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Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna
Brotherhood of the Screaming My Life with Terence McKenna, is an autobiographical account of renowned ethnobotanist Dennis McKenna’s childhood, his relationship with his brother, and the author’s experiences with and reflections on psychedelics, philosophy, and scientific innovation. Chronicling the McKenna brothers’ childhood in western Colorado during the 1950s and 1960s, Dennis writes of his adolescent adventures including his first encounters with alcohol and drugs (many of which were facilitated by Terence), and the people and ideas that shaped them both. Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss weaves personal narrative through philosophical ideas and tales of psychedelic experimentation.
In this book, Dennis describes these inquiries with the wisdom of perspective. In his account of what has become known as “The Experiment at La Chorrera”— which Terence documented in his own 1989 book, True Hallucinations — Dennis describes how he had visions of merging mushroom and human DNA, the brothers’ predictions for the future, and their evolving ideas about society and consciousness. He also offers an intellectual understanding of the hallucinogenic effects of high-dose psychedelic mushrooms and other psychedelic substances. Dennis, now world-renowned for this ethnobotanical work, describes in Brotherhood his early interests in cosmology and astrology, his sometimes rocky relationship with his older brother and how their paths diverged later in their lives. Dennis describes his academic career in between touching accounts of both his mother’s and Terence’s battles with cancer. In the 10th Anniversary edition of Brotherhood, Dennis reflects on scientific revelations, climate change, and the social and political crises of our time. The new edition also features both the original foreword by Luis Eduardo Luna and a new foreword by Dr. Bruce Damer. Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss is a story about brotherhood, psychedelic experimentation, and the intertwining nature of science and myth.
In this book, Dennis describes these inquiries with the wisdom of perspective. In his account of what has become known as “The Experiment at La Chorrera”— which Terence documented in his own 1989 book, True Hallucinations — Dennis describes how he had visions of merging mushroom and human DNA, the brothers’ predictions for the future, and their evolving ideas about society and consciousness. He also offers an intellectual understanding of the hallucinogenic effects of high-dose psychedelic mushrooms and other psychedelic substances. Dennis, now world-renowned for this ethnobotanical work, describes in Brotherhood his early interests in cosmology and astrology, his sometimes rocky relationship with his older brother and how their paths diverged later in their lives. Dennis describes his academic career in between touching accounts of both his mother’s and Terence’s battles with cancer. In the 10th Anniversary edition of Brotherhood, Dennis reflects on scientific revelations, climate change, and the social and political crises of our time. The new edition also features both the original foreword by Luis Eduardo Luna and a new foreword by Dr. Bruce Damer. Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss is a story about brotherhood, psychedelic experimentation, and the intertwining nature of science and myth.
520 pages, Paperback
Published February 21, 2023
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September 2, 2025
Written in 2012 yet eerily prescient about how society has unfolded, long before Trump became president.
Loved learning about Dennis's early family life. Terence comes across as an unsympathetic character in his youth, who was not often kind to Dennis nor those closest to him. Not unlike many teenagers who are coming to discover themselves and who they are.
Having never read True Hallucinations, Dennis's recollection of the events at La Chorrera are insane! Glad that he acknowledges it as such today. He could have become a demagogue himself and deified himself had he stayed on the same track as ayahuasca the day after 19 psilocybin mushrooms. The fact that he has stayed grounded and continues to be in light of his magnanimous stature is a wonderful sign of his character. As he describes himself as an insufferable romantic at sixteen after his first DMT experience:
"Its beauty defies comprehension, but the beauty that it produced and I experienced has made me a better person. As long as one can experience and express (and to experience is to express) the beautiful, then he is saved from madness, he is saved from damnation. I have tried to look at life more positively, I have tried to be more aware of beauty, I have enjoyed the world more and hated myself less."
If there is a better summary of the positive therapeutic effect of psychedelics, I have not read it.
Describing a DMT experience many years later when he was no longer a novice: "That experience was no less amazing than it used to be, perhaps, but far more austere. Reality is a hallucination generated by the brain to help us make sense of our being; it is made of fragments of memory, associations, ideas, people you remember, dreams you've had, things you've read and seen, all of which is somehow blended and extruded into something resembling a coherent conscious narrative, the hallucination that we call 'experience.' Dimethyltryptamine rips back that curtain to show the raw data before it has been processed and massaged. […] Is this the difference between the DMT dimension visited by a lusty, romantic kid of sixteen and the jaded man of sixty-one? I honestly can't say. I don't feel that all joy and meaning has fled from my life. I still take ayahuasca regularly and am grateful for the lessons she imparts. But I may never again visit that amusement park of the mind. It is a place you take your girl on a first date, and I am romantic no longer."
Also loved hearing about Dennis's early love of Space Travel as driven by the ambition and hope of science fiction. Written in 2006, he was prophetic: "With the end of the shuttle program, NASA seems to epitomize this uncertainty; indeed, some would say that it lost its guiding vision (and justification for existence) when the Apollo program ended in 1972. In this, the space agency is not unlike the rest of America. As a people and a country, America has lost its way; the future is no longer viewed as an uncharted vista, beckoning us with its promise of exploration and discovery, but as a prospect of dread, as something to be feared and delayed as long as possible. In the current political and social climate, denial of the future has become pervasive; many political and cultural leaders now seek to return to some delusional golden age that never existed, some Reagan-era fantasy where it is again Morning in America. It is not going to happen, and it never happened. America veered off course decades ago, though only now are we beginning to see the consequences of our lack of vision. The future is not only coming, it's already here. And I am concerned that we are facing it not as a challenge, but as a threat."
“Psychedelic experiences are usually not about visiting some transcendent realm of angels and demons (though that does happen); more often than not, they are about experiencing the here and now in a very intense way.”
"Freedom of religious belief is a constitutional right, and people are free to believe in whatever delusions they want. But when it comes to forging national policies based on those delusions (for instance, the denial of climate change) then thinking citizens must stand up and denounce such ignorance. The sad thing is there are fewer and fewer thinking citizens, or so it appears. A frightened populace just wants to be told what to think and do, and the ideologues are more than happy to oblige them. One result is a trend in the public sphere toward the glorification of a willful shallow-mindedness. In the private sphere, that often manifests itself as a conscious refusal to acknowledge the mind's unconscious depths." [p101]
"Trying to run an egalitarian community in a dense city is a challenge under the best of circumstances. And every community that aspires to be spontaneous, to thrive without leaders or hierarchies, must confront the vacuum it creates for the power-crazed. Another factor that contributed to the short life of the hippie movement, at least in the Haight, was that so many of the people who had been drawn there were already damaged in some way. They made the pilgrimage in search of something, though many knew not what. Once they arrived, they were likely to become exposed to drugs and other experiences that they had no tools to deal with, and no clue. Those people quickly became dysfunctional and a liability to the rest of the community. Not everyone suffered this fate, of course. In fact, most people who were motivated enough to make the pilgrimage to California that summer probably benefited from their experience."
"Terence was inventing himself as the Irish bard of the psychedelic zeitgeist. The things he said resonated with people […] His talks were works of art; they were beautiful, and people heard in that beauty a confirmation of their own psychedelically illuminated insights. Through him, many listeners learned to trust their intuitions rather than simply accepting the assumptions of science and secularism, dreary existentialism, and religion. Terence told stories that post-scientific rationalists could believe, and in doing so he re-infused the universe with magic and wonder." [p249]
- Demagoguery and confirmation bias in speech early on
Loved learning about Dennis's early family life. Terence comes across as an unsympathetic character in his youth, who was not often kind to Dennis nor those closest to him. Not unlike many teenagers who are coming to discover themselves and who they are.
Having never read True Hallucinations, Dennis's recollection of the events at La Chorrera are insane! Glad that he acknowledges it as such today. He could have become a demagogue himself and deified himself had he stayed on the same track as ayahuasca the day after 19 psilocybin mushrooms. The fact that he has stayed grounded and continues to be in light of his magnanimous stature is a wonderful sign of his character. As he describes himself as an insufferable romantic at sixteen after his first DMT experience:
"Its beauty defies comprehension, but the beauty that it produced and I experienced has made me a better person. As long as one can experience and express (and to experience is to express) the beautiful, then he is saved from madness, he is saved from damnation. I have tried to look at life more positively, I have tried to be more aware of beauty, I have enjoyed the world more and hated myself less."
If there is a better summary of the positive therapeutic effect of psychedelics, I have not read it.
Describing a DMT experience many years later when he was no longer a novice: "That experience was no less amazing than it used to be, perhaps, but far more austere. Reality is a hallucination generated by the brain to help us make sense of our being; it is made of fragments of memory, associations, ideas, people you remember, dreams you've had, things you've read and seen, all of which is somehow blended and extruded into something resembling a coherent conscious narrative, the hallucination that we call 'experience.' Dimethyltryptamine rips back that curtain to show the raw data before it has been processed and massaged. […] Is this the difference between the DMT dimension visited by a lusty, romantic kid of sixteen and the jaded man of sixty-one? I honestly can't say. I don't feel that all joy and meaning has fled from my life. I still take ayahuasca regularly and am grateful for the lessons she imparts. But I may never again visit that amusement park of the mind. It is a place you take your girl on a first date, and I am romantic no longer."
Also loved hearing about Dennis's early love of Space Travel as driven by the ambition and hope of science fiction. Written in 2006, he was prophetic: "With the end of the shuttle program, NASA seems to epitomize this uncertainty; indeed, some would say that it lost its guiding vision (and justification for existence) when the Apollo program ended in 1972. In this, the space agency is not unlike the rest of America. As a people and a country, America has lost its way; the future is no longer viewed as an uncharted vista, beckoning us with its promise of exploration and discovery, but as a prospect of dread, as something to be feared and delayed as long as possible. In the current political and social climate, denial of the future has become pervasive; many political and cultural leaders now seek to return to some delusional golden age that never existed, some Reagan-era fantasy where it is again Morning in America. It is not going to happen, and it never happened. America veered off course decades ago, though only now are we beginning to see the consequences of our lack of vision. The future is not only coming, it's already here. And I am concerned that we are facing it not as a challenge, but as a threat."
“Psychedelic experiences are usually not about visiting some transcendent realm of angels and demons (though that does happen); more often than not, they are about experiencing the here and now in a very intense way.”
"Freedom of religious belief is a constitutional right, and people are free to believe in whatever delusions they want. But when it comes to forging national policies based on those delusions (for instance, the denial of climate change) then thinking citizens must stand up and denounce such ignorance. The sad thing is there are fewer and fewer thinking citizens, or so it appears. A frightened populace just wants to be told what to think and do, and the ideologues are more than happy to oblige them. One result is a trend in the public sphere toward the glorification of a willful shallow-mindedness. In the private sphere, that often manifests itself as a conscious refusal to acknowledge the mind's unconscious depths." [p101]
"Trying to run an egalitarian community in a dense city is a challenge under the best of circumstances. And every community that aspires to be spontaneous, to thrive without leaders or hierarchies, must confront the vacuum it creates for the power-crazed. Another factor that contributed to the short life of the hippie movement, at least in the Haight, was that so many of the people who had been drawn there were already damaged in some way. They made the pilgrimage in search of something, though many knew not what. Once they arrived, they were likely to become exposed to drugs and other experiences that they had no tools to deal with, and no clue. Those people quickly became dysfunctional and a liability to the rest of the community. Not everyone suffered this fate, of course. In fact, most people who were motivated enough to make the pilgrimage to California that summer probably benefited from their experience."
"Terence was inventing himself as the Irish bard of the psychedelic zeitgeist. The things he said resonated with people […] His talks were works of art; they were beautiful, and people heard in that beauty a confirmation of their own psychedelically illuminated insights. Through him, many listeners learned to trust their intuitions rather than simply accepting the assumptions of science and secularism, dreary existentialism, and religion. Terence told stories that post-scientific rationalists could believe, and in doing so he re-infused the universe with magic and wonder." [p249]
- Demagoguery and confirmation bias in speech early on
Displaying 1 of 1 review