The Archaic Revival: Is It Happening?

“McKenna named the Archaic Revival in 1992. Something is happening that resembles what he named. Whether it is what he meant is harder to say.”

McKenna introduced the term Archaic Revival to describe a cultural reorientation in progress: a recovery of shamanic practices, plant medicine traditions, and non-rational epistemologies that Western industrial culture had suppressed.

Something is happening that resembles what he described. Legal psilocybin services operate in Oregon and Colorado. Ayahuasca retreat centers number in the hundreds globally. Mushroom cultivation has become widespread. The psychedelic renaissance is genuinely a cultural phenomenon with institutional expression.

But McKenna's Archaic Revival was not primarily about access to substances. It was about a reorientation of consciousness, a shift in how Western culture relates to the natural world. The question is whether current psychedelic culture represents this reorientation or primarily represents the integration of psychedelic experience into the consumer lifestyle it was supposed to critique.

The thousand-dollar ayahuasca retreat. The branded microdosing protocol. The Silicon Valley optimization of psilocybin for productivity. These are not what McKenna was describing. They are the dominator culture consuming the medicine that was supposed to change the dominator culture.

The genuine Archaic Revival, if it is happening, is quieter: the restoration of land to indigenous stewardship, the return of botanical relationship to communities that had lost it, the integration of plant medicine into genuine healing traditions.

Sources

• McKenna, Food of the Gods (1992)