The Cosmic Serpent

by Jeremy Narby

  Mircea Eliade has shown that these different images form a common theme that he called the axis mundi, or axis of the world, and that he found in shamanic traditions the world over. According to Eliade, the axis mundi gives access to the Otherworld and to shamanic knowledge; there is a “paradoxical passage,” normally reserved for the dead, that shamans manage to use while living, and this passage is often guarded by a serpent or a dragon. For Eliade, shamanism is the set of techniques that allows one to negotiate this passage, reach the axis, acquire the knowledge associated with it, and bring it back—most often to heal people.12

  Here, too, the connection with DNA is clear. In the literature of molecular biology, DNA’s shape is compared not only to two entwined serpents, but also, very precisely, to a rope, a vine, a ladder, or a stairway—the images varying from one author to another. For instance, Maxim Frank-Kamenetskii considers that “in a DNA molecule the complementary strands twine around one another like two lianas.” Furthermore, scientists have recently begun to realize that many illnesses, including cancer, originate, and therefore may be solved, at the level of DNA.13

  I set about exploring the different representations of the axis of the world, those images parallel to the cosmic serpent. The notion of an axis mundi is particularly common among the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. The Ashaninca, for example, talk of a “sky-rope.” As Gerald Weiss writes: “Among the Campas there is a belief that at one time Earth and Sky were close together and connected by a cable. A vine called inkíteca (literally, “sky-rope”), with a peculiar stepped shape, was pointed out to the author as the cable that held Earth and Sky together.”14 According to Weiss, this vine is the same as the one indicated at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Taulipang Indians to Theodor Koch-Grünberg, one of the first ethnographers. In his work, Koch-Grünberg provided a skillful sketch of the Taulipang’s vine.

  “Liana (Bauhinia caulotretus) ‘that goes from earth up to heaven.’” From Koch-Grünberg (1917, Vol. 2, Drawing IV).

  Strangely, the Taulipang live in Guyana, some three thousand miles from the Ashaninca, yet they associate exactly the same vine with the sky-rope.

  One of the best-known variants of the axis mundi is the caduceus, formed by two snakes wrapped around an axis. Since the most ancient times, one finds this symbol connected to the art of healing, from India to the Mediterranean. The Taoists of China represent the caduceus with the yin-yang, which symbolizes the coiling of two serpentine and complementary forms into a single androgynous vital principle15:

  In the Western world, the caduceus continues to be used as the symbol of medicine, sometimes in modified form16:

  Among the Shipibo-Conibo in the Peruvian Amazon, the axis mundi can be represented as a ladder. In the following drawing based on descriptions by ayahuasquero José Chucano Santos, the “sky-ladder” is surrounded by the cosmic anaconda Ronín (see top of page 96).

  The ladder that gives access to shamanic knowledge is such a widespread theme that Alfred Métraux calls it the “symbol of the profession.” He also reports that, as far as Amazonian shamans are concerned, it is by contacting the “spirits of the ladder or of the rungs” that they learn to “master all the secrets of magic.”

  The “sky ladder” drawing based on descriptions by ayahasquero José Chucano Santos.

  Métraux also points out that these shamans drink “an infusion prepared from a vine, the form of which suggests a ladder.”17 Indeed, the ayahuasca vine is often compared to a ladder, or even to a double helix, as this photo taken by ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes indicates (see top of page 97).

  MOST OF THE CONNECTIONS I HAD FOUND up to this point between the cosmic serpent and the axis of the world, and DNA, were related to form. This concurred with what Carlos Perez Shuma had told me: Nature talks in signs and, to understand its language, one has to pay attention to similarities in form. He had also said that the spirits of nature communicate with human beings in hallucinations and dreams—in other words, in mental images. This idea is common in “pre-rational” traditions. For instance, Heraclitus said of the Pythian oracle (from the Greek puthôn, “serpent”) that it “neither declares nor conceals, but gives a sign.”18

  “Banisteriopsis caapi, a liana that tends to grow in charming double helices, is one of the primary ingredients in an entheogenic [hallucinogenic] potion known as ... ayahuasca, yagé, caapi. ... Those who know it call it ‘spirit vine’ or ‘ladder to the Milky Way.’ It is known also as ayahuasca [‘vine of the soul’].” (Howard Rheingold quote.) From Schultes and Raffauf (1992, p. 26).

  I wanted to go further than mere formal connections, however, and I knew, thanks to the work of Mircea Eliade, that shamans almost everywhere speak a secret language, “the language of all nature,” which allows them to communicate with the spirits. I started looking for information about this phenomenon to see if there were any common elements in content between the language of the spirits of nature that shamans learn and the language of DNA.

  Unfortunately, there are not many in-depth studies of shamanic language, no doubt because anthropologists have never really taken it seriously.19 I found an exception in Graham Townsley’s recent work on the songs of Yaminahua ayahuasqueros in the Peruvian Amazon.

  According to Townsley, Yaminahua shamans learn songs, called koshuiti, by imitating the spirits they see in their hallucinations, in order to communicate with them. The words of these songs are almost totally incomprehensible to those Yaminahua who are not shamans. Townsley writes: “Almost nothing in these songs is referred to by its normal name. The abstrusest metaphoric circumlocutions are used instead. For example, night becomes ‘swift tapirs,’ the forest becomes ‘cultivated peanuts,’ fish are ‘peccaries,’ jaguars are ‘baskets,’ anacondas are ‘hammocks’ and so forth.”

  In each case, writes Townsley, the metaphorical logic can be explained by an obscure, but real, connection: “Thus fish become ‘white-collared peccaries’ because of the resemblance of a fish’s gill to the white dashes on this type of peccary’s neck; jaguars become ‘baskets’ because the fibers of this particular type of loose-woven basket (wonati) form a pattern precisely similar to a jaguar’s markings.”

  The shamans themselves understand very clearly the meaning of these metaphors and they call them tsai yoshtoyoshto, literally “language-twisting-twisting.” Townsley translates this expression as “twisted language.”

  The word twist has the same root as two and twin. Twisted means, technically, “double and wrapped around itself.”

  Why do Yaminahua shamans talk in twisted language? According to one of them: “With my koshuiti I want to see—singing, I carefully examine things—twisted language brings me close but not too close—with normal words I would crash into things—with twisted ones I circle around them—I can see them clearly.”

  For Townsley, all shamanic relations with the spirits are “deliberately constructed in an elliptical and multi-referential fashion so as to mirror the refractory nature of the beings who are their objects.” He concludes: “Yoshi are real beings who are both ‘like and not like’ the things they animate. They have no stable or unitary nature and thus, paradoxically, the ‘seeing as’ of ‘twisted language’ is the only way of adequately describing them. Metaphor here is not improper naming but the only proper naming possible.” 20

  I WENT ON to look for the connection between the language of spirits described by Yaminahua ayahuasqueros and the language of DNA. I found that “double and entwined,” or “twisting-twisting,” or “yoshtoyoshto,” corresponded perfectly to the latter.

  The genetic information of a human being (for example), called “genome,” is contained in 3 billion letters spread out along a single filament of DNA. In some places, this filament winds around itself to form 23 more compact segments known as “chromosomes.” We all inherit a complete set of chromosomes from each of our parents, and so we have 23 pairs of chromosomes. Each chromosome is made up of a very long thread of DNA which is already a dou
ble message to begin with—the main text on one ribbon, and the complementary duplicate on the other. Thus our cells all contain two complete genomes as well as their backup copies. Our genetic message is doubly double and contains a total of 6 billion base pairs, or 12 billion letters.

  The DNA contained in the nucleus of a human cell is two yards long, and the two ribbons that make up this filament wrap around each other several hundred million times.21

  As far as its material aspect or its form is concerned, DNA is a doubly double text that wraps around itself. In other words, it is a “language-twisting-twisting.”

  THE TRANSCRIPTION ENZYMES read only the parts of the DNA text that code for the construction of proteins and enzymes. These passages, called “genes,” represent only 3 percent of the human genome, according to various estimates. The remaining 97 percent are not read; their function is unknown.

  Scientists have found spread out among the non-coding parts of the text a great number of endlessly repeated sequences with no apparent meaning, and even palindromes, which are words or sentences that can be read in either direction. They have called this apparent gibberish, which constitutes the overwhelming majority of the genome, “junk DNA.”22

  In this “junk,” one finds tens of thousands of passages like this: ACACACACACACACACACACACACACACACAC. ... There is even a 300-letter sequence that is repeated a total of half a million times. All told, repeat sequences make up a full third of the genome. Their meaning, so far, is unknown.

  Molecular biologists Chris Calladine and Horace Drew sum up the situation: “The vast majority of DNA in our bodies does things that we do not presently understand.”23

  Scattered among this ocean of nonsense, genes are like islands where the language of DNA becomes comprehensible. Genes spell out the instructions for lining up amino acids into proteins. They do this with words of three letters. “CAG,” for example, codes for amino acid glutamine in DNA language.

  As all the words of the genetic code have three letters, and as DNA has a four-letter alphabet (A,G,C,T), the genetic code contains 4 × 4 × 4 = 64 possible words. These words all have a meaning and correspond either to one of the 20 amino acids used in the construction of proteins or to one of two punctuation marks (“start,” “stop”). So there are 22 possible meanings for 64 words. This redundancy has led scientists to say that the genetic code is “degenerate.” In fact, it simply has a wealth of synonyms—like a language where words as different as “jaguar” and “basket” have the same meaning.24

  In reality, things are even more complex. Within genes, there are many non-coding segments called “introns.” As soon as the transcription enzymes have transcribed a given gene, editing enzymes eliminate the introns with atomic precision and splice together the true coding segments, known as “exons.” Some genes consist of up to 98 percent introns—which means that they contain only 2 percent genetic information. The role of these introns remains mysterious.25

  The proportion of introns and exons in the human genome is not yet known, because so far, only half of all the genes it contains have been identified, out of a total estimated at 100,000.26

  Along the DNA filament, “junk” and genes alternate; within genes, introns intermix with exons, which are themselves expressed in a language where almost every word has a synonym.

  As far as both its content and its form are concerned, DNA is a doubly double language that wraps around itself.

  Just like the twisted language of the spirits of nature.

  WHAT DO THESE CONNECTIONS between DNA and the cosmic serpent, the axis of the world, and the language of the spirits of nature, mean?

  The correspondences are too numerous to be explained by chance alone. If I were a member of a jury having to pronounce itself on the matter, I would have the conviction that the same reality is being described from different perspectives.

  “The cosmic serpent, provider of attributes.” From Clark (1959, p. 52).

  Take the cosmic serpent of the Ancient Egyptians, the “provider of attributes.” The signs that accompany it mean “one” “several” “spirit, double, vital force” “place” “wick of twisted flax” and “water” Under the chin of the second serpent, there is an Egyptian cross meaning “key of life.”27

  The connections with DNA are obvious and work on all levels: DNA is indeed shaped like a long, single and double serpent, or a wick of twisted flax; it is a double vital force that develops from one to several; its place is water.

  What else could the Ancient Egyptians have meant when they talked of a double serpent, provider of attributes and key of life, if not what scientists call “DNA”?

  Why are these metaphors so consistently and so frequently used unless they mean what they say?

  Chapter 8

  THROUGH THE EYES OF AN ANT

  One sunny afternoon that spring I was sitting in the garden with my children. Birds were singing in the trees, and my mind began to wander. There I was, a product of twentieth-century rationality, my faith requiring numbers and molecules rather than myths. Yet I was now confronted with mythological numbers relative to a molecule, in which I had to believe. Inside my body sitting there in the garden sun were 125 billion miles of DNA. I was wired to the hilt with DNA threads and until recently had known nothing about it. Was this astronomical number really just a “useless but amusing fact,”1 as some scientists would have it? Or did it indicate that the dimensions, at least, of our DNA are cosmic?

  Some biologists describe DNA as an “ancient high biotechnology,” containing “over a hundred trillion times as much information by volume as our most sophisticated information storage devices.” Could one still speak of a technology in these circumstances? Yes, because there is no other word to qualify this duplicable, information-storing molecule. DNA is only ten atoms wide and as such constitutes a sort of ultimate technology: It is organic and so miniaturized that it approaches the limits of material existence.2

  Shamans, meanwhile, claim that the vital principle that animates all living creatures comes from the cosmos and is minded. As ayahuasquero Pablo Amaringo says: “A plant may not talk, but there is a spirit in it that is conscious, that sees everything, which is the soul of the plant, its essence, what makes it alive.” According to Amaringo, these spirits are veritable beings, and humans are also filled with them: “Even the hair, the eyes, the ears are full of beings. You see all this when ayahuasca is strong.”3

  During the past weeks, I had come to consider that the perspective of biologists could be reconciled with that of ayahuasqueros and that both could be true at the same time. According to the stereoscopic image I could see by gazing at both perspectives simultaneously, DNA and the cell-based life it codes for are an extremely sophisticated technology that far surpasses our present-day understanding and that was initially developed elsewhere than on earth—which it radically transformed on its arrival some four billion years ago.

  This point of view was completely new to me and had changed my way of looking at the world. For instance, the leaves of trees now appeared to be true solar panels. One had only to look at them closely to see their “technological,” or organized, aspect (see top of page 105).

  This revelation was troubling. I started thinking about my eyes, through which I was looking at the plants in the garden. Over the course of my readings, I had learned that the human eye is more sophisticated than any camera of similar size. The cells on the outer layer of the retina can absorb a single particle of light, or photon, and amplify its energy at least a million times, before transferring it in the form of a nervous signal to the back of the brain. The iris, which functions as the eye’s diaphragm, is automatically controlled. The cornea has just the right curvature. The lens is focused by miniature muscles, which are also controlled automatically by feedback. The final result of this visual system, still imperfectly understood in its entirety, is a clear, colored, and three-dimensional image inside the brain that we perceive as external. We never see reality, but only an internal rep
resentation of it that our brain constructs for us continuously.4

  A magnified section of a leaf illustrating its organized, technological aspect.

  What troubled me was not so much the resemblance of the human eye to an organic and extremely sophisticated technology born of cosmic knowledge, but that they were my eyes. Who was this “I” perceiving the images flooding into my mind? One thing was sure: I was not responsible for the construction of the visual system with which I was endowed.

  I did not know what to make of these thoughts. Staring blankly at the lawn in front of me, I started following a shiny, black ant making its way across the thick blades of grass with the determination of a tank. It was heading toward the colony of aphids in the tree at the bottom of the garden. This was an ant belonging to a species that herds aphids and “milks” them for their sweet secretions.

  I began thinking that this ant had a visual system quite different from my own that apparently functioned every bit as well. Despite our differences in size and shape, our genetic information was written in the same language—which we were both incapable of seeing, given that DNA is smaller than visible light, even to the eyes of an ant.

  I found it interesting that the language containing the instructions for the creation of different visual systems should be itself invisible. It was as if the instructions were to remain hidden from their beneficiaries, as if we were wired in such a way that we could not see the wires....

  Why?

  I tried reconsidering the question from a “shamanic” point of view. It was as if these beings inside us wanted to hide.... But that’s what the Ashaninca say! They call the invisible beings who created life the “maninkari,” literally “those who are hidden”!