Archaic Revival

[Intro (spoken): Terence McKenna]
All right. Tonight, for your edification and amusement: three raves, two interregnums. Visions by Rose X. Didgeredoo: Stephen Kent. And sound by Spacetime. Words and ideas by Terence McKenna.
Rap one: The Archaic Revival.

[Monologue (spoken): Terence McKenna]
History is ending, because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley. And as the inevitable chaostrophe approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble, it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa, fifteen thousand years ago, rocked in the cradle of the great horned mushroom goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets, and monotheism; before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us, because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism: the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the Paleolithic. And that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock and roll, and catastrophe theory. The twentieth-century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom-dotted plains of Africa, where the plant–human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are.

And why does this matter? It matters because it chose that the way out is back, and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. It's a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity.

And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together, the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace. Because what we need is a new myth. What we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe. And that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and that when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience, the ego is suppressed. And the suppression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience. And nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience. But that's what holds the community together.

And as we break out of the silly myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace, what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body—in the body—there are Niagaras of beauty: alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life.

I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without having sex. It means that you never figured out what it was all about. The mystery is in the body, and the way the body works itself into nature. What the archaic revival means is shamanism, ecstasy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people.

And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy, and monotony. And if you get them on the run, you have the dominators sweating, folks. Because that means that you're getting it all reconnected. And getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind. And the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. It's an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet; and without that experience, we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies; but, with that experience, the compass of the self can be set.

And that's the idea: that we're figuring out how to reset the compass of the self: through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence—intelligence. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.