How McKenna turned the King Wen sequence into 21 December 2012
The I Ching has, in one Western reading, been treated as a clock. In 1975 Terence and Dennis McKenna published The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching. The second part of that book reads the King Wen sequence of the sixty-four hexagrams as a code for the flow of time, and it gives that flow an ending. From the 384 lines Terence McKenna built a waveform later called Timewave Zero, supposed to reach its end point in 2012. The construction is fascinating. On the points that matter, it is unsound.
Terence Kemp McKenna was born on 16 November 1946 in Paonia, Colorado, and died on 3 April 2000 in San Rafael, California, at the age of 53, of glioblastoma multiforme. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1975 received a self-designed degree in ecology, conservation, and shamanism. His younger brother Dennis, later an ethnopharmacologist, was his constant partner in research on plants and psychedelics.
La Chorrera, 1971
According to the Chinese Wikipedia page 泰瑞司·麦肯南, one of two independently translated articles on the same man, McKenna at fourteen was deeply impressed by Aldous Huxley's writings on drug-induced mystical experience. In 1968 he went to Nepal to study shamanic plants and Tibetan Buddhism, before the Amazon journey of 1971. That page thereby confirms the year 1971.
In March 1971 Terence and Dennis McKenna, with friends including a woman referred to as Ev, travelled to La Chorrera, a settlement on the Río Putumayo in the Colombian Amazon, in search of oo-koo-hé, a DMT-containing plant mixture. On the evening of 4 March 1971, Terence, Dennis, and Ev each ate two Stropharia cubensis mushrooms and drank half a cup of boiled ayahuasca.
Dennis's hypothesis was that psilocybin would bind with their DNA and raise a standing wave, so that one of them would act as a lens making cosmic insights available. He later described this as building a hyperdimensional vehicle from the 4D transformation of his own DNA, interwoven with the DNA of a mushroom. By his own account, the experience kept Terence awake for ten nights, with supposed telepathy, communication with the mushroom, and a perceived UFO; Dennis temporarily entered a psychotic state. Terence later described it, according to the English Wikipedia, as contact with the Logos, an informative voice he took to underlie visionary experience.
The idea for the timewave, Novelty Theory, arose in the aftermath of La Chorrera. The exact date on which McKenna first turned the King Wen sequence into numbers is not recorded. In 1975 Seabury Press published The Invisible Landscape, by both brothers: part one on shamanism, neurochemistry, eschatology, and La Chorrera; part two on the King Wen sequence.
From the King Wen sequence to a wave
McKenna claimed to have found a statistical anomaly in the successive differences between hexagrams in the King Wen sequence. The anomaly showed, he said, that the sequence had been deliberately constructed to record the nature of the flow of time in the world. Using the 384 lines of the 64 hexagrams as numerical values, he built the Novelty Time Wave. That is a different operation from consulting the book: the figures become data. Another Western numerical reading of the same figures, aimed at something else entirely, is Leibniz and the binary hexagrams.
In the theory, novelty names creative, disruptive, or progressive phenomena; habit names entropic, repetitive, or conservative ones. McKenna held that the universe functions as a machine designed for the production and conservation of novelty. The wave was supposed to be fractal. He called this temporal resonance: smaller intervals would contain the same information as larger, older ones, so that the shape would repeat at every scale.
For the end date he used a cycle of 6 times 64 times 64 days, 24,576 days, about 67.29 years. He took the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, 6 August 1945, as an indisputably novel event and added the cycle, which gave November 2012. According to secondary sources, the original date was mid-November 2012; some name 16 November specifically, McKenna's birthday. Only after fixing that date did he learn that the Maya long count, on the common GMT correlation (Goodman-Martinez-Thompson, based on the work of J. Eric S. Thompson), would complete a thirteenth baktun on 21 December 2012. He adjusted his end date to match. According to the English Wikipedia entry on Novelty Theory, the programmer Peter J. Meyer worked with McKenna on the mathematical formalization and on the Timewave Zero software, ready in July 1987.
That suggests that the end date did not fall out of the hexagrams. It was laid onto the calendar in two steps: first through Hiroshima, then through a Maya correlation he had not calculated himself. That is the opposite of the myth, discussed further on, that he arrived at the Maya date independently.
What Chinese sources make of it
The Chinese Wikipedia page 特伦斯·麦克纳 confirms that in the 1970s McKenna, starting from the 64 hexagrams 依文王卦顺序 (in King Wen's order), assigned values and, by curve integration and a computer program, constructed a timewave function: 时间波动函数, shíjiān bōdòng hánshù. The scientific community, the page says, regards this as 伪科学, wěi kēxué, pseudoscience. That judgment matches the English Wikipedia.
The page 2012年现象 (the 2012 phenomenon) supplies a precision not found in the English sources consulted. The first edition of The Invisible Landscape (1975) already named the year 2012 twice, without an exact date. Only the revised second edition (1993) fixed 21 December 2012. The same page cites critics who say the timewave theory contradicts numerous concepts established as fact by scientists, and rests on disputed extrapolations at odds with empirical logic.
On 11 February 2010 an unsigned article on 新浪女性 (Sina Women) set McKenna's timewave beside the Chinese prophecy book 推背图, Tuī Bèi Tú, the Back-Pushing Charts, a set of riddling predictive poems with images, traditionally ascribed to the Tang period. The article brings in the ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches (干支, gānzhī) and the five elements (五行, wǔxíng) as China's own equivalent of prediction systems. It takes no position on the value of either. Western writing on McKenna almost never makes this comparison. The article was not checked by professional historians.
Searches in 周易研究 (Zhouyi Yanjiu), on the site of the 山东大学易学与中国古代哲学研究中心 (Center for Yijing Studies and Ancient Chinese Philosophy at Shandong University), and via queries such as "麦肯纳 易经 误读", returned no academic article devoted to McKenna. The Chinese Yijing field appears, so far as those searches show, barely to engage Timewave Zero at all. What we found in Chinese is mostly Wikipedia translations, popular science pages, and a lifestyle column, not criticism by Yijing scholars themselves.
Our reading, on a narrow base (one unsigned article and a search with no results): set this beside the Western story and what stands out is that in Chinese McKenna does not land in Yixue, the professional study of the I Ching, but beside Tuī Bèi Tú: among prophecy books. The silence in Zhouyi Yanjiu is not a refutation. It looks more like a sorting. Our reading: whoever turns the King Wen sequence into an end date does not enter the Chinese scholarly conversation but appears under prediction. That is also why the I Ching in China today does not need McKenna in order to describe how the book is actually used.
Hiroshima, the Maya calendar, and 21 December 2012
A persistent myth says McKenna arrived independently at 21 December 2012, and that the overlap confirms the theory. He first calculated November 2012 from Hiroshima, and moved the date once he heard of the GMT correlation. That correlation is twentieth-century academic work, not a Maya prophecy of the end of the world. The 2012 phenomenon in popular culture rests on that correlation, not on a text in which the Maya themselves recorded the world's end on that day.
Our reading of the two editions, set next to that order of calculation: 2012 was first a year without a day, and only in 1993 a date that already sat on someone else's calendar.
Critics, as summarized on the English Wikipedia page for Novelty Theory, point to numerology rather than a grounded method, to the manual shift from November to December, and to errors in the historical calibration points. McKenna's assumed date for the origin of Homo sapiens would be some 70,000 years off; ancient Sumer and Egypt would already have existed before the point he marks as the beginning of history.
An essay at Dreamflesh adds a philosophical point, not a mathematical one. Assigning time a fixed, final endpoint sits in tension with the anti-eschatological, cyclic Taoist world-view from which the I Ching itself comes. The same source notes unfalsifiability: events in a trough (habit) and events on a peak (novelty) are both read by adherents as confirmation. It follows, we think, that an unsolved pattern in the sequence, one of the things scholars still argue about, is not evidence that the sequence measures history.
The Watkins objection
In the 1990s the mathematician Matthew Watkins of the University of Exeter analysed McKenna's construction. He found an unaccounted-for, arbitrary step: the half twist, a sign reversal applied to half of the 384 derived numerical values. In the manual of McKenna's own program that step carried a footnote: "This is the mysterious 'half twist'. The reason for this is not well understood at present."
According to most of the sources consulted, Watkins met McKenna in spring 1996 at the Maya site of Palenque in Mexico and confronted him there. McKenna could give no mathematical justification. The exact day is not pinned to a primary source; at least one secondary source gives 1995 rather than 1996.
Without the half twist a different, non-fractal waveform appears: a piecewise linear course, which Watkins held had no rational basis as a measure of novelty. According to the Fourmilab reconstruction, McKenna at first acknowledged the criticism and said the theory had no basis in rational thought. He then brought in John Sheliak, described in the sources as a mathematician and an expert in nuclear fusion. Sheliak's precise academic appointment has not been independently verified.
Sheliak confirmed by vector analysis that McKenna's method contained a procedural error, and constructed a corrected data series, sometimes called Timewave One or the Sheliak wave, which in most cases diverges only slightly from the original. Watkins found the Sheliak Clarification incredibly dense and unnecessarily complicated, and unconvincing. A revised software version, Timewave 2.0 or version 7.1, released by Peter Meyer in 1999, took Sheliak's correction as an improvement. The end date of 21 December 2012 remained unchanged.
There is no consensus on how fatal the Watkins objection is. Some adherents, working from Sheliak's reformulation, hold that the core of the wave survives correction of the arithmetic error. Watkins himself, and most outsiders, hold that even apart from the half twist there is no demonstrable relation between the King Wen sequence and historical novelty. Why the half twist was introduced has never been cleared up. Some accounts suggest an adjustment to make the wave fit history better; that remains speculation.
Another myth says that after Watkins the mathematical error was corrected and the theory thereby became scientifically valid. The Sheliak version also yields no demonstrable link to novelty. Both the original wave and the corrected one rest, apart from the arithmetic error, on the assumption that the King Wen sequence encodes time. That assumption is not substantiated.
Our reading: the year was the invariant, the mathematics the variable. Hiroshima gave November, the Maya correlation gave 21 December, the half twist gave the fractal shape, Sheliak gave a wave that looked almost the same. What did not move was 2012. Novelty Theory and Timewave Zero are classed as pseudoscience by the English Wikipedia, by specialist sources, and by the Chinese Wikipedia. That is not a judgment on McKenna himself, nor on the I Ching.
Sources
- Terence McKenna (Wikipedia), for biography, cause of death, and the attribution of the Logos
- Novelty theory (Wikipedia), for the construction of the wave, the classification as pseudoscience, the calibration points, and Peter Meyer
- Baktun (Wikipedia), for the thirteenth baktun, the GMT correlation, and the myth of a Maya ending
- Timewave Zero, autopsy (Fourmilab), for the half-twist footnote, the confrontation with Watkins, and McKenna's reported concession
- X.com/SoC_trilogy, for the year and place of the meeting between Watkins and McKenna
- The Watkins Objection (Reality Sandwich), for the wave without the half twist, Sheliak's reply, and Timewave 2.0
- End of the River (Dreamflesh), for the cycle from Hiroshima, the date shift, the Taoist objection, and unfalsifiability
- John Sheliak, TWZ Formalization, for the corrected data series
- The Experiment at La Chorrera (McKenna Academy), for the 1971 journey and Dennis's hypothesis
- 特伦斯·麦克纳 [Terence McKenna], for the timewave function and the classification as 伪科学
- 泰瑞司·麦肯南 [Terence McKenna, variant transliteration], for Huxley, Nepal in 1968, and the year 1971
- 2012年现象 [the 2012 phenomenon], for 2012 in the 1975 edition versus the date in 1993
- 新浪女性, 11 February 2010 article [Sina Women], for the placement beside 推背图, 干支, and 五行
- Watkins Objection Not Fatal, for the position that the objection does not fatally strike the core of the wave