Vital Materialism and Terence McKenna’s Archaic Revival

Vital Materialism and Terence McKenna’s Archaic Revival

Vital materialism is a philosophic concept that challenges our basic notions of subject and object, the familiar bounds by which we describe and interpret the world in its everyday actions. Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter is a clarion call for the need to embrace a radically redefined notion of agency and animism in our everyday environments, attenuating ourselves to the ways in which objects typically viewed as inert have a life of their own. She argues, “The ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open to it.”[1] In opening ourselves to the liveliness of commonplace objects, manmade or not, Bennett hopes “to see how analyses of political events might change if we give the force of things more due.”[2]

Nobody captures the play and magic of such a philosophy of vital materialism better than Terence McKenna, the famed (and infamous) proponent of psychedelic substances. Over the course of a lifetime, McKenna explored the human relationship with the many psychedelic substances that inhabit our planet, and the ways in which these seemingly passive materials in fact offer entire worlds of their own. Following his own musings to a dramatic rereading of human history, McKenna’s book Food of the Gods deviates from the commonplace history of evolution. In its place, McKenna’s “Stoned Ape” theory suggests that much of the credit for human’s relative command over other creatures is in part due to the consciousness-expanding powers of the psilocybin mushroom. Absurd on its face, the Stoned Ape version of human progression is so alien to our basic notions of evolution as to render itself unbelievable.

But, understood in a vital materialist framework, and amidst the backdrop of climate catastrophe and earthly power described in Bruno Latour’s essay “Agency in the Time of the Anthropocene,” his vision assumes new meaning, given clarity by the expansive redefinition of what constitutes agential being. As a mere fungus, the psychedelic mushroom is remarkably capable of tearing open the bounds of consciousness in our species, a powerful source of understanding and imagination that has been essential to human culture, even before humans could conceptualize of themselves as such. It disrupts any attempt to grant rational humankind as the only nexus of understanding historical progress, instead distributing powerful action to the various substances that have been central to human societies into our prehistory.

From all of this, McKenna calls for an Archaic Revival to help humans understand the fundamental ground of their being, rooted in plants that have helped alter their consciousness for generations. Latour suggests that “To be a subject is not to act autonomously in front of an objective background, but to share agency with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy.”[3] To grant the psychedelic mushroom its own thing-power (in Bennett’s terminology) is to grasp the ways in which we are co-implicated in its success, understanding that, without its evolutionary assistance, we may not have advanced as far as we have as a species. By returning to a substance which once served to organize and mediate a harmonious relationship with nature, McKenna suggests that a mutually-knowing relationship between human and nature may reemerge, channeled through the radical agency of the hallucinogenic mushroom.

On the flip side I was once almost attacked by a friend high on LSD so the path to enlightenment *can* run through psychedelics, but this to me is like how pain killers can be responsibly used.

There is also the danger of addiction, overdose, or even just not actually being ready to take such consciousness altering substances...