TelexExternal LinkInternal LinkInventory Cache

book _The Archaic Revival_ authored by Terence McKenna

• DMT
• UFO's

  

The archaic revival is a clarion call to recover our birthright, however uncomfortable that may make us.  It is a call to realize that life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based, is life trivialized, life denied!  Life enslaved to the ego and its fear of dissolution in the mysterious matrix of feeling that is all around us.  It is in the archaic revival that our transcendence of the historical dilemma actually lies.  There is something more. It is now clear that new developments in many areas, including mind machine interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, and data storage imaging and retrieval techniques; it is now clear that new developments in these new areas are coalescing into the potential for at truly demonic, or an angelic self-imaging of our culture.

- Terence McKenna - _Food Of The Gods_

A student of Tibetan    Shamanism, virtual reality, and the botany of the  Amazon, McKenna is a legendary raconteur, adventurer, and proponent of  the use of the psilocybin   mushroom who claims that hallucinogenic plants are a key to our evolution as a language-using species.

And so you see, I see this whole business of the twentieth century as having the psychedelic  experience as its centrepiece, as a cultural icon, but surrounding that are all the other impulses to the archaic that surround us now. It begins as far back as impressionism, which  deconstructs the realistic image of the romantics, and then you get Freud's discovery of the  unconscious, he points out that we are not victorian ladies and gentlemen but dark thoughts split behind our eyelids, that we are obsessed with sexuality, with fecal matter -- you know the list.

Following Freud comes Jung, who carries it a step further, introduces the notion of a race mind, racial consciousness, archetypes. Working in a slightly different area, people like Picasso journey to Africa and return to Paris with the masks of tribal peoples which then begin to feed into the theories of analytical and synthetic cubism. Simultaneously, the quantum physicists are announcing that the orderly billiard ball world of the Hamiltonian atom has to be replaced with wave mechanical functions of excruciating complexity, then you get, you know, in short order, I don't know, abstract expressionism, rock and roll, the outbreak of communal lifestyles of the 1960s -- you see, I think all of these cultural phenomena can be placed under the umbrella of what I call 'an archaic revival'. This is what house music is, this is what the psychedelic rebirth is, this is what the new cyber-tribalism is,  and at the centre of this the sparkplug, the necessary element, the sine qua non, if you will, is the psychedelic experience, because it's not an ideology, it's not something that you get from Baba if you clean up around the ashram for a few years, it doesn't come to you from some beady-eyed roshi, rishi, geshe, or guru. It's a direct relationship between you and the plant,  between you and nature, and when you open yourself up to this you discover that this is the secret that was lost and how they keep the lid on this I really haven't the faintest idea.

- Terence McKenna - Camden Talks 6/15/92

But in all of these phenomena there's an overarching theme -- a return to the prehistoric and aboriginal mode. So this unconscious process has proceeded quite far.  The great paradox of modernism is that it began as a promise of a leap into a science fiction future and it ends by setting you down stoned on Ayahuasca in a rain forest somewhere in Peru. So that's the Archaic Revival.

How can the archaic revival exist in an 'Interneted' planet of six, seven, eight, billion people? The answer is what is always the answer: through technology, through virtual reality, through nanotechnology. Eventually I want to see us end up in a place where we walk naked on a beach at sunset. We appear to be completely primitive people. Healthy, naked, no infrastructure, no cities, no nothing. But if you were suddenly to find yourself in the body of one of those people and close your eyes, you would see menus hanging in space. These are the menus of the culture: world news menus, world weather menus, latest menus. Talk to your friend on the other side of the planet. In other words, the Internet will become an integrated prosthesis of the human body.

- Terence McKenna

track _Archaic Revival_ MP3 (160k) by Spacetime Continuum and Terence McKenna off of _Alien

History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophy 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 15,000 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-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th 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 shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its 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 when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed and the supression 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 Niagras 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 ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.
 

What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, 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 your 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. Its 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; 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.

- recorded live February 27th, 1993 (8 Ak'bal (House)/8 Aq'ab'al (Foredawn) - 203/260 - 12.18.19.16.3

• _History Ends in Green: Gaia, Psychedelics and the Archaic Revival_/Audio Cassette by Terence McKenna
• free jazz space rock track _A Song Of Rememberance For A Time When Wife Swapping Was Considered Politically Correct_ (112k) by Mushroom off of _Analog Hi-Fi Surprise_ on Clearspot (1999)
• 604 release _Basic Tribal Pattern_ CD by Mekkanikka on Spirit Zone #145 (2003)
• 1. _The Dr. Is In_
• 2. _Ancient's Cult_
• 4. _War (What Is It Good For?)_
• 9. _Basic Tribal Pattern (Sid Mix)_ MP3 (192k)
• samples Timothy Leary right before he says his famous mantra "turn on tune in drop out"
  
• ambient track _Maya & Aliens_ MP3 (160k) by Steve Be Zet off of _Archaic Modulation_ CD on Recycle Or Die #005 (1993)

 
• techno release _From Modern To Ancient_ 12" by Oliver Ho on Meta #011 (2000)

• a1 untitled MP3 (192k)
• a2 untitled
• b1 untitled
• b2 untitled
• b3 untitled

TelexExternal LinkInternal LinkInventory Cache