Terence McKenna’s Australian Adventure

Graham St John (Aus / UK)

Terence McKenna was the 20th century’s psychedelic renaissance man. In this talk, we’ll squeeze into the back seat of McKenna’s 1997 tour of Australia. For a brief moment in Feb/Mar of that year, McKenna served as alien frontman for the Aussie experimental music underground. In our journey, we’ll explore the visitor’s enigmatic stature as a cult figure, novelty theorist, and psychedelic prophet with an untiring vision: that the clock is running down on history. His message about the end was magnified by McKenna’s own abrupt departure within three years of his visit. But if time was disappearing, and the “transcendental object at the end of time” was fast approaching, as his audience learned during his whirlwind southern adventure, McKenna was laughing all the way to the eschaton.

The lecture will introduce content from my recently published Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna, a comprehensive biography of this stand-up philosopher, rogue scholar, and surreal oracle. Perfecting his rugged philosophy on the role of psychedelics in evolution, consciousness, and time, McKenna was a riotous provocateur who charted the edges of mind and matter with razor wit and poetic charm. Documenting one of the most celebrated yet least understood figures of the twentieth century, Strange Attractor chronicles the life, work, and legacy of a bold cartographer of the weird, whose voice affected multitudes and continues to haunt the present.

For all details about Strange Attractor, see https://www.edgecentral.net/terence-mckenna-biography