Philosophy

Six-and-a-half hours of the 1989 weekend Terence McKenna shared with Amazon explorer and medicinal-plant researcher Nicole Maxwell. Sound Photosynthesis sold the full event as a seven-and-a-half-hour set (5 audio cassettes #A478-89 / 4 video cassettes #V192-89) under the title "Shamanology of the Amazon"; this collection previously held only a one-hour video excerpt of it. McKenna opens by noting "last year I was here with Riane Eisler", which places this at the Ojai Foundation the year after that 1988 weekend. Maxwell is audible throughout, trading Amazonian pharmacopoeia -- contraceptives, abortifacients, plant taxonomy -- against McKenna's overview of shamanism and the ecological crisis.

Two-part Esalen lecture from August 1992. Nominally on politics and ethos, it ranges over psychedelic ontologies, modernity, language, reason, religion and freedom in part one, then shamanism, synesthesia, paranormal phenomena, climatology, astronomy, Renaissance humanism and telepathy in part two. Released from Esalen's own archive.

McKenna lays out the Stoned Ape hypothesis -- that psilocybin ingestion shaped early human evolution by suppressing dominance hierarchies, strengthening communal bonds and sharpening hunting -- and describes Food of the Gods as a Trojan horse left on the doorstep of anthropology. Released from Esalen's archive as an EXCERPT of a longer August 1992 Esalen talk.