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	# 2025-05-14 - Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna

	Derwid by Jacek Malczewski

	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.

	Terence McKenna

	Archaic Revival (1991)

	tags: biophilia,counterculture,manifesto

	# Tags

	biophilia
	counterculture
	manifesto