Speaker: Dr Graham St John, edgecentral.net
About: Terence McKenna (1946-2000) was the 20th century’s psychedelic renaissance man. Expounding his freak rap on the role of psychedelics in evolution, consciousness, and time, McKenna was a provocateur who charted the edges of mind and matter with razor wit and poetic charm. Drawing on extensive biographical research, my presentation explores the many sides of McKenna, a figure who over the course of his life adopted multiple personas, pursued numerous obsessions, and wore various hats: among them, freak, outlaw, exile, gnostic, anarchist, shaman, bard, scientist, prophet, surrealist. With plentiful illustrations of an incongruous profile, the presentation showcases an enigmatic personality who maintained a reputation as the éminence grise of cognitive liberty while becoming a preposterous anomaly in the world of psychedelic science, where he is today received as something of a persona non grata.
Through his own life, and in the 25 years since his early departure, McKenna’s extraordinary career has mushroomed. The figure who self-identified as an “edge runner” and once penned a column titled “Our Man in Nirvana,” disrupted official culture while assuming a heroic place in the psychedelic underground. A multi-dimensional figure, McKenna possessed a strange orphic charm, and an impossible legacy. With attention to my recent biography, Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna (MIT Press, Oct 2025), the presentation explores the many faces of this hyper-liminal figure—a psychedelic trickster in equal measure familiar and weird.
Bio: Graham St John, PhD, is an anthropologist and historian specialising in the study of transformational events, movements, and figures. The latest among his ten books is Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna (MIT Press, 2025) sold out its initial pressing within a month from release. Regarded by Dennis McKenna as “the definitive biography” of his brother, and variously lavished with praise as “wonderful,” “captivating,” “infectious,” ”psychoactive,” “impossible to put down,” and “a monumental work of epic proportions,” Strange Attractor chronicles the life, work, and legacy of the stand-up philosopher, rogue scholar, and surreal oracle. Other titles include Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT, Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance, and FreeNRG: Notes from the Edge of the Dancefloor. Graham is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Media, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Huddersfield, UK and he is Executive Editor of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Music and Dance Culture.
