The Archaic Revival

Every time a culture gets into trouble, loses its bearing, the traditional response is to go back in history to find the previous “anchoring model.” ... In the twentieth century a global civilization has lost its bearing, and as we look back in time for a model to anchor us we have to go back before history to around twelve or fifteen thousand years ago.

What I call the Archaic Revival is the process of reawakening awareness of traditional attitudes toward nature, including plants and our relationship to them…. So, the importance of the re-empowerment of ritual, the rediscovery of shamanism, the re-cognition of psychedelics, and the importance of the Goddess. There must also be an authentic religious mystery driving this.

The Archaic Revival is a much larger, more global phenomenon that assumes that we are recovering the social forms of the late Neolithic, and the Archaic Revival reaches far back into the twentieth century to Freud, to surrealism, to abstract expressionism …. [the entire artistic idea of the “return to the primitive”] But the stress on ritual, on organized activity, on race/ancestor consciousness—these are themes that have been worked out throughout the entire twentieth century, and the Archaic Revival is an expression of that.

And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the lost archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The twentieth century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed .... What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstasy, and orgiastic sexuality.

– Terence McKenna