Terence McKenna was an American author and lecturer, born in 1946 (Open Library), who wrote and spoke about psychedelic plants, shamanism and language. His brother Dennis, an ethnopharmacologist, has written that Terence died in 2000 (McKenna Academy). The anthropologist Graham St John dates his first DMT experience to the fall of 1965 in Berkeley, not 1967 as some sources say (St John, via Chacruna).
In 1971 the brothers travelled to La Chorrera in the Colombian Amazon looking for an orally active DMT preparation; what followed became the basis of his later books and theories, and Dennis now describes the ideas behind it as mostly nonsense (McKenna Academy). Dennis later co-wrote a 1984 analysis of ayahuasca samples from Peru showing that the brew’s β-carbolines are strong, reversible MAO inhibitors that could protect DMT (McKenna, Towers and Abbott, 198490003-5)).
Terence’s lasting influence is on DMT vocabulary. He popularized “machine elves” and was the lead commentator on “the dome” and “the chrysanthemum” (St John, 2017). Researchers treat his descriptions as cultural reports: in 3,778 coded online DMT reports, machine elves made up 2.9% of entity encounters, and the authors noted that borrowed terms like this may shape later reports (Lawrence et al., 2022).
Sources
- St John, When Terence McKenna first smoked DMT (Chacruna excerpt)
- Dennis McKenna, The experiment at La Chorrera: a 50-year retrospective
- Lawrence et al., 2022, Scientific Reports: 3,778 coded DMT reports
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