From the Foreword of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss:
When Dennis asked me to write a
foreword for this book, I was surprised and delighted. It had never occurred to
me that such a book would require any foreword at all. Dennis is a well-respected
researcher and thinker, and many of us have read his scientific papers or
listened with pleasure to his interdisciplinary lectures, which combine
ethnobotany, psychopharmacology, history, and philosophical reflections. But
this is not an academic book. It is the long-awaited account of his lifelong
relationship with his older brother Terence, the great raconteur of
wide-reaching philosophical and eschatological ideas. In other words, what we
have here is the privilege of going behind the curtains and peering into the
private lives of these two extraordinary brothers, the poet and the scientist,
the public figure and the more retiring originator of ideas, one who haunts us
from the invisible yet pervasive World Wide Web (his words still fresh and even
more relevant twelve years after his death), the other still with us, wise, and
with an acute sense of humor. Like his brother, Dennis is a teacher from whom
we still have much to learn.
Luis Eduardo Luna
Wasiwaska
Florianópolis,
Brazil
August 3, 2012
The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss reveals the story of the McKenna brothers' eye-opening expedition to the Amazon in 1971 for psychedelic research. Once introduced by famed psychedelics advocate Timothy Leary as "one of the most important people on the planet," radical philosopher Terence McKenna was an iconic legend in the psychedelic community. He died in 2000, but his ideas live on in the writings of author Dennis McKenna. On their Amazonian journey together, the brothers explored the outer limits of psychedelic experience and were haunted ever since by the curious events that overtook them in that primeval rainforest.
Description:
When Dennis asked me to write a foreword for this book, I was surprised and delighted. It had never occurred to me that such a book would require any foreword at all. Dennis is a well-respected researcher and thinker, and many of us have read his scientific papers or listened with pleasure to his interdisciplinary lectures, which combine ethnobotany, psychopharmacology, history, and philosophical reflections. But this is not an academic book. It is the long-awaited account of his lifelong relationship with his older brother Terence, the great raconteur of wide-reaching philosophical and eschatological ideas. In other words, what we have here is the privilege of going behind the curtains and peering into the private lives of these two extraordinary brothers, the poet and the scientist, the public figure and the more retiring originator of ideas, one who haunts us from the invisible yet pervasive World Wide Web (his words still fresh and even more relevant twelve years after his death), the other still with us, wise, and with an acute sense of humor. Like his brother, Dennis is a teacher from whom we still have much to learn.
Luis Eduardo Luna
Wasiwaska
August 3, 2012
The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss reveals the story of the McKenna brothers' eye-opening expedition to the Amazon in 1971 for psychedelic research. Once introduced by famed psychedelics advocate Timothy Leary as "one of the most important people on the planet," radical philosopher Terence McKenna was an iconic legend in the psychedelic community. He died in 2000, but his ideas live on in the writings of author Dennis McKenna. On their Amazonian journey together, the brothers explored the outer limits of psychedelic experience and were haunted ever since by the curious events that overtook them in that primeval rainforest.