The Cosmic Serpent

by Jeremy Narby

  15 Bayard (1987) writes in his book on the symbolism of the caduceus: “First, one must retain the association of elements that we find in all civilizations, from India to the Mediterranean, including Egypt, Palestine and Sumerian Mesopotamia: the stone, the column, the truncated and sacred tree, with one or two entwined serpents.... The cult of the serpent is thus linked to the art of healing since the most ancient times” (pp. 161-163). Regarding the caduceus, Chevalier and Gheerbrandt (1982) write: “The serpent has a doubly symbolic aspect: one is beneficial, the other is evil, of which the caduceus represents, as it were, the antagonism and equilibrium; this equilibrium and polarity are above all those of the cosmic currents, which are figured more generally by the double spiral”; in Buddhist esotericism, for example, “the caduceus’s staff corresponds to the axis of the world and the serpents to the Kundalini,” the cosmic energy inside every being (pp. 153-155). See also Boulnois (1939) and Baudoin (1918) on the ancientness of this symbol. According to Bayard (1987), the two serpents of the caduceus, the yin-yang of the T’ai Chi, and the swastika of the Hindus all symbolize “a cosmic force, with opposed directions of rotation” (p. 134) See Guénon (1962, p. 153) on the equivalence of the caduceus and the yin-yang.

  16 There is a certain confusion surrounding the origin of the caduceus as the symbol of Western medicine. To start with, in Greek mythology, the caduceus’s staff is the symbol of Hermes, who is, according to Campbell (1959), “the archetypal trickster god of the ancient world . . . Hermes, too, is androgyne, as one should know from the sign of his staff” (p. 417). Campbell (1964) adds that Hermes is the “guide of souls to the underworld, the patron, also, of rebirth and lord of the knowledges beyond death, which may be known to his initiates even in life” (p. 162). Hermes’s staff is topped by two wings and is thus a variant on the theme of the plumed serpent. However, Hermes’s staff has mainly been interpreted as a peace symbol, devoid of medical significance. The official medical caduceus is considered to belong to Aesculapius, who was said to be a real-life healer practicing around 1200 B.C., and who only became the Greek god of healing much later. Around the 5th century B.C., rationalism and patriarchy were being set up and myths were modified: Zeus, who was at first represented as a serpent, defeats the serpent-monster Typhon with the help of his daughter Athene (“Reason”), thereby guaranteeing the reign of the patriarchal gods of Olympus; concomitantly, he brings Aesculapius back to life (having previously killed him with a lightning bolt) and gives him a staff with a single serpent wrapped around it. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Aesculapius’s staff “is the only true symbol of medicine. The caduceus with its winged staff and intertwined serpents, frequently used as a medical symbol, is without medical relevance since it represents the magic wand of Hermes, or Mercury, the messenger of the gods and the patron of trade” (vol. 1, p. 619). To make things more complicated, the caduceus symbol, sometimes with one snake, sometimes two, has been taken up again in the twentieth century for unclear reasons. For instance, in 1902, the medical department of the United States Army adopted Hermes’s staff as its symbol—while the American Medical Association took Aesculapius’s staff shortly thereafter (see Friedlander 1992, pp. 127ff., 146ff.). The caduceus formed by the cup and the serpent became the official symbol of French pharmacies only in 1942 (see Burnand 1991, p. 7). The pharmacists with whom I talked invariably said that the serpent was linked to their profession “because of the venom”—for which pharmacies have antidotes.

  17 Métraux (1967, pp. 191, 85, 83, 95).

  18 There are many different translations of Heraclitus’s fragmented work. I rely mainly on Kahn (1979). The fragment that I quote is: “The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither declares nor conceals, but gives a sign” (p. 43). The town of Delphi was originally called Pytho. The oracle in Delphi first belonged to the earth goddess Gaia and was defended by her child, the serpent Python. Later, Apollo slew Python and appropriated the oracle.

  19 See Eliade (1964, pp. 96ff.) on the secret language of shamans. Why has there not been more interest in this language of spirits, which is reported around the world? I believe that one of the reasons is that most anthropologists do not believe that spirits really exist, so they cannot take them seriously. As Colchester (1982) writes in his study of the cosmovision of the Sanema in the Venezuelan Amazon: “We can only designate this spiritual realm a ‘metaphoric’ one, because we do not believe in its reality. Our effective understanding of Sanema phenomenology founders on this lack of belief” (p. 131). Unfortunately, Colchester’s honesty is not typical.

  20 The six quotes are from Townsley (1993, pp. 459-460, 453, 465). Townsley is not the only anthropologist to report the existence of a highly metaphoric shamanic language. Siskind (1973, p. 31), regarding the songs of Sharanahua ayahuasqueros, writes: “These songs are sung in an esoteric form of language, difficult to understand, and filled with metaphors.” See also Colchester (1982, p. 142) on the “poetic licence” used by Sanema shamans in their songs, and Chaumeil (1993, p. 415) on the “archaic language which is incomprehensible to most” and which is used by Yagua ayahuasqueros.

  21 The double helix wraps around itself completely every 10 base pairs. As there are 6 billion base pairs in a human cell, the latter’s DNA wraps around itself approximately 600 million times.

  22 The estimate of 97 percent of non-coding passages in the human genome is the most frequent—see, for example, Nowak (1994, p. 608) or Flam (1994, p. 1320); but Calladine and Drew (1992) consider that only 1 percent of the human genome codes for the construction of proteins (p. 14), and Blocker and Salem (1994) write: “Currently, it is generally considered that only 10% of the human genome, at most, codes for proteins; . . . No precise function has yet been found for the remaining 90% of our DNA, and it is not even certain that one will be found: it could possibly be mere ‘scrap’” (p. 127). Regarding palindromes, Frank-Kamenetskii (1993) writes: “Palindromes are frequently encountered in DNA texts. Since DNA consists of two strands (i.e., as if they were two parallel texts), its palindromes may be of two types. Such palindromes in an ordinary, single text are called ‘mirrorlike.’ But more frequently to be met in DNA are palindromes that read alike along either strand in the direction determined by the chemical structure of DNA” (p. 106). The expression “junk DNA,” meanwhile, was first coined by Orgel and Crick (1980) in an article entitled “Selfish DNA: The ultimate parasite,” where they write: “In summary, then, there is a large amount of evidence which suggests, but does not prove, that much DNA in higher organisms is little better than junk. We shall presume, for the rest of this article, that this hypothesis is true” (pp. 604-605). See also Dawkins (1982, pp. 156ff.).

  23 Calladine and Drew (1992, p. 14). Wills (1991, p. 94) estimates that there are between 30,000 and 50,000 “ACACACACACAC . . .” passages in the human genome. Nowak (1994, p. 609) estimates that the “Alu” sequence (which is 300 bases long) is repeated half a million times in the human genome. According to Watson et al. (1987, p. 668), there are several sorts of “Alu” sequences amounting to a total of a million. Jones (1993, p. 69) considers that approximately a third of the human genome is made up of repeat sequences.

  24 Among the 64 words of the genetic code, only “UGG” has no synonym; it is the only word signifying the amino acid tryptophan. (The words of the genetic code are written in RNA, rather than DNA, withaUinstead of a T.) The 63 other words all have at least one synonym. For instance, there are no fewer than six words for arginine: “CGU,” “CGC,” “CGA,” “CGG,” “AGA,” “AGG.” Moreover, two words have a double meaning: “AUG” and “GUG,” which correspond respectively to amino acids methionine and valine, can also signify to the transcription enzyme where to start transcribing the text (“start”). Lewontin (1992) writes about this ambiguity: “Unfortunately, we do not know how the cell decides among the possible interpretations” (p. 67). Moreover, Watson et al. (1987) write: “Many amino acids are specified by more than one codon, a phenomenon called degeneracy” (p.
437, original italics). Trémolières (1994) writes: “The code is considered to be degenerate. The word is perhaps badly chosen; let us say that we are dealing with a language that has many synonyms” (p. 97).

  25 Editing enzymes are called “snurps” (small nuclear ribonucleoproteins). Regarding the editing of the genetic message, Frank-Kamenetskii (1993) writes: “But what tells the enzyme how to cleave the molecule correctly and how to splice together the resulting RNA fragments? And how do in-between spaces get dropped out in the process? The inner workings of such cutting and assembling are far from simple, for if an enzyme just cuts RNA into pieces, Brownian motion will scatter them around, with no hope for Humpty-Dumpty being put back together again” (p. 79). Blocker and Salem (1994) write: “The role of introns is extremely mysterious. Strangely, they are copied during the first stage of transcription only to end up not being transformed into ‘messages.’ Indeed, ‘pre’-messenger RNA contains the entire gene, introns and exons. Then, still within the nucleus, a complicated mechanism takes out, or edits out, the introns. . . . Furthermore, the editing of a gene can occur in several different ways, from one time to another, often to respond to the particular demands of a given cell type. This means that this ‘choice in editing’ is probably strictly regulated inside each type of cell, but the way in which this regulation is realized remains almost entirely unknown” (p. 128). The alternation of exons and introns within genes is the province of “higher” organisms—in chickens, for instance, the gene corresponding to the instructions to build collagen contains fifty exons (see Watson et al. 1987, p. 629); in comparison, bacterial DNA contains practically no introns. For genes that contain up to 98 percent introns, see Wills (1991, p. 112).

  26 Most estimates consider that the human genome contains 100 thousand genes. But Pollack (1994) writes: “If larger human chromosomes carry as many surprises [as yeast’s], we can expect to find we are carrying, not the current estimate of one hundred thousand genes, but at least four hundred thousand genes, the majority of them unexpected and unknown” (p. 92). Meanwhile, Wade (1995b) reports on the rapid gains on the sequencing of the human genome (“which may be 99% done by 2002”).

  27 For the translation of these signs, see Gardiner (1950, pp. 33, 122, 457, 490, 525) and Jacq (1994, pp. 45, 204).

  8: THROUGH THE EYES OF AN ANT

  1 Jones (1993) writes: “A useless but amusing fact is that if all the DNA in all the cells in a single human being were stretched out it would reach to the moon and back eight thousand times” (p. 5). This calculation is based on an estimate of 3 × 1012 cells in a human body, which is 33 times smaller than the usual estimate of 1014 (which I use to obtain 125 billion miles of DNA in a human body). As I explained in a note to Chapter 7, this estimate varies considerably from one specialist to another.

  2 Margulis and Sagan (1986) write: “In their first two billion years on Earth, prokaryotes continuously transformed the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. They invented all of life’s essential, miniaturized chemical systems—achievements that so far humanity has not approached. This ancient high biotechnology led to the development of fermentation, photosynthesis, oxygen breathing, and the removal of nitrogen gas from the air” (original italics, p. 17). Wills (1991) writes: “So the DNA molecules themselves pack over a hundred trillion times as much information by volume as our most sophisticated information storage devices” (p. 103). Pollack (1994) writes: “The second strand [of the DNA molecule] is the minimum imaginable amount of extra-molecular baggage necessary to make either strand’s information self-replicating” (p. 28).

  3 Luna and Amaringo (1991, pp. 33-34).

  4 For the details regarding the visual system, see Ho and Popp (1993, p. 185) and Wesson (1991, p. 61).

  5 See Weiss (1969), pp. 108, 202 (Avíreri, “the Great Transformer”), p. 212 (“Avíreri creates the seasons), and more generally pp. 199-226. Regarding the universality of the trickster-transformer in creation myths, Radin writes: “In the entire world there is no myth as widespread as the ‘Trickster myth’ that we will deal with here. There are few myths about which we can so confidently say that they belong to humanity’s most ancient modes of expression; few other myths have kept their original content in such an unchanged way. The Trickster myth exists in a clearly recognizable form among the most primitive peoples as well as more evolved ones; we find it among the Ancient Greeks, the Chinese, the Japanese and in the Semitic world.... Though it is always linked to other myths and though it is markedly reconstructed and retold in a new form, the fundamental action seems always to have prevailed over the others” (in Jung, Kerényi, and Radin 1958, p. 7).

  6 Stocco (1994, p. 38).

  7 Harner (1973) writes: “Both Jívaro and Conibo-Shipibo Indians who had seen motion pictures told me that the ayahuasca experiences were comparable to the viewing of films, and my own experience was corroboratory” (p. 173).

  8 In an article entitled “Evidence of photon emission from DNA in living systems,” Rattemeyer et al. (1981) write: “Probably, DNA is the most important source of ‘ultra-weak’ photon emission (or electromagnetic radiation) from living cells” (p. 572). On DNA’s trapping and transfer of electrons, see, for example, Murphy et al. (1993), Beach et al. (1994), Clery (1995), and Hall et al. (1996); Hall et al. write: “Although the reaction we have described involves long-range photoinduced electron transfer, the precise mechanism for this DNA-mediated charge transfer is not yet known” (p. 735).

  9 Wilson (1992) writes: “The black earth is alive with a riot of algae, fungi, nematodes, mites, springtails, enchytraeid worms, thousands of species of bacteria. The handful may be only a tiny fragment of one ecosystem, but because of the genetic codes of its residents it holds more order than can be found on the surfaces of all the planets combined” (p. 345). See also Wilson (1984, p. 16).

  10 Margulis and Sagan (1986) write: “As soon as there were significant quantities of oxygen in the air an ozone shield built up. It formed in the stratosphere, floating on top of the rest of the air. This layer of three-atom oxygen molecules put a final stop to the abiotic synthesis of organic compounds by screening out the high-energy ultra-violet rays” (p. 112). Meanwhile, the depth of the layer of microbial life on the planet is only beginning to be investigated—see Broad (1994). Frederickson and Onstott (1996) write in their article “Microbes deep inside the earth” that they have found bacteria “from depths extending to 2.8 kilometers (1.7 miles) below the surface” (p. 45). Regarding the presence of cell-based life in the air we breathe, Krajick (1997) writes: “A cubic yard of the atmosphere can contain hundreds of thousands of bacteria, viruses, fungal spores, pollen grains, lichens, algae, and protozoa” (p. 67).

  11 Quoted in Gebhard-Sayer (1987, p. 25).

  12 Harner (1973) writes: “The shamans under the influence of ayahuasca see snakes apparently at least as often as any other single class of beings” (p. 161). Harner cites visions of snakes among the Jívaro, Amahuaca, Tukano, Siona, Piro, and Ixiamas Chama. According to Schultes and Hofmann (1979): “Ingestion of Ayahuasca usually induces nausea, dizziness, vomiting, and leads to either an euphoric or an aggressive state. Frequently the Indian sees overpowering attacks of huge snakes or jaguars. These animals often humiliate him because he is a mere man” (p. 121).

  13 In a groundbreaking and fascinating work, Reichel-Dolmatoff (1978) gave color crayons to Desana-Tukano shamans and asked them to draw their visions; there are a good number of serpents in these drawings—see drawings, I, IV, V, VI, VII, XVIII, XXI, XXIII, XXVI, XXVII, XXIX, XXXI, and XXXII; the latter shows two pairs of serpents wrapping around each other in spirals and, to their right, a yellow double helix; according to the caption: “This design represents four ‘yagé snakes’ (gahpí piró) that are seen after one or two cups of yagé and are in the act of climbing up the house-posts and winding around the rafters. The other, irregular, lines represent luminous sensations in the form of yellow flashes” (p. 112). Dobkin de Rios (1974) writes about the inhabitants of Iquitos who cons
ult ayahuasqueros: “Informants repeatedly told of the boa appearing before them while under the effects of ayahuasca. However, despite the negative implications of a large, fearsome creature, this shared vision was believed to be an omen of future healing” (p. 16). See also Dobkin de Rios (1972, pp. 118-120). William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg (1963) were among the first to write about ayahuasca; Ginsberg describes his visions: “And then the whole fucking Cosmos broke loose around me, I think the strongest and worst I’ve ever had it nearly . . .—First I began to realize my worry about the mosquitoes or vomiting was silly as there was the great stake of life and Death—I felt faced by Death, my skull in my beard on pallet on porch rolling back and forth and settling finally as if in reproduction of the last physical move I make before settling into real death—got nauseous, rushed out and began vomiting, all covered with snakes, like a Snake Seraph, colored serpents in aureole around my body, I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe—or a Jivaro in headdress with fangs vomiting up in realization of the Murder of the Universe—my death to come—everyone’s death to come—all unready—I unready . . .” (pp. 51-52). The Cashinahua talk also of brightly colored and large snakes (see Kensinger 1973, p. 9), as does ayahuasquero Manuel Córdoba-Rios (see Lamb 1971, p. 38). Anthropologist Michael Taussig (1987) writes about his personal experience with ayahuasca: “My body is distorting and I’m very frightened, limbs stretch and become detached, my body no longer belongs to me, then it does. I am an octopus, I condense into smallness. The candlelight creates shapes of a new world, animal forms and menacing.... Self-hate and paranoia is stimulated by horrible animals—pigs with queer snouts, slithering snakes gliding across one another, rodents with fish-fin wings. I am outside trying to vomit; the stars and the wind above, and the corral for support. It’s full of animals; moving” (p. 141). Some anthropologists drink ayahuasca without seeing snakes; Philippe Descola (1996) writes about his experience with the Achuar Jivaros: “It seems likely that the strange beings, monstrous spirits and animals in a perpetual state of metamorphosis that throng their visions—but have not yet visited me—appear to them like a succession of temporarily coagulated forms against a moving background composed of the geometric patterns whose strange beauty I am now experiencing” (p. 208)—though barely a page previous to this he also writes: “Animal forms of unrecognized species display their metamorphoses and transformations before my eyes: the water-marked skin of the anaconda merges into tortoise-shell scales that elongate into the stripes of an armadillo, then reshape into the crest of an iguana against the intense blue of the wings of a Morpho butterfly, then stretch into black stripes which immediately fragment into a constellation of haloes standing out against the silky fur of some large cat” (p. 207). Some people hallucinate with greater difficulty than others; the dose of the hallucinogen also plays a role; this may have influenced Descola’s experiences based on “half a coffee-cupful” of ayahuasca (p. 206). According to Reichel-Dolmatoff (1975), the Desana-Tukano people can glance at a drawing of hallucinations and estimate almost exactly how many cups of ayahuasca the artist had consumed: “‘This is what one sees after two cups,’ they would say; or ‘This one can see after six cups’” (p. 173).