The Antibodies, Named
The Teaching
We have gone very, very sick. And the twentieth century is an enormous effort at self-healing. … And the body politic—like any body when it feels itself to be sick—it begins to produce antibodies or strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease. … Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing—the list is endless—what do all these things have in common? They represent various styles of rejection of linear values. … The society is trying to cure itself by an archaic revival, by a reversion to archaic values. — Terence McKenna
Commentary
This site takes its name from the middle sentence of that passage, and for most of its life it quoted the sentence without the one that follows it. The sentence that follows is a list. When McKenna said the body politic produces antibodies, he didn’t mean ideas in the abstract. He named them, among them surrealism, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, and psychedelic drug use. The music, the dance and the medicine were in the site’s name from the start.
What the list has in common, he said, is that each is a style of rejecting linear values, and each reaches back for something older. He called it the archaic revival: a sick society trying to cure itself by remembering what it had forgotten. That is Layer V’s argument in his vocabulary. The counterculture of the 1960s was the body politic producing antibodies in real time, and among the first things it reached for were the plants the old traditions had held sacred.
McKenna was not an advocate in the ordinary sense, and he said so: “we cannot simply advocate ‘Just say no’ any more than we can advocate ‘Try it, you’ll like it.’” His point was not that everyone should take anything. As this site reads him, it was that a culture which forbids every experience that dissolves the boundary between self and world has cut itself off from one of the ways a sick body heals.
He had a brother who took the other road. Terence and Dennis McKenna grew up in the same small town in Colorado and went into the Amazon together in 1971. Terence came out a bard. Dennis came out determined to learn how to do science before rejecting it, and the research institute he helped found in 1993 funded the 2016 psilocybin trials at New York University and Johns Hopkins. The antibody, in other words, was carried in both directions: as a vision, and as a hypothesis someone could test.
Three pieces on this site take the list’s third item seriously from three sides: the contemplative (Let It Happen), the empirical (More Real Than Real) and the historical (The Sacred Mushroom). A Collection draws the lines between them. Nothing here recommends that anyone take anything.