A term coined by
Terence McKenna referring to the modern
cultural mode that
recapitulates patterns of human behavior from
prehistory. As the following quote from
Alien Dreamtime elaborates, the
Archaic Revival includes activities like
ecstatic dance and music (
rave culture), ingestion of
entheogens (
psychedelic culture), even
group mind behavior (the
internet).
History is ending, because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley. And as the inevitable chaostrophe approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble, it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa, 15,000 years ago, rocked in cradle of the great horned mushroom goddess before history. Before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism. Before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us. Because the secret faith of the 20th century is not modernism. The secret faith of the 20th century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the Paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock and roll, and Catastrophe Theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom-dotted plains of Africa, where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are.
- from Alien Dreamtime
The Archaic Revival is also a book by
Terence McKenna, a collection of essays and interviews detailing his ideas on topics ranging from
UFO to
DMT.