“Machine elves” is a phrase popularized by Terence McKenna for small, playful, endlessly shape-shifting beings that seem to be made of mechanical or geometric material. The printed record starts with McKenna himself: in a full-text search of the Open Library book collection, the earliest dated book using the phrase is his 1991 collection, The Archaic Revival (Open Library search). In Google’s book data it first registers in 1992 (Google Books Ngram).
Despite its fame, the phrase describes a small minority of reports. A University of Toronto-led team coded 3,778 DMT experiences posted to one forum from 2009 to 2018. Entities appeared in 1,719 of them, and machine elves in 50 of those encounters (2.9%) (Lawrence et al., 2022). Feminine figures, deities and aliens were far more common.
The idea behind the phrase does recur. In a 2021 field study of 36 interviews, the most common “texture” given to beings was “self-transforming”, and the authors link it to McKenna’s description (Michael et al., 2021). Researchers also warn that a famous label can colour how later experiences are described. None of this tells us what, if anything, the beings are.
Sources
- Lawrence et al., 2022, Scientific Reports: 3,778 coded DMT reports
- Michael, Luke and Robinson, 2021, Frontiers in Psychology: DMT field study
- Open Library full-text search: “machine elves”
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