Ask Terence McKenna

...er in a darkened hut at night, and they take it and the sing. But the songs, their selling them at the table back there, the songs, when there’s ...

... a lot as a key issue. You were mentioning in South America, you sang songs. Were those songs ayahuasca songs, Inca songs or little ditties you w...

...of nigh all shamans world wide. In other words it consists of magical songs, the blowing of tobacco smoke over the body of the patient, the layin...

...d ruins and phosphorescent maidens in diaphanous gowns, howling demon songs beneath a violet moon,” not funny ideas. I worked pretty diligently a...

...n.” Well, here’s how I think it happened. My little example about the songs earlier was a stab at this, but here’s more. It’s that all kinds – al...

...discovered that, uh, the people were singing what they called magical songs, that were, uh, revealed to them under the intoxicating influence of ...

...o take this drug, are into what they call, icaros. Icaros are magical songs, i.c.a.r.o.s., icaro, and the accomplishment of a shaman is judged by...

...powerment, and psychic healing… that their hands, their spells, their songs, can cure. And, you know, until you’re truly ill in a world without r...

... knows. A world of symbolic activity driven by the imagination. First songs and stories and then writing and then mathematics and language and th...

...y is, is ripping stuff off of people: mummies, cooking utensils, folk songs, dances, plants, and you bring all the stuff back to your colleagues ...

...a stimulant for the production of intellectual product in the form of songs, rituals, dances, body painting, abstract ideas. All of these things ...

...oing and how they were communicating was by generating, through their songs, objects, so that what I was surrounded by was a crowd of diminutive,...

... if we are to believe them, what happened was that by singing certain songs, burning certain incense and performing these rituals at certain time...

... the scene, but these old guys would sing these icaros, these magical songs on ayahuasca that appear as colored tapestries in front of your eyes ...

...the new civilization will be, somehow in the singing of the ayahuasca songs in the rainforests, in the tremendous hypermetallic transcendental of...

... surrounded by a bunch of Indians and suddenly, I understand what the songs are about. And they’re always about the same thing. They’re about the...

...tegy to make DMT happen, but it ends up with the DMT happening. Their songs were not to be listened to, but to be seen. People would say, "How di...

...impression. This is actually being done by shamans in the Amazon. The songs they sing sound as they do in order to look a certain way. They are n...

...nd whirling fizzgigs and stuff like that. We're talking about scenes, songs, strings of imagery, bursts of poetic flight that hover between being...

...huasca with these people, and they would sing these thousand-year-old songs, and you would eventually- you would get to the place where you had t...

...yond death, he would hope to be an enameled golden bird singing sweet songs to the lords and ladies of Byzantium. In other words, it’s the image ...