María Sabina and the Machine Elves: Two Accounts of Encountering the Other

María Sabina described the mushrooms as giving her "words", communications from spiritual entities that she received and transmitted during healing ceremonies. The entities spoke through her; she was their vehicle. The velada, the all-night ceremony, was structured around this communication: Sabina would chant and sing the words she received, and the words were the medicine.

Terence McKenna described his DMT experiences as encounters with "machine elves", self-transforming insectoid entities that presented him with objects made of meaning, spoke to him in a language he could almost but not quite understand, and conveyed a sense of absolute importance that he spent thirty years trying to translate into English.

Critics of Sabina discount her entity encounters as cultural framework overlaid on a pharmacological experience: the mushrooms produce visual phenomena, Mazatec spiritual tradition provides the interpretive apparatus (spirits, healing power, divine speech), and the combination produces the velada. There is no need to posit actual entities.

Critics of McKenna discount his machine elves as personal mythology elaborated through two decades of public performance: the specific imagery (insectoid, self-transforming, manufacturing objects from language) is McKenna's, shaped by his reading in Gnostic literature and science fiction. There is no need to posit actual entities.

Both critiques are the same critique. And both critiques have the same problem.

The problem is consistency. The entity contact phenomenon, the sense of encountering autonomous non-human intelligences, the quality of meeting rather than projecting, the conviction that the entities have information the experimenter did not bring into the session, appears across cultures, across substances, and across subjects who have never heard of María Sabina or Terence McKenna. The 2020 Johns Hopkins survey by Davis and colleagues (J. Psychopharmacol. 34(9):1008-1020) found similar patterns in reports from 2,561 self-selected respondents who had already had an encounter (mean age 32, 77 percent men). It did not compare cultures.

Sabina's spirits and McKenna's machine elves are different cultural elaborations of the same underlying phenomenological pattern. The cultural elaboration is real and shapes the experience. Whether something consistent lies underneath, across cultures, has not been tested, and the "it's just the cultural framework" explanation has not been ruled out.

What that something is, we do not know. The entity contact problem is the most interesting unresolved question in psychedelic science precisely because it cannot be dismissed without dismissing evidence that does not easily go away.

Sabina knew the entities were real. McKenna knew the entities were real. They used different words for the same conviction. The phenomenon they are both describing is scientifically interesting, even if neither framework for evaluating it is scientifically evaluable.

Sources

• Hofmann, LSD: My Problem Child (1979)
• McKenna, True Hallucinations (1993)
• Hunter (ed.), Paranthropology (2011)