http://brotherhoodofthescreamingabyss.com/



We’ve come up hearing from Terence McKenna, the psychedelic figurehead of the 1980s and 90s. We’ve listened to his rap, read his books, and consumed his message. But overshadowed by his brother, Dennis McKenna has played just as critical as Terence, if not more so. Dennis is the scientist of the pair and has greatly contributed to the understanding of these psychedelic plants and substances. This is his memoir about his early life and that of his brother Terence, and their formative years.

This book was honestly delightful to read. I appreciated the love that Dennis put into the descriptions of his life. It’s clear that not only is he a capable writer, but has lived an interesting adventure working with psychedelics.

The bulk of the book is about their childhood growing up together and holds many surprises. Dennis spends a great deal of time describing his family background; his aunts, uncles, grandparents, as the drive behind how their personalities developed. They grew up in a small Colorado town, very much a picture of 1950s Americana. Terence, from Dennis’s description, would have fit in as one of the brothers in Malcolm in the Middle. He was precocious, rebellious, and took great delight in tormenting his younger brother. They were both very literary children, voracious readers from an early age. The book recounts how Terence moved out at 16 to live with relatives and friends, and eventually into an alternative university education. Meanwhile, Dennis was left at home, finally out of his brother’s shadow and free to become his own person, unpopular as hippie but leader of his clique. Terence would come back and visit now and again bringing hash, psychedelics, and new literature to Colorado to a young Dennis; the two became entwined in the same adventure of exploring this alternate psychedelic world.

The event that made the pair famous was the Experiment at La Chorrera, a small Colombian village where they had set out to find oo-ko-he (sp) a legendary psychedelic, but ended up at La Chorrera during the psilocybin fruiting season. The experiment consisted of the brothers and their friends consuming copious amounts of mushrooms for about two weeks in a remote village. In their stupor, they received visions from their mushrooms about the end of the world, and how they would be the ones to merge human and mushroom DNA to accelerate the eschaton and bring about a mass enlightenment of humanity. Needless to say, this didn’t pan out exactly as the mushrooms told them. The most interesting part of these descriptions was how Dennis recounted the events here with sobriety and an intellectual mind. Terence wrote about these same incidents in his book True Hallucinations, and though I haven’t yet read the book, I expect it his description of the events to be far more colorful than Dennis’s. Though they did not succeed in a mass enlightment, they did end up writing Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide which opened up psilocybin mushroom cultivation to the world, which Dennis supposes is about as close to merging mushroom DNA into humans and expanding the mind of the world as they’re probably ever going to get.

At this point the book is more than half way through. Dennis goes onto describe his academic career, and finally Terence’s death from brain cancer. I don’t mean to make it sound like this part is less important than the other two, however as science tends to be, it does come off a bit drier than stories of traipsing kids and journeys into the inner self. One of the highlights of this section though is the description of an ayuhuasca trip Dennis took with the UDV in Brazil. During this trip Dennis witnessed photosynthesis from the perspective of a water molecule. I personally maintain that psychs cannot reveal anything that you do not already know, and with Dennis’s background, he know photosynthesis very well, but man, can psychs give you a new perspective on what you already have in you. The description of the trip was beautiful, and must be read IMHO to be appreciated.

The last couple of chapters deal with Terence’s struggle with brain cancer, and the people in his life gathering around him, and him dealing with his own frustrations about his career. Terence was a very intelligent man, but from the sounds of it hard to deal with at times and very much on the woo side of the psychedelic spectrum. His superpower was enrapturing people with his voice, though that is not to say everything he said was entirely true or consistent. Dennis and Terence represented two sides of the same coin, science and myth respectively. Dennis makes it clear that neither of their stories are over; Terence still lives on with his recordings widely available on YouTube, and Dennis’s life is far from over. Regardless, the book ends here, recounting a journey of two remarkable brothers through a strange and unknowable landscape.