Graham St John – Strange Attractor: The Accidental Occultism of Terence McKenna

How did Terence McKenna become both a psychedelic outlaw and an occult icon?
In this lecture from Occulture Conference 2025, Graham St John explores the paradoxical legacy of McKenna as a philosopher of the weird.

Recorded at Occulture Conference 2025, this talk introduces research from Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna (MIT Press, 2025), a comprehensive biography of the psychedelic thinker who helped shape late twentieth-century consciousness culture.

Once celebrated as a visionary guide to psychedelics, evolution, and time—and later dismissed by parts of the scientific establishment—Terence McKenna occupies a strange cultural position: rejected in formal psychedelic science yet embraced as an occult figure in underground culture. Graham St John examines this tension, tracing how McKenna’s ideas migrated across domains of philosophy, mysticism, art, and counterculture.

The lecture presents McKenna as a “cartographer of the weird”—a rogue scholar and stand-up philosopher whose speculative cosmology, poetic rhetoric, and psychedelic evangelism influenced generations of psychonauts and artists. By documenting his life, work, and afterlife in culture, the talk asks why McKenna continues to haunt contemporary conversations about consciousness, psychedelics, and the boundaries of knowledge.

About the speaker:
Graham St John, PhD, is a cultural historian specializing in transformational movements and psychedelic culture. His book Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna (MIT Press, 2025) is the latest among his ten works, including Mystery School in Hyperspace and Global Tribe.

He is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Media, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Huddersfield and Executive Editor of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. He also curates the speaker program at Chambok House, Ozora Festival.

About Occulture Conference:
Occulture Conference brings together artists, researchers, and practitioners to explore the intersections of culture, esotericism, politics, and contemporary spiritual practice.

Learn more at:
👉 https://www.occultureconference.com