary 'Gaian' mind.

  Conveniently, perhaps, he argued that multiple hypotheses were unavoidable because it was impossible to predict how the universe would look after an ingression of novelty had occurred. Could one, say, have predicted Reality TV by watching the stars forming? The big concrescence was coming, but as it lay beyond the event horizon, it remained in 'an abyss of ambiguity'.35 The best anyone could do was try to catch glimpses and intimations. McKenna was like a small child straining to peep over the garden wall: he leapt and leapt again, but never knew if he had seen aright.

  One image he had was of the 'object' as some celestial glitter-ball sending off distorted reflections of itself backwards through time. In his own unique take on Aldous Huxley's 'perennial philosophy' the idea that all religions are just different but commensurate paths up the same spiritual mountain he suggested that mystics, saints, visionarles and prophets were simply people caught by the sudden light of those reflections. The Buddha, Mohammed, Moses and Jesus were just unusually sensitive people 'in a relationship of resonance with the transcendental object, such that they, in a sense, embodied itV Those less naturally tuned in could peer at hyperspace through the telescop­ic lens of the mushroom.

  What, then, are we to make of this extraordinary scenario, one that has gripped the hardcore psychedelic community on both sides of the Atlantic, and has elevated McKenna to the status of sainthood in psychedelic eyes? Objections fall into two categories: mathematical and metaphysical. Because of the fringe nature of McKenna's ideas, and the opaque text of The Invisible Landscape, the timewave went for twenty years without being properly scrutinised. It was a brilliant young mathematician, Matthew Watkins, now at Exeter University, who made the first proper analysis in 1994. Then a Cambridge PhD student and McKenna fan (later a mendicant mystic, travelling through Ireland with little but a donkey, a cart and a Turkish saz), his critique is known on the Internet as 'the Watkins Objection'.37

  Again sparing the mathematical details, Watkins found three prob­lems with the timewave. The first, weak objection was that it was not fractal, as McKenna had claimed, but was a 'complex piecewise linear progression' no less. Though this took some of the shine off, it did not completely undermine the timewave. More problematically, in order to produce the wave, McKenna had performed a 'half-twist' on the data: the mathematical equivalent of the mountebank switching the cups while the audience isn't looking. Watkins could find no justifica­tion for this piece of arithmetical legerdemain, other than that without it a different, trivial and uninteresting wave was produced. And final­ly, Watkins found that the end point of 22 December 2012 was not calculated but assigned arbitrarily, because it apparently gave the 'best possible fit' to 'known' ingressions of novelty. In fact, McKenna chose this date because it already has significance within the psychedelic movement as the supposedly portentous date on which the ancient Mayan cyclical calendar ends.

  When moving the wave to and fro to find the best fit, McKenna was not content to restrict his definition of novelty to changes in the phys­ical organisation of the universe. Rather, he stretched 'novelty to include historical events, cultural trends, and even fads and fashions. Thus, he defined 'the sixties' as a partial ingression of novelty, an likewise the Acid House days of the 1980s and 1990s. His timewave had become a grand unifying theory of everything, of physics, cos­mology, culture, religion and consciousness. But it is not hard to spot the cultural bias and Americo-centricism inherent in his construction of significant dates. Nor to see that the considerable margins of error in. say, trying to pinpoint the exact moment when stars began to form, would make it impossible to place the timewave with any degree of accuracy. In fact his timewave is so crenulated, and the vicissitudes of history so convoluted, that such margins of error are irrelevant: one could randomly drop the wave onto the actual timeline, and always find something significant happening on the predicted dates.

  McKenna was certainly mining a rich and valid vein of thought by considering the physical evolution of the universe. He was correct to point out that the cosmos has become increasingly complex through time, and could, just conceivably, be right in his assertion that novelty has advanced in discreet, mathematically predictable intervals: after all, he would not be the first to suggest that the universe runs like clock­work. However, the process by which he made his prediction of 2012 as the date of the apocalypse turns out to be nothing more than an elab­orate piece of circular numerological chicanery. The date may yet prove significant, but we should certainly call time on the timewave.

  Of course, sceptics might wonder why a theory constructed on numerological speculation about an ancient and opaque fortunetelling system, the I Ching, should merit serious consideration at all. McKenna would surely reply that if, as he supposed, the metaphysical object at the end of time actually existed, then there was no reason why some essence of its nature should not be written into the divinatory system of a calendrically obsessed culture like the ancient Chinese. We have reached the nub of all McKenna's arguments, for w
hether he was talking about the machine elves or the discarnate mushroom Other, the evolution of humanity or the end of time, all his ideas rested upon the same assumption that runs throughout this his­tory: that there was a metaphysical truth that could be accessed through the use of hallucinogens.

  lor McKenna, the truth resided in the metaphysical object at the L'nd of time, and a new facet of it was encountered with every mush­room trip. kWhen you take psilocybin,' he once cried, 'it takes you. You are participating in all the trips that it ever induced in anyone.'*1 fhe insights gained on magic mushrooms were therefore genuine and true* and the fact that the Other often chose to broker this information through the mouths of elves and gnomes was neither here nor there (though it did reveal the universe to have an idiosyncratic sense of humour).

  But this assumption highlights the philosophical dilemma that lies at the heart of the debate as to whether the use of magic mushrooms and other hallucinogens should be tolerated in contemporary society. Enthusiasts believe passionately that mushrooms enable them to punc­ture the envelope of ordinary consciousness, to transcend the self, and to acquire knowledge that was not known before. Just as one down­loads new songs to an iPod, mushrooms hook up an Ethernet connec­tion to the metaphysical realms. Mainstream society, wedded to a scientific materialist view of consciousness, denies this, and maintains that all a drug such as psilocybin can do is put the iPod of conscious­ness on shuffle, so that its existing contents are mixed up and juxta­posed in novel and surprising ways. At best one might acquire pleasing poetic insight, at worst a psychotic reaction, but in no sense can one gain new empirical knowledge.

  The two positions are hard to reconcile. The matter would surely be resolved if the mushrooms or the machine elves imparted information that was testable. At first sight, the 2012 prediction would seem to sat­isfy this requirement, but McKenna's vagueness about what exactly will happen, coupled with the rather elastic boundaries surrounding his definition of novelty, means that it will be extremely difficult to recognise if anything significant has actually occurred. Indeed, it is not entirely clear that he acquired the date while under the influence of mushrooms. He never emphatically explained how he alighted on it (probably because it was so arbitrarily assigned), sometimes saying that it was given him by an elf-troop, sometimes that he chose it because it was the end of the Mayan calendar, and sometimes that it fell out of his timewave calculations. In truth, while most enthusiasts claim to have gained significant and important insights while tripping on mushrooms, few, as far as I know, claim to have been given testable empirical data. As McKenna himself admitted, the 'character of the mushroom experience is almost entirely that of understanding, which is not the same thing as knowledge.

  The uncertainty as to whether mushrooms really can bestow tran­scendence is magnified by the fact that so many of McKenna's idea> are historically and culturally contingent. That is, for someone so con­cerned with metaphysics, his ideas are remarkably of their time. c

  have already seen how his feminist construction of the past, and his nod to new-manism in his vision of the archaic revival, were shaped by contemporary late-twentieth-century American Goddess spirituality. But he also couched his ideas in the language of chaos theory (of frac­tals and strange attractors) and of ecology (especially the Gaia hypoth­esis), which happened to be enthusing popular culture at the time he was writing. His vision of shamanism was very much the standard Western, Eliadean, twentieth-century construction, and his concern with nature and transcendence places him squarely in the American Romantic tradition of Emerson and Thoreau. His notion that the future was mathematically predictable was entirely a modernist assumption, while his apocalyptic concern with the end of the world could easily be seen as a product of a Catholic upbringing, and the background pre-millennial tension that suffused the 1990s.

  Furthermore, it is hard not to hear McKenna's own voice when reading the famous monologue he attributed to the mushroom. Would an indigenous curandeso have described the mushroom as 'the part of my body given over to sex thrills and sunbathing'40? Certainly the prudish Maria Sabina, for whom sex-thrills and sunbathing were unheard of, never said such a thing. Could it be that the space-age vision of intergalactic citizenship and hyper-light travel were not the product of an alien mind, but of the man who, as a geeky child with bad eyesight, discovered an enduring love of geology, astronomy and science fiction? Could it be that the machine elves' obsession with lan­guage was actually McKenna's own?

  On the other hand, might we not expect a superior intelligence to tailor its message to our historically bound cultural expectations, to tell the truth in such a way that we would understand it, and believe? And if the elves are real, with genuine free will and agency, might they not decide to withhold from us empirical data? According to McKenna, the 'mushroom' desired to share the knowledge of hyperlight travel and to grant us the keys to intergalactic citizenship, but we had not reached the required level of cultural development to merit such a dispensation.

  Hie frustrating thing is that experience, psychedelic or otherwise, is a private affair, and so there is no basis upon which to judge the truth of McKenna's claims about what he had beheld. There is an insepara­ble ontological gulf between the believers who have had the experi­ence, and the doubters and onlookers who have not. The latter see it as all in the mind; the former, as something so powerful, moving, and overwhelmingly other, that it cannot but originate outside. If that leaves them with a certain humility, or a set of praxes by which they can better lead their lives, then perhaps the provenance of the machine elves and the glittering object at the end of time is ultimately irrele­vant. As McKenna said: The elves and the gnomes are there to remind us that, in the matter of understanding the self, we have yet to leave the playpen in the nursery of ontology.'4' Anything that dents human pride a little must surely be a good thing.

  One final philosophical objection to McKenna's reasoning concerns free will. If, as he maintained, the next catastrophic ingression of nov­elty is to occur, come what may, on 22 December 2012, then why do we need the archaic revival of psychedelic shamanism that he called for? How can our actions make any difference to this dreadful event, whatever it is, the nature of which is set in metaphysical stone? If, on the other hand, an archaic revival would mollify or ameliorate the event in some way, perhaps by making us better prepared for it, then the idea of time being ineluctably pulled forward outwith causality cannot be true. Either the future is already determined, or it isn't: he can't have it both ways.

  Such dilemmas, quandaries and philosophical wranglings will doubtless do little to unseat McKenna from the position he now occu­pies within the psychedelic pantheon. He is seen as a visionary and a prophet, and I have even heard him called the 'Jesus of the Mushroom'. The late American psychonaut and comedian Bill Hicks (1961-1994) built an entire routine around McKenna's ideas, and I am sure they will be with us for as long as people continue to use mushrooms.

  It is not hard to see why his message has struck such a chord with enthusiasts. He reinforced the idea that salvation is to be found, not through prayer or devotion or political agitation or social change, but through higher doses, taken more often. By insisting that genuine shamanism is based on psychedelic ingestion, he elevated psychedelic enthusiasts to the status of shamans. Shroomers were now visionaries, users of the very plant that had shaped human destiny, prophets who would help humanity ride the rapids of the eschaton. And, essential for any apocalyptic prophecy, his timewave theory held within it the ultimate get-out clause: for if the revolution failed to materialise, then that was because there was another, bigger and better one waiting round the corner. These are potent myths of identity for a section of society usually lambasted as flakes, cranks, malingerers and wasters.

  How, then, are we to judge Terence McKenna? He was certainly a rare and brilliant thinker, but sadly, few of his ideas stand up well under academic scrutiny. His version of the past, of the role of mushrooms in human evolution and in creatin
g a golden age of early civilisation, is based on scant evidence and is untestable. The arcane numerology of the timewave, meanwhile, is best forgotten. As for the machine elves, we cannot rule out the possibility of their independent existence, but the burden of proof must surely lie with the believers, and not the gainsayers who have the weight of the culturally sanctioned scientificmaterialistic discourse behind them.

  Finally, zoiz. I agree with Watkins that the demolition of the timewave does not preclude something interesting, unusual, or even of great magnitude from happening as predicted, but this has to be set in the wider context of the doom-mongers' atrocious track record in these matters. Then again, with the alarming predictions about the speed of global warming, and the West's apparently gleeful intention to resurrect medieval vendettas as it presses for global democracy and oil 2012 seems as good a date for the apocalypse as any.

  Where does that leave McKenna? He was a visionary, certainly . . . but a scientist? a philosopher? Though he might protest, and though he was well versed in both areas, I do not think we should see him as either: these drab disciplines could never have contained or fulfilled his restless and colourful imagination. Rather, I think it best to see him as a storyteller. He was an Irish-American seanachie, blessed with inspi­ration and gab-gifted in the best tradition of the bards, who deftly spun a golden mythology from the straw of our rationalist culture, and who held us transfixed with the beguiling power of his words. He believed wholeheartedly in the stories he told, for like Ossian or I homas the Rhymer, he had been to the otherworld and seen it with his own eyes. But the masterful way he told them, placing them just on the edge of plausibility and setting them in the dominant theological language of our time fairy tale explained as science meant that they could be both understood and believed. Who else but a storyteller