“The first time an Ashaninca man told me that he had learned the
medicinal properties of plants by drinking a hallucinogenic brew, I thought he
was joking. …But he was not smiling.”
The Cosmic Serpent is a fascinating exploration of the links
between DNA and molecular biology by anthropologist Jeremy Narby. While doing
fieldwork in the Amazon Pichis Valley, the Quirishari told him that their
incredible knowledge of plants and biochemistry was given to them by the plants
while under the influence of ayahuasca. Narby was sceptical at first, but then
became increasingly drawn into a quest to understand how this was possible. The
book recounts this quest as a compelling investigation that pushes him to the limits
of rationality and forces him to question his scientific training.
Forest Television
His quest began when a
shaman called Roberto Gomez told him, “You know, brother Jeremy, to understand
what interests you, you must drink ayahuasca.” He didn’t really take it
seriously, but agreed to try, and found himself confronted by two florescent
snakes who gave him a hard time for being human:
“These enormous snakes are there, my eyes are closed and I see a spectacular world of brilliant lights, and in the middle of these hazy thoughts, the snakes start talking to me without words. They explain that I am just a human being. I feel my mind crack, and in the fissures, I see the bottomless arrogance of my presuppositions. It is profoundly true that I am just a human being, and, most of the time, I have the impression of understanding everything, whereas here I find myself in a more powerful reality that I do not understand at all and that, in my arrogance, I did not even suspect existed. I feel like crying in view of the enormity of these revelations. Then it dawns on me that this self-pity is part of my arrogance. I feel so ashamed that I no longer dare feel ashamed. Nevertheless, I have to throw up again.”
He was deeply humbled
and apologised to the snakes for stepping over them as he went outside to be
sick. The experience (and there’s more of it in the book) led to his hypothesis
that the human mind is capable of communicating directly with the intelligence
at the heart of life – DNA. This wasn’t a straightforward process because first
he had to confront his own assumptions and training. He desperately wanted to
understand what the shamans were trying to show him, but couldn’t take it
seriously because he didn’t believe it.
Western science can’t
take ‘hallucinations’ seriously because they’re seen as illusions. If you have
hallucinations then you’re psychotic, or imagining things. Hallucinations
aren’t ‘real’. Consciousness is seen as originating in the brain, so anything
you see must come from your own brain. The entheogens fit into receptors in the
brain which unlock images stored in the subconscious. The idea that there could
be a connection between a plant and a human mind is absurd. How could a plant
communicate in symbols and images the way we do? It’s impossible!
It’s this view of
consciousness that creates a massive blind spot and makes it hard for us to
understand the claims of shamans. What’s experienced under entheogens goes way
beyond anything you could dream up or imagine. The beings encountered appear to
have their own reality. It’s also important to remember that the ‘scientific’
world doesn’t really understand how entheogens work in practice and haven’t
studied it in depth. So the Western scientific position on this starts to look
more like assumption, prejudice, or blind faith.
Narby describes the
process of learning how to ‘defocalise’ and shift his thinking away from the
limited ‘rational’ approach in his search for an answer to this problem. The
breakthrough came when he when made the connection between DNA and serpents,
and realised the source of the hallucinations could be internal and external at
the same time.
Serpent Mythologies
Serpents are everywhere
in ancient mythology. Creator gods in the form of serpents are found in the
Amazon, Mexico, Australia, Sumer, Egypt, Persia, India, the Pacific, Crete,
Greece, and Scandinavia. They’re often depicted as two serpents entwined, such
as the caduceus, or they have two heads or a dual nature. For example, the
ancient Egyptian cosmic serpent – ‘the provider of attributes’ – has two heads,
as seen in this illustration from the book:
This double or twin
quality is depicted in various ways to show the paradoxical nature of the
serpent. For example, the dragon
lives in water and breathes fire, and so represents the union of opposites.
Some mythical serpents are huge, such as Sesha,
the thousand-headed serpent that floats in the cosmic ocean with Vishnu and
Lakshmi (the twin creator beings) reclining in its coils.
Many ancient myths tell
of a huge terrifying serpent or dragon that guards the axis of knowledge (often
depicted as a ladder, vine, cord, or tree). In fact, the same basic elements
are repeated in mythologies around the world: serpents, water, ladders, ropes,
trees, staircases, vines, and twin creator beings.
Cosmic serpents are
also associated with creation myths. This is where we find endless examples of
twins and trickster figures, such as the Ashaninca story of Avireri and his twin sister. Although
Avireri isn’t a serpent, he is a divine twin and he creates through
transformation using music. One day he gets drunk and his sister pushes him
down a hole. She pretends to pull him out by lowering a thread, then a cord,
then a rope, but none of them are long enough. Finally, Avireri escapes by
digging into the underworld to a place called ‘river’s end’ where he becomes
wrapped in a vine. From there, he continues to create and sustain the earth.
In Aztec mythology we
find Quetzalcoatl and his twin
brother Tezcatlipoca, who are both children of the cosmic serpent Coatlicue.
The word coatl means both serpent and
twin, and Quetzalcoatl means either ‘plumed serpent’ or ‘magnificent twin’.
There are many more examples, too many to list here.
An interesting
historical side note: With the rise of monotheism the meaning of the ancient
neolithic mythologies was inverted and distorted. This can be seen in the Bible
which still contains many of the old symbols: the serpent, the tree, and the
twin beings. But now the meaning is negative and the serpent is the bad guy. Yahweh
has defeated the Leviathan. We can also see it in the myth of Zeus killing the
Typhon – the new patriarchal gods, or male sun gods, slaying the ancient gods.
The old gods were more
complete within themselves. The cosmic serpent is androgynous, neither male nor
female. In making the new gods, the patriarchy split the function of the old
gods in two, so the new gods aren’t entirely whole. This is clear in the Eden
story. Originally, the twin beings in the garden were one. Adam was an
hermaphrodite who was split to make Adam and Eve. The Bible distorts the
biological truth of life coming from the goddess (female), and inverts it with
the idea of Eve being created from Adam’s rib. It actually says she comes from
his ‘side’ and that’s been interpreted to mean his rib, but it really means Eve
is one side of Adam, i.e. half of him – his twin. The serpent in the Eden story
is now the bad guy, rather than the source of all life.
Even more interesting
side note: the name ‘Eve’ in Aramaic (chava
or hava) is very similar to the word
for snake, and in Arabic, Eve is hawwa
which means ‘snake’ or ‘giver of life.’
DNA and the Serpent
DNA is often described
as a ladder, a twisted rope or spiral staircase. Shamans also use these symbols
and talk of ladders, braided ropes, vines, or bridges that connect heaven to
earth. The Shamanic ladder is the earliest version of the ‘axis of the world’
or World Tree that connects different levels of reality. Usually you have to be
dead to climb this axis and enter the Otherworld, but a shaman does it by using
entheogens and music. Are they really accessing DNA when they do this?
One of the striking
parts of The Cosmic Serpent, is the
section where Narby describes what happened when he showed some paintings by
Peruvian shamans to a molecular biologist. The paintings are by Luis Eduardo
Luna and Pablo Amaringo and are filled with brightly coloured snakes, zigzags,
vines and mysterious beings. Narby’s biologist friend instantly recognised the
molecular structure of DNA hidden within the artwork:
“Those are triple helixes… And that’s DNA from afar, looking like a telephone cord. This looks like chromosomes at a specific phase… There’s the spread-out form of DNA, and right next to it are DNA spools in their nucleosome structure.”
It seems that shamans
can take their consciousness down to the molecular level and watch DNA
replicating itself. They have direct access to the reality of molecular
biology, and have done for thousands of years. Western science is only just
starting to catch up.
There are many
parallels between the serpent myths and DNA. Each human cell contains DNA about
2 metres long, so there’s about 125 billion miles of DNA in your body – enough
to wrap around the earth 5 million times. One thread of DNA is tiny – 120 times
narrower than the smallest wavelength of visible light. So DNA is massive and
tiny at the same time, like the mythical serpents. DNA is also connected with
water. All cells contain salt water which helps the DNA to twist into the
double helix shape. It does this to protect itself because the four bases (A,
G, C, and T) are insoluble in water so they twist up inside the cell to stay
out of touch with the water molecules.
DNA has maintained its
basic structure for billions of years, despite constantly copying and changing
itself. The serpent too creates by transforming itself and yet always stays the
same. To copy itself, the DNA molecule uncoils and unzips so it can make an
identical copy – like twins.
Seeing the Light
All living things emit
biophotons and DNA is the source of this light. The DNA bases are hexagonal but
they each have a slightly different shape. T and C are hexagonal, while A and G
have a 9 atom structure – a hexagon next to a pentagon. These stack on top of
each other to give a slightly irregular structure, except for certain repeat
sequences (like ACACACA, etc.) when it becomes more regular, like a quartz
crystal.
It’s the aperiodic
crystal structure that allows DNA to emit light (biophotons) and sound
(biophonons). The light is transmitted in a narrow band of visible light and is
ultra-weak but very coherent, like a laser. The coherent light is the source of
the luminescent images seen during trance visions, and researchers have shown
that plants can use biophoton emissions as a kind of ‘cellular language’ to
talk to each other.
So it looks like
shamans really are communicating with the plants via biophoton emissions. The
biosphere is constantly interacting with us, trying to guide us and share its
vast knowledge and wisdom. The earth is surrounded by and teeming with DNA in a
global network. Before life began, this planet was a barren rock. The earliest
life started around 3.85 billion years ago, then over time it slowly
transformed the planet. DNA made the air we breathe, the landscape and all the
creatures. It terraformed the earth and created us. The serpent is our creator
– our first god and the origin of life and knowledge – and it lives inside us.
The Cosmic Serpent is one of those books that turns your mind
inside out. Jeremy Narby draws together shamanism, ancient mythology, molecular
biology and neurology to show that specific biological information can be
directly transmitted through DNA into our consciousness. This fascinating book
will completely change your view of what it’s possible to know and how that
knowledge can be achieved. I can’t recommend it enough.
Artwork: Pablo Amaringo
First posted: http://jessicadavidson.co.uk/2015/07/20/the-cosmic-serpent-dna-and-the-origins-of-knowledge/
