The Cosmic Serpent

by Jeremy Narby

  “Where?”

  “In the Perene. We found out about its power thanks to ayahuasca, that other plant, because it is the mother.”

  “Who is the mother, tobacco or ayahuasca?”

  “Ayahuasca.”

  “And tobacco is its child?”

  “It’s the child.”

  “Because tobacco is less strong?”

  “Less strong.”

  “You told me that ayahuasca and tobacco both contain God.”

  “That’s it.”

  “And you said that souls like tobacco. Why?”

  “Because tobacco has its method, its strength. It attracts the maninkari. It is the best contact for the life of a human being.”

  “And these souls, what are they like?”

  “I know that any living soul, or any dead one, is like those radio waves flying around in the air.”

  “Where?”

  “In the air. That means that you do not see them, but they are there, like radio waves. Once you turn on the radio, you can pick them up. It’s like that with souls; with ayahuasca and tobacco, you can see them and hear them.”

  “And why is it that when one listens to the ayahuasquero singing, one hears music like one has never heard before, such beautiful music?”

  “Well, it attracts the spirits, and as I have always said, if one thinks about it closely ... [long silence]. It’s like a tape recorder, you put it there, you turn it on, and already it starts singing: hum, hum, hum, hum, hum. You start singing along with it, and once you sing, you understand them. You can follow their music because you have heard their voice. So, it occurs, and one can see, like the last time when Ruperto was singing.”

  AS I LISTENED to these explanations, I realized that I did not really believe in the existence of spirits. From my point of view, spirits were at best metaphors. Carlos, on the other hand, considered spirits to be firmly rooted in the material world, craving tobacco, flying like radio waves, and singing like tape recorders. So my attitude was ambiguous. On the one hand, I wanted to understand what Carlos thought, but on the other, I couldn’t take what he said seriously because I did not believe it.

  This ambiguity was reinforced by what people said about spirits; namely, that contact with spirits gave one power not only to cure, but to cause harm.

  One evening I accompanied Carlos and Ruperto to the house of a third man, whom I will call M. Word had gone around that Ruperto, just back from an eight-year absence, had learned his lessons well with the Shipibo ayahuasqueros. For his part, M. boasted that he had a certain experience with hallucinogens, and said that he was curious to see just how good Ruperto was.

  M. lived on the crest of a little hill surrounded by forest. We arrived at his house around eight in the evening. After the customary greetings, we sat down on the ground. Ruperto produced his bottle of ayahuasca and placed it at the bottom of the ladder leading up to the house’s platform, saying, “This is its place.” Then he passed around a rolled cigarette and blew smoke on the bottle and on M. Meanwhile, Carlos took my hands and also blew smoke on them. The sweet smell of tobacco and the blowing feeling on my skin were pleasurable.

  Three months had gone by since my first ayahuasca session. I felt physically relaxed, yet mentally apprehensive. Was I going to see terrifying snakes again? We drank the bitter liquid. It seemed to me that Ruperto filled my cup less than the others. I sat in silence. At one point, with my eyes closed, my body seemed to be very long. Ruperto started singing. M. accompanied him, but sang a different melody. The sound of this dissonant duo was compelling, though the rivalry between the two singers implied a certain tension. Carlos remained silent throughout.

  I continued feeling calm. Apart from a few kaleidoscopic images, I did not have any particularly remarkable visions, nor did I feel nauseated. I started to think that I had not drunk enough ayahuasca. When Ruperto asked me whether I was “drunk,” I answered “not yet.” He asked me whether I would like some more. I told him that I was not sure and wanted perhaps to wait a bit. I asked Carlos in a whisper for his opinion. He advised me to wait.

  I spent approximately three hours sitting on the ground in the dark in a slightly hypnotic, but certainly not hallucinatory state of mind. In the darkness, I could only make out the shape of the other participants. Both Carlos and M. had told Ruperto that they were “drunk.”

  The session came to a rather abrupt end. Carlos stood up and said with unusual haste that he was going home to rest. I got up to accompany him and thanked both our host and Ruperto, to whom I confided that I had been slightly fearful of the ayahuasca. He said, “I know, I saw it when we arrived.”

  Carlos and I had only one flashlight. He took it and guided us along the path through the forest. I followed him closely to take full advantage of the beam. After covering approximately three hundred yards, Carlos suddenly yelped and scratched at the back of his calf, from which he seemed to extract some kind of sting. In the confusion, what he was holding between his fingers fell to the ground. He said, “That man is shameless. Now he is shooting his arrows at me.” I was relieved to hear his words, because I was afraid a snake had bitten him, but I had no idea what he was talking about. I asked questions, but he interrupted, saying, “Later. Now, let’s go.” We marched over to his house.

  On arrival, Carlos was visibly upset. He finally explained that M. had shot one of his arrows at him, “because he wants to dominate, and show that he is stronger.”

  For my part, I was left with a doubt. How could one really aim a little sting in total darkness across three hundred yards of forest and touch the back of the calf of a person walking in front of someone else?

  Nevertheless, Carlos was ill the following day, and the tension between him and M. continued to the end of my stay in Quirishari. These suspicions of sorcery gave rise to a network of rumors and counterrumors that partially undermined the community’s atmosphere of goodwill.

  Contact with the spirits may allow one to learn about the medicinal properties of plants and to cure. But it also gives the possibility of exploiting a destructive energy. According to the practitioners of shamanism, the source of knowledge and power to which they gain access is double-edged.

  TOWARD THE END of my stay in Quirishari, I read over my fieldnotes and drew up a long list of questions. Most of them concerned the central subject of my investigation, but several dealt with the shamanic and mythological elements that had mystified me. In one of my last taped conversations with Carlos, I asked him about these matters:“Are tabaquero and ayahuasquero the same?”

  “The same.”

  “Good, and I also wanted to know why it is that one sees snakes when one drinks ayahuasca.”

  “It’s because the mother of ayahuasca is a snake. As you can see, they have the same shape.”

  “But I thought that ayahuasca was the mother of tobacco?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So who is the true owner of these plants, then?”

  “The owner of these plants, in truth, is like God; it is the maninkari. They are the ones who help us. Their existence knows neither end nor illness. That’s why they say when the ayahuasquero puts his head into the dark room: ‘If you want me to help you, then you must do things well, I will give you the power not for your personal gain, but for the good of all.’ So clearly, that is where the force lies. It is by believing the plant that you will have more life. That is the path. That’s why they say that there is a very narrow path on which no one can travel, not even with a machete. It is not a straight path, but it is a path nonetheless. I hold on to those words and to the ones that say that truth is not for sale, that wisdom is for you, but it is for sharing. Translating this, it means it is bad to make a business of it.”

  During my last interviews with Carlos, I had the impression that the more I asked questions, the less I understood his answers. Not only was ayahuasca the mother of tobacco, which I already knew, but the mother of ayahuasca was a snake. What could this possibly mean—other than that t
he mother of the mother of tobacco is a snake?

  On leaving Quirishari, I knew I had not solved the enigma of the hallucinatory origin of Ashaninca ecological knowledge. I had done my best, however, to listen to what people said. I had constantly tried to reduce the nuisance of my presence as an anthropologist. I never took notes in front of people to avoid their feeling spied on. Mostly, I would write in the evening, lying on my blanket, before going to sleep. I would simply note what I had done during the day and the important things that people had said. I even tried thinking about my presuppositions, knowing that it was important to objectify my objectifying gaze. But the mystery remained intact.

  I left with the strange feeling that the problem had more to do with my incapacity to understand what people had said, rather than the inadequacy of their explanations. They had always used such simple words.

  Chapter 4

  ENIGMA IN RIO

  In late 1986, I went home to rural Switzerland to write my dissertation. Two years later, after becoming a “doctor of anthropology,” I felt compelled to put my ideas to practice. Under Ashaninca influence I had come to consider that practice was the most advanced form of theory. I was tired of doing research. Now I wanted to act. So I turned my back on the enigma of plant communication.

  I started working for Nouvelle Planète, a small Swiss organization that promotes community development in Third World countries. In 1989, I traveled around the Amazon Basin, talking with indigenous organizations and collecting projects for the legal recognition of indigenous territories. Then I gathered funds for these projects in Europe.

  This took up my time for four years. Most of the projects that I presented to individuals, communities, citizen groups, foundations, and even a governmental organization were funded and carried out successfully.1

  Working hand in hand with indigenous organizations, South American topographers and anthropologists did the actual job of land titling. Each country has a different set of laws specifying the requirements for official recognition of indigenous territories. In Peru, for example, topographers must visit and map in detail the rivers, forests, mountains, fields, and villages used by a given indigenous people, and anthropologists must account for the number of persons occupying the territory and describe their way of life; these documents are then registered with the Ministry of Agriculture, which processes them and issues official land titles in the names of the indigenous communities. These titles guarantee the collective territorial ownership by people who have occupied the land for millennia, in many cases.

  The funds that I raised served to pay the salaries of the anthropologists and topographers, their travel expenses in isolated parts of the rainforest, the materials needed for mapmaking, and the cost of following the documents through the bureaucratic process. The most successful project was carried out in Peru’s Putumayo, Napo, and Ampiyacu regions by AIDESEP, the national federation of indigenous organizations of the Peruvian Amazon; they hired the topographers and anthropologists and managed to gain titles to close to one and a half million acres of land for only U.S.$21,525.

  Part of my work consisted of flying to South America occasionally, visiting the areas that had been titled, and checking the accounts. Given the difficulties indigenous people often have learning accounting, I was surprised to find in most cases that things had been done according to the plans laid out in the initial projects.

  Back in Europe, I would give talks explaining why it makes ecological sense to demarcate the territories of indigenous people in the Amazonian rainforest, saying that they alone know how to use it sustainably. I would point out the rational nature of indigenous agricultural techniques such as polyculture and the use of small clearings. The more I talked, however, the more I realized that I was not telling the whole truth as I understood it.

  I was not saying that these Amazonian people claim that their botanical knowledge comes from plant-induced hallucinations; I had tried these hallucinogens myself under their supervision, and my encounter with the fluorescent snakes had modified my way of looking at reality. In my hallucinations, I had learned important things—that I am just a human being, for example, and am intimately linked to other life forms and that true reality is more complex than our eyes lead us to believe.

  I did not talk about these things, because I was afraid people would not take me seriously.

  At this point, “being taken seriously” had to do with effective fund-raising more than with the fear of disqualification from an academic career.

  In June 1992 I went to Rio to attend the world conference on development and environment. At the “Earth Summit,” as it was known, everybody had suddenly become aware of the ecological knowledge of indigenous people. The governments of the world mentioned it in every treaty they signed2; personal care and pharmaceutical companies talked of marketing the natural products of indigenous people at “equitable” prices.3 Meanwhile, ethnobotanists and anthropologists advanced impressive numbers relative to the intellectual property rights of indigenous people: 74 percent of the modern pharmacopoeia’s plant-based remedies were first discovered by “traditional” societies; to this day, less than 2 percent of all plant species have been fully tested in laboratories, and the great majority of the remaining 98 percent are in tropical forests; the Amazon contains half of all the plant species on Earth4; and so on.

  In Rio the industrial and political worlds were just waking up to the economic potential of tropical plants. The biotechnology of the 1980s had opened up new possibilities for the exploitation of natural resources. The biodiversity of tropical forests suddenly represented a fabulous source of unexploited wealth, but without the botanical knowledge of indigenous people, biotechnicians would be reduced to testing blindly the medicinal properties of the world’s estimated 250,000 plant species.5

  Indigenous people let their position on the matter be known during their own conference, held on the outskirts of Rio a week before the official summit. Following the lead of the Amazonian delegates, they declared their opposition to the Convention on Biodiversity that governments were about to sign, because it lacked a concrete mechanism to guarantee the compensation of their botanical knowledge. The Amazonian representatives based their position on experience: Pharmaceutical companies have a history of going to the Amazon to sample indigenous plant remedies and then of returning to their laboratories to synthesize and patent the active ingredients without leaving anything for those who made the original discovery.6

  CURARE is the best-known example of this kind of poaching. Several millennia ago, Amazonian hunters developed this muscle-paralyzing substance as a blow-gun poison. It kills tree-borne animals without poisoning the meat while causing them to relax their grip and fall to the ground. Monkeys, when hit with an untreated arrow, tend to wrap their tails around branches and die out of the archer’s reach. In the 1940s, scientists realized that curare could greatly facilitate surgery of the torso and of the vital organs, because it interrupts nerve impulses and relaxes all muscles, including breathing muscles. Chemists synthesized derivatives of the plant mixture by modifying the molecular structure of one of its active ingredients. Currently, anesthesiologists who “curarize” their patients use only synthetic compounds. In the entire process, everyone has received compensation for their work except the developers of the original product.7

  Most of the time scientists balk at recognizing that “Stone Age Indians” could have developed anything. According to the usual theory, Indians stumbled on nature’s useful molecules by chance experimentation. In the case of curare, this explanation seems improbable. There are forty types of curares in the Amazon, made from seventy plant species. The kind used in modern medicine comes from the Western Amazon. To produce it, it is necessary to combine several plants and boil them for seventy-two hours, while avoiding the fragrant but mortal vapors emitted by the broth. The final product is a paste that is inactive unless injected under the skin. If swallowed, it has no effect.8 It is difficult to see how anybody could hav
e stumbled on this recipe by chance experimentation.

  Besides, how could hunters in the tropical forest, concerned with preserving the quality of the meat, have even imagined an intravenous solution? When one asks these people about the invention of curare, they almost invariably answer that it has a mythical origin. The Tukano of the Colombian Amazon say that the creator of the universe invented curare and gave it to them.9

  IN RIO, ethnobotanists often cited the example of curare to demonstrate that the knowledge of Amazonian people had already contributed significantly to the development of medical science. They also discussed other plants of the indigenous pharmacopoeia that had only recently started to interest scientists: An extract of the Pilocarpus jaborandi bush used by the Kayapo and the Guajajara had recently been turned into a glaucoma remedy by Merck, the multinational pharmaceutical company, which was also devising a new anticoagulant based on the tikiuba plant of the Uru-eu-Wau-Wau. The fruit of Couroupita guienensis used by the Achuar to treat fungal infections, and the leaves of the Aristolochia vine brewed into a tea by the Tirio for the relief of stomachache, also attracted interest, along with many other unidentified plants that indigenous Amazonians use to cure skin lesions, diarrhea, snakebite, and so on.10

  At the Earth Summit, everybody was talking about the ecological knowledge of indigenous people, but certainly no one was talking about the hallucinatory origin of some of it, as claimed by the indigenous people themselves. Admittedly, most anthropologists and ethnobotanists did not know about it, but even those who did said nothing, presumably because there is no way to do so and be taken seriously. Colleagues might ask, “You mean Indians claim they get molecularly verifiable information from their hallucinations? You don’t take them literally, do you?” What could one answer?