The French-Canadian separatist and messiah Louis Riel was executed today in 1885. Serving briefly as a Canadian MP, Riel held that mankind was at the dawn of a Third Age, which would begin as soon as papal authority was transferred to him.
Louis Riel's life was dramatized in an exellent graphic novel of that same title by Canadian comics artist Chester Brown.
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Today is also the birthdate of American shaman, professor, and psychonaut Terence McKenna in 1946. In his writings and lectures McKenna managed to associate hallucinogenic drugs with nearly all aspects of experience, even identifying them as the primary driver of human evolution. McKenna’s “novelty theory” held that the universe is a “teleological attractor” which compounds Jungian-type synchronicities in an escalating cascade leading to a singularity. With this theory, McKenna was arguably the first modern popularizer of the 12/21/12 close of the Mayan long-count calendar, claiming that this date was an on-track prediction of his psychedelic eschaton.
(Later, the 2012 date was made even better-known in the final episode of The X Files as the scheduled coming of an alien civilization to Earth. –And while we’re at it, in a very different cult-television-show connection, McKenna himself was the inspiration for the Twin Peaks character Dr. Jacoby.)
McKenna died tragically of brain cancer in 2000.
