TERENCE KEMP McKENNA


November 16, 1946 — April 3, 2000

Terence McKenna, son of Joe McKenna and Hazelle Kemp, died in the early morning hours of April 3rd, after a long battle with brain cancer. He is survived by his two children Finn and Klea, his brother Dennis, his former spouse Kathleen Harrison, his recent partner Christy Silness, and numerous nieces and nephews. His parents are both deceased. Terence grew up and spent the first 16 years of his life in Paonia, Colorado, a small town in the Western foothills of the Rocky Mountains. He completed his last two years of high school in California, attending Los Altos High School during his junior year, and graduating from Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster, California in his senior year. He enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley in 1965 and was accepted into the Tussman Experimental College, an educational program emphasizing self-direction and eclectic reading. On completion of the two-year program in 1967 he embarked on a succession of extensive travels in Asia, Europe, and South America that continued sporadically for much of his life. He returned temporarily from life on the road in 1972 to complete his own self-tailored degree in Shamanology in the Department of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley. During the years following 1975 and the publication of his first book, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching (co-authored with his brother Dennis) Terence became well-known for his provocative and controversial ideas. He was a proponent of the view that psychedelic plants, and the psychedelic experience, play an important role in human cultural and biological evolution. Terence was also known for his eschatological speculations based on the "time-wave" a mathematical construct based on the I Ching which he claimed could be used as a map of cosmic, evolutionary, and historical time-scales. Based on his interpretation of the historical information in the time-wave, he predicted an abrupt end to historical continuity in 2012, corresponding to the end of the Mayan Calendar and a postulated "collapse" of the time-wave at the same historical juncture. His discussion of these and other free-wheeling ideas at conferences and other public venues attracted attention, and from the early 1980’s on, Terence became ever more well-known as a public lecturer, teacher, raconteur and social commentator. His engaging style, Irish sense of humor, and ability to stretch people’s imaginations won him a widespread and devoted following that continues even beyond his death. He married Kathleen Harrison in 1976 and they have two children, Finn (b. 1978) and Klea (b. 1980). During their seventeen-year alliance, they founded and operated Botanical Dimensions, a non-profit organization dedicated to the investigation of ethnomedical and sacred plants, and established a gene bank of rare medicinal species in Hawaii. Terence resided in Sonoma county for most of the 80’s and the early 90’s. Following a divorce from Kathleen in 1992, he moved to the Big Island of Hawaii, and resided in a house he constructed on the South Kona coast. He was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a rare form of brain cancer, in May 1999, and made medical history when he became only the fourth person to receive gene therapy for the disease. This and other measures proved fruitless however, and Terence succumbed to the disease while under hospice care in California. Terence's published work includes Food of the Gods, an examination of the evolutionary significance of psychoactive drug plants, and True Hallucinations, a narrative account of the two brother’s adventures in 1971 in the Colombian Amazon that led to the publication of The Invisible Landscape and the discovery of the Timewave. Terence is also the author or co-author of numerous other books and audiotapes. Some of these include The Archaic Revival (Harper San Francisco, 1991), Trialogues at the Edge of the West, written with Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake (Bear & Company, 1992), and another Sheldrake/Abraham collaboration, The Evolutionary Mind: Trialogues at the Edge of the Unthinkable.

Many of Terence McKenna's ideas were controversial and provoked both outrage and ridicule from arbiters of political and cultural convention, Terence's interest in psychedelic drugs and plants, and their possible importance in the origin and evolution of human consciousness and culture, struck a resonant chord with many people. Whether his notions are right or wrong, his thought-provoking public discussions of psychedelics served to keep the topic alive in the collective consciousness during the 80's and 90's, a period when the cultural mainstream was deeply committed to the suppression of reasoned debate on the positive aspects of psychedelics. The current resurgence of scientific interest in the potential therapeutic applications of psychedelics, and their use as research tools in the investigation of consciousness, the mind, and the brain, can be largely credited to Terence's public insistence on the importance of these substances. He will be remembered for his mesmerizing speaking style, his intellectual playfulness, and his elfin, often self-deprecating sense of humor in presenting concepts that stretched people's conceptual boundaries.

In the words of author Erik Davis in a profile published shortly after his death, "Terence McKenna is a real visionary." (Wired magazine, May 2000) Terry, as he was known to those closest to him, will be fondly remembered and sorely missed by his family, his brother, and his numerous friends, fans, and acquaintances.


Dennis McKenna
Marine on St. Croix, Minnesotaine May 2000