the cusp of a catastrophe, and that beyond that cusp we are unrecognizable to
ourselves. The wave of novelty that has rolled unbroken since the birth of the
universe has now focused and coalesced itself in our species’. The statement was an
iteration of an earlier performance reproduced as part of the track ‘Re: Evolution’
from the Shamen’s 1992 album Boss Drum:
History is ending. I mean, we are to be the generation that witnesses the
revelation of the purpose of the cosmos. History is the shock wave of the
Eschaton. History is the shock wave of eschatology, and what this means for
those of us who will live through this transition into hyperspace, is that we
will be privileged to see the greatest release of compressed change probably since
the birth of the universe. The twentieth century is the shudder that
announces the approaching cataracts of time over which our species and the
destiny of this planet is about to be swept.^5In McKenna’s framework, planetary novelty will accelerate exponentially to a point
which, according to the maths, possesses a quantified value of zero—the Omega
Point, the Eschaton: December 2012. In a most extraordinary development, the
calculations were only much later discovered to be almost identical to the cosmic
rebirth foreseen in the Tzolkin, the Mayan Sacred Calendar. According to
archeoastronomer John Major Jenkins (who published his work in Maya
Cosmogenesis 2012 [1998]), over 2,300 years ago the Maya calculated that the
December solstice of 2012 (6 a.m. on 21 December) will occasion an alignment of
the path of the sun with the Galactic Equator of the Milky Way (which the ancient
Maya recognized as ‘the Sacred Tree’), an event signifying cosmogenesis in Mayan
thought, the end of a great gestation period and the birth of a new world age.^6
Corresponding with the Tzolkin, McKenna modelled an accelerating rate of
change making major species change immanent. Yet, while the end of the world was
nigh, it would hardly correspond to the apocalyptic scenarios of orthodox religion.
According to McKenna, the ‘strange attractor’ lying in the future ‘throws off
reflections of itself, which actually ricochet into the past, illuminating this mystic,
inspiring that saint or visionary’. Furthermore, ‘out of these fragmentary glimpses of
eternity we can build a kind of map, of not only the past of the universe, and the
evolutionary egression into novelty but a kind of map of the future’. While
psilocybe mushrooms catalysed the evolution of language (and technology) in Homo
sapiens 50,000 years ago, our species once again stands at the threshold of a major
evolutionary event. McKenna felt that the understanding of ‘planetary purpose’ was
critical for humans to become ‘agents of evolution’. An advocate of the ‘archaic
revival’, a return to ‘the palaeolithic world of natural magic’ and community in
preparation for the coming Eschaton, McKenna was himself such a humble
visionary In the revival, humanity would experience reconnection to ‘the vegetal
Goddess’, to the Earth Mother: ‘Returning to the bosom of the planetary
partnership means trading the point of view of the history-created ego for a more
maternal and intuitional style.’ And the use of hallucinogenic plants would enable
212 GRAHAM ST JOHN