The Brothers McKenna: A Study in Contrasts

“Terence and Dennis McKenna went to the same Amazon, ate the same mushrooms, and came back with completely different relationships to certainty.”

The most interesting thing about Terence and Dennis McKenna is not their agreement but their disagreement.

They went to La Chorrera together. They ate the same mushrooms. They underwent extraordinary experiences that changed the direction of their lives. They came back with different conclusions.

Terence became the most famous psychedelic lecturer of his generation, voluble, confident, willing to make claims that exceeded his evidence. He built a cosmology from La Chorrera and spent thirty years elaborating it.

Dennis became a neuropharmacologist. He spent decades studying the biochemistry of ayahuasca at the level of molecular mechanisms. He has spoken, consistently, with admiration for Terence's genius and caution about Terence's conclusions. He believes something happened at La Chorrera. He is careful about what 'something' means.

Both responses are legitimate. Terence's produced a cultural impact that Dennis's careful science could not have produced. Dennis's produced knowledge that Terence's cosmological speculation could not have produced.

They needed each other. They had each other. The asymmetry between them is the book.

Sources

• McKenna, True Hallucinations (1993)
• D. McKenna, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (2012)