The Cosmic Serpent (23 page)

During this investigation I complemented months of straightforward scholastic work (reading, note taking, and categorizing) with defocalized approaches (such as walking in nature, nocturnal soliloquies, dissonant music, daydreaming), which greatly helped me find my way. My inspiration for this is once again shamanic. But shamans are not the only ones to seek knowledge by cultivating defocalization. Artists have done this throughout the ages. As Antonin Artaud wrote: “I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.”
¹²

DID I SEE imaginary connections in my fever? Am I wrong in linking DNA to these cosmic serpents from around the world, these sky-ropes and axis mundi? Some of my colleagues will think so. Here's one of the reasons:

In the nineteenth century the first anthropologists set about comparing cultures and elaborating theories on the basis of the similarities they found. When they discovered, for instance, that bagpipes were played not only in Scotland, but in Arabia and the Ukraine, they established false connections between these cultures. Then they realized that people could do similar things for different reasons. Since then, anthropology has backed away from grand generalizations, denounced “abuses of the comparative method,” and locked itself into specificity bordering on myopia. This is why anthropologists who study Western Amazonia's hallucinatory shamanism limit themselves to specific analyses of a given culture—failing to see the essential common points between cultures. So their fine-grained analyses allow them to see that the diet of an apprentice ayahuasquero is based on the consumption of bananas and/or fish. But they do not notice that this diet is practiced throughout Western Amazonia, and so they do not consider that it may have a biochemical basis—which in fact it does.

By shunning comparisons between cultures, one ends up masking true connections and fragmenting reality a little more, without even realizing it.

Is the cosmic serpent of the Shipibo-Conibo, the Aztecs, the Australian Aborigines, and the Ancient Egyptians the same? No, will reply the anthropologists who insist on cultural specificity; to believe otherwise, according to them, comes down to making the same mistake as Mircea Eliade four decades ago, when he detached all those symbols from their contexts, obliterated the sociocultural aspect of phenomena, mutilated the facts, and so on. The critique is well known now, and it is time to turn it on its head. In the name of
what
does one mask fundamental similarities in human symbolism—if not out of a stubborn loyalty to rationalist fragmentation? How can one explain these similarities with a concept other than chance—which is more an
absence of concept
than anything? Why insist on taking reality apart, but never try putting it back together again?

 

ACCORDING TO MY HYPOTHESIS, shamans take their consciousness down to the molecular level and gain access to biomolecular information. But what actually goes on in the brain/mind of an ayahuasquero when this occurs? What is the nature of a shaman's communication with the animate essences of nature? The clear answer is that more research is needed in consciousness, shamanism, molecular biology, and their interrelatedness.

Rationalism separates things to understand them. But its fragmented disciplines have limited perspectives and blind spots. And as any driver knows, it is important to pay attention to blind spots, because they can contain vital information. To reach a fuller understanding of reality, science will have to shift its gaze. Could shamanism help science to defocalize? My experience indicates that engaging shamanic knowledge requires looking into a great number of disciplines and thinking about how they fit together.

 

FINALLY, a last question: Where does life come from?

Over the last decade, scientific research has come up against the impossibility that a single bacterium, representing the smallest unit of independent life as we know it, could have emerged by chance from any kind of “prebiotic soup.”
¹³
Given that a cosmic origin, such as the one proposed by Francis Crick in his “directed panspermia” speculation, is not scientifically verifiable, scientists have focused almost exclusively on terrestrial scenarios.
¹⁴
According to these, precursor molecules took shape (by chance) and prepared the way for a world based on DNA and proteins. However, these different scenarios—based on RNA, peptides, clay, undersea volcanic sulfur, or small oily bubbles—all propose explanations relying on systems that have, by definition, been replaced by life as we know it, without leaving any traces.
¹⁵
These, too, are speculations that cannot be verified scientifically.
¹⁶

The scientific study of the origins of life leads to an impasse, where agnosticism seems to be the only reasonable and rigorous position. As Robert Shapiro writes in his book
Origins: A skeptic's guide to the creation of life on Earth:
“We do not have the slightest idea about how life got started. The very particular set of chemicals that were necessary remains unknown to us. The process itself could have included an improbable event, as it could have happened according to a practically ineluctable sequence. It could have required several hundred million years, or only a few millennia. It could have happened in a tepid pool, or in a hydrothermal source at the bottom of the ocean, in a bubble in the atmosphere, or somewhere else than on Earth, out in the cosmos.”
¹⁷

Any certitude on this question is a matter of
faith
. So what do shamanic and mythological traditions say in this regard? According to Lawrence Sullivan, who has studied the indigenous religions of South America in detail: “In the myths recorded to date, the majority of South American cultures show little extended interest in absolute beginnings.”
¹⁸

Where does life come from? Perhaps the answer is not graspable by mere human beings. Chuang-Tzu implied as much a long time ago, when he wrote: “There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is nonbeing. But I do not know, when it comes to nonbeing, which is really being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I do not know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something.”
¹⁹

All things considered, wisdom requires not only the investigation of many things, but contemplation of the mystery.

NOTES

1
According to La Barre (1976), an anthropologist known for his studies of the indigenous uses of the peyote cactus, Castaneda's first book “is pseudo-profound, sophomoric and deeply vulgar. To one reader at least, for decades interested in Amerindian hallucinogens, the book is frustratingly and tiresomely dull, posturing pseudo-ethnography and, intellectually, kitsch” (p. 42). De Mille (1980) calls Castaneda's work a “hoax” and a “farce” (pp. 11, 22).

2
The projects were carried out despite an independent evaluation done in 1981 for the United States Agency for International Development, which showed that all the “uninhabited” areas the Peruvian government proposed to develop and colonize were actually occupied by indigenous people who had been there for millennia and who, in some cases, had already reached their territory's carrying capacity—see Smith (1982, pp. 39-57).

3
A large majority of Ashaninca men living in the Pichis Valley in 1985 spoke fluent Spanish.

4
Toé
is
Brugmansia suaveolens.
According to Schultes and Hofmann (1979, pp.128-129),
Brugmansia
and
Datura
were long considered to belong to the same genus, but were finally separated for morphological and biological reasons. However, their alkaloid content is similar.

1
In this paragraph, I simplify the possible ingredients of ayahuasca. Building on the work of Rivier and Lindgren (1972), McKenna, Towers, and Abbott (1984) show that the
Psychotria viridis
bush (
chacruna
in Spanish) is almost invariably the source of the dimethyltryptamine contained in the ayahuasca brew prepared in the Peruvian Amazon, while in Colombia the
Diplopterys cabrerana
vine is used instead. The only constant in the different ayahuasca recipes is the
Banisteriopsis caapi
vine, containing three monoamine oxidase inhibitors, harmine, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmine, which are also hallucinogenic at sufficient dose levels. As Luna (1986) points out, the basic mixture is often used to reveal the properties of all sorts of other plants; thus, “the number of additives is unlimited, simply because ayahuasca is a means of exploring properties of new plants and substances by studying the changes they cause on the hallucinatory experience, and by examining the content of the visions” (p. 159). According to McKenna, Luna, and Towers (1986), ayahuasca admixtures constitute a veritable “non-investigated pharmacopoeia.” It should also be noted that the
Banisteriopsis caapi
vine is commonly known as “ayahuasca,” not to be confused with the brew of the same name of which it is a component. See Schultes and Hofmann (1979) for further information on these different plants. Concerning the endogenous production of dimethyltryptamine in the human brain, see Smythies et al. (1979) and Barker et al. (1981)—though Rivier (1996 personal communication) warns that current extraction procedures can lead to chemical transformation and that the presence of dimethyltryptamine in extracted cerebrospinal liquid does not prove its endogenous existence; it could simply be the result of the transformation of endogenous tryptamines, such as 5-hydroxytryptamine (serotonin). According to the archeological evidence gathered by Naranjo (1986), Amazonian peoples have been using ayahuasca for at least five thousand years. The quote in the text is from Schultes (1972, pp. 38-39). Finally, Lévi-Strauss (1950) writes: “Few primitive people have acquired as complete a knowledge of the physical and chemical properties of their botanical environment as the South American Indian” (p. 484).

2
The use of hallucinogens is by no means uniform across the immensity of the Amazonian Basin. Out of approximately 400 indigenous peoples, Luna (1986) lists 72 who use ayahuasca and who are concentrated in Western Amazonia. In other parts of the Amazon, dimethyltryptamine-based hallucinogens are also used, but are extracted from different plants, such as
Virola
—which is snuffed in powder form (see Schultes and Hofmann 1979, pp. 164-171). Some peoples use only tobacco, the hallucinogenic properties of which have been documented by Wilbert (1987). Finally, in some Amazonian cultures, shamans work with dreams rather than hallucinations (see Perrin 1992b, Kracke 1992, and Wright 1992). See Schultes and Raffauf (1990, p. 9) for the estimate of 80,000 plant species in the Amazon.

3
Reichel-Dolmatoff (1971, 1975, 1978), Chaumeil (1982, 1983), Chevalier (1982), Luna (1984, 1986), and Gebhart-Sayer (1986) are exceptions.

4
Darwin (1871, p. 197).

5
The word “primitive” comes from the Latin
primitivus,
first born. Regarding the foundation of anthropology on an illusory object of study, see Kuper (1988).

6
Tylor (1866, p. 86). The word “savage” comes from the Latin
silvaticus,
“of the forest.”

7
Malinowski (1922) writes with satisfaction: “Ethnology has introduced law and order into what seemed chaotic and freakish. It has transformed for us the sensational, wild and unaccountable world of ‘savages' into a number of well ordered communities, governed by law, behaving and thinking according to consistent principles” (pp. 9-10).

8
Lévi-Strauss (1963a), explaining the notion of “order of orders,” writes: “Thus anthropology considers the whole social fabric as a network of different types of orders. The kinship system provides a way to order individuals according to certain rules; social organization is another way of ordering individuals and groups; social stratifications, whether economic or political, provide us with a third type; and all these orders can themselves be ordered by showing the kind of relationships which exist among them, how they interact with one another on both the synchronic and the diachronic levels” (p. 312). Trinh (1989) writes: “Science is Truth, and what anthropology seeks first and foremost through its noble defense of the native's cause (whose cause? you may ask) is its own elevation to the rank of Science” (p. 57).

9
Anthropological discourse is not understandable by those who are its object, but anthropologists have generally not considered this a problem. As Malinowski (1922) writes: “Unfortunately, the native can neither get outside his tribal atmospheres and see it objectively, nor if he could, would he have intellectual and linguistic means sufficient to express it” (p. 454). Likewise, Descola (1996) writes: “The underlying logic detected by scholarly analysis seldom rises into the conscious minds of the members of the culture that he is studying. They are no more capable of formulating it than a young child is capable of setting out the grammatical rules of a language that he has, notwithstanding, mastered” (p. 144).

10
Lévi-Strauss (1949a pp. 154-155).

11
Rosaldo (1989 p. 180). Bourdieu (1990) writes: “Undue projection of the subject onto the object is never more evident than in the case of the primitivist participation of the bewitched or mystic anthropologist, which, like populist immersion, also plays on the objective distance from the object to play the game as a game while waiting to leave it in order to tell it. This means that participant observation is, as it were, a contradiction in terms (as anyone who has tried to do it will have confirmed in practice)” (p. 34). The published translation of Bourdieu's paragraph is imprecise, and I have rectified it here; see the French original, Bourdieu (1980 p. 57) in comparison.