His younger brother, ethnopharmacologist Dennis McKenna, founded the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy in 2019. This page is the Academy’s home for Terence: his biography, a timeline of his life, his key ideas and books, and our archive of conversations, writing and video about him.

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A childhood in Paonia, Colorado (1946–1965)

Terence Kemp McKenna was born on 16 November 1946 in Paonia, a ranching and orchard town on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies, the first son of Joe and Hazel McKenna. His brother Dennis arrived four years later. By Terence’s own account they were unusual children: voracious readers drawn early to science fiction, natural history and the philosophy of mind. Terence hunted fossils in the canyons around Paonia and was reading Carl Jung while still a boy. In his teens he moved to California, finishing high school in Lancaster.

Berkeley and the road east (1965–1970)

In 1965 he entered the University of California, Berkeley, and was accepted into the Tussman Experimental College. The interdisciplinary path he followed there, which would become a degree in ecology, resource conservation and shamanism, was already an argument about how the world fits together. Berkeley could not hold him for long. In 1969 he travelled to Nepal to study Tibetan Bon shamanism and the Tibetan language, then wandered Southeast Asia, collecting butterflies in Indonesia. Across these journeys he kept meeting the same assumption in different forms: that the visible world is not the whole world, and that certain plants and practices can open what ordinary consciousness keeps closed.

La Chorrera, 1971: the expedition that shaped everything

In early 1971 Terence and Dennis travelled to La Chorrera, a remote settlement on the Río Igaraparaná in the Colombian Amazon. They went looking for oo-koo-hé, a rare visionary preparation used by the Witoto people. What they found instead were Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms growing in the dung of introduced cattle, and an experiment with them that neither brother ever fully stopped trying to understand.

For Dennis, La Chorrera became the start of a scientific vocation: a doctorate in botanical sciences at the University of British Columbia and decades of research on ayahuasca and plant pharmacology. For Terence it became the generative event behind nearly everything he later wrote, including his theories of time and novelty. He told the story in True Hallucinations (1993); Dennis has revisited it in The Experiment at La Chorrera: a 50-year Retrospective.

Writer, lecturer and “bard” of psychedelia (1975–1999)

Terence returned to Berkeley in 1972 and graduated in 1975, the same year he and Dennis published The Invisible Landscape, the first formal statement of the ideas born at La Chorrera. In 1976, writing as O.T. Oss and O.N. Oeric, the brothers published Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide, which helped bring home cultivation of psilocybin mushrooms to a wide audience.

In 1985 Terence and his wife, ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison, founded Botanical Dimensions, a nonprofit plant preserve on the Big Island of Hawaii dedicated to medicinal and visionary plants and the knowledge that surrounds them. Through the 1980s and 1990s he lectured widely, often at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, and joined biologist Rupert Sheldrake and mathematician Ralph Abraham in a long-running series of public “trialogues.” In 1987 he completed the first Timewave Zero software with programmer Peter Meyer.

The early 1990s brought the books for which he is best known: The Archaic Revival (1991), Food of the Gods (1992) and True Hallucinations (1993). His talks, rapid, precise and unexpectedly funny, moved from mycology to Joyce to the end of history without losing the thread, and they spread on cassette and later online. He described himself not as a guru but as a phenomenologist: “Here is something weird we found in the woods. What is it?” In 1992 he made Hawaii his permanent home.

Illness and death (1999–2000)

On 22 May 1999, a week after returning home from six weeks on the road, Terence suffered a seizure at his house on the slopes of Mauna Loa. A scan in Kona revealed a brain tumour, diagnosed as glioblastoma multiforme. He underwent surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, and radiation treatment. In early 2000 he moved to a friend’s home in Marin County, where his family gathered, and he died there on 3 April 2000, at the age of 53. Erik Davis’s interview with him in his final months, “Terence McKenna’s Last Trip,” was published in Wired in May 2000.

He had spent years arguing that the fear of death was a misreading of how the universe works, comparing us to caterpillars dreading the chrysalis without knowing what emerges from it.

Legacy

Terence McKenna is more widely heard today than during his lifetime. Recordings of his lectures circulate across YouTube, podcasts and streaming platforms, and the questions he pressed, about psychedelics and consciousness, plants and human evolution, and a civilisation that had lost touch with direct experience, have moved closer to the mainstream as clinical psychedelic research has grown. He was often wrong in his specifics, and said so. He was rarely wrong in his instinct that these were questions worth taking seriously.

The McKenna Academy is not a shrine to Terence. It is an answer to the questions he kept asking, pursued with the rigour, lineage and reciprocity that a single brilliant voice cannot supply alone.

Key dates in Terence McKenna’s life and work, and in the life of his ideas after his death.

McKenna is often reduced to his most spectacular claims: machine elves, the end of time in 2012, stoned apes. Those are real parts of his work, but the core of it was a set of connected arguments about consciousness, language, psychedelics and the direction of history.

McKenna’s books often read like transcribed thinking, ideas spoken before they were written. These are his principal works, in order of first publication.

Books by Terence McKenna

Principal works · 1975–1998

1975

The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens and the I Ching

With Dennis McKenna

The most technically dense of his books and the first formal account of the La Chorrera research, the Timewave and its roots in the I Ching.

1976

Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide

With Dennis McKenna, as O.T. Oss and O.N. Oeric

A practical cultivation handbook that carried psilocybin mushrooms far beyond their native range.

1991

The Archaic Revival

Essays and interviews

The most accessible entry point to his thought: language and the Logos, shamanism, the Gaian hypothesis and the suppression of plant medicines.

1992

Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

Subtitled “A Radical History of Plants, Drugs and Human Evolution”

His magnum opus and the home of the Stoned Ape theory: a sweeping argument about the role of psychoactive plants in human cultural evolution.

1992

Trialogues at the Edge of the West

With Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham

Conversations on chaos, creativity and the sacred, drawn from the trio’s public dialogues.

1993

True Hallucinations

Memoir

His account of La Chorrera: part memoir, part philosophy, and committed to holding the inexplicable open rather than explaining it away.

1998

The Evolutionary Mind

With Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham

A second volume of trialogues on science, imagination and spirit.

Books about Terence McKenna

memoir

The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (2012)

Dennis McKenna’s memoir of growing up with Terence, La Chorrera and the decades that followed. More about the Book here.

biography

Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna (2025)

Graham St John’s full-length biography, discussed on Brainforest Café.

creative
nonfiction

A Short, Strange Trip (2026)

John O´Connor recount of the happenings at La Chorrera, discussed on Brainforest Café.

From McKenna Academy transcripts of his talks What I Have Learned from Psychedelics and Metaphysics of Psychedelics.

Everything the McKenna Academy has published about Terence, gathered in one place.

Tribute to Terence McKenna (April 2020)

To mark the 20th anniversary of Terence’s death on 3 April 2020, Dennis McKenna and seven of Terence’s friends and collaborators gathered for four online events celebrating his life and legacy. The series opened with the premiere of a never-released 1989 video of Terence lecturing at Esalen, hosted by Mike Margolies of Psychedelic Seminars.

Watch the tribute conversations

Who was Terence McKenna?

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) was an American ethnobotanist, author and lecturer known for his writing and talks on psychedelic plants, consciousness, language and the nature of time. His best-known books are Food of the Gods, The Archaic Revival and True Hallucinations.

How did Terence McKenna die?

He died of glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive brain cancer, on 3 April 2000 in San Rafael, California, at the age of 53. The tumour was found after he suffered a seizure at his home in Hawaii in May 1999.

What did Terence McKenna predict for 2012?

Through his Novelty Theory and the Timewave Zero graph, McKenna proposed that novelty in the universe would reach a maximum on 21 December 2012, a “zero point” he described as a transformation beyond imagining. The date passed without event. Read how the Timewave was built and why it failed.

Was Terence McKenna related to Dennis McKenna?

McKenna’s proposal, set out in Food of the Gods (1992), that early humans’ consumption of psilocybin mushrooms helped drive the rapid evolution of human cognition, language and culture. It remains speculative and contested; see what the evidence actually shows.

What books did Terence McKenna write?

His main books are The Invisible Landscape (1975, with Dennis McKenna), Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide (1976), The Archaic Revival (1991), Food of the Gods (1992), Trialogues at the Edge of the West (1992), True Hallucinations (1993) and The Evolutionary Mind (1998).

Where can I hear Terence McKenna’s lectures?

Hundreds of his recorded talks circulate on YouTube, podcast platforms and audio archives. The McKenna Academy’s own archive collects conversations about Terence with the people who knew him, including the 2020 tribute series and Brainforest Café episodes.