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