The Cosmic Serpent Read online

  In reading the literature on Amazonian shamanism, I had noticed that the personal experience of anthropologists with indigenous hallucinogens was a gray zone. I knew the problem well for having skirted around it myself in my own writings. One of the categories in my reading notes was called “Anthropologists and Ayahuasca.” I consulted the card corresponding to this category, which I had filled out over the course of my investigation, and noted that the first subjective description of an ayahuasca experience by an anthropologist was published in 1968—whereas several botanists had written up similar experiences a hundred years previously.10

  The anthropologist in question was Michael Harner. He had devoted ten lines to his own experience in the middle of an academic article: “For several hours after drinking the brew, I found myself, although awake, in a world literally beyond my wildest dreams. I met bird-headed people, as well as dragon-like creatures who explained that they were the true gods of this world. I enlisted the services of other spirit helpers in attempting to fly through the far reaches of the Galaxy. Transported into a trance where the supernatural seemed natural, I realized that anthropologists, including myself, had profoundly underestimated the importance of the drug in affecting native ideology.”11

  At first Michael Harner pursued an enviable career, teaching in reputable universities and editing a book on shamanism for Oxford University Press. Later, however, he alienated a good portion of his colleagues by publishing a popular manual on a series of shamanic techniques based on visualization and the use of drums. One anthropologist called it “a project deserving criticism given M. Harner’s total ignorance about shamanism.”12 In brief, Harner’s work was generally discredited.

  I must admit that I had assimilated some of these prejudices. At the beginning of my investigation, I had only read through Harner’s manual quickly, simply noting that the first chapter contained a detailed description of his first ayahuasca experience, which took up ten pages this time, instead of ten lines. In fact, I had not paid particular attention to its content.

  So, for pleasure and out of curiosity, I decided to go over Harner’s account again. It was in reading this literally fantastic narrative that I stumbled on a key clue that was to change the course of my investigation.

  Harner explains that in the early 1960s, he went to the Peruvian Amazon to study the culture of the Conibo Indians. After a year or so he had made little headway in understanding their religious system when the Conibo told him that if he really wanted to learn, he had to drink ayahuasca. Harner accepted not without fear, because the people had warned him that the experience was terrifying. The following evening, under the strict supervision of his indigenous friends, he drank the equivalent of a third of a bottle. After several minutes he found himself falling into a world of true hallucinations. After arriving in a celestial cavern where “a supernatural carnival of demons” was in full swing, he saw two strange boats floating through the air that combined to form “a huge dragon-headed prow, not unlike that of a Viking ship.” On the deck, he could make out “large numbers of people with the heads of blue jays and the bodies of humans, not unlike the bird-headed gods of ancient Egyptian tomb paintings.”

  After multiple episodes, which would be too long to describe here, Harner became convinced that he was dying. He tried calling out to his Conibo friends for an antidote without managing to pronounce a word. Then he saw that his visions emanated from “giant reptilian creatures” resting at the lowest depths of his brain. These creatures began projecting scenes in front of his eyes, while informing him that this information was reserved for the dying and the dead: “First they showed me the planet Earth as it was eons ago, before there was any life on it. I saw an ocean, barren land, and a bright blue sky. Then black specks dropped from the sky by the hundreds and landed in front of me on the barren landscape. I could see the ‘specks’ were actually large, shiny, black creatures with stubby pterodactyl-like wings and huge whale-like bodies.... They explained to me in a kind of thought language that they were fleeing from something out in space. They had come to the planet Earth to escape their enemy. The creatures then showed me how they had created life on the planet in order to hide within the multitudinous forms and thus disguise their presence. Before me, the magnificence of plant and animal creation and speciation—hundreds of millions of years of activity—took place on a scale and with a vividness impossible to describe. I learned that the dragon-like creatures were thus inside all forms of life, including man.”

  At this point in his account, Harner writes in a footnote at the bottom of the page: “In retrospect one could say they were almost like DNA, although at that time, 1961, I knew nothing of DNA.”13

  I paused. I had not paid attention to this footnote previously. There was indeed DNA inside the human brain, as well as in the outside world of plants, given that the molecule of life containing genetic information is the same for all species. DNA could thus be considered a source of information that is both external and internal—in other words, precisely what I had been trying to imagine the previous day in the forest.

  I plunged back into Harner’s book, but found no further mention of DNA. However, a few pages on, Harner notes that “dragon” and “serpent” are synonymous. This made me think that the double helix of DNA resembled, in its form, two entwined serpents.

  AFTER LUNCH, I returned to the office with a strange feeling. The reptilian creatures that Harner had seen in his brain reminded me of something, but I could not say what. It had to be a text that I had read and that was in one of the numerous piles of documents and notes spread out over the floor. I consulted the “Brain” pile, in which I had placed the articles on the neurological aspects of consciousness, but I found no trace of reptiles. After rummaging around for a while, I put my hand on an article called “Brain and mind in Desana shamanism” by Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff.

  I had ordered a copy of this article from the library during my readings on the brain. Knowing from Reichel-Dolmatoff’s numerous publications that the Desana of the Colombian Amazon were regular ayahuasca users, I had been curious to learn about their point of view on the physiology of consciousness. But the first time I had read the article, it had seemed rather esoteric, and I had relegated it to a secondary pile. This time, paging through it, I was stopped by a Desana drawing of a human brain with a snake lodged between the two hemispheres (see top of page 57).

  I read the text above the drawing and learned that the Desana consider the fissure occupied by the reptile to be a “depression that was formed in the beginning of time (of mythical and embryological time) by the cosmic anaconda. Near the head of the serpent is a hexagonal rock crystal, just outside the brain; it is there where a particle of solar energy resides and irradiates the brain.”14

  Several pages further into the article, I came upon a second drawing, this time with two snakes (see top of page 58).

  The human brain. The left hemisphere is referred to as Side One, and the right as Side Two. The fissure is occupied by an anaconda. (Redrawn from Desana sketches.) From Reichel-Dolmatoff (1981, p. 81).

  According to Reichel-Dolmatoff, the drawing on page 58 shows that within the fissure “two intertwined snakes are lying, a giant anaconda (Eunectes murinus) and a rainbow boa (Epicrates cenchria), a large river snake of dark dull colors and an equally large land snake of spectacular bright colors. In Desana shamanism these two serpents symbolize a female and male principle, a mother and a father image, water and land ...; in brief, they represent a concept of binary opposition which has to be overcome in order to achieve individual awareness and integration. The snakes are imagined as spiralling rhythmically in a swaying motion from one side to another.”15

  Intrigued, I began reading Reichel-Dolmatoff’s article from the beginning. In the first pages he provides a sketch of the Desana’s main cosmological beliefs. My eyes stopped on the follow-ing sentence: “The Desana say that in the beginning of time their ancestors arrived in canoes shaped like huge serpents.”16
r />   The human brain. The fissure is occupied by an anaconda and a rainbow boa. (Redrawn from Desana sketches.) From Reichel-Dolmatoff (1981, p. 88).

  At this point I began feeling astonished by the similarities between Harner’s account, based on his hallucinogenic experience with the Conibo Indians in the Peruvian Amazon, and the shamanic and mythological concepts of an ayahuasca-using people living a thousand miles away in the Colombian Amazon. In both cases there were reptiles in the brain and serpent-shaped boats of cosmic origin that were vessels of life at the beginning of time. Pure coincidence?

  To find out, I picked up a book about a third ayahuasca-using people, entitled (in French) Vision, knowledge, power: Shamanism among the Yagua in the North-East of Peru. This study by Jean-Pierre Chaumeil is, to my mind, one of the most rigorous on the subject. I started paging through it looking for passages relative to cosmological beliefs. First I found a “celestial serpent” in a drawing of the universe by a Yagua shaman. Then, a few pages away, another shaman is quoted as saying: “At the very beginning, before the birth of the earth, this earth here, our most distant ancestors lived on another earth. ...” Chaumeil adds that the Yagua consider that all living beings were created by twins, who are “the two central characters in Yagua cosmogonic thought.”17

  These correspondences seemed very strange, and I did not know what to make of them. Or rather, I could see an easy way of interpreting them, but it contradicted my understanding of reality: A Western anthropologist like Harner drinks a strong dose of ayahuasca with one people and gains access, in the middle of the twentieth century, to a world that informs the “mythological” concepts of other peoples and allows them to communicate with life-creating spirits of cosmic origin possibly linked to DNA. This seemed highly improbable to me, if not impossible. However, I was getting used to suspending disbelief, and I had decided to follow my approach through to its logical conclusion. So I casually penciled in the margin of Chaumeil’s text: “twins = DNA?”

  These indirect and analogical connections between DNA and the hallucinatory and mythological spheres seemed amusing to me, or at most intriguing. Nevertheless, I started thinking that I had perhaps found with DNA the scientific concept on which to focus one eye, while focusing the other on the shamanism of Amazonian ayahuasqueros.

  More concretely, I established a new category in my reading notes entitled “DNA Snakes.”

  Chapter 6

  SEEING CORRESPONDENCES

  The following morning my wife and children left for a vacation in the mountains. I was going to be alone for ten days. I set about classifying my notes on the practices and beliefs of both indigenous and mestizo ayahuasqueros. This work took six days and revealed a number of constants across cultures.

  Throughout Western Amazonia people drink ayahuasca at night, generally in complete darkness; beforehand, they abstain from sexual relations and fast, avoiding fats, alcohol, salt, sugar, and all other condiments. An experienced person usually leads the hallucinatory session, directing the visions with songs.1

  In many regions, apprentice ayahuasqueros isolate themselves in the forest for long months and ingest huge quantities of hallucinogens. Their diet during this period consists mainly of bananas and fish, both of which are particularly rich in serotonin. It also happens that the long-term consumption of hallucinogens diminishes the concentration of this neurotransmitter in the brain. Most anthropologists are unaware of the biochemical aspect of this diet, however, and some go as far as to invent abstract explanations for what they call “irrational food taboos.”2

  As I classified my notes, I was looking out for new connections between shamanism and DNA. I had just received a letter from a friend who is a scientific journalist and who had read a preliminary version of my second chapter; he suggested that shamanism was perhaps “untranslatable into our logic for lack of corresponding concepts.”3 I understood what he meant, and I was trying to see precisely if DNA, without being exactly equivalent, might be the concept that would best translate what ayahuasqueros were talking about.

  These shamans insist with disarming consistency on the existence of animate essences (or spirits, or mothers) which are common to all life forms. Among the Yaminahua of the Peruvian Amazon, for instance, Graham Townsley writes: “The central image dominating the whole field of Yaminahua shamanic knowledge is that of yoshi—spirit or animate essence. In Yaminahua thought all things in the world are animated and given their particular qualities by yoshi. Shamanic knowledge is, above all, knowledge of these entities, which are also the sources of all the powers that shamanism claims for itself.... it is through the idea of yoshi that the fundamental sameness of the human and the non-human takes shape.”4

  When I was in Quirishari, I already knew that the “animist” belief, according to which all living beings are animated by the same principle, had been confirmed by the discovery of DNA. I had learned in my high school biology classes that the molecule of life was the same for all species and that the genetic information in a rose, a bacterium, or a human being was coded in a universal language of four letters, A, G, C, and T, which are four chemical compounds contained in the DNA double helix.

  So the rather obvious relationship between DNA and the animate essences perceived by ayahuasqueros was not new to me. The classification of my reading notes did not reveal any further correspondences.

  ON MY SEVENTH DAY of solitude, I decided to go to the nearest university library, because I wanted to follow up a last trail before getting down to writing: the trail of the life-creating twins that I had found in Yagua mythology.

  As I browsed over the writings of authorities on mythology, I discovered with surprise that the theme of twin creator beings of celestial origin was extremely common in South America, and indeed throughout the world. The story that the Ashaninca tell about Avíreri and his sister, who created life by transformation, was just one among hundreds of variants on the theme of the “divine twins.” Another example is the Aztecs’ plumed serpent, Quetzalcoatl, who symbolizes the “sacred energy of life,” and his twin brother Tezcatlipoca, both of whom are children of the cosmic serpent Coatlicue.5

  I was sitting in the main reading room, surrounded by students, and browsing over Claude Lévi-Strauss’s latest book, when I jumped. I had just read the following passage: “In Aztec, the word coatl means both ‘serpent’ and ‘twin.’ The name Quetzalcoatl can thus be interpreted either as ‘Plumed serpent’ or ‘Magnificent twin.’”6 A twin serpent, of cosmic origin, symbolizing the sacred energy of life? Among the Aztecs?

  It was the middle of the afternoon. I needed to do some thinking. I left the library and started driving home. On the road back, I could not stop thinking about what I had just read. Staring out of the window, I wondered what all these twin beings in the creation myths of indigenous people could possibly mean.

  When I arrived home, I went for a walk in the woods to clarify my thoughts. I started by recapitulating from the beginning: I was trying to keep one eye on DNA and the other on shamanism to discover the common ground between the two. I reviewed the correspondences that I had found so far. Then I walked in silence, because I was stuck. Ruminating over this mental block I recalled Carlos Perez Shuma’s words: “Look at the FORM.”

  That morning, at the library, I had looked up DNA in several encyclopedias and had noted in passing that the shape of the double helix was most often described as a ladder, or a twisted rope ladder, or a spiral staircase. It was during the following split second, asking myself whether there were any ladders in shamanism, that the revelation occurred: “THE LADDERS! The shamans’ ladders, ‘symbols of the profession’ according to Métraux, present in shamanic themes around the world according to Eliade!”

  I rushed back to my office and plunged into Mircea Eliade’s book Shamanism: Archaic techniques of ecstasy and discovered that there were “countless examples” of shamanic ladders on all five continents, here a “spiral ladder,” there a “stairway” or “braided ropes.” In Australia, Tibet
, Nepal, Ancient Egypt, Africa, North and South America, “the symbolism of the rope, like that of the ladder, necessarily implies communication between sky and earth. It is by means of a rope or a ladder (as, too, by a vine, a bridge, a chain of arrows, etc.) that the gods descend to earth and men go up to the sky.” Eliade even cites an example from the Old Testament, where Jacob dreams of a ladder reaching up to heaven, “with the angels of God ascending and descending on it.” According to Eliade, the shamanic ladder is the earliest version of the idea of an axis of the world, which connects the different levels of the cosmos, and is found in numerous creation myths in the form of a tree.7

  Until then, I had considered Eliade’s work with suspicion, but suddenly I viewed it in a new light.8 I started flipping through his other writings in my possession and discovered: cosmic serpents. This time it was Australian Aborigines who considered that the creation of life was the work of a “cosmic personage related to universal fecundity, the Rainbow Snake,” whose powers were symbolized by quartz crystals. It so happens that the Desana of the Colombian Amazon also associate the cosmic anaconda, creator of life, with a quartz crystal:

  “The ancestral anaconda ... guided by the divine rock crystal.” From Reichel-Dolmatoff (1981, p. 79).

  How could it be that Australian Aborigines, separated from the rest of humanity for 40,000 years, tell the same story about the creation of life by a cosmic serpent associated with a quartz crystal as is told by ayahuasca-drinking Amazonians?

  The connections that I was beginning to perceive were blowing away the scope of my investigation. How could cosmic serpents from Australia possibly help my analysis of the uses of hallucinogens in Western Amazonia? Despite this doubt, I could not stop myself and charged ahead.