Amulets by Merlin's Blog

Back in the Eighties, I became acquainted with Terence McKenna and became intrigued with his lectures. He spoke about many things, including a “Time-wave-zero” project which predicted a major shift in human behavior in 2012:

“…the story of the universe is that information, which I call novelty, is struggling to free itself from habit, which I call entropy… and that this process… is accelerating… It seems as if… the whole cosmos wants to change into information… All points want to become connected… The path of complexity to its goals is through connecting things together… You can imagine that there is an ultimate end-state of that process—it’s the moment when every point in the universe is connected to every other point in the universe.”
— Terence McKenna 1998

McKenna derived his findings from a combination between the I Ching, the Mayan Calender and what he considered a balance between novelty and entropy in human activities. Terence even developed a computer program (innovative for the ’80s) that predicted a series of events projecting both backwards into the past and forward to the fateful day of December 21, 2012. One of his predictions was the fall of the Berlin Wall which came to pass just as his program projected.

In his other studies, he considered the Peruvian Shaman known as the Ayahuasqueros who practice Shamanism deep in the jungles of South America. Following in the footsteps of Charles Grob, M.D. (a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at UCLA’s School of Medicine directed in 1993 the Hoasca Project and popularized by the beat generation writers William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg in The Yage Letters) he went to the Shaman themselves, learning their ideas, traditions and use of Ayahuasca. Terrence surmised it’s use and capabilities with the psychoactive Psilocybin popularly used in the Sixties and Seventies by the counter culture of the time.

While listening to what seemed to be “endless” lectures post Midnight on KPFK in Los Angles, I decided to create a variation of the Peace Sign that both recollected the Sixties’ longing for an end of the War and a reaching out to another form of thinking, an exploration of Consciousness that tends to “break the rules” of society, yet hearkens back to a pre-historical attitude towards plants.

In a previous blog about my brief contact with Terrance, I related about how I had crystallized his ideas (or at least a few of them) into an amulet. Deciding I could expand on the idea, I developed a matching ring. Like the original amulet, this heavy ring is composed of mushrooms grown into the shape of a peace sign.

The Mushroom rendered in both the ring and amulet is the Amanita Muscaria, a variety of mushroom found in northern Europe and is often found in Christmas decorations in Germany. It is said that finding such a mushroom brings good luck. Farther speculation of ethnology-historians have suggested that the seeking of the “little man of red and white” may be attributed to later traditions concerning Kris Kringle: an elf found in the forest before Yule, who (when found) offer presents of illumination.

If you would like to have one, please visit my web page featuring the Peaceful Mushroom Ring. I make each ring as they are ordered to provide you with the ring size (no matter how unusual) you need.