The Slocan Community Library is proud to present Dennis McKenna, author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, on Friday, June 19 at 7 p.m. This is a free event at the library, located at 710 Harold St. in Slocan.
In The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, Dennis describes growing up in a small Colorado town during the 1950s and turbulent ‘60s and explains the ideas and adventures shared with his brother Terence McKenna, famous radical philosopher, futurist and raconteur, sometimes called “the intellectual’s Timothy Leary.”
The two brothers, along with other kindred spirits in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, yearned to explore the mysteries of time, mind and the improbable reality of existence, searching for the Holy Grail in the form of a legendary hallucinogen that would “change everything forever, which it did though not in ways they’d ever imagined.”
Dennis McKenna is currently assistant professor in the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. His professional and personal interests are focused on the interdisciplinary study of ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. He has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon.
His doctoral research at the University of British Columbia in 1984 focused on the ethnopharmacology of two tryptamine-based hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples in the northwest Amazon.
He continues to investigate the therapeutic uses of psychoactive medicines derived from nature and used in indigenous ethnomedical practices. He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute (heffter.org) a non-profit scientific and educational institution focusing on therapeutic uses of psychedelic medicines. He will be in Nelson giving a rediscovering nature weekend workshop at the Mountain Waters Retreat Centre this weekend.
In his presentation at the Slocan Community Library, McKenna will share his insights into the deepest mysteries of life on earth, humanity’s evolutionary odyssey through time and history and the outer dimensions of consciousness.