The Second Psychedelic Revolution Part Three: Terence McKenna, The Rise of the Plant Shaman
Metaphorically, DMT is like an intellectual black hole in that once one knows about it, it is very hard for others to understand what one is talking about. One cannot be heard. The more one is able to articulate what it is, the less others are able to understand. This is why I think people who attain enlightenment, if we may for a moment comap these two, are silent. They are silent because we cannot understand them. Why the phenomenon of tryptamine ecstasy has not been looked at by scientists, thrill seekers, or anyone else, I am not sure, but I recommend it to your attention. ~ Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelics, Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFO’s, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, & the End of History. (1991)
The publication of PIHKAL and TIHKAL by Alexander and Ann Shulgin resulted in a plethora of new psychedelics (see Part Two) that are now commonly available largely thanks to the scarcity of Acid after the Y2K Kansas missile-silo LSD bust (see Part One). However, unlike the First Psychedelic Revolution, which was sparked primarily by the artificial psychedelic LSD and to a lesser extent laboratory synthesized mescaline, psilocybin, and DMT [1], (as listed in the introduction of ‘The Psychedelic Experience: A manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead’ by Leary, Metzner, and Alpert in 1964), the Second Psychedelic Revolution cannot be defined purely by ‘synthetic’ drugs alone. For although the LSD drought resulted in the popularizing of 2-CB, 2-C-T-7, 5-MeO-DIPT, and other previously unknown laboratory-discovered psychedelic compounds, it also accelerated an ongoing rekindling of interest in naturally occurring plant entheogens [2] and the popularization of the previously little known concept of plantshamanism and the idea that these plants were not so much ‘psychedelic drugs’, as they were ‘spiritual medicines’.
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