Towards “TimeWave Zero”: Psychedelia and Eschatology in Terence McKenna

In addition to being one of the "prophets" of the psychedelic Counterculture of the second half of the last century, Terence McKenna was able to build, in the course of thirty years of studies and experiments, a real eschatological system for the Third Millennium, in view of final explosion, based on the recovery of shamanic practices, on a new interpretation of the Sacred as "Mysterium Tremendum" and on the vision, beyond the ordinary dichotomy between life and death, of what he called an "Ecology of Souls".

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di Marco Maculotti

While still enjoying today, twenty years after his death, a fame limited to a certain niche of readers (the most famous "quote" of his character can be found in the figure of Dr. Jacobi, his alter ego in the successful television series of Lynch and Frost Twin Peaks), In Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000) however, it is necessary to recognize one of the most brilliant minds of the "short century", capable of merging the ancient Greek philosophers (which he defined as "psychedelic philosophers") and the traditions of the first Gnostic sects into a very personal eschatological vision of the history of humanity. "symbolic" work by scholars such as Mircea eliade e CG Young [1], the anthropology of Robert Graves, James Frazer e Marija Gimbutas, the "visions" of Aldous Huxley e Rupert sheldrake and the "mathematics of Chaos" by Alfred North Whitehead e Ralph Abraham.

Born in Colorado in 1946 from a family with Sicilian and above all (as you can easily guess from the surname) Irish ancestors, it is first of all interesting to note how his life was somehow "parallel" to that of Reverend of Scotland, Robert Kirk, who lived in the XNUMXth century, who, like McKenna, became interested and wrote a treatise (The Secret Commonwealth) concerning the intelligences of the "Secret Kingdom", and who also died of apoplexy to him (in McKenna's case, a consequence of a brain tumor).

He was interested in the wonders of geology as a child, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in Ethnobotany and shamanic cultures, McKenna was able to make his first psychedelic experiences first in the university environment, then during some "exotic" trips (Japan, India, Indonesia and the Amazon rainforest): the so-called "La Chorrera experiment" carried out in the Colombian Amazon with his brother Dennis [2], during which he began to understand and develop some key points of his future eschatology, above all the idea of ​​finding ourselves in a moment of extreme "concrescence", therefore close to the "end of time".

Often cited as an exponent of the American counterculture of the seventiesHowever, McKenna often distanced himself from it, openly criticizing the whole trend New Age, which he perceived as too politicized and focused on propaganda rather than on a real inner experience. The figure of the guru, in his opinion, was only a miserable substitute for "Master-plants" who have always had a primary role in the shamanic and ecstatic education of novices («Follow plants, not gurus» was his famous motto): the practices of New Age, far from being understood as "spiritual", they were thus reduced to an escape from the psychedelic experience proper. And nonetheless, paradoxically, the figure of McKenna himself, after his earthly death, was somehow reduced to a "simulacrum" to favor the psychedelic experience of his many "followers": the "santini" and artwork with his most epochal phrases imprinted they can recall those used in India by the followers, for example, of a Sai Baba.

McKenna wasn't even missing, somehow distancing itself from the "progressive" paradigm typical of Berkeleyan cultural circles of those years (and even more today), to harshly criticize the turn taken by the West in the second half of the twentieth century, probably influenced in this by the traditionalist vision of Mircea Eliade. In DMT he thus exposes his merciless criticism [3]:

"The compulsive tendency of the West has been to subjugate all other cultural styles, it has swallowed and digested the North American culture, it has replaced the ethnic differences of European culture with the mega-culture of Nouveau Europe, whatever that means. Cultures have merged into the belly of the beast of Western science to form part of the framework of a Western scientism that continues to expand. »

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This one's anti-rationalist and anti-scientist conception it obviously derived largely from experiences with entheogenic substances, as well as from studies on shamanic cultures. Particularly important in this regard were the experiences with the dimethyltryptamine (or, more simply, DMT), making use of which McKenna experienced what he defined as a real "Access to Hyperspace": the impression of being suddenly "catapulted" into an "other" place was not only a harbinger of wonder and amazement, but also of a sort of "sacred terror" that finds doctrinal precedents in the Mysterium Tremendum by Rudolf Otto [4] and in Sacred understood as an "Unspeakable Enigma" by Giorgio Colli [5].

The existence of this invisible dimension behind the visible one, a classic theme of shamanism around the world, was for McKenna a revelation closely connected with psychedelic experiences. Not only that: McKenna also theorized that this "invisible world" was to be found below o behind the "language barriers", from this deriving that, once the "human, all too human" linguistic barrier had been crossed, access to a size trans-linguistics e trans-real, which was precisely the one opened up by the experiences with psilocybin or DMT [6]:

“The ability of hallucinogens to cancel boundaries breaks down language barriers. These plants show us that the surface of reality is not such, but it is only the surface of our particular language, which at that point disappears revealing what is underneath. » 

McKenna links his theory to the phenomenon of spontaneous glossolalia, particularly common under the influence of psychotropic substances of those of the aforementioned type [7]:

“It is as if psilocybin were a pheromone that stimulates linguistic activity, an attempt to somehow connect linguistic intentionality to the ontos of being. And it is as if the words gush out of your mouth, words come to life. And these concrescences of meaning then created that kind of unitary environment we call understanding. "

He then came to the conclusion that, under the barrier of language, there was an ordinarily invisible "language" and at the same time more real than language itself, a sort of occult code which would govern all natural, conscientious and cosmic phenomena, something similar to what is claimed by alchemists and hermetics. This "language", unlike that normally used by human beings, must be more than hearing visa [8]:

« I believe that language is something that must be seen, not heard, and I think we will evolve towards a visible language, although we are currently operating with these poor quality beep codes. I believe that in some ways history is the process that allows this natural language to emerge, reveal itself, define itself, refine itself. "

This idea came to him by observing the fact that the Amazonian shamans, after having composed and sung their own Icaros (sacred songs donated by the "spirits of Ayahuasca"), they commented on them not according to auditory criteria, but according to visual criteria: it happened that a member of the tribe commented that the Icarus, although "colorful" or "bright", would have been better if it had been "more purple than blue", or comments of this kind. In other words, the Shuar shamans described their songs more like paintings than musical compositions [9].

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However, this theory was mainly inspired by the personal experiences of McKenna himself, who during his ecstatic journeys in DMT used to meet interdimensional entities named by him Tykes [10] or "Elven Machines". The place where he felt "catapulted" after smoking the DMT, in fact, appeared to him alive, full of information, or in any case inhabited by such entities [11], who related to him by means of a kind of "Visual language": by emitting sounds, they were able to create visual reality by means of geometric shapes and objects materialized out of thin air, similar to those that the popular tradition of the British Isles refers to as the work of Fairies, the "secret people".

We can also see in this a correspondence with the shamanic tradition (Central and North Asian, American and Australian), according to which the spirit-masters or the most powerful shamans would be able to "Sing" and materialize objects (such as quartz crystals or "magic darts") inside the neophyte's body, to make them live the experience known in ethnology as "initiatory dismemberment" and then forge them a sort of "new body", thanks to which they will then be able to perform ecstatic "flights". To this revelation, McKenna linked the sentence of Alexandrian Philo, ancient Greek philosopher of Jewish culture who lived in the first century, according to whom [12]

«The perfect logos is that which passes from being heard to being looked at without this transition being evident even for a moment. "

In this regard McKenna quoted the octopus as a symbol of the new era: it changes color not to hide but to communicate. This too, in our opinion, is a form of telepathy: seeing the meaning instead of hearing it. This, on the other hand, is comparable to the creation of vision through the power of singing, as known by the shamans of the Amazonian jungle. [13]. IThe whole world, visible and invisible, is made up of language; language is also replicated in the DNA, it “infests” matter. From this it follows that, in the final analysis, reality is governed by codes, which we human beings in our ordinary state of consciousness can "read" and understand only in a minimal part [14].

However, McKenna perceived in the encounter with these "interdimensional elves" a reflection of thearchetype of the circus and amusement park, "carnival" places that however have two facades, one "bright" and one "dark, sinister" (for example the one that includes the show of freaks), an archetype that according to ours had well understood the Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, which in works such as Amarcord o Juliet of the Spirits (but, we add, also the Satyricon and the short film Toby Dammit) created "carnival scenes that refer to the DMT" [15] (it is also confirmed that Fellini had experiments with lysergic acid, LSD). McKenna summed up with these words the ambiguity of the encounter with these "other" intelligences, connecting it topanic experience of the ancient Greeks [16]:

“There is an emotionality in all this, which finds no correspondence in our world, because it embodies an incredible strangeness combined with an extraordinary familiarity. It is an ecstasy that it is coincidence oppositorum, it is simultaneously what it is and what it is not. And the human mind can't handle it, it's called cognitive dissonance and generates total panic. " 

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It didn't take long to put i Tykes of the DMT, the spirits-helpers of shamans and witches and Fairies of Celtic legends: McKenna soon came to the conclusion that [17]

« Human history is totally permeated by the unusual, by the non-human, by what has intentionality and affection for the human race, for humanity. And the shamans call for help just that, that's how healings happen, thanks to these allied spirits. "

Furthermore, sacred knowledge of this type did not suddenly disappear with the advent of the modern era and scientism, but were kept alive in new "archetypal containers", such as that of fairy tales [18]:

« Santa Claus is the lord of the elves, the elfi who controls are demons who make toys for the world of children in their immense underground toy store. And where are they […]? To the North Pole. I don't have to remind an audience of Jungians that the North Pole is theaxis mundi, Yggdrasil, the ash of the wizarding world, the center of the mandala. And what are the colors of Santa Claus? Red and white, the colors offly agaric, of course […] When you analyze it you will find all the important themes: the creator demons, the elves, the cosmic axis, the magical flight. IS a magnificent example of the preservation of pagan themes of the use of psychedelics in a modern context » [19]

By questioning the real nature of such "subtle" entities, McKenna came to believe that "the reason our fantasies of angels and aliens tell us about hominids with binocular vision using acoustic language - in other words, creatures very similar to us - is because in this universal information field we can only recognize what is familiar to us. ": In other words, taking a cue fromParaphysical hypothesis of Keel and Vallée [20], theorized that these entities, without a defined form as we humans usually understand it, showed themselves to us according to our background cultural: among the archaic populations as spirits of the Ancestors, in the Middle Ages as fairies and elves, to the Christian saints as angels and demons and finally, in the modern era, as aliens who came from outer space. Instead, they would ultimately all these things together, and at the same time none of them.

On the other hand, it was precisely by realizing that for shamanic populations such "subtle" entities were considered the spirits of the Ancestors, or in other words of the deceased members of the tribe, that in McKenna's theory an eschatological perspective began to break through, in which the destiny of (living) humanity was to be conceived as intimately connected to that of the disembodied entities that dwell in the world behind ours: it was born from here the conception of Hyperspace as a place used as a sort of subtle, conscientious and collective process that ours defined "Ecology of Souls" [21]:

« What we are about to discover is that death does not sting, that the place where you enter with the DMT is an ecology of human souls in a different dimension. [...] this idea makes the hair stand on end of my head as I spent all my adolescence and adulthood freeing myself from Catholicism and its assumptions and I never imagined that exploring the mysteries of life would lead me to the conclusion that, in reality, life is but a prelude. We are in a kind of tiny womb, our lives are just stations and this is not where we are meant to be fulfilled as human beings. It is a stage of metamorphosis as can be the pupa for the butterfly. »

Consider it from this perspective, the subtle entities of the Other World would be nothing more than our past and our future at the same time, existing in a subtle dimension that can be conceived simultaneously as before birth in the world of matter and as after physical death. A conclusion which, mutatis mutandis, folklorists such as the aforementioned Reverend Kirk had already arrived in the past, or still Lewis Spence e WY Evans-Wentz [22].

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“This is our house. This is what "playing in the fields of the goddess" must mean. For some reason, history has made us dysfunctional, it has buried the mystery, in the best of cases it has made it a jealously guarded secret by few. " [23]

Aware that in archaic traditions (and, in fact, still lives only a few centuries ago in Wales, Ireland and Scotland) the subtle entities present themselves at the same time as spirits of the Ancestors and as "demons" of fertility and vegetation (top which remains alive even in the technological age in the description of extraterrestrials as "little green men"), McKenna decided to put what he defined at the center of his personal eschatological vision "Archaic Revival", an individual and collective process of "Return to Gaia" and re-emergence of the "vegetable mind" that humanity would have allowed to atrophy over the millennia [24]. In short, it would have been a question of returning to "seeing plants as food, refuge, clothing and a source of education and religion" [25], as well as to learn from them the capacity for "fixity" and resistance in one's "center", internalization rather than externalization and finally the interconnectivity typical of plant organisms (and of the fungi themselves) [26].

According to McKenna, human consciousness was historically formed many thousands of years ago, in North Africa: the Sahara at the time was not yet a desert, but on the contrary a sort of Edenic oasis in which the psilocybin mushroom grew freely and abundantly. In his opinion, it was psilocybin that acted as a "catalyst agent" of the evolution and birth of language, which humans do not share with any other animal species; some clues of the psychedelic experience as a decisive factor in the evolution of human consciousness can be found in the pictograms of the Tassili plateau, in Algeria, or in the pre-Columbian fabrics of the Paracas culture, graphic works in which xenomorphic entities are depicted that are difficult to classify as "human " [27].

However, following the desertification of the Sahara which occurred with the advent of the last ice age 12.000 years ago, the need to preserve the fungi in honey or fermented in alcoholic beverages: the transition from a "mushroom cult" to a "fermented drink cult" (such as, for example, the Bacchic-Dionysian one) took place progressively [28]:

"I believe that the use of honey as a preservative has really precipitated the situation, because honey transforms, even without adding anything else, into a psychedelic substance, honey ferments and becomes mead, a primitive type of alcoholic drink . So over the millennia what was initially an ecstatic mushroom cult turned into a cult of fermented substances, a cult of alcohol intoxication, and at a certain point the proportions reversed and we arrived at a situation very similar to that today. "

The psychedelic cult, according to McKenna, however, remained alive in some ecumens, such as the Anatolian one, where the first tribes of permanent ranchers noticed how a certain type of psilocybin mushroom grew on cows' feces: thus a cult current founded on the Great Goddess, the cattle and the mushroom [29].

Le Indo-European invasions they subtracted the exclusivity of the sacred use of fungi from the matriarchal cultures settled on the territories that the new arrivals occupied: the lunar divinity, closely connected to the cult of plant nature and the consumption of the sacred mushroom, became male for the Indo-Arîs - Sum, selenic god (see also the Sumerian moon god Sin) and at the same time mysterious drink, probably psychotropic, which according to the Vedas would have been able to make its consumers achieve immortality and the divine state [30].

The latest cultic current referring to the Goddess and to the original principles of "vegetable religiosity" can be traced back to Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, centered on the metaphor of sowing and growth and on the equation of man with the seed, in a clearly eschatological vision. In these theories, it is not difficult to trace the influence of JJ Bachofen and Gimbutas [31].

The rise and worldwide spread of monotheistic cults finally put an end to the "vegetable consciousness" and the connection with the imaginal world of the Goddess. From this perspective, McKenna framed the destruction of paganism as "the greatest disservice ever done to the evolution of the human psyche" and that of witchcraft as the definitive repression of shamanic botanical knowledge [32].

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The purpose of the "Archaic Revival" would have been to bring humanity back to Hyperspace, toother transcendent: "A hyperdimensional space full of meaning, wisdom and beauty, which seems more real than ordinary reality" [33]. A revolution (in the original Latin sense of re-volve, "Return to the origin") necessary and even no longer postponable at the culminating point in which human evolution has reached, since McKenna was convinced that he was living in the so-called "Last times" mentioned by ancient traditions around the world. Taking the strings from what Mircea Eliade observed (and, we add, also from Ernst Jünger, Julius Evola and René Guénon [34]) on the so-called "Acceleration of the current of time", as well as studying thei ching Chinese and the Mayan calendar, he came to the conclusion that [35]

«[…] The ever more rapid concretion of technology indicates that the story is strangely shortened at the end, because everything happens faster and faster. It is a process that begins slowly, but once started it takes on the characteristics of a waterfall, or rather of free-falling bodies that accelerate to 10 meters per second. "

The conclusion he drew is that, ultimately, "The story [is] simply a disturbance on the surface of the waters of time as we approach the edge of the waterfall in concrescence, novelty and completeness" [36] and that "We are about to be sucked into the mass of eternity and [...] it will happen very soon" [37], when what McKenna called it occurs TimeWave Zero (“Zero time wave”, that is to say the moment when the space-time continuum will completely cancel itself out).

From this point of view, the 21st century is not simply aanomalybut rather the culminating moment of a process that has been in motion for as long as the world has existed [38]. Lat the end of time it is thus configured as a abyss, in which not only the "crisis of the death of the individual" occurs, but also the "crisis of the death of the human community" [39].

The state of exceptional concrescence / complexity in which humanity finds itself is on the other hand in line with the traditional doctrines of cosmic cycles visually represented in the image of the descending spiral (see again, in addition to the ancient doctrines of the Hesiodic ages and of the Yuga Hindus, the aforementioned Guénon and Evola, and also Gaston Georgél [40]). Thus McKenna defines this extraordinary state of concrescence in which we find ourselves at this point in our "evolution" [41]:

"A concrescence exerts a kind of attraction, we can define it as the temporal equivalent of gravity, in which all the objects of the universe are dragged through time [...] This is why it seems that the universe becomes more and more complex at a speed  greater. The idea is that, since each epoch is shorter than the previous one, an asymptotic approach curve is generated [...] We and our entire world are drawn to confront something that is hidden at this level under the event horizon of rational understanding. » 

This "something" is defined by McKenna "Transcendental attractor at the end of time", and is connected to the eschatological beliefs found in all archaic and traditional societies: the Second Coming of Christ, the Buddha Maitreya for Buddhists, Kalki last avatar of Vishnu for Hindus, the Secret Imam for Muslims, the Ragnarokkr for the ancient Norsemen [42]:

“What I mean is that the universe was not born of a violent explosion that pushes it into a continuous explosion. The universe is not pushed from behind, the universe is drawn from the future towards an inevitable goal [...] So I suggest something different, namely that the universe is attracted to a complex attractor that precedes us in time and that our ever-increasing speed through the phenomenological world of connectivity and novelty depends on the fact that we are now a lot, very close to the attractor. All Western religions have asserted that God would become tangential to history, but no one has the courage to tell us when this will happen. "

The theory of concrescence, first conceived by the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, takes up the idea of ​​the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin on the so-called "Omega point", namely that telos which attracts and drags history on itself, thus reducing it to a sort of "shock wave of eschatology". So says McKenna [43]:

“My idea is that, from the larger moving stream of animal evolution, a species was selected, or fell victim to the influence of an attractor pulling in the direction of symbolic activity. This is what we have been involved in through magic, drama, dance, poetry, religion, science, politics, and cognitive activities of all kinds, in the span of less than 25.000 years - a blink of an eye on a cosmic scale. This is the shock wave that precedes eschatology »

It's still [44]:

“My idea is that we are trapped - the transcendental attractor is a kind of black hole, and we have fallen into its basin of attraction. We are now orbiting faster and deeper, deeper and deeper, as we get closer to the singularity, which we call Eschaton. All of this is beyond rational understanding. It lies outside the scope of a possible description. We are on a collision course with the unspeakable. Unlike other forms of animal life, we have been selected for a completely peculiar metamorphosis, through information and the conquest of dimensions, to become something completely different: a new ontological order of being »

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Such a "program" for which the human species would have been selected "consists in grow from the initial seed and return to the higher, hidden source of everything outside the pleroma of three-dimensional space. It is a Gnostic return, an idea of ​​alchemical sublimation and rarefaction " [45]. It is no coincidence that McKenna also included an ancient belief of gods in his eschatological vision Mandeans, a heretical (Gnostic) Christian sect which asserted that at the end of time the "Secret Adam", a messianic figure he would have built a car to transmit all souls back to the primordial source, outside the gears of the matrix cosmic [46].

From this point of view, once again, human life is seen as a consequence of "Cadopts in history " [47] of which he spoke, among others, too Simone Weil, and "The exit from time" of eliadian memory is connected, in the final analysis, to the ultimate goal of the human being, to be traced back to liberation of the light body (entelechy) from the physical body [48], a classical doctrine of the ancient Mediterranean ecumene (think only ofanamnesi Platonic). In the vision psychedelic ed eschatological by McKenna, "The object at the end and beyond the story [would be] the human species fused in eternal tantric union with the superconducting Beyond: [this would be] the mystery that casts its shadow backwards through time " [49] and that has "haunted the space-time continuum" [50] since the world has existed, causing all the apocalyptic concrescences that have marked human evolution [51]:

“We have reached the point where the masks start to fall off and we are finding that there is an angel inside the monkey, screaming to get out free. The crisis of history concerns this question. I see it as a necessary chaos that will lead us to a new and better order. "

The event that will occur at the end of time will be, in other words, the union of spirit and matter in pure light or, to put it mildly scientifically, in the photon also called "quantum of light": according to this prediction, “The material universe could potentially disappear in a single moment. All that would remain would be light, because light doesn't have an antiparticle " [52]. In this way, even the space-time continuum itself would be canceled in an instant; this being perfectly in line with the belief, typical of traditional societies, in the future return to the Source original and undivided, or in other words mythical Golden Age that preceded the actual story [53]:

"I think we are on the edge of something huge, call it incorporeal reality, call it immaterial presence or, if you prefer, take courage and call it death, but this is the border line. This is the meaning of life [...] this transcendental object at the end of time, this attractor that has chosen us throughout the animal kingdom [...] this thing that has been calling us to itself for eons of cosmic time [...] a drama of cosmic redemption […] For thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years we have been pushed towards this omega point, the Earth is like an egg and has now reached the stage of fruiting. " 

« It is about to arrive and I believe it will redeem history, that history is not a nightmare but a passage, it is an initiation. Think of the fetus in the womb at the time of transition. It must be distressing, the walls are getting closer, they are crushing and crumbling, the infinite amniotic oceans of a few months before have disappeared along with the weightlessness [...] Suddenly, everything is boundary and agony and devastating pressure, that's where we are. [we must] slip into hyperspace, where I believe that all members of magical humanity are waiting for us, encouraging us. They are all there, Proclus, Plotinus, Hypatia, Enrico Cornelio Agrippa, John Dee, Robert Fludd and Eliphas Levi, they are all there cheering for us. And all the shamans, all the magicians of any age have been part of the plan, of the conspiracy, of the great work, of the distillation of the quintessence. History is a magical invocation and at the end of this plea, if done correctly, all boundaries will dissolve into stone, the trans-dimensional vehicle lapis lazuli that can travel through space-time, i.e. the collectivity of all souls. humans finally released in what William Blake called "the divine imagination". »

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Note:

[1] "I believe that the combination of Jung and Eliade has provided us with a first map of the psyche, the most reliable map of the geography of the psyche that one can have before embarking on one's personal journey and reshaping the landscape with notes and objective observations" [T . McKenna, DMT, P. 11]

[2] On the La Chorrera experiment, see T. McKenna, True hallucinations

[3] DMT, P. 112

[4] Broken, The Sacred, SE, Milan 2009

[5] G. Colli, Greek wisdom vol. THE, Adelphi, Milan 1990

[6] DMT, P. 43

[7] Ibid, p. 34

[8] Ibid, p. 46

[9] T. McKenna, The Archaic Revival, P. 209

[10] "[THE Tykes] are very witty, very mercurial, fickle, and even charming, but I think it was Jung who warned us against the Mercury spirit's sense of humor because it can turn against you. It is not a friendly humor, it is too crazy, too many plates fly, too many cars explode, it is a kind of cartoon by the Marx brothers that takes place on the thin line that separates chaos from madness [...] These entities manifest new patterns of language never seen before. They sing and their elven chatters condense into objects that have no bearing on this world "[DMT, P. 52]

[11] «When you smoke dmt you have the sensation of breaking into a place, not of having a psychological experience. This is not a mental experience, you are catapulted into a place. The first shock is that that place is inhabited, this is the trauma that I have never overcome, because the last thing I expected to find in a chemical substance was the equivalent of a Bugs Bunny cartoon "[DMT, P. 51]

[12] DMT, P. 61

[13] The Archaic Revival, p. 21-2

[14] Ivi, p. 64. "I suspect that all of nature is a continuous web of pheromone-mediated connections and interactions, and that we are simply not at an efficient level of analysis and observation to see this interconnected web" [DMT, p. 42]. “Another way of looking at psychedelics is as amplifiers of the morphogenetic field. They allow us to see what connects everything that is observed and to see everything that is connected, this is because the morphogenetic field is always present, even if it is hidden by our linguistic habits, but with psychedelics it suddenly becomes visible "[Ibid, p. 77].

[15] DMT, P. 54

[16] Ibidem

[17] DMT, P. 59

[18] Ibid. pp. 59-60

[19] See M. Maculotti, The archaic substratum of the end of year celebrations: the traditional significance of the 12 days between Christmas and the Epiphany, on AXISmundi

[20] See M. Maculotti, Who is hiding behind the mask? Visits from Elsewhere and the paraphysical hypothesis, on AXISmundi

[21] DMT, P. 94

[22] See R. Kirk, The Secret Kingdom, Adelphi, Milan 1980; L. Spence, British Fairy Origins, Watts & Co., London 1946; WY Evans-Wentz, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, Citadel Press, New York 1990 (with introduction by T. McKenna)

[23] DMT, p. 95-6

[24] The Archaic Revival, P. 150

[25] Ibid, p. 218

[26] Ibid, p. 220

[27] Ibid, p. 147

[28] DMT, P. 48

[29] The Archaic Revival, P. 149

[30] Ibid, p. 152

[31] See JJ Bachofen, Mothers and Olympic virility, Mediterranee, Rome 2010; M. Gimbutas, The language of the GoddessVenice, 2008

[32] The Archaic Revival, P. 17

[33] T. McKenna, R. Sheldrake and R. Abraham, The Evolutionary Mind, P. 42

[34] See M. Eliade, The myth of the Eternal Return, Rusconi, Milan 1975; E. Jünger, At the wall of time, Adelphi, Milan 2000; J. Evola, Riding the tiger, In the sign of the Golden Fish, Milan 1961 and R. Guénon, The crisis of the modern world, Mediterranee, Rome 2015 e The reign of quantity and the signs of the times, Adelphi, Milan 1982

[35] DMT, P. 120

[36] Ibid, p. 150

[37] Ibid, p. 148

[38] The Archaic Revival, P. 18

[39] Ibid, p. 92

[40] See G. Georgél, The four ages of humanity, the Circle, Rimini 1982

[41] DMT, P. 145

[42] Ibid, pp. 142-3

[43] The Evolutionary Mind, P. 63-4

[44] Ibid, p. 69-70

[45] Ibid, p. 70

[46] The Archaic Revival, P. 85

[47] The Evolutionary Mind, P. 174

[48] The Archaic Revival, P. 90

[49] Ibid, p. 100; italics ours

[50] Ibid, p. 60

[51] Ibid, p. 160

[52] The Evolutionary Mind, P. 80

[53] DMT, p. 97-9

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Bibliography:

• T. McKenna, The Archaic Revival, Harper Collins, San Francisco 1991
• T. McKenna, DMT, ShaKe, Milan 2015
• T. McKenna, True hallucinations, ShaKe, Milan 2008
• T. McKenna, R. Sheldrake and R. Abraham, The Evolutionary Mind, Tlon, Milan 2017

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