Terence McKenna once said, “The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind.” A bold claim, maybe even grandiose, but is it true? And if so, how does an artist—whether a writer, painter, musician, or digital creator—actually go about saving something as vast and abstract as the soul of humanity?

Let’s start by defining the danger. If the soul of mankind needs saving, it implies that it’s at risk—of decay, of mechanisation, of forgetting itself. McKenna, ever the psychonaut and cultural critic, saw modern society as a kind of psychic cage, where rigid structures of capitalism, reductionist science, and bureaucratic inertia strip human life of its depth, spontaneity, and mystery. The world becomes flat. Meaning collapses into profit margins and efficiency models. The mythic, the transcendent, and the chaotic are pushed aside in favour of a sanitised, predictable existence.

This is where the artist steps in.

the artist as a shaman

McKenna often linked artists to shamans—the visionaries of early human cultures who ventured beyond the known world and returned with gifts of knowledge, symbols, and new ways of seeing. Shamans didn’t just heal bodies; they healed perception itself, guiding their communities toward deeper understanding through ritual, story, and altered states of consciousness.

In modern times, the artist serves the same function. Art—whether it’s a novel that changes how we think about time, a painting that makes us feel a sense of awe, or a song that pulls something buried from deep within us—breaks the loop of conditioned thought and reminds us that life is not just a series of transactions but something infinitely stranger, wilder, and more meaningful.

resisting the reduction of life to pure mechanism

One of the greatest dangers of the modern world is the belief that everything can be measured, optimised, and monetised. This is the ultimate flattening of reality, where even the ineffable—love, beauty, mystery—must be quantified to be deemed valuable. Art refuses this premise.

A poem doesn’t need to be profitable to be valuable. A painting doesn’t need an algorithm’s approval to be meaningful. A novel doesn’t need to serve a function beyond itself. Art resists commodification because it operates on a different frequency—one that values experience over efficiency, expression over extraction.

To save the soul of mankind, artists must act as counterforces to this reductionist worldview. They must continue to create things that don’t fit neatly into economic models, that are messy, ambiguous, and alive.

breaking cultural conditioning

McKenna also saw culture as a kind of mass hallucination, a script handed down to keep people operating within predefined boundaries. Artists break that script.

• The Dadaists shattered artistic norms with absurdity, questioning the very foundations of meaning.
• The Beat poets rejected rigid literary forms and embraced raw, unfiltered experience.
• Sci-fi authors have long dreamed up alternate futures that challenge the present.

Every time an artist creates something that disrupts expectations, they loosen the grip of cultural programming. They make space for new possibilities, new ways of being, new modes of thinking.

the artist as a midwife of the future

Artists don’t just challenge the present; they bring the future into being. McKenna often spoke of the future as an attractor, pulling human consciousness forward. Art functions as an advance scout for this process, giving shape to what hasn’t yet fully arrived.

The works of Philip K. Dick, for example, anticipated the age of surveillance, AI consciousness, and simulated realities long before they became part of mainstream discourse. Punk music embodied rebellion before society could articulate what it was rebelling against. Even in more subtle ways, art plants seeds of change, setting the stage for revolutions—personal, cultural, and philosophical.

art as psychedelic technology

McKenna, as an advocate of psychedelics, saw them as tools for altering consciousness and revealing deeper truths. But he also recognised that art does the same thing.

A powerful novel, an intense film, a painting that haunts you for years—these aren’t passive experiences. They change you. They rewire perception. They induce altered states. And in doing so, they expand the human soul, making it more resilient, more aware, and more alive.

In this sense, art isn’t just entertainment. It’s an existential lifeline. A way of reconnecting us to something greater than ourselves, whether that be the mystery of existence, the vastness of human potential, or simply the raw, unfiltered intensity of being alive.

so, does the artist really save the soul of mankind?

Yes—but not in the way that a doctor saves a life or a firefighter saves a home. The artist saves by reminding. By disrupting. By introducing chaos where there is too much order and meaning where there is too much emptiness.

Artists don’t prevent wars or feed the hungry, but they keep the inner world of humanity from starving. They keep the numinous alive. They keep us from forgetting that there is more to existence than what we are told. And in a world increasingly dominated by efficiency, algorithms, and control, that act of keeping the human soul intact may be the most radical act of all.

McKenna was right. If the artist does not save the soul of mankind, who will?