True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise

Describes the search for a mushroom that could reveal the secrets of consciousness

In 1971 ethnobotanist McKenna ( The Archaic Revival ), his brother Dennis and three friends boated to a town in Amazonian Colombia, seeking a hallucinogenic plant that enables the Witoto tribe to talk to elf-like "little men." In psychedelicized ravings interspersed with diary excerpts, McKenna records their experiences after ingesting mind-altering mushrooms and other psychoactive plants. A flying saucer slowly flew over McKenna's head; he calls it a "holographic mirage" of a future technology. Dennis had a revelation about a "psychofluid" that pervades the universe. McKenna flashes forward to Hawaii in 1975 where mantis-like creatures from hyperspace attack his lover, and flashes back to his tantric lovemaking in Tibet and to Indonesia where unrepentant Nazi scientists tried to recruit him in 1970. He posits the existence of a particle of time, the chronon , which conditions matter. A bizarre book.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Readers of Food of the Gods (1992) will recall McKenna's diverting claim that the ingestion in ancient times of hallucinogenic mushrooms spurred human consciousness into wakefulness and sophistication. Here, this consummate storyteller tells of his first life-changing encounter with magic mushrooms, in 1971 in the Colombian Amazon. Veteran of the Berkeley riots of the 1960's and of a self- imposed exile in India and Indonesia--during which he smoked pot, studied alternative religions, collected butterflies, and steered clear of the FBI--McKenna was inspired in 1971 to journey to La Chorrera, Colombia, in search of the psychedelic brew ayahuasca and any plants containing the hallucinogenic drug DMT. Joined by his devoted 18-year-old brother, Dennis, and by several other Americans, McKenna reached the Putumayo River only to be sidetracked by a chance ingestion of some magic mushrooms growing in a field. One mushroom led to another, and soon the wildly philosophizing Dennis had devised an experiment to determine whether the production of a cicada-like noise could bind the wisdom of the mushroom with his own DNA. The local Indians may have laughed as the Americans stumbled through the rain forest chasing flying saucers and talking to themselves, but McKenna's newfound conviction that the mushroom showed the way to higher consciousness determined the very uneven course of his future life and career. Now, 20 years later--on the brink of divorce from a woman the mushroom told him was his destiny, and pressed to earn money for their two kids--McKenna relates his journey of psychedelic self- discovery and study with refreshing candor, humor, and occasional rue. All of which makes this, if hardly a convincing scientific treatise (``My dear young friend, these ideas are not even fallacious,'' said Gunther Stent, a molecular geneticist at Berkeley), certainly a captivating, all-too-human tale. Here's one man who proudly--even passionately--inhaled. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Unlike McKenna's last book, the preposterous Food of the Gods ( LJ 2/15/92), this work is more an adventure story than an anthropological treatise. It is the chronicle of the author's 1971 trip to the Amazon jungle in search of secret tribal hallucinogens. While his band of hippie adventurers never do find the fabled hallucinogen "oo-koo-he," they do manage to ingest an incredible amount of native psilocybin mushrooms, which trigger mystical and psychic experiences. It is hard to accept McKenna's conclusion that something unexplainable really did happen in the Amazon. Instead, his book reads like an account of an especially chaotic drug experience. Pseudoscientific ramblings concerning the nature of time serve only to move this book farther out toward the fringes. McKenna's story will be of interest to certain subcultures, but the appeal will not extend to most general readers. An optional purchase for public libraries.
- Eric Hinsdale, Trinity Univ. Lib., San Antonio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.