Language as Reality: McKenna's Linguistics

“McKenna believed that visible language, language that could be seen, not just heard, was what psilocybin unlocked. He called this 'the alien tongue' and spent decades trying to describe it.”

Running through Food of the Gods, and more explicitly through McKenna's lectures, is an argument about language that is distinct from and more interesting than the stoned ape hypothesis.

McKenna proposed that high-dose psilocybin unlocked a form of experience he called 'visible language', a mode of communication in which language is not heard but seen, in which meaning takes visual form. He described the entities he encountered as 'offering objects', producing visible, physical manifestations of meaning that existed independent of any verbal code. He called the mode of experience 'glossolalia with access to the visual field.'

This is not the hallucination description that most popular accounts of psilocybin offer. McKenna was not describing patterns and colors. He was describing a different epistemic mode: one in which the gap between symbol and referent collapses, in which meaning becomes directly perceptible rather than inferred from signs.

The linguistic argument in Food of the Gods connects to the broader cultural argument: the dominator culture's reliance on verbal-conceptual representation is, in his view, a limitation that psychedelics expose. Verbal language is representational, it points at things. What psilocybin opens, in McKenna's account, is something more direct: meaning without the mediation of sign.

This argument is speculative but not empty. Current neuroscience of psychedelics confirms that they produce unusual cross-modal integration, sounds can be seen, shapes can carry emotional meaning, the usual segregation of sensory modalities loosens. Whether this constitutes 'visible language' in McKenna's sense is unclear. That something corresponding to his description occurs is supported by the consistency of the report across independent subjects.

McKenna was, among other things, a theorist of language. Food of the Gods is partly a book about what language costs us, and what the plants restore.

Sources

• McKenna, Food of the Gods (1992)
• McKenna, various lectures 1984-2000 [Source not found; under review]
• Wikipedia, Terence McKenna