The Cosmic Serpent (1998)
The anthropologist, on field placement with the Ashaninca tribe in the upper Amazon of Peru, is astonished to discover the vast range of botanical knowledge held by the tribe. How do these primitive peoples have so much molecular knowledge of botanical pharmacology without science? “The plants tell us” says the local shaman, an ayahuasquero. The anthropologist attends an ayahuasca ceremony, has the most profound and humiliating experience of his life, is reprimanded by a giant snake that he is “only a human being” and afterwards, subsequently suspending the timeworn western hubris that plants do not communicate, dares to ask what the plants have been telling us. Over the next several years of study, exhuming vast amounts of ethnographic data from diverse global sources—as far away as ancient Egypt, native Australia, the Aztecs, the early Daoists and the Ashaninca—he finds a common aesthetic element: twin snakes, a twisted vine, a sky ladder; followed closely by a common mythology: all life on earth was created by a cosmic serpent; this cosmic serpent lives within all life. A further bout of vertiginous insight turns the anthropologist’s world upside down. Had not these peoples discovered, some many thousands of years avant la lettre, what science calls DNA? A bewildering comparative study follows by which a global shamanic mythology is neatly overlaid upon the impassive and impersonal data of a gene science that refuses to wonder at its own findings. The absolutely mind-bending fact that an individual human contains within them 125 billion miles of text, (an information capacity far in advance of any human technology) all precisely written and communicated via beams emanating from quartz-like crystals each giving infinitesimal entities (ribosomes) instruction in the construction and maintenance of cell life, seems to be lost on the scientist—trained to suppress any and all amazement. But it is a fact not lost upon the anthropologist, who has now convinced himself that DNA is minded; the cosmic serpent is sentient. When the anthropologist returns to the upper amazon many years later and meets the old Ayahuasquero to tell him that western science has discovered the cosmic serpent, the Ayahuasquero asks: “what took you so long?”
The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, 1998, Jeremy Narby
Note: while I had originally read this book last summer with considerable amazement, as if the cosmic serpent was literal, since writing my thesis I now read the book as an example of Freud’s endopsychic perception on the most grand scale: the figures of mythology are expressions of an obscure psychical reality. The science of genome and the mythology of the cosmic serpent are two ways of viewing the same impossible phenomena. That Freud at times describes the psyche as a microscope is more to the point; it is an apparatus capable of offering a view of psychical reality that extends all the way down into the atomic blueprints of life itself. Terence McKenna’s apt name for the apprehension of this psychical extension (via DMT, the base tryptamine in ayahuasca) is “death by astonishment.”
Vision of Snakes, 2003, Pablo Amaringo
