The McKenna Index [TE]

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes, 1 second. Contains 1606 words

Jan 29, 2025

Welcome friend, we’re still running.

Hope you’ve uh been surviving *waves hands at everything*

Let’s keep things direct here.

Here was our first definition of the newsletter.

“Alright, so this is Trenchant Edges. Trenchant as in Trench, as in digging. Edges like you find on maps.
This newsletter is kind of an open research project designed to let me create high quality, long-form content about stuff that interests me and also never be homeless again.”

I originally tried to build this newsletter as a tightly focused product aimed at the audience of Terence McKenna fans I’d built up at the time.

That has long since become laughable, but I think the original plan of taking Terence McKenna’s ideas seriously has some real merit. If nothing else it’s more fun to play for real stakes.

Now, this is all unfinished and pretty rough. But if you like Terence McKenna there’s a bunch of interesting details here.

We’ll get back around to it eventually. [laugh track plays].

Terence often bragged about how being a butterfly collector got people to dismiss him as a harmless eccentric in the field.

There’s an upside of my current grad school work: I might have enough math by the end of it to figure out what the fuck Dennis was on about in The Invisible Landscape.

Here’s my original plan for TE:

Down to brass tacks, though.
What matters today is figuring out what questions I have that need answered by the research.
I think the questions come in three categories:
What did Terence Say?
How did it change over time?
How does any of this matter?
There are lots of nooks and crannies for this subject. Like, one thing I've wondered is if Terence ever talks about other conceptions of time speeding up like Alvin Toffler's Future shock. I wonder 'cause Toffler's ideas about futurism seem like the rationalist structure from which Terence extrapolated his wilder metaphysics of novelty. You can check out Toffler's 1965 essay, "The Future as a way of Life," to get a taste of what I mean.
But I might need to avoid such tempting rabbit holes to focus on the hyperobject structure of the Timewave.
The advantage of this kind of format is there's considerable pressure to push to find what answers I can in a short time rather than letting a research effort blur.
Some other questions I've got in no particular order:
What do Terence's friends and family (especially Dennis, Kat, and Finn) say about the Timewave today?
How did Terence handle criticism of the Timewave?
What rhetorical tools did Terence use to promote and defend the Timewave?
Was novelty theory and the Timewave as intertwined as much as I remember?
What is the specific structure of the theory, and what are the possible points where it could be in error leading to its failed 2012 prediction?
Is there an intellectually honest way of saying the Timewave's 2012 prediction succeeded?
Why did restoring Telos/purpose to western metaphysics appeal so much to Terence?
If the Timewave was a fraud, did Terence know he was promoting a fraud?
Is there anything within the Timewave worth salvaging for our own roadshows?
If you've got any questions you'd like added to the mix, I'd be happy to consider them. Just shoot me a reply.

Ahhh, dreams.

So yeah, I basically accomplished none of that.

Still, I find myself oddly proud of this vestigial project. It could really have gone somewhere, you know?

I hope you enjoy taking a tour through the first year or so of this whole thing.

The Terrence index:

June 28, 2020: Terry And Me

A pretty good introduction to both my own deep lore and The Timewave. There are other and more focused pieces though.

Jul 05, 2020: Terence McKenna, colonialism, and cultural appropriation

My plan to take Terence’s big ideas like novelty theory and time wave seriously immediately got derailed by politics and I’m still pretty pleased with this one. It’s clumsy but I think most of the content is good.

Jul 07, 2020: Just Who Was this Terence Guy?

I finally wrote a biography of the guy. It’s good.

July 12, 2020: Terence and the Experiment

Both a FAQ and trying to set the scene a bit for why Terence went to the Amazon and what he thought he was doing.

July 16, 2020: Terence McKenna The Criminal

An exploration of Terence’s time smuggling drugs mostly using his brother’s memoir The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.

July 19, 2020: Shockwaves of a Singularity

A timeline of their time in the jungle and my first attempt at describing the theory they ended up with.

July 23rd, 2020: Terence's Other Books

Short reviews of a few of Terence’s books

July 27, 2020: Dennis' Opus and What Came Next

Skip it. Here’s the only relevant bit:
So far I’ve spent a lot of time talking about Terence and Dennis’ expectations as something of a millennial dream, a hope to liberate mankind from profane history and the deathmarch of progress.
And that’s not wrong, but it’s also not exactly right either. Like Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the Experiment at La Chorrera was built on trying to push past the despair of the failures of 60s radical politics.
Where Thompson went with atavistic excess and hoping he could sell enough books about it to keep him out of jail and in fresh cocaine, Terence thought the world just needed to contend more with some transcendental other to change fast enough to meet the challenges of the era.
To that end, he and his friends scoured the literature of anthropology for information on living Shamanic cultures and techniques. They were primarily interested in the “visionary brew” of Ayahausca, which as we discussed earlier, combines a MAOI and DMT. MAOIs make DMT orally active and extend the trip for much longer.
They settled on La Chorrera because of a secret local variation called Oo-koo-he, as a place to investigate further for a technique that might open the transcendent dimension for everyone, not just the usual crop of saints and mystics.
But when they arrived, of course, they found magic mushrooms and things got weird fast.

August 16, 2020: Holograms and the Timewave

A discussion of some of the fields Terence brought into The Invisible Landscape

August 23rd, 2020: The Shoddy Scholarship of Terence McKenna

TLDR: Terence isn’t interested in being a scholar.

May 4, 2021 The Original Invisible Landscape

A brief exploration of one of the few copies of the original 1975 Invisible Landscape.

May 19, 2021: Foundations of an Outline

One of many attempts to try and bring focus and control to myself and the project.

June 4, 2021 Invisible Landscapes Pt1

You might notice there’s not a IL Part 2 anywhere in this list. Whoops.

June 7, 2021 Natural And Supernatural

Rambling about the natural nature of magic

June 13, 2021: Why this matters

The worst genre of TE posts: “Wait, why did I care about this in the first place?”

June 15, 2021: The Crisis

The second invasion of politics into this newsletter, laying out the context for why Terence was, uh trying to use jungle drugs to create the, uh, philosopher’s stone.

June 16, 2021 The Crisis and Terence Mckenna

More grasping at context

June 24, 2021 Differences between

Kind of the concept of looking at the differences between the editions of the invisible landscape more than actually doing it. Skip.

June 28, 2021: Nothing Unannounced

Finally getting to the meat of Terence and Dennis’ theories

June 30, 2021: Why Experiment at La Chorrea

Another attempt at breathing life back into our project. Skip

July 3, 2021: The Experiment

Another timeline? Skip

July 5, 2021: Terence and UFOs

Terence had some interesting thoughts on nonhuman intelligence and this doesn’t do a very good job of talking about them.

August 13, 2021: The Psychedelic Bard

The last thing I wrote about Terence, exploring his legacy.

August 19, 2021: The Maddest Scientist

OK, so this is actually about John Lilly and not Terence but if you’ve read this far you’ll enjoy it.

October 10th, 2021: The Far Off Land

Also not about Terence, but about a Mormon scholar who did a bunch of psychedelics and his thoughts about them in 1959 I think, published by his grandson about a decade ago. Could have been a rival to Huxley or Leary if he’d felt safe talking about it or sharing his thoughts.

And… I think that’s everything. Radio silence for almost 4 years on the guy this whole thing was supposed to be about.

I’m a bit conflicted about that, but ultimately the narrow focus of TE was never going to play out like that and it’s silly to pretend otherwise.

Would have liked to finish the arc though.

Where To From Here?

So, will I revisit Terence McKenna at all?

Eventually.

A lot of my motivation to revisit his work was the anniversary of the 2012 prediction his novelty theory made and once it became clear to me that I wouldn’t have the project done by the end of 2022 the urgency disappeared.

I still think his work is worth a real reappraisal, but that may be for another year.

2025 has, uh, let’s say other ideas about things.

But I think I can do a lot more relevant work in other places.

Anyway, this was both pleasant to revisit and such an enormous pain in the ass to do. Manually combing through 200 posts written over 5 years with wildly different ideas about what should be done and how?

Whew.

We’ll see how the rest of the year goes.

Wrapping Up

All this stuff feels like a first draft. I hope the enthusiasm carries where the exercises themselves failed.

We’ll see.

Grad school and uh the world have been kicking my ass but I’ve been making progress on a few more posts so don’t be surprised if this isn’t the last time you see me this month.

We’ve got at least two more index posts.

The next one is probably the one you should be hyped for: The Weird Index, which has most of my real bangers.'

See you soon.

-S