Passage: The First Description of Machine Elves

“Merry elfin, self-transforming, machine creatures, looking like self-dribbling Fabergé eggs on the rebound, they had surrounded me and tried to teach me the lost language of true poetry.”

The passage: 'During my own experiences smoking synthesized DMT in Berkeley, I had had the impression of bursting into a space inhabited by merry elfin, self-transforming, machine creatures. Dozens of these friendly fractal entities, looking like self-dribbling Fabergé eggs on the rebound, had surrounded me and tried to teach me the lost language of true poetry.'

Why this passage: It is the founding phenomenological document of the entity contact literature. McKenna wrote this description approximately twenty years after the original experiences (the DMT experiments in Berkeley began in the mid-1960s). It entered wide cultural circulation with the publication of True Hallucinations in 1993.

The description's vocabulary is notable: merry, elfin, self-transforming, machine, fractal, friendly. Each term carries specific information. Merry and friendly establish the emotional tone of most, though not all, entity encounters. Elfin and fractal attempt to capture the appearance. Self-transforming is the quality most consistently reported across independent accounts: the entities are in constant motion, changing form continuously. Machine suggests mechanical intelligence rather than biological organic life.

The 'lost language of true poetry', the entities attempting communication through visible language, through objects made of meaning rather than words, is the feature McKenna returned to most obsessively. He believed the entities were demonstrating a mode of communication that preceded and exceeded verbal language.

The 2020 Johns Hopkins online survey (Davis et al., J. Psychopharmacol. 34(9):1008-1020) collected reports from 2,561 people who had already had an entity encounter after inhaling DMT (mean age 32; 77 percent men). Because every respondent was recruited for having had an encounter, it cannot show how often encounters happen, and because it did not compare cultures, it cannot show that the reports are the same across cultures. It shows that many self-selected respondents described similar features. Respondents' vocabulary varies; entities that seem to communicate something are among the most reported features. McKenna described it first and best.

Sources

• McKenna, True Hallucinations (1993)
• Sexton et al., J. Psychopharmacol. 33(9) (2019) [Source not found; under review]
• Davis et al., J. Psychopharmacol. 34(9):1008-1020 (2020)