The Cosmic Serpent

by Jeremy Narby

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, I returned to my office and started rereading the passages concerning the maninkari in Gerald Weiss’s exhaustive study on Ashaninca cosmology. According to Weiss, the Ashaninca believe that the most powerful of all maninkari is the “Great Transformer” Avíreri, who created life on earth, starting with the seasons and then moving on to the entirety of living beings. Accompanied sometimes by his sister, at others by his nephew, Avíreri is one of the divine trickster twins who create by transformation and are so common in mythology.

  It was in reading the last story about the end of Avíreri’s trajectory that I had a shock. Having completed his creation work, Avíreri goes to a party where he gets drunk on manioc beer. His sister, who is also a trickster, invites him to dance and pushes him into a hole dug in advance. She then pretends to pull him up by throwing him a thread, then a cord—but neither is strong enough. Furious with his sister, whom he transforms into a tree, Avíreri decides to escape by digging a hole into the underworld. He ends up at a place called River’s End, where a strangler vine wraps around him. From there, he continues to sustain to this day his numerous children on earth.5

  How could I have missed the connections between the twin being Avíreri, the Great Transformer, and the DNA double helix, first creating the breathable atmosphere (“the seasons”), then the entirety of living beings by transformation, living in the microscopic world (“underworld”), in cells filled with seawater (“River’s End”), taking the form of a thread, a cord, or a strangler vine which wraps around itself, and, finally, sustaining to this day all the living species of the planet?

  For weeks I had been finding connections between myths and molecular biology. I was not even surprised to see that the creation myth of an indigenous Amazonian people coincided with the description made by today’s biologists of the development of life on earth. What shook me, and even filled me with consternation, was that I had had this evidence under my nose for years without giving it the slightest importance. My gaze had been too narrow.

  Sitting in my office, I remembered the time Carlos Perez Shuma had told me, “The maninkari taught us how to spin and weave cotton.” Now the meaning seemed obvious; the two ribbons of the DNA double helix wrap around each other 600 million times inside each human cell: “Who else could have taught us to weave?” The problem for me was that I had not believed him. I had not considered for one moment that his words corresponded to something real.

  Under these circumstances, what did my title “doctor of anthropology” signify—other than an intellectual imposture in relation to my object of study?

  These revelations overwhelmed me. To make amends, I resolved then and there to take shamans at their word for the rest of my investigation.

  WHAT HAD BECOME of the investigation that posed the enigma of the hallucinatory knowledge of Western Amazonia’s indigenous people? Why had it ended up with cosmic serpents from around the world entwined with DNA molecules?

  For some weeks now, I had been in a sort of trance, my mind flooded with an almost permanent flux of strange, if not impossible, connections. My only discipline had been to note them down, or to tape them, instead of repressing them out of disbelief. My worldview had been turned upside down, but I was slowly coming back to my senses, and the first question I asked myself was: What did all this mean?

  I was now of the opinion that DNA was at the origin of shamanic knowledge. By “shamanism,” I understood a series of defocalization techniques: controlled dreams, prolonged fasting, isolation in wilderness, ingestion of hallucinogenic plants, hypnosis based on a repetitive drumbeat, near-death experience, or a combination of the above. Aboriginal shamans of Australia reach conclusions similar to those of Amazonian ayahuasqueros, without the use of psychoactive plants, by working mainly with their dreams. What techniques did Chuang-Tzu, the Egyptian pharaohs, and the animists of Benin use, to name but a few? Who could say? But they all spoke, in one form or another, of a cosmic serpent—as did the Australians, the Amazonians, and the Aztecs.

  By using these different techniques, it therefore seemed possible to induce neurological changes that allow one to pick up information from DNA. But from which DNA? At first I thought that I had found the answer when I learned that, in each human cell, there is the equivalent of “the information contained in one thousand five hundred encyclopedia volumes”6—in other words, the equivalent of a bookcase about ten yards long and two yards high. There, I thought, is the origin of knowledge.

  On reflection, however, I saw that this idea was improbable. There was no reason why the human genome, no matter how vast, should contain information about the Amazonian plants necessary for the preparation of curare, for example. Furthermore, the ayahuasqueros said that the highly sophisticated sound-images that they saw and heard in their hallucinations were interactive, and that it was possible to communicate with them. These images could not originate from a static, or textual, set of information such as 1,500 encyclopedia volumes.

  My own experience with ayahuasca-induced hallucinations was limited, but was sufficient to suggest a trail. Ayahuasquero Ruperto Gomez, who had initiated me, had called the hallucinogenic brew “the television of the forest,” and I had indeed seen sequences of hallucinatory images flashing by at blinding speed, as if they were truly transmitted from outside my body, but picked up inside my head.7

  I knew of no neurological mechanism on which to base this working hypothesis, but I did know that DNA was an aperiodic crystal that traps and transports electrons with efficiency and that emits photons (in other words, electromagnetic waves) at ultraweak levels currently at the limits of measurement—and all this more than any other living matter.8 This led me to a potential candidate for the transmissions: the global network of DNA-based life.

  All living beings contain DNA, be they bacteria, carrots, or humans. DNA, as a substance, does not vary from one species to another; only the order of its letters changes. This is why biotechnology is possible. For instance, one can extract the DNA sequence in the human genome containing the instructions to build the insulin protein and splice it into the DNA of a bacterium, which will then produce insulin similar to that normally excreted by the human pancreas. The cellular machines called ribosomes, which assemble the proteins inside the bacterium, understand the same four-letter language as the ribosomes inside human pancreatic cells and use the same 20 amino acids as building blocks. Biotechnology proves by its very existence the fundamental unity of life.

  Each living being is constructed on the basis of the instructions written in the informational substance that is DNA. A single bacterium contains approximately ten million units of genetic information, whereas a microscopic fungus contains a billion units. In a mere handful of soil, there are approximately ten billion bacteria and one million fungi. This means that there is more order, and information, in a handful of earth than there is on the surfaces of all the other known planets combined.9 The information contained in DNA makes the difference between life and inert matter.

  The earth is surrounded by a layer of DNA-based life that made the atmosphere breathable and created the ozone layer, which protects our genetic matter against ultraviolet and mutagenic rays. There are even anaerobic bacteria living half a mile beneath the ocean floor; the planet is wired with life deep into its crust.10

  When we walk in a field, DNA and the cell-based life it codes for are everywhere: inside our own bodies, but also in the puddles, the mud, the cow pies, the grass on which we walk, the air we breathe, the birds, the trees, and everything that lives.

  This global network of DNA-based life, this biosphere, encircles the entire earth.

  “Cosmovision.” From Gebhart-Sayer (1987, p. 26).

  What better image for the DNA-based biosphere than Ronín, the cosmic anaconda of the Shipibo-Conibo? The anaconda is an amphibious snake, capable of living both in water and on land, just like the biosphere’s creatures. Ayahuasquero Laureano Ancon explains the above image: “The earth upon which we find ou
rselves is a disk floating in great waters. The serpent of the world Ronín is half-submerged and surrounds it entirely.”11

  Here is, according to my conclusions, the great instigator of the hallucinatory images perceived by ayahuasqueros: the crystalline and biospheric network of DNA-based life, alias the cosmic serpent.

  DURING MY FIRST AYAHUASCA EXPERIENCE I saw a pair of enormous and terrifying snakes. They conveyed an idea that bowled me over and later encouraged me to reconsider my self-image. They taught me that I was just a human being. To others, this may not seem like a great revelation; but at the time, it was exactly what the young anthropologist I was needed to learn. Above all, it was a thought that I could not have had by myself, precisely because of my anthropocentric presuppositions.

  I also felt very clearly that the speed and the coherence of certain sequences of images could not have come from the chaotic storage room of my memory. For example, I saw in a dizzying visual parade the superimposing of the veins of a human hand on those of a green leaf. The message was crystal clear: We are made of the same fabric as the vegetal world. I had never really thought of this so concretely. The day after the ayahuasca session, I felt like a new being, united with nature, proud to be human and to belong to the grandiose web of life surrounding the planet. Once again, this was a totally new and constructive perspective for the materialistic humanist that I was.

  This experience troubled me deeply. If I was not the source of these highly coherent and educational images, where did they come from? And who were those snakes who seemed to know me better than myself? When I asked Carlos Perez Shuma, his answer was elliptic: All I had to do was take the snakes’ picture the next time I saw them. He did not deny their existence—on the contrary, he implied that they were as real as the reality we are all familiar with, if not more so.

  Detail from Pablo Amaringo’s painting “Pregnant by an Anaconda,” reproduced in Luna and Amaringo (1991, p. 111).

  Eight years after my first ayahuasca experience, my desire to understand the mystery of the hallucinatory serpents was undiminished. I launched into this investigation and familiarized myself with the different studies of ayahuasca shamanism only to discover that my experience had been commonplace. People who drink ayahuasca see colorful and gigantic snakes more than any other vision12—be it a Tukano Indian, an urbanized shaman, an anthropologist, or a wandering American poet.13 For instance, serpents are omnipresent in the visionary paintings of Pablo Amaringo 14 (see above).

  Over the course of my readings, I discovered that the serpent was associated just about everywhere with shamanic knowledge—even in regions where hallucinogens are not used and where snakes are unknown in the local environment. Mircea Eliade says that in Siberia the serpent occurs in shamanic ideology and in the shaman’s costume among peoples where “the reptile itself is unknown.” 15

  Then I learned that in an endless number of myths, a gigantic and terrifying serpent, or a dragon, guards the axis of knowledge, which is represented in the form of a ladder (or a vine, a cord, a tree ...). I also learned that (cosmic) serpents abound in the creation myths of the world and that they are not only at the origin of knowledge, but of life itself.

  Snakes are omnipresent not only in the hallucinations, myths, and symbols of human beings in general, but also in their dreams. According to some studies, “Manhattanites dream of them with the same frequency as Zulus.” One of the best-known dreams of this sort is August Kekulé’s, the German chemist who discovered the cyclical structure of benzene one night in 1862, when he fell asleep in front of the fire and dreamed of a snake dancing in front of his eyes while biting its tail and taunting him. According to one commentator, “There is hardly any need to recall that this contribution was fundamental for the development of organic chemistry.” 16

  Why do life-creating, knowledge-imparting snakes appear in the visions, myths, and dreams of human beings around the world?

  The question has been asked, and a simple and neurological answer has been proposed and generally accepted: because of the instinctive fear of venom programmed into the brains of primates such as ourselves. Balaji Mundkur, author of the only global study on the matter, writes, “The fundamental cause of the origin of serpent cults seems to be unlike any which gave rise to practically all other animal cults; that fascination by, and awe of, the serpent appears to have been compelled not only by elementary fear of its venom, but also by less palpable, though quite primordial psychological sensitivities rooted in the evolution of the primates; that unlike almost all other animals, serpents, in varying degree, provoke certain characteristically intuitive, irrational, phobic responses in human and nonhuman primates alike; ... and that the serpent’s power to fascinate certain primates is dependent on the reaction of the latter’s autonomic nervous system to the mere sight of reptilian sinuous movement—a type of response that may have been reinforced by memories of venomous attacks during anthropogenesis and the differentiation of human societies.... The fascination of serpents, in short, is synonymous with a state of fear that amounts, at least temporarily, to morbid revulsion or phobia ... whose symptoms few other species of animals—perhaps none—can elicit” (original italics).17

  In my opinion, this is a typical example of a reductionist, illogical, and inexact answer. Do people really venerate what they fear most? Do people suffering from phobia of spiders, for instance, decorate their clothes with images of spiders, saying, “We venerate these animals because we find them repulsive”? Hardly. Therefore, I doubt that Siberian shamans embellish their costumes with a great number of ribbons representing serpents simply because they suffer from a phobia of these reptiles. Besides, most of the serpents found in the costumes of Siberian shamans do not represent real animals, but snakes with two tails. In a great number of creation myths, the serpent that plays the main part is not a real reptile; it is a cosmic serpent and often has two heads, two feet, or two wings or is so big that it wraps around the earth. Furthermore, venerated serpents are often nonvenomous. In the Amazon, the nonvenomous snakes such as anacondas and boas are the ones that people consider sacred, like the cosmic anaconda Ronín. There is no lack of aggressive and deadly snakes with devastating venom in the Amazon, such as the bushmaster and the fer-de-lance, which are an everyday threat to life—and yet, they are never worshipped.18

  The answer, for me, lies elsewhere—which does not mean that primates do not suffer from an instinctive, or even a “programmed,” fear of snakes. My answer is speculative, but could not be more restricted than the generally accepted theory of venom phobia. It is that the global network of DNA-based life emits ultra-weak radio waves, which are currently at the limits of measurement, but which we can nonetheless perceive in states of defocalization, such as hallucinations and dreams. As the aperiodic crystal of DNA is shaped like two entwined serpents, two ribbons, a twisted ladder, a cord, or a vine, we see in our trances serpents, ladders, cords, vines, trees, spirals, crystals, and so on. Because DNA is a master of transformation, we also see jaguars, caymans, bulls, or any other living being. But the favorite newscasters on DNA-TV seem unquestionably to be enormous, fluorescent serpents.

  This leads me to suspect that the cosmic serpent is narcissistic—or, at least, obsessed with its own reproduction, even in imagery.

  Chapter 9

  RECEPTORS AND TRANSMITTERS

  My investigation had led me to formulate the following working hypothesis: In their visions, shamans take their consciousness down to the molecular level and gain access to information related to DNA, which they call “animate essences” or “spirits.” This is where they see double helixes, twisted ladders, and chromosome shapes. This is how shamanic cultures have known for millennia that the vital principle is the same for all living beings and is shaped like two entwined serpents (or a vine, a rope, a ladder ...). DNA is the source of their astonishing botanical and medicinal knowledge, which can be attained only in defocalized and “nonrational” states of consciousness, though its results are empirically
verifiable. The myths of these cultures are filled with biological imagery. And the shamans’ metaphoric explanations correspond quite precisely to the descriptions that biologists are starting to provide.

  I knew this hypothesis would be more solid if it rested on a neurological basis, which was not yet the case. I decided to direct my investigation by taking ayahuasqueros at their word—and they unanimously claimed that certain psychoactive substances (containing molecules that are active in the human brain) influence the spirits in precise ways. The Ashaninca say that by ingesting ayahuasca or tobacco, it is possible to see the normally invisible and hidden maninkari spirits. Carlos Perez Shuma had told me that tobacco attracted the maninkari. Amazonian shamans in general consider tobacco a food for the spirits, who crave it “since they no longer possess fire as human beings do.”1 If my hypothesis were correct, it ought to be possible to find correspondences between these shamanic notions and the facts established by the study of the neurological activity of these same substances. More precisely, there ought to be an analogous connection between nicotine and DNA contained in the nerve cells of a human brain.

  The idea that the maninkari liked tobacco had always seemed funny to me. I considered “spirits” to be imaginary characters who could not really enjoy material substances. I also considered smoking to be a bad habit, and it seemed improbable that spirits (inasmuch as they existed) would suffer from the same kinds of addictive behaviors as human beings. Nevertheless, I had resolved to stop letting myself be held up by such doubts and to pay attention to the literal meaning of the shamans’ words, and the shamans were categorical in saying that spirits had an almost insatiable hunger for tobacco.2