How a fringe theory from the I Ching fed the 2012 end-of-time craze
Terence McKenna claimed to find fractal patterns in the ancient Chinese I Ching that pointed to an end of time, and a shift in human consciousness, in 2012. His novelty theory is considered pseudoscience, yet together with the Maya calendar it helped spread the widespread 2012 beliefs of the late 20th century.
McKenna was born in 1946 and grew up in Paonia, Colorado, hunting fossils and, by 14, reading Carl Jung. A 1957 Life magazine article introduced him to so-called magic mushrooms, and the books of Aldous Huxley pulled him further into psychedelic literature. At Berkeley he studied Tibetan folk religion, and his wanderings took him to Nepal, where he learned Tibetan and, by his own account, smuggled hashish until a shipment was seized by US Customs. He later worked as a professional butterfly collector in Indonesia.
After his mother died in 1970, he travelled to the Colombian Amazon with his brother Dennis looking for a plant brew containing DMT, but found fields of giant mushrooms instead. At La Chorrera the brothers staged a bizarre experiment meant to fuse a plant compound with their own DNA using special vocal techniques, and Terence said it put him in touch with a teaching voice he called the Logos. That episode sent him to the I Ching and to novelty theory.
Back in California the brothers adapted a technique for growing edible mushrooms on rye grain and, in 1976, published a home cultivation guide, signing it with the pen names O.T. Oss and O.N. Oeric. By its 1986 revised edition it had sold over 100,000 copies. McKenna also floated the controversial stoned ape theory, suggesting psychedelics had driven human evolution and language, and even speculated that mushrooms were intelligent life from elsewhere.
In the 1980s and 1990s he became a counterculture star. Timothy Leary called him one of the most important people on the planet, the comedian Bill Hicks built a routine around his ideas, and his recorded lectures were sampled on rave and trance records, earning him the label intellectual voice of rave culture. Critics accused him of spreading dangerous ideas and questioned his sanity. He founded a 19-acre ethnobotanical garden on Hawaii's Big Island in 1985 and died of brain cancer in 2000.
Source: Terence McKenna
