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The Nonsense Bazaar

The Nonsense Bazaar is a bravely paranoid, neon-colored voyage into irrationality and the imaginal by way of conspiracies, cults, UFOs, magic, mysticism, and the secret history of our silly world.

Who among us hasn’t had apocalyptic visions with a head full of mushrooms? Terrence sure did. This week we’re looking at one of the pillars of the legendary psychedelic evangelist’s cosmology: Timewave Zero. After Terrence McKenna and his brother Dennis had their noggins rocked by psilocybe cubensis mushrooms in Colombia, Terrence returned from the jungle with “some funny ideas,” ideas around a self-similar fractal waveform, calculated through doing fancy wizard math on the I-Ching, the ancient Chinese divination system. According to McKenna the resulting waveform could be overlayed on top of human history and showed a steady, relentless march towards a point of infinite novelty, infinite newness, the eschaton. And this eschaton, according to Mckanna, was set to arrive “on time and under budget” on…December 21, 2012. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. But that doesn’t make the ideas within Timewave Zero any less relevant, worth talking about, or poetically true. And hey, maybe the apocalypse did happen in 2012 and this is all just our hallucinatory death dream. You really never know.

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