The Cosmic Serpent

by Jeremy Narby

  9 Campbell (1964, p. 11).

  10 Campbell (1968, p. 154).

  11 Chevalier and Gheerbrant (1982, pp. 867-868).

  12 The quotes are from Campbell (1964, pp. 17, 9, 22). Campbell writes regarding the twin beings in the Garden of Eden: “They had been one at first, as Adam; then split in two, as Adam and Eve” (p. 29). However, “the legend of the rib is clearly a patriarchal inversion” (p. 30), as the male begets the female, which is the opposite of previous myths and of biological reality. Meanwhile, the damnation of the serpent is particularly ambiguous; Yahweh accuses it of having shown Eve the tree that allows one to tell the difference between good and evil; how can one apply the Ten Commandments without an understanding of this difference? According to Campbell, these patriarchal inversions “address a pictorial message to the heart that exactly reverses the verbal message addressed to the brain; and this nervous discord inhabits both Christianity and Islam as well as Judaism, since they too share in the legacy of the Old Testament” (p. 17).

  13 See Campbell (1964, p. 22) and Chevalier and Gheerbrant (1982, p. 872).

  14 Reichel-Dolmatoff (1975, p. 165). He adds: “Now, the phenomenon of macroscopia, the illusion of perceiving objects much larger than they are, is frequent in hallucinations induced by narcotic snuff” (p. 49). This phenomenon is frequently mentioned in the hallucinogen literature. It also calls to mind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when Alice becomes extremely small after eating a piece of mushroom on which a caterpillar is smoking a hookah. Meanwhile, Descola (1996) writes regarding his personal experience with ayahuasca: “Curiously enough, these unanchored visions do not obscure the still landscape that frames them. It is rather as though I were looking at them through the lens of a microscope operating as a window of variable dimensions set in the middle of my usual and unchanged field of vision” (pp. 207-208).

  15 Gebhart-Sayer (1986) writes concerning the visual music perceived by Shipibo-Conibo shamans: “This spirit [of ayahuasca] projects luminous geometric figures in front of the shaman’s eyes: visions of rhythmic undulation, of perfumed and luminous ornamentation, or the rapid skimming over of the pages of a book with many motifs. The motifs appear everywhere one looks: in star formations, in a person’s teeth, in the movements of his tuft of grass. As soon as the floating network touches his lips and crown, the shaman can emit melodies that correspond to the luminous vision. ‘My song is the result of the motif’s image,’ says the shaman to describe the phenomenon, a direct transformation of the visual into the acoustic. ‘I am not the one creating the song. It passes through me as if I were a radio.’ The songs are heard, seen, felt and sung simultaneously by all those involved” (p. 196). The notion that ayahuasqueros learn their songs directly from the spirits is generalized. According to Townsley (1993), Yaminahua shamans “are adamant that the songs are not ultimately created or owned by them at all, but by the yoshi themselves, who ‘show’ or ‘give’ their songs, with their attendant powers, to those shamans good enough to ‘receive’ them. Thus, for instance, in their portrayal of the process of initiation, it is the yoshi who teach and bestow powers on the initiate; other shamans only facilitate the process and prepare the initiate, ‘clean him out’ so as to receive these spirit powers” (p. 458). Likewise, according to Luna (1984): “The spirits, who are sometimes called doctorcitos (little doctors) or abuelos (grandfathers), present themselves during the visions and during the dreams. They show how to diagnose the illness, what plants to use and how, the proper use of tobacco smoke, how to suck out the illness or restore the spirit to a patient, how the shamans defend themselves, what to eat, and, most important, they teach them icaros, magic songs or shamanic melodies which are the main tools of shamanic practices” (p. 142). Chaumeil (1993) talks of the extremely high-pitched sounds emitted by the spirits who communicate with Yagua shamans, more particularly of “strange melodies, both whistled and ‘talked,’ with a strong feminine connotation” (p. 415). Regarding the learning of songs by imitation of the spirits, see also Weiss (1973, p. 44), Chaumeil (1983, pp. 66, 219), Baer (1992, p. 91), and Townsley (1993, p. 454). See Luna (1986, pp. 104ff.) regarding the different functions of the songs (call the spirits, communicate with them, influence hallucinations, cure). See also, more generally, Lamb (1971), Siskind (1973), Dobkin de Rios and Katz (1975), Chevalier (1982), Luna and Amaringo (1991), Luna (1992), and Hill (1992). Finally, Bellier (1986) writes that among the Mai Huna of the Peruvian Amazon, “it is inconceivable to take yagé [ayahuasca], to penetrate the primordial world (miña) and to remain silent” (p. 131).

  16 Luna and Amaringo (1991, pp. 31, 43). Luna writes: “I asked Pablo how he conceives and executes his paintings. He told me that he concentrates until he sees an image in his mind—a landscape, or a recollection of one of his journeys with ayahuasca—complete, with all the details. He then projects this image upon the paper or canvas. ‘When this is done, the only thing I do is just add the colors.’ When painting his visions he often sings or whistles some of the icaros he used during his time as vegetalista. Then the visions come again, as clear as if he were having the experience again. Once the image is fixed in his mind, he is able to work simultaneously with several paintings. He knows perfectly well where each design or color will go. In his drawings and paintings there are no corrections—in the five years since we met he has never thrown away one single sheet of paper. Pablo believes that he acquired his ability to visualize so clearly and his knowledge about colors partly from the ayahuasca brew” (p. 29).

  17 Suren Erkman, personal communication, 1994.

  18 Jon Christensen, personal communication, 1994.

  19 See Crick (1981, pp. 51, 52-53, 70). He also writes: “Consider a paragraph written in English. This is made from a set of about thirty symbols (the letters and punctuation marks, ignoring capitals). A typical paragraph has about as many letters as a typical protein has amino acids. Thus, a similar calculation to the one above would show that the number of different letter-sequences is correspondingly vast. There is, in fact, a vanishingly small hope of even a billion monkeys, on a billion typewriters, ever typing correctly even one sonnet of Shakespeare’s during the present lifetime of the universe” (p. 52).

  7: MYTHS AND MOLECULES

  1 Angelika Gerhart-Sayer, personal communication, 1995.

  2 The quotes about the Ouroboros are from Chevalier and Gheerbrant (1982, pp. 716, 868, 869), who also write that the dragon is “a celestial symbol, the power of life and of manifestation, it spits out the primordial waters of the Egg of the world, which makes it an image of the creating Verb.” Mundkur (1983) writes in his exhaustive study of the serpent cult: “It is doubtful, however, that any serpent can or has ever been known to attempt to bite or ‘swallow’ its own tail” (p. 75).

  3 According to Graves (1955), Typhon was “the largest monster ever born. From the thighs downward he was nothing but coiled serpents, and his arms which, when he spread them out, reached a hundred leagues in either direction, had countless serpents’ heads instead of hands. His brutish ass-head touched the stars, his vast wings darkened the sun, fire flashed from his eyes, and flaming rocks hurtled from his mouth” (p. 134). Chuang-Tzu (1981) begins his book with this paragraph: “In the North Ocean there is a fish, its name is the K’un; the K’un’s girth measures who knows how many thousand miles. It changes into a bird, its name is P’eng; the P’eng’s back measures who knows how many thousand miles. When it puffs out its chest and flies off, its wings are like clouds hanging from the sky. This bird when the seas are heaving travels to the South Ocean. (The South Ocean is the Lake of Heaven.) In the words of the Tall stories, ‘When the P’eng travels to the South Ocean, the wake it thrashes on the water is three thousand miles long, it mounts spiralling on the whirlwind ninety thousand miles high, and is gone six months before it is out of breath’” (p. 43).

  4 Laureano Ancon is quoted in Gebhart-Sayer (1987, p. 25). Eliade (1949) writes: “A limitless number of legends and myths represent Serpents or Dragons
who control the clouds, live in ponds and provide the world with water” (pp. 154-155). According to Mundkur (1983): “Among the Aborigines of Australia, the most widespread of mythic beliefs has to do with a gigantic Rainbow Serpent, a primordial creature associated largely with beneficent powers of fertility and water. He (sometimes she) is also the source of magical quartz crystals known as kimba from which the medicine man derives his own power” (p. 58). According to Chevalier and Gheerbrant (1982): “The Underworld and the oceans, the primordial water and the deep earth form one single materia prima, a primordial substance, which is that of the serpent. Spirit of the primary water, it is the spirit of all waters, those of below, those that run on the surface of the earth, or those of above” (p. 869). Davis (1986) writes about Damballah, the Great Serpent of Haitian myth: “On earth, it brought forth Creation, winding its way through the molten slopes to carve rivers, which like veins became the channels through which flowed the essence of all life. In the searing heat it forged metals, and rising again into the sky it cast lightning bolts to the earth that gave birth to the sacred stones. Then it lay along the path of the sun and partook of its nature. Within its layered skin, the Serpent retained the spring of eternal life, and from the zenith it let go to the waters that filled the rivers upon which the people would nurse. As the water struck the earth, the Rainbow arose, and the Serpent took her as his wife. Their love entwined them in a cosmic helix that arched across the heavens” (p. 177). Davis (1996) discusses the cosmological notions of Kogi Indians as reported by Reichel-Dolmatoff: “In the beginning, they explained, all was darkness and water. There was no land, no sun or moon, and nothing alive. The water was the Great Mother. She was the mind within nature, the fountain of all possibilities. She was life becoming, emptiness, pure thought. She took many forms. As a maiden she sat on a black stone at the bottom of the sea. As a serpent she encircled the world. She was the daughter of the Lord of Thunder, the Spider Woman whose web embraced the heavens. As Mother of Ice she dwelt in a black lagoon in the high Sierra; as Mother of Fire she dwells by every hearth. At the first dawning, the Great Mother began to spin her thoughts. In her serpent form she placed an egg into the void, and the egg became the universe” (p. 43)—see also Reichel-Dolmatoff (1987). Bayard (1987) writes regarding the serpent’s symbolism: “Serpents, in their relationship with the depths of the primordial waters and of life, intertwine and establish the knot of life, which we find in the Osirian way in the druidic conception of the Nwyre” (p. 74).

  5 Each human cell contains approximately 6 billion base pairs (= 6 × 109, meaning 6 followed by 9 zeros). Each base pair is 3.3 angstroms long [1 angstrom = 10-10 meters (m)]. Multiplying these two figures, one obtains 1.98 m in length, which is generally rounded to 2 m. Moreover, the double helix is 20 angstroms wide (20 × 10-10 m). By dividing the length by the width, one obtains a billion—see Calladine and Drew (1992, pp. 3, 16-17). The average little finger is more or less 1 centimeter wide; Paris and Los Angeles are separated by a distance of approximately 9,100 kilometers. This comparison is supposed to give a notion easy to visualize rather than an exact equation; in fact, the DNA contained in a human cell is 10 percent longer, relatively speaking, than a centimeter-wide finger stretching from Paris to Los Angeles. Moreover, in the wide spectrum of electromagnetic waves, human eyes perceive only a very narrow band, from 7 × 10-7 m (red light) to 4 × 10-7 m (violet light). De Duve (1984) writes: “Even with a perfect instrument, no detail smaller than about half the wavelength of the light used can be perceived, which puts the absolute limit of resolution of a microscope utilizing visible light to approximately 0, 25 µm” (p. 9); that is, 2,500 angstroms.

  6 Wills (1989) writes that the nucleus of a cell “is about two millionths of the volume of a pinhead” (p. 22). Frank-Kamenetskii (1993) writes: “If we assume that the whole of DNA in a human cell is one molecule, its length L will be about 2 m. This is a million times more than the nucleus diameter” (p. 42). Moreover, according to some estimates, there are 100 thousand billion, or 1014, cells in a human body—see, for example, Sagan and the Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1993, p. 965), Pollack (1994, p. 19), and Schiefelbein (1986, p. 40). However, there is no consensus on this figure. Dawkins (1976, p. 22) uses 1015 (“a thousand million million”); Margulis and Sagan (1986, p. 67) use 1012, but in the French translation of their book they write: “The human body is made up of 1016 (10 million billion) animal cells and 1017 (100 million billion) bacterial cells” (1989, p. 65). The difference between 1012 and 1016 is of the order of 10,000! To calculate the total length of the DNA in a human body, I chose the figure that seems to be the most widely used, and that is halfway between the extremes. When I write that our body contains 125 billion miles of DNA, or 200 billion kilometers, it is merely a rough estimate; the true number could be 100 times greater, or smaller. Finally, a Boeing 747 traveling for 75 years at 1,000 km/h would travel 657 million kilometers, which is 0.32 percent of 200 billion kilometers; the average distance between Saturn and the Sun is 1,427,000,000 kilometers.

  7 Most cells contain between 70 and 80 percent water. According to Margulis and Sagan (1986): “The concentrations of salts in both seawater and blood are, for all practical purposes, identical. The proportions of sodium, potassium, and chloride in our tissues are intriguingly similar to those of the worldwide ocean.... we sweat and cry what is basically seawater” (p. 183-184). Without water, a cell cannot function; as De Duve (1984) writes: “Even the hardiest bacteria need some moisture around them. They may survive complete dryness, but only in a dormant state, with all their processes arrested until they are reawakened by water” (p. 21). On the relationship between water and the shape of the DNA double helix, see Calladine and Drew (1992), who write: “We see right away how DNA forms a spiral or helix on account of the low solubility in water of the bases” (p. 21).

  8 Pollack (1994, pp. 29-30).

  9 Both quotes are from Margulis and Sagan (1986, pp. 115-116, 111). On the terrestrial atmosphere before the apparition of life, see Margulis and Sagan (1986, pp. 41-43). They also write: “Barghoorn’s Swaziland discovery of actual 3,400-million-year-old microbes raises a startling point: the transition from inanimate matter to bacteria took less time than the transition from bacteria to large, familiar organisms. Life has been a companion of the Earth from shortly after the planet’s inception” (p. 72). The recently discovered traces of biological activity dating back 3.85 billion years consist of a reduced ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 in sedimentary rocks in Greenland—see Mojzsis et al. (1996) and Hayes (1996); Hayes writes: “The new finding seems to extend that record to the very bottom of our planet’s sedimentary pile, crucially altering earlier views of these oldest sediments and leaving almost no time between the end of the ‘late heavy bombardment’ of bodies within the inner Solar System by giant meteorites and the first appearance of life” (p. 21). Judson (1992) writes regarding nucleated cells (“eukaryotes”): “Eukaryotic cells are far larger than bacteria—proportionately as a horse to a bumblebee. They have hundreds of times more genes, and 500-fold more DNA” (p. 61).

  10 Lewontin (1992) writes: “Fully 99.999 percent of all species that have ever existed are already extinct” (p. 119). For estimates regarding the current number of species, see Wilson (1990, p. 4, “most biologists agree that the actual number is at least 3 million and could easily be 30 million or more”) and Pollack (1994, p. 170, “five million to fifty million”). Wilson (1992, p. 346) also writes: “Even though some 1.4 million species of organisms have been discovered (in the minimal sense of having specimens collected and formal scientific names attached), the total number alive on earth is somewhere between 10 and 100 million.”

  11 Wills (1991, p. 36). Regarding the direct observation of DNA’s propensity to wriggle (“like small snakes slithering through mud”), see Lipkin (1994, p. 293). Dubochet (1993) writes: “It is not the enzyme that rotates along the DNA helix during transcription, but the DNA that rotates on itself, while moving like a supercoil
ed conveyor belt” (p. 2).

  12 Regarding the “paradoxical passage,” see Eliade (1964, p. 486). Regarding the serpent-dragon guarding the axis, see Eliade (1949, pp. 250-251), Chevalier and Gheerbrant (1982, p. 385), and Roe (1982, p. 118).

  13 To describe DNA’s form, Pollack (1994, p. 22) talks of “twisted vines”; Calladine and Drew (1992, pp. 24, 42, 123) of a “highly twisted ladder,” a “spiral staircase,” and a “snake”; Blocker and Salem (1994, p. 60) of a “spiral staircase”; Stocco (1994, p. 37) of a “ladder”; Frank-Kamenetskii (1993, p. 14) of a “rope ladder.” The quote in the text (“like two lianas”) is from Frank-Kamenetskii (1993, p. 92). Regarding the genetic nature of cancer, and the recent advances in scientific understanding of the phenomenon, see Sankarapandi (1994) and Jones (1993).

  14 The quote is from Weiss (1969, p. 302). He also writes: “The Sky-Rope motif, which we have already encountered among the Campas and Machiguengas, and which we now find present among the Piros, turns out to be quite widespread among the Tropical Forest tribes. It is reported, in one form or another, for the Cashinahua, the Marinahua, the Jívaro, the Canelo, the Quijo, the Yagua, the Witoto, a number of the Cuiana tribes (the Korobohana, Taulipang and Warrau), the Bacairi, the Umotina, the Bororo, the Mosetene, and the Tiatinagua; it is also reported for the Lengua, Mataco, Toba, and Vilela of the Chaco region.... Clearly equivalent to the concept of the Sky-Rope is that of the Sky-Ladder, reported for the Conibo, the Tucuna and the Shipaya, and that of the Sky-Tree, reported for the Sherente, the Cariri, the Chamacoco, the Mataco, the Mocoví, and the Toba—in each case comprehended as having once connected Earth with Sky. The distribution of this motif might be extended even further if we care to recognize as equivalent the idea of a chain of arrows to the sky, reported for the Conibo, the Shipibo, the Jívaro, the Waiwai, the Tupinamba, the Chiriguano, the Guarayú, the Cumana, and the Mataco” (p. 470). Weiss also notes: “Of particular interest is the Taulipang identification of the Sky-Rope with the same peculiarly stepped vine as that which the present author’s Campa informants pointed out as their own inkíteca” (p. 505).