no one even comes close,
yet.

Pesce has tried and, instead reverted to cyber-commentary.

Pinchbeck has tried, but he hasn't the eloquence or vision that approaches Terence's.

Even Denis (Terence's brother) has offered some interesting, albeit more scholarly than bard-like, commentary on the role of plant medicines.

Perhaps no one person has risen as an heir apparent to McKenna's visionary role, but perhaps no one person is necessary. For one thing, Terence's talks continue to inspire, provoke, and guide many people who are just now discovering his hours upon hours of talks and lectures around the internet. For another thing, perhaps a leader, visionary, or guide is not what is needed (anymore), but rather a concerted effort on the part of communities formed around the ideas and insights shared over a decade ago. Say something once, why say it again?

No, the exciting work these days, to my mind, has been in the slow but methodical revivification of scientific and clinical scrutiny of these plant medicines. Individuals like Rick Strassman, Charles Grob, Alexander Shulgin, Stanislav Grof, Rick Doblin, and others work to rebuild a rightful acceptance and respect for these chemicals and substances which, many believe, may be the catalyst for the collective raising of consciousness this planet so desperately needs.

wade davis is amazing ... different but on the same level

I've thought of this a lot - his torch sits on the ground still burning, waiting for someone to take it up

look's like Hillary's gonna have some time on her hands, maybe she can take up the torch? Wouldn't that be weird as hell, pull a link to a site where where Hillary's lecturing an assembled group in the benefits of entheogens?

id like to see a woman inspire us in such a profoundly intellectual and metaphysical way ;)

Yeah, interesting thing to bring up. In a sense, Terence provided a nice contrast to the stadium filling, cast your cares to the wind and drop acid leary. His style was definitely more gentle, and wide ranging, although both provided a nice new vocabulary of ideas. As I was listening to a terence lecture, he mentions, about his talks, that they are a statement on the state of the union, yes, I thought, in a way, he was the psychedelic president, he was a leader of a cultural group, and one that I could get behind, or at least one that I'm very willing to pay attention to. And I have been thinking about who is there to fill his grandiose shoes. Who could? One thing about psychedelics is that they create such unique characters, he was so unique that I don't think anyone could succeed him in his own manner, but one who sort of explains, guides, directs,
a psychedelic mentality, and provides incisive cultural commentary, I think could achieve this in many different ways. When I met Daniel Pinchbeck in Durham, I mentioned to him that I thought it was interesting that he considered himself to be sort of taking the place of terence mckenna, the psychedelic spokesperson, or the alien ambassador or whatever. Although I like daniel, and I like his book, and I feel that he's representative of a more contemporary culture than terence in a way, and younger that mark pesce also, I don't think he could hold a candle to terence's mental glow. I'm not saying he's dim at all, it's just that terence was and is one of the few people who I can say, I am really interested in. He really impressed me. And he still does. He's one of the very few that I feel like I could learn from them. I don't really feel that way about Daniel, although he is somewhat interesting and I'm glad he's doing what he's doing. Yes terence was truly exceptional.
Was it all the mushrooms and dmt? I wonder. Mark Pesce has said some interesting things and is also very intelligent, but I don't feel his character has reached the unfoldment that terence did, whatever that means. One meme I take from Mark Pesce is the concept of moving into the future with a guarded optimism, and the mimicry of biological systems in preparation for a nanotech world. It's funny how Dennis Mckenna makes a big point that he's not his brother, and he sure isn't. He said terence could read the phonebook and people would be interested, but he's someone different. I don't know. Even terence said, that there's got to be people out there who can describe this stuff as well or better than he but they sure don't show up. I agree, I think there are people out there on his level of description and intellect, but they may not come out for whatever reason. Daniel Pinchbeck and Mark Pesce aren't bad. I'd like to at least try to do what terence did, in terms of simply facilitating dialogue on the significance of psychedelic experiences with my friends, and I think about the socratic method of learning through dialogue that he talked about and practiced. Oh well, at least I can listen to him on my ipod whenever I want.

Erik Davis aka Elf was a close friend of TM's, recorded the last interview with him, is an excellent speaker and to top it off, check out this synchronistic photo taken of him lecturing at Burning Man 2003 where he is in the exact same pose as the photo of TM on the platform that he's lecturing from!
harlanemil.com/bman2003/elf.html

I thought it was sort-of misguided for Terrence to have been called Leary's successor by some....
so I think it would be equally innaccurate to label someone else as such to Terrence.

Dennis is his own incredible person and although I wish I heard more references to Dennis and
"the McKenna Brothers" - It is my understanding (I think i read it somewhere, but no source)
that Dennis' much lower-profile life was completely his own decision and that they each agreed that
the other WAS the best suited for the type of endeavors they were each involved in.

Im glad that since the 60's, the number of people available to expound upon these things has exploded.

no one could ever replace Leary, Terrence, or Dennis...
and I think Dennis is his own right should be recognized for the unique pioneer he is BEFORE we no longer have him.

Hah! Terence McKennna's "successor"?

Well, M_Glow, I wish there were an easy answer, even if it was wrong; for example, as if one were asked "who is Timothy Leary's successor?" and the answer was "Terence McKenna". The notion of a "successor" hardly fits with Terence's deeply anti-hierarchical point of view, does it? He wasn't "the psychedelic president", he hated that kind of crap. He was bigger than his psychedelic interests.

Terence was an artist and a poet. Who was Joyce's successor? Who was Shakespeare's successor?

It's just so sad he died. I remember crushing his hand encouragingly and telling him he would beat the cancer. I think a lot of people are still in mourning for him. What a unique person. His like will not be seen again, as the Irish say.

But anyway, I think if he were still here to consider the question, he would be saying something like "Why don't YOU be my successor? Please?"

Will there ever be a replacement for Terence? NEVER!!!

(Oh, and just for the record, his tumor was NOT on his pineal gland)

Only the mushroom speaks as eloquent as Terence. I always felt somehow Terence selected us, however, It is what you think that is important.

I have thought about this question a lot over the years and never had a good answer. I recently subscribed to the Psychedelic Salon podcast and I am getting caught up and at the end of one of the podcasts the host, Lorenzo, said that he conducted a poll on the site about which speaker his listeners enjoyed the most. I would've thought that Terence would win a poll like this easily, with Leary as a possible contender.

To my surprise and Lorenzo's the winner was Erik Davis. My only exposure to him prior to this was Terence's final interview with Erik Davis. He seemed very knowledgeable but I just never thought much of it. After hearing about this poll result I quickly downloaded all of Davis' talks that were up over at the Psychedelic Salon and have made it through three of them so far. I really like him, for me he has helped put visionary art like this Alex Grey stuff in its proper historical place and also spoke about what exactly the imagination is in one of the talks. It really resonated. I'll be on the lookout for more of Davis' stuff and I'll be grabbing some of his books. Listening to him talk has more of a down to earth, almost conversational feeling than Terence in my opinion. It might be an age thing. Terence is almost too eloquent with his elven languages and DMT descriptions. As informative and entertaining as Terence is, that is just not how my friends and I talk and I couldn't just stroll up to my friends and unleash a Terence McKenna rap on them. Davis is clearly on the level, but not quite as "oh my fucking god" as Terence, if that makes any sense at all. He talks about these memes and realms similar to the way that I would speak conversationally, which is a cool tool for propagating these memes. I feel like I could play an Eric Davis tape to anyone and they wouldn't look at me like I was nuts. I don't think anyone can replace Terence, but Davis was certainly a nice voice to hear who got my mind going in novel directions.

Another guy has to be Jan Irvin from gnosticmedia. One day I was searching for more info on how christianity evolved from earlier pagan religions because I was specifically interested in what pagan traditions made it into the new faith. Somehow after some googling I found his book, Astrotheology and Shamanism. I was interested in the topic so I ordered the book but I thought that it was going to be mainly conjecture and theory. What I realized was that Jan has read hundreds of books on religion and has a very well formed hypothesis and he has a forum where he defends his position against all challengers who to try to debunk his work. I spent a couple months reading his posts on his own forum and other forums and really he has yet to be defeated. His work is exciting to me because although I always kind of knew in the back of my heads that the current religious models are based at least somewhat off of shamanic/pagan roots (IE making Christmas on Dec. 25th to coincide with a popular pagan festival), I had never really seen the evidence of exactly what christianity borrowed from pagan faiths layed out so clearly and concisely, and I was actually surprised to see how much of it is taken from earlier faiths. Highly recommended. I really hadn't been that excited about academic work since I first heard Terence claiming that we're monkeys involved in a symbiotic relationship with a mushroom. Irvin's research invokes the same kind of reaction in me that Terence's does, where I hear/read about it and think "If what he says is actually true...this is awesome!!"

I don't think Jan is quite the speaker Terence was but he works hard and writes legit stuff and is doing a bunch of really interesting interviews on his podcast weekly. I think it's tough and unfair to expect people to literally be Terence, though. I'm definitely glad that Jan has emerged on the scene because he is different than Terence, but fantastic in his own unique way. Although what he says is going to be very controversial, he has done the research and after reading his stuff it's hard to argue with his conclusions. If anyone doesn't know, Jan has basically re-examined the work of John Marco Allegro in light of new evidence and has concluded that he was more correct than anyone ever gave him credit for in his heyday.