Speaker Bio
Patrick Everitt is an independent researcher of western esotericism and esoteric philosophy from Ireland. He completed the Bachelor of Arts at Maynooth University, where his philosophy dissertation analyzed the system of magical attainment described in the Oratio (1486) of Italian Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola. He completed the Master of Arts in Religious Studies (Western Esotericism) at the Center for the History of Hermetic Philosophy in the University of Amsterdam, where his thesis explored the role of peyote in the life and work of English occultist Aleister Crowley. Since then he has conducted further research on aspects of Crowley's occultism, which he is preparing for publication, in addition to several studies on the intersection of esoteric philosophy and entheogenic practice in the works of Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Timothy Leary. He is currently working on an extensive, in-depth, philosophical analysis of Aleister Crowley's magical and religious thought. He has presented his academic research on esotericism and psychedelics at a number of international conferences and events, including the Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research (ICPR), the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism conference (ESSWE), Breaking Convention, Beyond Psychedelics, Altered Conference, Occulture Conference, and the O.Z.O.R.A. Festival.
ICPR 2024 Abstract
Language, Magic, and Alien Intelligence: Esotericism and mystery in Terence McKenna's description of the DMT experience
According to the American ethnobotanist and psychedelic raconteur Terence McKenna, the human mind is "a co-creator in the process of reality through acts of language": "the real secret of magic is that the world is made of words [and] if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish!"
McKenna claimed to attain this gnosis through years of smoking N,N-Dimethyltryptamine. For McKenna, his DMT pipe was the gateway to a realm of "hyperspatial entities", and the tryptamine psychedelics have the potential to bring humans into contact with the "Truly Other": an "alien voice", the "Logos", who wishes to catalyze our future evolution and communicate to mankind the "syntactical nature of reality". This category of DMT experience is radically beyond normal experience and expectation and, according to McKenna, indications of its existence are almost entirely absent from human culture, apart from slight traces in the most esoteric and shamanic of mankind's traditions.
This talk will analyze McKenna's philosophy of language, magic, and non-human intelligence as it relates to his DMT experiences, and his use of esoteric themes to convey their mystery. It will also compare McKenna's thought with that of Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley, two early commentators on psychedelic mysticism often referenced in the emerging scholarship on the philosophy of psychedelics, to consider the question of whether voices like McKenna's are likely to find serious engagement in academic philosophy, or if something fundamentally precludes McKenna's philosophical speculations from scholarly analysis.