Nomad Codes

meant to so much of humanity.” Over the next week, almost a thousand e-mails came in each day.
    This flood of digital well-wishing is testament to McKenna’s stature in the world of psychedelics, a largely underground realm that includes the ravers, old hippies, and New Agers one might expect, but also a surprising number of people who live basically straight lives, especially when compared with the users of the ’60s. McKenna serves as this hidden world’s most visible “altered statesman.” He has written five books—two with his brother—and has developed a worldwide following. Brainy, eloquent, and hilarious, McKenna applies his Irish gift of the gab to making a simple case: going through life without trying psychedelics is like going through life without having sex. For McKenna, mushrooms and DMT do more than force up the resonant remains of last night’s dream; they uncover the programming language of mind and cosmos.
    “The psychedelic experience is not the equivalent of a dust bunny under your psychic bed,” says McKenna. “It’s a product of the fractal laws that govern the world at an informational level. There is no deeper truth.”
    McKenna is the most loved psychedelic barnstormer since Timothy Leary, the self-appointed guru of LSD who died in 1996 amid a flurry of digital hype about online euthanasia and his plans—which he scrapped—to undergo cryonic preservation. Like McKenna, Leary was an intellectual entertainer, a carny barker hawking tickets to the molecular mind show. McKenna calls it “the harlequin role,” a role he plays almost willingly. At the same time, McKenna is a far mellower man than Leary. “I don’t seek to live forever,” he says, “and I don’t want the removal of my head to become a net event.”
    Leary spent the late ’60s attempting to gather a hippie army under the battle cry of “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Taking his advice, McKenna dropped out and headed to India, where he bought Mahayana art and smuggled hashish until a stateside bust forced him into hiding in the wilds of Indonesia. In 1971, he and his brother went to the Amazon to hunt for ayahuasca, a legendary shamanic brew. But when they arrived at the Colombian village of La Chorera that spring, what they found were fields blanketed with Stropharia cubensis , aka magic mushrooms.
    In some ways, it was a turning point in American psychedelic culture. Back home, Leary’s LSD shock troops had already disintegrated into harder drugs and bad vibes, and Leary himself was hiding out abroad after escaping from an American jail. Serious heads knew all about psilocybin mushroom from Gordon Wasson’s famous June 10, 1957 Life magazine article, but no one in the US was eating much S. cubensis in the early ’70s because no one had figured out how to cultivate it. After returning from South America, the McKenna brothers discovered a reliable method. While they were not the only heads to crack the shroom code in this era, they did publish their results. Magic mushrooms were now on the underground menu.
    McKenna farmed shrooms into the 1980s. He could turn out seventy pounds of them every six weeks, like clockwork. The trade financed the middle-class existence of a relatively settled man. Then a good friend of his, an acid chemist, got busted.“They fucked him so terrifyingly that I saw I couldn’t do this anymore. I had to work something else out.” What McKenna worked out was “Terence McKenna,” a charismatic talking head he marketed, slowly but successfully, to the cultural early adopters.
    McKenna got his fifteen minutes of fame when four of his books came out in rapid succession. His 1991 collection of essays, The Archaic Revival , is particularly influential, especially among ravers and other alternative tribes attracted to the idea that new technologies and ancient pagan rites point toward the same ecstatic truths. Food of the Gods , published in 1992, aims directly at scholars. In it, McKenna lays out an unorthodox case that psychedelics helped kick-start human consciousness and culture, giving our mushroom-munching ancestors a leg up on rivals by enhancing their visual and linguistic capacities. Though anthropologists ignored his arguments, the time was right for McKenna’s visions. He was tempted with movie deals, was featured in magazines, and toured like a madman. He hobnobbed with Silicon Valley hotshots like interface gurus Brenda Laurel and Jaron Lanier and performed at raves with