Revisiting Terence McKenna's Idea of the 'Archaic Revival'

The ‘archaic revival’ is one of Terence McKenna’s most popular ideas, and it is the title of his 1991 book that explores a variety of topics related to psychedelics. The core of the idea is that several 20th-century movements represent a return to the spiritual and ecological sensibilities of Paleolithic and Neolithic shamanistic societies. The archaic revival is a return to what McKenna calls ‘archaic values’ or the ‘archaic style of existence’. However, while there are signs of this return, an awakening of sorts, we have of course not fully returned. McKenna argues that we need to fully awaken to archaic values if we are to resolve our most pressing problems, with environmental destruction being a primary one.

McKenna diagnoses many social, cultural, emotional, and environmental ills with what he refers to as ‘dominator culture’, or a culture in which an ethos of domination reigns. He describes this as “a style of domination, hierarchy with alpha males, with powerful males controlling females at the center of these hierarchies.” It is a male-dominating, women-repressing, hierarchical ideology.

The term ‘dominator culture’ was popularised by futurist and writer Riane Eisler in her book The Chalice and the Blade (1987). In this work, Eisler contrasts the dominator model with the partnership model, an egalitarian structure of society. In the former, patriarchy is the status quo, and men rule over, or control, women. In contrast, a partnership culture is characterised by equality between the sexes. Eisler argues that other features of a dominator culture include an authoritarian social and family structure, a high level of violence and abuse, and a system of beliefs that normalise the dominator culture.

Regarding the last point, scientific theories may be presented to be used to justify the dominator model as being the natural order of society. Consider how Jordan Peterson uses dominance hierarchies in the animal kingdom (in particular, the example of lobsters) to justify human hierarchies. This commits the naturalistic fallacy (or ‘is-ought’ fallacy), which is the fallacious argument that if something is natural it is therefore good. However, just because something occurs in nature, this does not mean that we should consider it good, promote it as such, and perpetuate it. Peterson has similarly argued that patriarchal society is the ‘natural order’ as a way to support traditional gender roles. This is not only an example of the naturalistic fallacy; the claim that male supremacy is ‘natural’ is not supported by the evidence.

In a piece for Vice on Eisler’s ideas, Tao Lin states:

Eisler showed that the dominator model that now exists globally, and which is arguably led by the United States, a country with 44 consecutive male presidents and vice presidents, is a recent development. From ~35000 BC (the earliest that “so-called Venus figurines,” as Eisler called them, have been dated) to ~5000 BC, humans exemplified the partnership model. There was neither patriarchy nor matriarchy.

Prehistoric humans, noticing that new life entered the world exclusively from the female body—which then nourished and cared for that new life—apparently developed a religion/worldview that was centered around the worship of a female deity. Eisler used the word “worship” with the qualification that, “in prehistoric and, to a large extent, well into historic times, religion was life, and life was religion.” Women and men alike worshipped a female abstraction, which Eisler called the Goddess.

despite such evidence of the preeminence of women in both religion and life, there are no indications of glaring inequality between women and men. Nor are there any signs that women subjugated or oppressed men.

I don’t see it [dominator culture] as a male disease. I think everybody in this room has a far stronger ego than they need. The great thing that Riane Eisler, in her book The Chalice and the Blade, did for this discussion was to de-genderize the terminology. Instead of talking about patriarchy and all this, what we should be talking about is dominator versus partnership society.

Partnership culture is the reversal of dominator culture. It is characterised by the ideals of democracy; equal partnership between men and women; a rejection of abuse and violence; and belief systems that validate an empathetic perspective. Eisler argues that there is a continuum between partnership and dominator cultures, and where a particular society falls on the spectrum will be reflected in its culture.

McKenna points to examples of partnership cultures in the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age, hunter-gatherer) and Neolithic (New Stone Age, agricultural) ages. These were shamanistic cultures that pursued ecstatic experiences. But partnership culture began to die out with the invention of agriculture. McKenna tends to refer to the Paleolithic, hunter-gatherer age as exemplifying the archaic values he has in mind. He claims that ecstasy was not highly valued in agricultural societies because late-night orgies, dancing, and psychedelic trips were not conducive to working in the fields all day. Ecstasy gave way to productivity. Partnership societies declined following the invention of agriculture. The worship of cereals (corn, wheat, rye) replaced the worship of the Goddess. Following this, male ego and dominance have been on the rise.

McKenna writes:

The mushroom style, the shamanic style of the nomadic hunter-gatherer is a style of goddess-worship, and psychedelic shamanism, and orgiastic religion.

We can’t go back to ancient Rome or ancient Egypt or something like that and expect to have real answers. We have to go back further, to prehistory, to this archaic state. And there—in partnership, in genderless, self-organizing society—we begin to see the kinds of models that we have to somehow recreate in the modern world. Obviously, we can’t in the modern world become mushroom-eating, nomadic pastoralists. But we can study that approach to reality to try and learn from it how you live in equilibrium. That’s the key thing that the archaic world knew that we don’t know: how do you live in equilibrium so that your children may live in equilibrium? Because otherwise you get a cycle started that’s going to shove somebody over the cliff. And that somebody, in the present case, is either ourselves, our children, or their children.

McKenna argues that the 20th century showed signs of the archaic revival because it was in such a dire mess. Since the time he was writing about these ideas (the 90s), the climate situation has only worsened, so perhaps we are seeing further indications of people returning to archaic values. McKenna states:

[The archaic revival is] based on an idea that when societies get into trouble, an unconscious response seems to be: they search back through their own history to find a model that they can revivify or revitalize. The strongest example in our own history was when the Medieval world broke apart and didn’t make any sense anymore, the new middle class went back to classicism—to the Greeks and the Romans, to Roman law and Greek philosophy, and Greco-Roman architecture and mechanics, and that sort of thing—and created classicism. Classicism was invented in the fourteenth century.

the whole of the twentieth century—the discovery of the unconscious by Freud and Jung, the dissolving of the naturalistic image at the hands of the cubists, the probing of the dreamstate by the surrealists, the exploration of mass ritual by the fascists. I mean, it wasn’t all good, this stuff. But what all these things had in common was: they were a return and appeal to a level of the mass psyche that had been ignored and denied for a long, long time. The LSD-taking of the sixties was the same kind of thing. And I come out very strongly for [Marshall] McLuhan in the idea that, as the ratios of the mix of media in a society changes, the sensory ratios and values of the society change. And we’re living in a postliterate, postlinear kind of world now, where a whole different set of assumptions make sense—and they’re archaic assumptions. You know, the archaic world was a nonlinear, preliterate, audial, all-at-once kind of world, and the fact that our sensory ratios have shifted back in that direction makes us very sympathetic, very susceptible to this re-archaicization that wants to go on.

We have gone sick by following a path of untrammelled rationalism, male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism. We have gone very, very sick. And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, it begins to produce antibodies, or strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease. And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing.

Festivals, and psychedelic use at festivals, can be considered another sign of the archaic revival, which the writer Julian Vayne touched on in an interview for Psychedelic Times. In fact, he says, contrary to some psychedelic harm reduction advice, festivals are “possibly the optimum environment to take entheogens”. Burning Man (and other burn events), ecstatic dance, psytrance events, and transformational festivals in general can all be thought of as signs of the archaic revival. They can be seen to represent, and reflect, the fundamental human need for ritual, ecstasy, and communal experience. Humans desire collective (or shared) ecstasy. Solo psychedelic experiences can also be transformative, of course, but perhaps this pattern of psychedelic use is missing a key element: the communal, bonding experience. Vayne notes:

[W]e’re social animals, and so whilst we can do tripping on our own, and there’s a great value in that, there is tremendous value in tripping together. If we can do that in good ways and come together in groups, I think we end up working out a lot of really fundamental things that inform our relationships with others. You can introspect on those things all you like, and in a psychedelic state obviously you can get really interesting points of understanding, but to actually be in the living presence of other people, ideally people that you love and care for and have a good feeling with- that is where the social transformation really happens. This collective experience can touch us very, very deeply, because we are social animals. So collective entheogens, this “archaic revival,” is an essential part of the process, in my view.

So when I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity, or scarifying themselves, or showing a lot of flesh, or dancing to syncopated music, or getting loaded, or violating ordinary canons of sexual behaviour, I applaud all of this; because it's an impulse to return to what is felt by the body -- what is authentic, what is archaic -- and when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very centre of all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling.

And at the centre of that impulse is the shaman: stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with the spirit helpers, dancing in the moonlight, and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious, living mystery. That's what the world is. The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery: our birth, our death, our being in the moment -- these are mysteries. They are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of self-exploration, empowerment and hope for the human enterprise. And our culture has killed that, taken it away from us, made us consumers of shoddy products and shoddier ideals. We have to get away from that; and the way to get away from it is by a return to the authentic experience of the body -- and that means sexually empowering ourselves, and it means getting loaded, exploring the mind as a tool for personal and social transformation.

By returning to plant-based psychedelics and shamanism, McKenna argues, society can be set on the right track – away from planetary destruction and towards a more harmonious relationship with others and the natural world. However, one does have to wonder whether McKenna’s thoughts about the past show signs of Golden Age thinking, or the Golden Age fallacy: believing that a specific era in the past was inherently better than the present or any other time. This way of thinking is characterised by selective memory, idealisation, and a lack of critical analysis.

For example, McKenna describes the ancestral human as:

a self-reflected, minded creature practicing a shamanic mother-goddess religion in this nomadic context. And that was paradise. And that was the ideal for the archaic revival. In other words, that Eden actually existed.

Of course, one can hold that Indigenous peoples today and in prehistoric times weren’t ‘corrupted’ by many influences of Western, modern, industrialised civilisations; but this does not warrant the view that such peoples were morally superior and lived in perfect peace and harmony, that is, before agriculture or civilisation came and corrupted their innate goodness. It ignores the moral failings of the past (and moral improvements over time), as well as how human vices – like violence and warfare – were not non-existent in the prehistoric period. We have evidence of ancient hunter-gatherers engaging in warfare and massacres. Conflict, greed, jealousy, and oppression were not invented during the advent of agriculture and civilisation (this is true even if we grant that certain societal and cultural changes magnified or justified these tendencies).

A similar problem occurs in the account of ancestral humans given by Dr Chris Ryan, who – in his bestselling book Sex at Dawn (2010) – challenges that humans are naturally monogamous. Instead, he makes the case that monogamy is a Western, idealised social construct, and that for the vast majority of our evolutionary history, we lived in small, egalitarian, nomadic, non-monogamous communities. Sexual interaction, he argues, was viewed as a shared resource. According to Ryan, people in pre-agricultural communities were not possessive and territorial (with respect to resources, sexual partnerships, and child-rearing). These societies were fiercely egalitarian, he argues. Ryan points to the sexually promiscuous bonobos – our close cousins – as evidence of this, as well as anatomical, behavioural, and cultural evidence to support his theory.

Nevertheless, several academics have critiqued the arguments presented in Sex at Dawn, stating that the evidence is cherry-picked and that a more comprehensive reading of the evidence does not show ancestral humans to be sexually promiscuous in the way that Ryan claims. As Ryan Ellsworth concludes in a review of the book published in Evolutionary Psychology:

“It is true, as Sex at Dawn points out, that monogamy is difficult in modern society, but doubtful that this is because we are promiscuous at heart (this may apply to the behavior of most women more than the desire of most men), shackled by the trappings of a postagricultural dilemma of our own devices, unable to return to the ancestral days of sexual communism.

Is this book likely to open the eyes of scientists and make them realize that the emperor has, for so long, not been wearing any clothes? Will it initiate a major revision of perspective and research on the evolution of human sexuality among scientists? The answer to both is “no.” But, as mentioned at the beginning of this review, books like Sex at Dawn inform the wider public of the goings-on in academia. In this case, a distorted portrayal of current theory and evidence on evolved human sexuality is presented, and for this reason it deserves more attention from those on the inside.”

He adds that Sex at Dawn is guilty of “turn[ing] a blind eye to disconfirming, inconvenient facts, while indulging in quite a bit of fantasizing,” and he says the book presents “a naïve vision of a human that never evolved.” Some of the same critiques could be made of McKenna’s archaic revival idea. Relating this idea to Ryan’s view of human sexuality, we could question whether the rise of polyamory in the 21st century truly is a return to archaic values.

In his subsequent book, Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress (2019), Ryan – in a similar vein to McKenna – argues for a kind of archaic revival. He stresses the costs and harms of civilisation (e.g. dietary- and lifestyle-related diseases and screen addiction) and the healthy patterns of living in prehistoric times that we’ve lost. Prehistoric living was not without its dangers and disadvantages (e.g. a lack of modern medicine would make certain situations life-threatening), but Ryan argues that how we live today, including what our relationships are like, is worse than it used to be. So we need to learn from the (distant) past in order to correct the present. This argument is legitimate, but we should, nevertheless, be wary about veering into Golden Age thinking to make this case.

I would also argue that McKenna’s view on psychedelics, which he relates to the archaic revival, gives an impression of utopian thinking. He states:

I think most people in this room, most people who’ve had a psychedelic experience, will agree that the most profound, the most open-hearted, the most moving moments of their lives, some of them have been tied in with those experiences. But we seem unable or unwilling or afraid to extrapolate that conclusion to the notion that this is a general panacea for society because we cannot conceive that the solution to a spiritual dilemma could lie in matter.

However, there are many examples of psychedelic use not correcting – instead being incorporated into, or used to solidify – uncaring values. Tripping does not always lead to ‘refeminised’ and progressive values. Misogynists, neo-Nazis, antisemitic conspiracy theorists, nationalists, and pro-capitalists also take psychedelics and don’t abandon their views. Psychedelics can, moreover, lead to ego inflation and delusions of grandeur. Sexual predators and narcissists can have ecstatic experiences with psychedelics but still engage in harmful and exploitative behaviour. Psychedelics are not a panacea, and they do not always mute the ego in favour of more egalitarian views or ethical conduct. As the writer Jules Evans highlights, referencing psychedelic-using Indigenous cultures, psychedelics don’t always make you liberal or non-violent. This is one of the points I make in my upcoming book: psychedelics don’t, by their very nature, improve our worldview and behaviour.

While we should be sceptical of the Golden Age fallacy and utopianism in McKenna’s presentation of the archaic revival idea, this does not mean we should reject the idea outright. Even if we didn’t live in a perfect, orgiastic, Edenic past, there are still certainly lessons to be learnt from our evolutionary history. We evolved in a specific kind of environment, and our psychology is still attuned to that context. This has all sorts of implications, from the dominant political ideology we live under to the kind of architecture that surrounds us.

We can, in line with McKenna’s thinking, also see certain cultural forces as an attempt to realign ourselves with a way of living that feels healthier and more satisfying. Despite the potential issues with McKenna’s formulation of the archaic revival, it nonetheless offers us a way to think about contemporary phenomena as harking back to the past. By better understanding this relationship between the present and the past, we can imagine and encourage a future that is both more human and more harmonious.

12