'And end history. And go to the stars': Terence McKenna and 2012

Terence McKenna (1946-2000) was a central fi gure in the underground New
Age culture mostly referred to as ‘psychedelic shamanism’. In a book published
together with his brother Dennis (! e Invisible Landscape, 1975) he developed
a grand macrohistorical theory called the ‘Eschaton Timewave’, which turns out
to be at the very origin of the widespread contemporary movement of New Age
millenarianism according to which the eschaton will arrive on December 21
2012. In this article I analyze the story of how Terence and Dennis McKenna
developed their theory in an eff ort to make sense of a religious ‘revelation’ that
happened to them during a psychedelic experiment in the Colombian Amazon
in 1971; furthermore I analyze the theory itself, and the chain of reasoning by
means of which it seeks to prove that a series of historical ‘cycles’ will all terminate
in 2012. Although 2012 millenarianism has spawned a small library of
popular literature since the mid-1980s, almost no research has been done into
this phenomenon as such, its origins, its theoretical underpinnings, the authors
responsible for it, or the current of alternative spirituality from his it has
emerged. " is article hopes to make a fi rst contribution to correcting that
situation.