This adventure in science and imagination, which the Medical Tribune said might herald "a Copernican revolution for the life sciences," leads the reader through unexplored jungles and uncharted aspects of mind to the heart of knowledge.

In a first-person narrative of scientific discovery that opens new perspectives on biology, anthropology, and the limits of rationalism, The Cosmic Serpent reveals how startlingly different the world around us appears when we open our minds to it.

The Cosmic Serpent is doubly themed.

• One theme is that of the symbol of the creator serpent (or twin serpents) as the source of knowledge and of all life itself.
• The other theme is that of DNA which in our modern western world-view is the source of all life and all organic information.
• These two threads are wound about in a spiraling narrative like the double helix of the DNA molecule or the twin serpents found in the timeless myths of cultures the world over.

The Cosmic Serpent is a major breakthrough for not only the field of entheogens but for all science and perhaps religion too. Originally published in French as Serpent Cosmique, this book presents the journey of a western scientist who ventures past the primitive superstitions of modern anthropology and takes part in a millennia-long scientific research program of Amazonian shamanism; wherein he learns of their seers’ profound communication with other species via experiential access to DNA.

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. We were in the forest squatting next to a bush whose leaves, he claimed, could cure the bite of a deadly snake. “One learns these things by drinking ayahuasca,” he said. But he was not smiling.

It was early 1985, in the community of Quirishari in the Peruvian Amazon’s Pichis Valley. I was twenty-five years old and starting a two-year period of fieldwork to obtain a doctorate in anthropology from Stanford University.

• My training had led me to expect that people would tell tall stories.
• I thought my job as an anthropologist was to discover what they really thought, like some kind of private detective.

During my research on Ashaninca ecology, people in Quirishari regularly mentioned the hallucinatory world of ayahuasqueros, or shamans.

• In conversations about plants, animals, land, or the forest, they would refer to ayahuasqueros as the source of knowledge.
• Each time, I would ask myself what they really meant when they said this.

I had read and enjoyed several books by Carlos Castaneda on the uses of hallucinogenic plants by “Yaqui sorcerer.” But I knew that the anthropological profession had largely discredited Castaneda, accusing him of implausibility, plagiarism, and fabrication. ^[1]

• Though no one explicitly blamed him for getting too close to his subject matter, it seemed clear that a subjective consideration of indigenous hallucinogens could lead to problems within the profession.
• For me, in 1985, the ayahuasqueros’ world represented a gray area that was taboo for the research I was conducting.

Furthermore, my investigation on Ashaninca resource use was not neutral.

• In the early 1980s, international development agencies were pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the “development” of the Peruvian Amazon.
• This consisted of confiscating indigenous territories and turning them over to market-oriented individuals, who would then develop the “jungle” by replacing it with cow pastures.

Experts justified these colonization and deforestation projects by saying that Indians didn’t know how to use their lands rationally. ^[2]

• I wanted to argue the contrary by doing an economic, cultural, and political analysis showing the rational nature of Ashaninca resource use.
• To emphasize the hallucinatory origin of Ashaninca ecological knowledge would have been counterproductive to the main argument underlying my research.

After two months in the field, I experienced an unexpected setback.

• I had left Quirishari for ten days to renew my visa in Lima. On returning to the community I was met with indifference.
• The following day, during an informal meeting in front of the house I was staying in, people asked whether it was true that I was going to return to my country to become a doctor.
• The question surprised me, as I usually described my future profession as “anthropologist” rather than “doctor,” to avoid any confusion with “medical practitioner.”
• It turned out that several employees of the government’s development project, the Pichis-Palcazu Special Project, had come to Quirishari in my absence and inquired about my activities.
• In answer the people showed them my file containing samples of medicinal plants.
• The project employees then scolded the inhabitants of Quirishari for being naive Indians – did they not realize that I was going to become a doctor and make a fortune with their plants?

In fact I had been classifying these plants to show that the tropical forest, which seemed “unused” to the experts flying over it in airplanes, represented a pharmacy for the Ashaninca, among other things.

• I had explained this to the inhabitants of Quirishari at the beginning of my stay.
• However, I knew that any further explanation would only confirm their suspicions, as I was truly going to become a “doctor.”
• I therefore proposed to put an immediate stop to the collection of medicinal plants and to entrust the contentious file to the community’s primary school.
• This settled the matter and dissipated the tension in the air – but it also removed one of the empirical bases on which I had been hoping to build a thesis demonstrating the rational nature of Ashaninca resource use.

After four months of fieldwork I left Quirishari to visit the neighboring community of Cajonari, a seven-mile walk through the forest.

• The inhabitants of Cajonari had let it be known that it was not fair for Quirishari to have the exclusive monopoly on the anthropologist who was giving “accounting” classes.
• These were actually informal arithmetic lessons that I had started to teach at the community’s request.

People in Cajonari gave me a warm welcome.

• We spent several evenings telling stories, singing for my tape recorder, and drinking manioc beer, a milky liquid that tastes like cold, fermented potato soup.
• During the day we did arithmetic, worked in the gardens, or listened to the songs taped the previous evening.
• Everyone wanted to listen to their own performance.

One evening in front of a house half a dozen men and I were drinking manioc beer and chatting in the twilight.

• The conversation veered to the question of “development,” a daily subject in the valley since the arrival of the Pichis-Palcazu Special Project and its $86 million budget.
• In general the Ashaninca expressed frustration, because they were continually being told that they did not know how to produce for a market, whereas their gardens were full of potential products and everyone dreamed of making a little money.

We were discussing the differences between Ashaninca agriculture and “modern” agriculture.

• I already understood that, despite their apparent disorderliness, indigenous gardens were polycultural masterpieces containing up to seventy different plant species that were mixed chaotically, but never innocently.
• During the conversation I praised their practices and ended up expressing my astonishment at their botanical mastery, asking, “So how did you learn all this?”

A man named Ruperto Gomez replied,

“You know, brother Jeremy, to understand what interests you, you must drink ayahuasca.”

I pricked up my ears. I knew that ayahuasca was the main hallucinogen used by the indigenous peoples of Western Amazonia. Ruperto, who was not turning down the calabashes of beer, continued in a confident tone:

“Some say it is occult, which is true, but it is not evil. In truth, ayahuasca is the television of the forest. You can see images and learn things.”

He laughed as he said this, but no one else smiled. He added,

“If you like, I can show you sometime.” ^[3]

I replied that I would indeed be interested.

• Ruperto then launched into a comparison between my “accounting” science and his “occult” science.
• He had lived with the Shipibo, the northern neighbors reputed for their powerful medicine.
• He had followed a complete ayahuasquero apprenticeship, spending long months in the forest eating only bananas, manioc, and palm hearts and ingesting huge quantities of hallucinogens under the watchful eye of a Shipibo ayahuasquero.
• He had just spent eight years away from Cajonari, over the the course of which he had also served in the Peruvian army – a source of personal pride.

On my part, I had certain prejudices about shamanism.

• I imagined the “veritable” shaman to be an old wise person, traditional and detached – somewhat like Don Juan in the Castaneda books.
• Ruperto the wanderer, who had learned the techniques of another tribe, did not correspond to my expectations.
• However, no old wise person had stepped up to initiate me, and I was not going to be choosy.
• Ruperto had made his proposal spontaneously, publicly, and as part of a bargain.
• In return I was to give him a special “advanced” accounting course.
• So I accepted his offer, especially since it seemed that it might not materialize once the effects of the beer had worn off.

Two weeks later I was back in Quirishari, when Ruperto appeared for his first private lesson. He told me before leaving,

“I will return next Saturday. Prepare yourself the day before, eat neither salt nor fat, just a little boiled or roasted manioc.”

He returned on the appointed day with a bottle full of a reddish liquid that was corked with an old corncob.

• I had not followed his instructions, because, deep down, I did not really take the matter seriously.
• The idea of not eating certain foods before an event seemed to me a superstition.
• For lunch I had nibbled a bit of smoked deer meat and some fried manioc.

Two other people had agreed to take ayahuasca under Ruperto’s direction.

• At nightfall, the four of us were sitting on the platform of a quiet house.
• Ruperto lit a cigarette that he had rolled in notebook paper and said, “This is toé.” He passed it around.
• If I had known at that point that toé is a kind of datura, I would perhaps not have inhaled the smoke, because datura plants are powerful and dangerous hallucinogens that are widely recognized for their toxicity. ^[4]
• The toé tasted sweet, though the cigarette paper could have been finer.

Then we each swallowed a cup of ayahuasca. It is extremely bitter and tastes like acrid grapefruit juice. Thirty seconds after swallowing: it, I felt nauseated.

I did not take notes or keep time during the experience.

• The description that follows is based on notes taken the next evening.

First Ruperto sprayed us with perfumed water (agua florida) and tobacco smoke.

• Then he sat down and started to whistle a strikingly beautiful melody.

I began seeing kaleidoscopic images behind my closed eyes, but I was not feeling well.

• Despite Ruperto’s melody, I stood up to go outside and vomit.
• Having disposed of the deer meat and fried manioc remnants, I returned feeling relieved.
• Ruperto told me that I had probably eliminated the ayahuasca also and that if I wanted, I could have same more.
• He checked my pulse and declared me strong enough for a “regular” dose, which I swallowed.

Ruperto started whistling again as I sat down in the darkness of the platform. Images started pouring into my head. In my notes I describe them as,

“unusual or scary: an agouti [forest rodent] with bared teeth and a bloody mouth; very brilliant, shiny, and multicolored snakes; a policeman giving me problems; my father looking worried. …”

Deep hallucinations submerged me. I suddenly found myself surrounded by two gigantic boa constrictors that seemed fifty feet long. I was terrified.

• “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 a part of my arrogance.
• “I feel so ashamed that I no longer dare feel ashamed.
• “Nevertheless, I have to throw up again.”

I stood up feeling totally lost, stepped over the fluorescent snakes like a drunken tightrope walker, and, begging their forgiveness, headed toward a tree next to the house.

• I relate this experience with words on paper. But at the time, language itself seemed inadequate.
• I tried to name what I was seeing, but mostly the words would not stick to the images.
• This was distressing, as if my last link to “reality” had been severed. Reality itself seemed to be no more than a distant and one-dimensional memory.
• I managed nonetheless to understand my feelings, such as “poor little human being who has lost his language and feels sorry for himself.”

I have never felt so completely humble as I did at that moment.

• Leaning against the tree, I started throwing up again.
• In Ashaninca, the word for ayahuasca is kamarampi, from the verb kamarank, “to vomit.”

I closed my eyes, and all I could see was red. I could see the insides of my body, red.

• “I regurgitate not a liquid, but colors, electric red, like blood. My throat hurts.
• “I open my eyes and feel presences next to me, a dark one to my left, about a yard away from my head, and a light one to my right, also a yard away.
• “As I am turned to my left, I am not bothered by the dark presence, because I am aware of it.
• “But I jump when I become aware of the light presence to my right, and I turn to look at it.
• “I can’t really see it with my eyes; I feel so bad, and control my reason so little, that I do not really want to see it.
• “I remain lucid enough to understand that I am not truly vomiting blood.
• “After a while I start wondering what to do. I have so little control that I abandon myself to the instructions that seem to be coming from outside me:
• “now it is time to stop vomiting,
• “now it is time to spit,
• “to blow nose,
• “to rinse mouth with water, not to drink water.
• “I am thirsty, but my body stops me from drinking.”

I looked up and saw an Ashaninca woman dressed in a traditional long cotton robe.

• She was standing about seven yards away from me, and she seemed to be levitating above the ground.
• I could see her in the darkness, which had become clear.
• The qualify of the light reminded me of those night scenes in movies which are filmed by day with a dark filter: somehow, not really dark, because glowing.
• As I looked at this woman, who was staring at me in silent clear darkness, I was once again staggered by this people’s familiarity with a reality that turned me upside down and of which I was totally ignorant.

"Still very confused, I reckon I have done everything, including rinse my face, and I feel amazed that I have been able to do all this by myself.

• I leave the tree, the two presences and the levitating woman, and I return to the group.
• Ruperto asks, ‘Did they tell you not to drink water?’
• I answer, ‘Yes.’
• ‘Are you drunk (mareado)?’
• ‘Yes.’ I sit down and he resumes his song. I have never heard more beautiful music, these slender staccatos that are so high-pitched they verge on humming.
• I follow his song, and take flight. I fly in the air, thousands of feet above the earth, and looking down, I see an all-white planet.
• Suddenly, the song stops, and I find myself on the ground, thinking: ‘He can’t stop now.’
• All I can see are confused images, some of which have an erotic content, like a woman with twenty breasts
• He starts singing again, and I see a green leaf, with its veins, then a human hand, with its veins, and so on relentlessly.
• “It is impossible to remember everything.”

Gradually, the images faded. I was exhausted. I fell asleep shortly after midnight.

The main enigma I encountered during my research on Ashaninca ecology was that these extremely practical and frank people, living almost autonomously in the Amazonian forest, insisted that their extensive botanical knowledge came from plant-induced hallucinations. How could this be true?

The enigma was all the more intriguing because the botanical knowledge of indigenous Amazonians has long astonished scientists.

• The chemical composition of ayahuasca is a case in point. Amazonian shamans have been preparing ayahuasca for millennia.
• The brew is a necessary combination of two plants, which must be boiled together for hours.
• The first contains a hallucinogenic substance, dimethyltryptamine, which also seems to be secreted by the human brain;
• But this hallucinogen has no effect when swallowed, because a stomach enzyme called monoamine oxidase blocks it.
• The second plant, however, contains several substances that inactivate this precise stomach enzyme, allowing the hallucinogen to reach the brain.

The sophistication of this recipe has prompted Richard Evans Schultes, the most renowned ethnobotanist of the twentieth century, to comment:

“One wonders how peoples in primitive societies, with no knowledge of chemistry or physiology, ever hit upon a solution to the activation of an alkaloid by a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Pure experimentation? Perhaps not. The examples are too numerous and may become even more numerous with future research.” ^[1]

So here are people without electron microscopes who choose, among some 80,000 Amazonian plant species,

• The leaves of a bush containing a hallucinogenic brain hormone,
• Which they combine with a vine containing substances that inactivate an enzyme of the digestive tract,
• Which would otherwise block the hallucinogenic effect.
• And they do this to modify their consciousness.

It is as if they knew about the molecular properties of plants and the art of combining them, and when one asks them how they know these things, they say their knowledge comes directly from hallucinogenic plants. ^[2]

Not many anthropologists have looked into this enigma ^[3] — but the failure of academics to consider this kind of mystery is not limited to the Amazon.

• Over the course of the twentieth century, anthropologists have examined shamanic practices around the world without fully grasping them.

A brief history of anthropology reveals a blind spot in its studies of shamanism.

In the nineteenth century, European thinkers considered that some races were more evolved than others. Charles Darwin, one of the founders of the theory of evolution, wrote in 1871:

“With civilised nations, the reduced size of the jaws from lessened use, the habitual play of different muscles serving to express different emotions, and the increased size of the brain from greater intellectual activity, have together produced a considerable effect on their general appearance in comparison with savages.” ^[4]

Anthropology was founded in the second half of the nineteenth century to study “primitive,” “Stone Age” societies. Its underlying goal was to understand where “we” Europeans had come from. ^[5]

The problem for the young discipline was the unreasonable nature of its object of study. According to Edward Tylor, one of the first anthropologists:

“Savages are exceedingly ignorant as regards both physical and moral knowledge; want of discipline makes their opinions crude and their action ineffective in a surprising degree; and the tyranny of tradition at every step imposes upon them thoughts and customs which have been inherited from a different stage of culture, and thus have lost a reasonableness which we may often see them to have possessed in their first origin. Judged by our ordinary modern standard of knowledge, which is at any rate a high one as compared to theirs, much of what they believe to be true, must be set down as false.” ^[6]

The question was: How could one study such incoherence scientifically?

The “father of modern anthropology,” Bronislaw Malinowski, found the answer by developing a method for the objective analysis of "savages.”

• Called “participant observation,” and used to this day, it involves living in close contact with the natives while observing them from a distance.
• By considering native reality with a distant gaze, the anthropologist manages to introduce “law and order into what seemed chaotic and freakish.” ^[7]

From the 1930s onward, anthropology obsessively sought order in its study of others, to elevate itself to the rank of science. ^[8] In the process it transformed reality into next to incomprehensible discourses. ^[9]

Here is an extract from Claude Lévi-Strauss's book The elementary structures of kinship (1949), one of the texts by which anthropology claimed to attain the rank of science:

“For example, in a normal eight-subsection system the grandson would reproduce his father's father's subsection by marriage with the mother's mother's brother's daughter's daughter. The wavering of the Murinbata between the traditional system and the new order ends in practice with the identification of the mother's brother's daughter and the mother's mother's brother's daughter's daughter as the possible marriage partner, i.e., for TJANAMA: nangala = nauola. Hence, a TJIMIJ man marries a namij woman. The father maintains that his daughter is nalyeri (which is the 'conventional' subsection). However, a namij woman is by kinship purima, a 'marriageable' daughter of the sister's son, but according to the subsections she is a sister.” Consequently, her daughter is nabidjin, for according to the aboriginal rule, formulated in a matrilineal idiom: 'namij makes nabidjin.' From this the conflict arises of whether the subsections are patrilineal or matrilineal.” ^[10]

Just when anthropology thought it had established itself within the scientific community thanks to such “structuralist” discourses, it experienced a fundamental setback.

• Its object of study, those primitives living outside of time, started to vanish like snow in the sun; by the middle of the twentieth century, it had become increasingly difficult to find “real” natives who had never had any contact with the industrial world.
• Indeed, such people may never even have existed.
• As early as the second half of the nineteenth century, the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, for instance, were dragooned on a grand scale into the construction of the industrial world, to which they contributed a vital component, rubber.
• Since then most of them have used metal tools of industrial origin.

During the 1960s, this crisis plunged anthropology into the doubt and self-criticism of “poststructuralism.”

• Anthropologists came to realize that their presence changed things, that they were themselves sorts of colonial agents, and, worse yet, that their methodology was flawed.
• Participant observation is a contradiction in terms, because it is impossible to observe people from above while participating in the action at their side, to watch the game from the stands while playing on the field.
• The anthropological method condemns its practitioners to “dance on the edge of a paradox” ^[11] and to play the schizophrenic role of the player‑commentator.
• Furthermore, the distant gaze of the anthropologist cannot perceive itself, and those who aspire to objectivity by using it cannot see their own presuppositions.
• As Pierre Bourdieu put it, objectivism “fails to objectify its objectifying relationship.” ^[12]

Anthropologists discovered that their gaze was a tool of domination and that their discipline was not only a child of colonialism, it also served the colonial cause through its own practice. The “unbiased and supra-cultural language of the observer” was actually a colonial discourse and a form of domination. ^[13]

The solution for the discipline consisted in accepting that it was not a science, but a form of interpretation. Claude Lévi-Strauss himself came to say:

“The human sciences are only sciences by way of a self-flattering imposture. They run into an insurmountable limit, because the realities they aspire to understand are of the same order of complexity as the intellectual means they deploy. Therefore they are incapable of mastering their object, and always will be.” ^[14]

Anthropologists invented the word 'shamanism” to classify the least comprehensible practices of "primitive” peoples.

The word “shaman” is originally Siberian. Its etymology is uncertain. ^[15]

• In the Tungus language, a saman is a person who beats a drum, enters into trance, and cures people.
• The first Russian observers who related the activities of these saman described them as mentally ill.

From the early twentieth century onward, anthropologists progressively extended the use of this Siberian term and found shamans in Indonesia, Uganda, the Arctic, and Amazonia.

• Some played drums, others drank plant decoctions and sang; some claimed to cure, others cast spells.
• They were unanimously considered neurotic, epileptic, psychotic, hysterical, or schizophrenic. ^[16]

As George Devereux, an authority on the matter, wrote:

“In brief, there is no reason and no excuse for not considering the shaman as a severe neurotic and even a psychotic. In addition, shamanism is often also culture dystonic. … Briefly stated, we hold that the shaman is mentally deranged. This is also the opinion of Kroeber and Linton.” ^[17]

In the middle of the twentieth century, anthropologists began to realize not only that “primitives” did not exist as such, but that shamans were not crazy.

• The change came abruptly. In 1949, Claude Lévi-Strauss stated in a key essay that the shaman, far from being mentally ill, was in fact a kind of psychotherapist — the difference being that “the psychoanalyst listens, whereas the shaman speaks.”
• For Lévi-Strauss, the shaman is above all a creator of order, who cures people by transforming their “incoherent and arbitrary pains” into “an ordered and intelligible form.” ^[18]

The shaman as creator of order became the creed of a new generation of anthropologists.

• From 1960 to 1980, the established authorities of the discipline defined the shaman as a creator of order, a master of chaos, or an avoider of disorder. ^[19]

Of course, things did not happen so simply.

• Until the late 1960s, several members of the old school continued to claim that shamanism was a form of mental illness, ^[20]
• And in the 1970s it became fashionable to present the shaman as a specialist in all kinds of domains who plays “the roles of physician, pharmacologist, psychotherapist, sociologist, philosopher, lawyer, astrologer, and priest.” ^[21]
• Finally, in the 1980s, a few iconoclasts claimed that shamans were creators of disorder.

So who are these shamans? Schizophrenics or creators of order? Jacks-of-all-trades or creators of disorder?

The answer lies in the mirror.

• When anthropology was a young science, unsure of its own identity and unaware of the schizophrenic nature of its own methodology, it considered shamans to be mentally ill.
• When “structuralist” anthropology claimed to have attained the rank of science, and anthropologists busied themselves finding order in order, shamans became creators of order.
• When the discipline went into a “poststructuralist” identity crisis, unable to decide whether it was a science or a form of interpretation, shamans started exercising all kinds of professions.
• Finally, some anthropologists began questioning their discipline's obsessive search for order, and they saw shamans as those whose power lies in “insistently questioning and undermining the search for order.” ^[22]

It would seem, then, that the reality hiding behind the concept of “shamanism” reflects the anthropologist's gaze, independently of its angle.

In 1951, around the time Lévi-Strauss was transforming the schizophrenic shaman into the psychoanalyst-creator of order, Mireca Eliade, one of the foremost authorities in the history of religions, published the now classic Shamanism: Archaic techniques of ecstasy. To this day, it is the only attempt at a world synthesis on the subject.

Eliade, who was not a trained anthropologist, saw neither mental illness nor creation of order.

• Instead he identified astonishing similarities in the practices and concepts of shamans the world over.
• Wherever these “technicians of ecstasy” operate, they specialize in a trance during which their “soul is believed to leave the body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld.”
• They all speak a “secret language” which they learn directly from the spirits, by imitation.
• They talk of a ladder — or a vine, a rope, a spiral staircase, a twisted rope ladder — that connects heaven and earth and which they use to gain access to the world of spirits.
• They consider these spirits to have come from the sky and to have created life on earth. ^[23]

Anthropologists rarely appreciate it when library-based intellectuals use their work without muddying their boots and discover connections that they had not seen. They made no exception with Eliade, rejecting his work because of its “latent mysticism.”

• They accused him of detaching symbols from their contexts, mutilating and distorting the facts, obliterating the sociocultural aspect of the phenomenon and locking it into a mystical dead end.
• Recently, it was even said that Eliade's notion of celestial flight was “a potentially fascistic portrayal of third world healing.” ^[24]

Nevertheless, despite these criticisms, Eliade understood before many anthropologists that it is useful to take people and their practices seriously and to pay attention to the detail of what they say and do.

Some anthropologists realized that the academic studies of shamanism were going around in circles.

• This led them to criticize the very notion of “shamanism.”
• Clifford Geertz, for instance, wrote that shamanism is one of those “insipid categories by means of which ethnographers of religion devitalize their data.” ^[25]

However, abandoning the concept of “shamanism,” as was done thirty years ago with the notion of “totemism,” ^[26] will not clarify the reality to which it refers.

• The difficulty of grasping “shamanism” lies not so much in the concept itself as in the gaze of those who use it.
• The academic analysis of shamanism will always be the rational study of the nonrational — in other words, a self-contradictory proposition or a cul‑de‑sac.

Perhaps the most revealing example in this respect is provided by Luis Eduardo Luna, the author of an excellent study of the shamanism of mestizo avahuasqueros in the Peruvian Amazon, who practice what they call vegetalismo, a form of popular medicine based on hallucinogenic plants, singing, and dieting. Luna focuses on the techniques of these shamans and reports their opinions without interpreting them. He writes:

“They say that ayahuasca is a doctor. It possesses a strong spirit and it is considered an intelligent being with which it is possible to establish rapport, and from which it is possible to acquire knowledge and power if the diet and other prescriptions are carefully followed.”

However, Luna writes in a rational language for a rational public (“us”), and it is not rational to claim that certain plants are intelligent beings capable of communication.

• Luna, who explores the question of “plant-teachers” over several pages, ends up concluding: “Nothing can be said … until we have some kind of understanding as to what these people are really talking about, when they say that the plants themselves reveal their properties.” ^[27]
• One cannot consider that what they say is real, because, in reality as “we” know it, plants do not communicate.

There is the blind spot.

Two days after my first ayahuasca experience, I was walking in the forest with Carlos Perez Shuma, my main Ashaninca consultant.

• Carlos was forty-five years old and was an experienced tabaquero-ayahuasquero who had also dealt extensively with missionaries and colonists.
• We reached a river that we had to cross and paused. The moment seemed right to ask a few questions, particularly since Carlos had also participated in the hallucinatory session two nights previously.
• “Tío [uncle],” I asked, “what are these enormous snakes one sees when one drinks ayahuasca?” “Next time, bring your camera and take their picture,” he answered, “That way you will be able to analyse them at your leisure.”

I laughed, saying I did not think the visions would appear on film.

• “Yes they would,” he said, “because their colors are so bright.”
• With this, he stood up and started wading across the river.

I scampered after him, thinking about what he had just said. It had never occurred to me that one could seriously consider taking pictures of hallucinations.

• I was certain that if I did so, I would only obtain photos of darkness.
• But I knew that this would not prove anything, because he could always question the capacities of my camera.
• In any case, these people seemed to consider the visions produced by hallucinogenic plants to be at least as real as the ordinary reality we all perceive.

A few weeks later I started recording a series of interviews with Carlos, who had agreed to tell me his life story.

• The first evening, we sat on the platform of his house, surrounded by the sounds of the forest at night.
• A kerosene lamp made of a tin can and a cotton wick provided a flickering source of light and gave off blackish fumes.

Despite my training, it was the first time in my life that I interviewed someone. I did not know where to start, so I asked him to start at the beginning.

Carlos was born in the Perene Valley in 1940.

• He lost his parents when he was five years old in the waves of epidemics that swept the area with the arrival of white settlers.
• His uncle took care of him for several years.
• Then he went to an Adventist mission, where he learned to speak, read, and write Spanish.

What follows is an extract from the transcript of this first interview. We talked in Spanish, which is neither his mother tongue nor mine, as a faithful translation reveals:

“My uncle was a tabaquero. I watched him take lots of tobacco, dry it a bit in the sun, and cook it. I wondered what it could be. 'That's tobacco,' my uncle told me, and once the mixture was good and black, he started tasting it with a little stick. I thought it was sweet, like concentrated cane juice. When he ate his tobacco, he could give people good advice. He could tell them, 'this is good' or 'this is not good.' I don't know what the intellectuals say now, but in those days, all the Adventist missionaries said, 'He is listening to his bats, to his Satan.' He had no book to help him see, but what he said was true: 'Everybody has turned away from these things, now they all go to the missionary. I do not know how to read, but I know how to do these things. I know how to take tobacco, and I know all these things.' So when he talked, I listened. He told me: 'Listen nephew, when you are a grown man, find a woman to look after, but before that, you must not only learn how to write, you must also learn these things.'”

“Learn to take tobacco?” I asked.

“Take tobacco and cure. When people would come to him, my uncle would say: 'Why do you ask me to cure you, when you say you know God now that you are at the mission, and I do not know God? Why don't you ask the pastor to pray, since he says he can cure people with prayers? Why don't you go to him?' But he would cure them anyway. He would pull out his coca, start chewing it, and sit down like us here now. Then, he would swallow his tobacco. Meanwhile, I would watch him and ask him what he was doing. The first time I saw him cure, he said: 'Very well, bring me the sick baby.' First, he touched the baby, then took his pulse: 'Ah, I see, he's in a bad way. The illness is here.' Then, he started sucking the spot [suction noise]. Then, he spat it out like this: ptt! Then, again, and a third time ptt! There, very good. Then he told the mother: 'Something has shocked this little one, so here is a herb to bathe him. After that, let him rest.' The next day, one could already see an improvement in the baby's health. So I took a liking to it and decided to learn. Ooh! The first time I had tobacco, I didn't sleep.”

“How old were you?”

“I was eight years old. I thought tobacco was sweet. But it was so bitter that I couldn't even swallow it. My uncle said: 'That's the secret of tobacco.' Then, he showed me everything. He gave me a tobacco gourd. Little by little, I learned to take it and to resist. Fairly quickly, I stopped vomiting.”

“Did your uncle also teach you how to use ayahuasca?”

“No, I learned that later, with my father-in-law. …”

Over the following months, I recorded approximately twenty hours on the meanders of Carlos's life.

• He spoke Spanish better than anybody in Quirishari; in the past, he had taught it to other Ashaninca in an Adventist school.
• However, his grammar was flexible, and he talked with unexpected rhythms, punctuating his sentences with pauses, gestures, and noises that completed his vocabulary nicely, but that are difficult to put into written English.
• Furthermore, his narrative style varied from a first-person account to the commentary of a narrator who also plays the roles of the characters.
• This is no doubt more appropriate for oratory, or radio plays, than for a text.

By taping Carlos's life story, I was not trying to establish the point of view of a “typical” Ashaninca.

• Rather, I was trying to grasp some specifics of local history by following the personal trajectory of one man.
• In particular, I was interested in questions of territory in the Pichis Valley:
• Who owned which lands, and since when? Who used which resources?
• As it happens, the overall history of the Ashaninca in the twentieth century is closely defined by the progressive expropriation of their territory by outsiders, as Carlos's life story reveals.

Carlos's birthplace, the Perene Valley, was the first Ashaninca region to undergo colonization.

• By 1940, the majority of indigenous lands in the area had already been confiscated.
• Ten years later, Carlos the young orphan had followed the mass migration of the Perene Ashaninca toward the Pichis Valley, where the forests were still free of colonists and diseases.
• After living twenty-six years in this new homeland, Carlos had been elected to the presidency of the congress of the Association of the Indigenous Communities of the Pichis (ACONAP).
• The goal of this organization was to defend indigenous lands from a new onslaught of colonization.
• Carlos was forced to abandon his position after four years when he was bitten by a snake. At this point, he retired to Quirishari to cure himself “with ayahuasca and other plants.”

When I appeared five years later, he was living like a retired politician, satisfied with the tranquillity, but nostalgic for yesteryear's struggles, he did not seem displeased at the idea of confiding his memoirs to a visiting anthropologist.

Over the course of our conversations, I often asked Carlos about the places he had lived, directing the conversation toward the solid ground of social geography. But he would regularly answer in ways that pointed toward shamanism and mythology. For example:

“The earthquake in the Perene, was that in 1948 or 1947?”

“1947.”

“And were you there at the time?”

“Of course, at that time, I was a young boy. It happened in Pichanaki. It killed three people. Pichanaki was a nice plain, but now there are more than twenty meters of earth burying the old village. It used to be a fertile lowland, good for corn.”

“And why was this place called Pichanaki?”

“That's the name that the first natives gave it in the old days, the tabaqueros, the avahuasqueros. As I have explained to you, it is simply in their visions that they were told that the river is called Pichanaki.”

“Ah yes. And 'Pichanaki' means something? All these place names that finish in -aki, like Yurinaki also, what does 'aki' mean?”

“It means that there are many minerals in the center of these places. The word means 'eye' in our language.”

“And 'Picha'?”

“He is called like that, because in the hills, there is a representative of the animals whose name is Picha.”

“Ah, 'the eyes of Picha.'”

“Now you see.”

I often asked Carlos to explain the origin of place names to me. He would invariably reply that nature itself had communicated them to the ayahuasqueros-tabaqueros in their hallucinations:

“That is how nature talks, because in nature, there is God, and God talks to us in our visions. When an ayahuasquero drinks his plant brew, the spirits present themselves to him and explain everything.”

Listening to Carlos's stories, I gradually became familiar with some of the characters of Ashaninca mythology. For instance, he often talked of Avíreri:

“According to our ancient belief, he is the one of the forest, he is our god. He was the one who had the idea of making people appear.”

Carlos also referred to invisible beings, called maninkari, who are found in animals, plants, mountains, streams, lakes, and certain crystals, and who are sources of knowledge:

“The maninkari taught us how to spin and weave cotton, and how to make clothes. Before, our ancestors lived naked in the forest. Who else could have taught us to weave? That is how our intelligence was born, and that is how we natives of the forest know how to weave.”

I had not come to Quirishari to study indigenous mythology. I even considered the study of mythology to be a useless and “reactionary” pastime.

• What counted for me were the hectares confiscated in the name of “development” and the millions of dollars in international funds that financed the operation.
• With my research, I was trying to demonstrate that true development consisted first in recognizing the territorial rights of indigenous people.
• My point of view was materialist and political, rather than mystical. ^[1]

So, after nine months in Quirishari, it was almost despite myself that I started reading Gerald Weiss's doctoral dissertation on Ashaninca mythology, entitled The Cosmology of the Campa Indians of Eastern Peru — “Campa” being the disparaging word used until recently to designate the Ashaninca, who do not appreciate it. ^[2]

I discovered as I read this thesis that Carlos was not making up fanciful stories. On the contrary, he was providing me with concise elements of the main cosmological beliefs of his culture, as documented extensively by Weiss in the 1960s.

According to Weiss, the Ashaninca believe in the existence of invisible spirits called maninkari, literally “those who are hidden,” who can nonetheless be seen by ingesting tobacco and ayahuasca.

• They are also called ashaninka, “our fellows,” as they are considered to be ancestors with whom one has kinship.
• As these maninkari are also present in plants and animals, the Ashaninca think of themselves as members of the same family as herons, otters, hummingbirds, and so on, who are all perani ashaninka, all our fellows long ago. ^[3]

Some maninkari are more important than others. Weiss distinguishes a hierarchy among these spirits.

• Avíreri, the god who creates by transformation, is the most powerful of them all.
• In Ashaninca myths, Avíreri, accompanied by his sister, creates the seasons with the music of his panpipes.
• He shapes human beings by blowing on earth.
• Then he wanders with his grandson Kíri, casually transforming human beings into insects, fruit trees, animals, or rock formations.
• Finally, Avíreri gets drunk at a festival. His malicious sister invites him to dance and pushes him into a hole that she has dug beforehand.
• Then she pretends to pull him out by throwing him a thread, a cord, and finally a rope, none of which is strong enough.
• Avíreri decides to escape by digging a tunnel into the underworld. He ends up in a place called “river's end,” where a strangler vine wraps itself around him.
• From there, he continues to sustain his numerous children of the earth.

And Weiss concludes:

“There Avíreri remains to the present day, no more able to move, because of the vine that constrains him.” ^[4]

Finally, Weiss notes in passing:

“To be sure, although these accounts are to be classified and referred to as myths, for the Campas they are reliable reports handed down orally from past generations of real happenings, happenings as authentically real as any actual event of past years that someone still remembers or was told about.” ^[5]

I had the same impression as Weiss: My Ashaninca informants discussed mythological characters and events as if they were real.

• This seemed quite fanciful to me, but I did not say so.
• As an anthropologist I was trained to respect outlandish beliefs.

The inhabitants of Quirishari had made it clear to me that I was not supposed to gather plant samples.

• However, I could study their uses of the forest as I pleased, and I could try their plant remedies.

So whenever I had a health problem and people told me they knew of a cure, I tried it.

• Often the results went beyond not only my expectations, but my very understanding of reality.
• For instance, I had suffered from chronic back pain since the age of seventeen, having played too much tennis during my adolescence.
• I had consulted several European doctors, who had used cortisone injections and heat treatment, to no avail.
• In Quirishari there was a man, Ahelardo Shingari, known for his “body medicine.”
• He proposed to cure my back pain by administering a sanango tea at the new moon.
• He warned me that I would feel cold, that my body would seem rubbery for two days, and that I would see some images.

I was skeptical, thinking that if it were really possible to cure chronic back pain with half a cup of vegetal tea, Western medicine would surely know about it.

• On the other hand, I thought it was worth trying, because it could not be less effective than cortisone injections.

Early one morning, the day after the new moon, I drank the sanango tea.

• After twenty minutes, a wave of cold submerged me.
• I felt chilled to the bone.
• I broke out into a profuse cold sweat and had to wring out my sweatshirt several times.
• After six rather difficult hours, the cold feeling went away, but I no longer controlled the coordination of my body.
• I could not walk without falling down.
• For five minutes I saw an enormous column of multicolored lights across the sky — my only hallucinations.
• The lack of coordination lasted forty-eight hours.
• On the morning of the third day, my back pain had disappeared. To this day it has not returned. ^[6]

I tend not to believe this kind of story unless I have lived it myself, so I am not trying to convince anybody about the effectiveness of sanango. However, from my point of view, Abelardo had pulled off a trick that seemed more biochemical than psychosomatic.

I had several other similar experiences.

• Each time, I noted that the seemingly fanciful explanations I was given ended up being verified in practice.
• Such as “a tea you drink at the new moon which turns your body to rubber and cures your back pain.”

So I began to trust the literal descriptions of my friends in Quirishari even though I did not understand the mechanisms of their knowledge.

Furthermore, by living with them on a daily basis, I was continually struck by their profound practicality.

• They did not talk of doing things; they did them.
• One day I was walking in the forest with a man named Rafael. I mentioned that I needed a new handle for my ax.
• He stopped in his tracks, saying “ah yes”, and used his machete to cut a little hardwood tree a few steps off the path.
• Then he carved an impeccable handle that was to last longer than the ax itself.
• He spent about twenty minutes doing the bulk of the work right there in the forest and an additional twenty minutes at home doing the adjustments.
• Perfect work, carried out by eye alone.
• Up until then, I had always thought that ax handles came from hardware stores.

People in Quirishari taught by example, rather than by explanation.

• Parents would encourage their children to accompany them in their work.
• The phrase “leave Daddy alone because he's working” was unknown.
• People were suspicious of abstract concepts. When an idea seemed really bad, they would say dismissively, “Es pura teoría” [“That's pure theory”].
• The two key words that cropped up over and over in conversations were práctica and táctica, “practice” and “tactics” — no doubt because they are requirements for living in the rainforest.

The Ashaninca's passion for practice explains, in part at least, their general fascination for industrial technology.

• One of their favorite subjects of conversation with me was to ask how I had made the objects I owned: tapes, lighters, rubber boots, Swiss army knife, batteries, etc.
• When I would reply that I did not know how to make them, nobody seemed to believe me.

After about a year in Quirishari, I had come to see that my hosts' practical sense was much more reliable in their environment than my academically informed understanding of reality.

• Their empirical knowledge was undeniable.
• However, their explanations concerning the origin of their knowledge were unbelievable to me.
• For instance, on two separate occasions, Carlos and Abelardo showed me a plant that cured the potentially mortal bite of the jergón (fer‑de‑lance) snake.
• I looked at the plant closely, thinking that it might come in useful at some point.
• They both pointed out the pair of white hooks resembling snake fangs, so that I would remember it.
• I asked Carlos how the virtues of the jergón plant had been discovered. “We know this thanks to these hooks, because that is the sign that nature gives.”

Once again, I thought that if this were true, Western science would surely know about it;

• Furthermore I could not believe that there was truly a correspondence between a reptile and a bush, as if a common intelligence were lurking behind them both and communicating with visual symbols.
• To me, it seemed that my “animist” friends were merely interpreting coincidences of the natural order.

One day at Carlos's house, I witnessed an almost surreal scene.

• A man called Sabino appeared with a sick baby in his arms and two Peruvian cigarettes in his hand. He asked Carlos to cure the child.
• Carlos lit one of the cigarettes and drew on it deeply several times.
• Then he blew smoke on the baby and started sucking at a precise spot on its belly, spitting out what he said was the illness.
• After about three minutes, he declared the problem solved. Sabino thanked him profusely and departed.
• Carlos called after him, placing the second cigarette behind his ear: “Come back any time.”

At that point, I thought to myself that my credulity had limits and that no one could get me to believe that cigarette smoke could cure a sick child. On the contrary, I thought that blowing smoke on the child could only worsen its condition.

A few evenings later, during one of our taped conversations, I returned to this question:

“When one does a cure, like the one you did the other day for Sabino, how does the tobacco work? If you are the one who smokes it, how can it cure the person who does not smoke?”

“I always say, the property of tobacco is that it shows me the reality of things. I can see things as they are. And it gets rid of all the pains.”

“Ah, but how did one discover this property? Does tobacco grow wild in the forest?”

“There is a place, for example in Napiari, where there are enormous quantities of tobacco growing.”

“Where?”

“In the Perene. We found out about its power thanks to ayahuasca, that other plant, because it is the mother.”

“Who is the mother, tobacco or ayahuasca?”

“Ayahuasca.”

“And tobacco is its child?”

“It's the child.”

“Because tobacco is less strong?”

“Less strong.”

“You told me that ayahuasca and tobacco both contain God.”

“That's it.”

“And you said that souls like tobacco. Why?”

“Because tobacco has its method, its strength. It attracts the maninkari. It is the best contact for the life of a human being.”

“And these souls, what are they like?”

“I know that any living soul, or any dead one, is like those radio waves flying around in the air.”

“Where?”

“In the air. That means that you do not see them, but they are there, like radio waves. Once you turn on the radio, you can pick them up. It's like that with souls; with ayahuasca and tobacco, you can see them and hear them.”

“And why is it that when one listens to the ayahuasquero singing, one hears music like one has never heard before, such beautiful music?”

“Well, it attracts the spirits, and as I have always said, if one thinks about it closely. … [long silence]. It's like a tape recorder, you put it there, you turn it on, and already it starts singing: hum, hum, hum, hum, hum. You start singing along with it, and once you sing, you understand them. You can follow their music because you have heard their voice. So, it occurs, and one can see, like the last time when Ruperto was singing.”

As I listened to these explanations, I realized that I did not really believe in the existence of spirits.

• From my point of view, spirits were at best metaphors.
• Carlos, on the other hand, considered spirits to be firmly rooted in the material world, craving tobacco, flying like radio waves, and singing like tape recorders.
• So my attitude was ambiguous. On the one hand, I wanted to understand what Carlos thought, but on the other, I couldn't take what he said seriously because I did not believe it.

This ambiguity was reinforced by what people said about spirits; namely, that contact with spirits gave one power not only to cure, but to cause harm.

One evening I accompanied Carlos and Ruperto to the house of a third man, whom I will call M.

• Word had gone around that Ruperto, just back from an eight-year absence, had learned his lessons well with the Shipibo ayahuasqueros.
• For his part, M. boasted that he had a certain experience with hallucinogens, and said that he was curious to see just how good Ruperto was.

M. lived on the crest of a little hill surrounded by forest. We arrived at his house around eight in the evening. After the customary greetings, we sat down on the ground.

• Ruperto produced his bottle of ayahuasca and placed it at the bottom of the ladder leading up to the house's platform, saying, “This is its place.”
• Then he passed around a rolled cigarette and blew smoke on the bottle and on M.
• Meanwhile, Carlos took my hands and also blew smoke on them.
• The sweet smell of tobacco and the blowing feeling on my skin were pleasurable.

Three months had gone by since my first ayahuasca session.

• I felt physically relaxed, yet mentally apprehensive.
• Was I going to see terrifying snakes again?
• We drank the bitter liquid. It seemed to me that Ruperto filled my cup less than the others. I sat in silence.
• At one point, with my eyes closed, my body seemed to be very long.
• Ruperto started singing. M. accompanied him, but sang a different melody.
• The sound of this dissonant duo was compelling, though the rivalry between the two singers implied a certain tension.
• Carlos remained silent throughout.

I continued feeling calm.

• Apart from a few kaleidoscopic images, I did not have any particularly remarkable visions, nor did I feel nauseated.
• I started to think that I had not drunk enough ayahuasca.
• When Ruperto asked me whether I was “drunk.” I answered “not yet.”
• He asked me whether I would like some more. I told him that I was not sure and wanted perhaps to wait a bit.
• I asked Carlos in a whisper for his opinion. He advised me to wait.

I spent approximately three hours sitting on the ground in the dark in a slightly hypnotic, but certainly not hallucinatory state of mind.

• In the darkness, I could only make out the shape of the other participants.
• Both Carlos and M. had told Ruperto that they were “drunk.”

The session came to a rather abrupt end.

• Carlos stood up and said with unusual haste that he was going home to rest.
• I got up to accompany him and thanked both our host and Ruperto, to whom I confided that I had been slightly fearful of the ayahuasca.
• He said, “I know, I saw it when we arrived.”

Carlos and I had only one flashlight. He took it and guided us along the path through the forest. I followed him closely to take full advantage of the beam.

• After covering approximately three hundred yards, Carlos suddenly yelped and scratched at the back of his calf, from which he seemed to extract some kind of sting.
• In the confusion, what he was holding between his fingers fell to the ground.
• He said, “That man is shameless. Now he is shooting his arrows at me.”
• I was relieved to hear his words, because I was afraid a snake had bitten him, but I had no idea what he was talking about.
• I asked questions, but he interrupted, saying, “Later. Now, let's go.” We marched over to his house.

On arrival, Carlos was visibly upset. He finally explained that M. had shot one of his arrows at him, “because he wants to dominate, and show that he is stronger.”

For my part, I was left with a doubt. How could one really aim a little sting in total darkness across three hundred yards of forest and touch the back of the calf of a person walking in front of someone else?

Nevertheless, Carlos was ill the following day, and the tension between him and M. continued to the end of my stay in Quirishari.

• These suspicions of sorcery gave rise to a network of rumors and counter-rumors that partially undermined the community's atmosphere of goodwill.

Contact with the spirits may allow one to learn about the medicinal properties of plants and to cure.

• But it also gives the possibility of exploiting a destructive energy.
• According to the practitioners of shamanism, the source of knowledge and power to which they gain access is double-edged.

Toward the end of my stay in Quirishari, I read over my fieldnotes and drew up a long list of questions.

• Most of them concerned the central subject of my investigation, but several dealt with the shamanic and mythological elements that had mystified me.
• In one of my last taped conversations with Carlos, I asked him about these matters:

“Are tabaquero and ayahuasquero the same?”

“The same.”

“Good, and I also wanted to know why it is that one sees snakes when one drinks ayahuasca.”

“It's because the mother of ayahuasca is a snake. As you can see, they have the same shape.”

“But I thought that ayahuasca was the mother of tobacco?”

“That's right.”

“So who is the true owner of these plants, then?”

“The owner of these plants, in truth, is like God; it is the maninkari. They are the ones who help us. Their existence knows neither end nor illness. That's why they say when the ayahuasquero puts his head into the dark room: 'If you want me to help you, then you must do things well. I will give you the flower not for your personal gain, but for the good of all.' So clearly, that is where the force lies. It is by believing the plant that you will have more life. That is the path. That's why they say that there is a very narrow path on which no one can travel, not even with a machete. It is not a straight path, but it is a path nonetheless. I hold on to those words and to the ones that say that truth is not for sale, that wisdom is for you, but it is for sharing. Translating this, it means it is bad to make a business of it.”

During my last interviews with Carlos, I had the impression that the more I asked questions, the less I understood his answers.

• Not only was ayahuasca the mother of tobacco, which I already knew, but the mother of ayahuasca was a snake.
• What could this possibly mean — other than that the mother of the mother of tobacco is a snake?

On leaving Quirishari, I knew I had not solved the enigma of the hallucinatory origin of Ashaninca ecological knowledge.

• I had done my best, however, to listen to what people said.
• I had constantly tried to reduce the nuisance of my presence as an anthropologist.
• I never took notes in front of people to avoid their feeling spied on.
• Mostly, I would write in the evening, lying on my blanket, before going to sleep.
• I would simply note what I had done during the day and the important things that people had said.
• I even tried thinking about my presuppositions, knowing that it was important to objectify my objectifying gaze.
• But the mystery remained intact.

I left with the strange feeling that the problem had more to do with my incapacity to understand what people had said, rather than the inadequacy of their explanations.

• They had always used such simple words.

In late 1986, I went home to rural Switzerland to write my dissertation.

• Two years later, after becoming a “doctor of anthropology," I felt compelled to put my ideas to practice.
• Under Ashaninca influence I had come to consider that practice was the most advanced form of theory.
• I was tired of doing research. Now I wanted to act.
• So I turned my back on the enigma of plant communication.

I started working for Nouvelle Planète, a small Swiss organization that promotes community development in Third World countries.

• In 1989, I traveled around the Amazon Basin, talking with indigenous organizations and collecting projects for the legal recognition of indigenous territories.
• Then I gathered funds for these projects in Europe.

This took up my time for four years.

• Most of the projects that I presented to individuals, communities, citizen groups, foundations, and even a governmental organization were funded and carried out successfully.^[1]

Working hand in hand with indigenous organizations, South American topographers and anthropologists did the actual job of land titling.

• Each country has a different set of laws specifying the requirements for official recognition of indigenous territories.
• In Peru, for example, topographers must visit and map in detail the rivers, forests, mountains, fields, and villages used by a given indigenous people,
• And anthropologists must account for the number of persons occupying the territory and describe their way of life;
• These documents are then registered with the Ministry of Agriculture, which processes them and issues official land titles in the names of the indigenous communities.
• These titles guarantee the collective territorial ownership by people who have occupied the land for millennia, in many cases.

The funds that I raised served to pay the salaries of the anthropologists and topographers, their travel expenses in isolated parts of the rainforest, the materials needed for mapmaking, and the cost of following the documents through the bureaucratic process.

• The most successful project was carried out in Peru's Putumayo, Napo, and Ampiyacu regions by AIDESEP, the national federation of indigenous organizations of the Peruvian Amazon;
• They hired the topographers and anthropologists and managed to gain titles to close to one and a half million acres of land for only $21,525.

Part of my work consisted of flyng to South America occasionally, visiting the areas that had been titled, and checking the accounts.

• Given the difficulties indigenous people often have learning accounting, I was surprised to find in most cases that things had been done according to the plans laid out in the initial projects.

Back in Europe, I would give talks explaining why it makes ecological sense to demarcate the territories of indigenous people in the Amazonian rainforest, saving that they alone know how to use it sustainably.

• I would point out the rational nature of indigenous agricultural techniques such as polyculture and the use of small clearings.
• The more I talked, however, the more I realized that I was not telling the whole truth as I understood it.

I was not saying that these Amazonian people claim that their botanical knowledge comes from plant-induced hallucinations; I had tried these hallucinogens myself under their supervision, and my encounter with the fluorescent snakes had modified my way of looking at reality.

• In my hallucinations, I had learned important things — that I am just a human being, for example, and am intimately linked to other life forms and that true reality is more complex than our eyes lead us to believe.

I did not talk about these things, because I was afraid people would not take me seriously.

At this point, “being taken seriously” had to do with effective fund-raising more than with the fear of disqualification from an academic career.

In June 1992 I went to Rio to attend the world conference on development and environment.

• At the “Earth Summit,” as it was known, everybody had suddenly become aware of the ecological knowledge of indigenous people.
• The governments of the world mentioned it in every treaty they signed; ^[2]
• Personal care and pharmaceutical companies talked of marketing the natural products of indigenous people at “equitable” prices.^[3]

Meanwhile, ethnobotanists and anthropologists advanced impressive numbers relative to the intellectual property rights of indigenous people:

• 74 percent of the modern pharmacopoeia's plant-based remedies were first discovered by “traditional” societies;
• To this day, less than 2 percent of all plant species have been fully tested in laboratories, and the great majority of the remaining 98 percent are in tropical forests;
• The Amazon contains half of all the plant species on Earth; ^[4] and so on.

In Rio the industrial and political worlds were just waking up to the economic potential of tropical plants. The biotechnology of the 1980s had opened up new possibilities for the exploitation of natural resources.

• The biodiversity of tropical forests suddenly represented a fabulous source of unexploited wealth,
• But without the botanical knowledge of indigenous people, biotechnicians would be reduced to testing blindly the medicinal properties of the worlds estimated 250,000 plant species.^[5]

Indigenous people let their position on the matter be known during their own conference, held on the outskirts of Rio a week before the official summit.

• Following the lead of the Amazonian delegates, they declared their opposition to the Convention on Biodiversity that governments were about to sign, because it lacked a concrete mechanism to guarantee the compensation of their botanical knowledge.
• The Amazonian representatives based their position on experience: Pharmaceutical companies have a history of going to the Amazon to sample indigenous plant remedies and then of returning to their laboratories to synthesize and patent the active ingredients without leaving anything for those who made the original discovery.^[6]

Curare is the best-known example of this kind of poaching.

• Several millennia ago, Amazonian hunters developed this muscle-paralyzing substance as a blow‑gun poison.
• It kills tree-borne animals without poisoning the meat while causing them to relax their grip and fall to the ground.
• Monkeys, when hit with an untreated arrow, tend to wrap their tails around branches and die out of the archer's reach.
• In the 1940s, scientists realized that curare could greatly facilitate surgery of the torso and of the vital organs, because it interrupts nerve impulses and relaxes all muscles, including breathing muscles.
• Chemists synthesized derivatives of the plant mixture by modifying the molecular structure of one of its active ingredients.
• Currently, anesthesiologists who “curarize” their patients use only synthetic compounds.
• In the entire process, everyone has received compensation for their work except the developers of the original product.^[7]

Most of the time scientists balk at recognizing that “Stone Age Indians” could have developed anything. According to the usual theory, Indians stumbled on natures useful molecules by chance experimentation. In the case of curare, this explanation seems improbable.

• There are forty types of curares in the Amazon, made from seventy plant species.
• The kind used in modern medicine comes from the Western Amazon.
• To produce it, it is necessary to combine several plants and boil them for seventy-two hours, while avoiding the fragrant but mortal vapors emitted by the broth.
• The final product is a paste that is inactive unless injected under the skin. If swallowed, it has no effect.^[8]
• It is difficult to see how anybody could have stumbled on this recipe by chance experimentation.

Besides, how could hunters in the tropical forest, concerned with preserving the quality of the meat, have even imagined an intravenous solution?

• When one asks these people about the invention of curare, they almost invariably answer that it has a mythical origin.
• The Tukano of the Colombian Amazon say that the creator of the universe invented curare and gave it to them.^[9]

In Rio, ethnobotanists often cited the example of curare to demonstrate that the knowledge of Amazonian people had already contributed significantly to the development of medical science.

• They also discussed other plants of the indigenous pharmacopoeia that had only recently started to interest scientists:
• An extract of the Pilocarpus jaborandi bush used by the Kayapo and the Guajajara had recently been turned into a glaucoma remedy by Merck, the multinational pharmaceutical company,
• Which was also devising a new anticoagulant based on the tikiuba plant of the Uru‑eu‑Wau‑Wau.
• The fruit of Couroupita guienensis used by the Achuar to treat fungal infections,
• And the leaves of the Aristolochia vine brewed into a tea by the Tirio for the relief of stomachache, also attracted interest,
• Along with many other unidentified plants that indigenous Amazonians use to cure skin lesions, diarrhea, snakebite, and so on.^[10]

At the Earth Summit, everybody was talking about the ecological knowledge of indigenous people, but certainly no one was talking about the hallucinatory origin of some of it, as claimed by the indigenous people themselves.

• Admittedly, most anthropologists and ethnobotanists did not know about it, but even those who did said nothing, presumably because there is no way to do so and be taken seriously.
• Colleagues might ask,

“You mean Indians claim they get molecularly verifiable information from their hallucinations? You don't take them literally, do you?”

What could one answer?

It is true that not all of the world's indigenous people use hallucinogenic plants.

• Even in the Amazon, there are forms of shamanism based on techniques other than the ingestion of hallucinogens;
• But in Western Amazonia, which includes the Peruvian, Ecuadorian, and Colombian part of the basin, it is hard to find a culture that does not use an entire panoply of psychoactive plants.
• According to one inventory, there are seventy-two ayahuasca-using cultures in Western Amazonia.^[11]

Richard Evans Schultes, the foremost ethnobotanist of the twentieth century, writes about the healers of a region in Colombia that he considers to be one of the centers of Western Amazonian shamanism:

“The medicine men of the Kamsá and Inga tribes of the Valley of Sibundoy, have an unusually extensive knowledge of medicinal and toxic plants. … One of the most renowned is Salvador Chindoy, who insists that his knowledge of the medicinal value of plants has been taught to him by the plants themselves through the hallucinations he has experienced in his long lifetime as a medicine man.” ^[12]

Schultes does not say anything further about the hallucinatory origin of the botanical expertise of Amazonian people, because there is nothing one can say without contradicting two fundamental principles of Western knowledge.

It was in Rio that I realized the extent of the dilemma posed by the hallucinatory knowledge of indigenous people.

• On the one hand, its results are empirically confirmed and used by the pharmaceutical industry;
• On the other hand, its origin cannot be discussed scientifically because it contradicts the axioms of Western knowledge.

When I understood that the enigma of plant communication was a blind spot for science, I felt the call to conduct an in-depth investigation of the subject.

• Furthermore, I had been carrying the mystery of plant communication around since my stay with the Ashaninca, and I knew that explorations of contradictions in science often yield fruitful results.
• Finally, it seemed to me that the establishment of a serious dialogue with indigenous people on ecology and botany required that this question be addressed.

After Rio, I knew that i wanted to write a book on the subject.

• My original intention was simply to name the enigma and to establish an exploratory map of the following cul‑de‑sac, or paradox: We can use their knowledge, but as soon as we reach the question of its origin, we must turn back.

By drinking ayahuasca in Quirishari, I had gone beyond the signs saying “you have reached the limits of science” and had found an irrational and subjective territory that was terrifying, yet filled with information.

• So I knew that the cul‑de‑sac had a passage that is normally hidden from the rational gaze and that leads to a world of surprising power.

However, I did not imagine for an instant that I could solve the enigma.

• I was convinced that I was dealing with an essentially paradoxical phenomenon that was not subject to solution.

Twelve months after the Rio conference a publisher accepted my proposal for a book on Amazonian shamanism and ecology.

• I was going to call it Ecological hallucinations.
• Several weeks later my employer agreed to let me spend part of my time working on the book.

I was set to investigate the enigma of plant communication. But where was I to begin?

My initial impulse would have been to return to the Peruvian Amazon and spend some time with the ayahuasqueros.

• However, my life had changed. I was no longer a free-roaming anthropologist, but the father of two young children.
• I was going to have to conduct my investigation from my office and the nearest library, rather than from the forests of Peru.

I started by rereading my fieldnotes and the transcripts of the Carlos Perez Shuma interviews.

• I paid particular attention to the strange passages I had left out of my thesis.
• Then, given that writing is an extension of thinking, I drafted a preliminary version of a first chapter on my arrival in Quirishari and my initial ayahuasca experience.

During this immersion in mysterious moments of my past, I started thinking about what Carlos had said.

• What if I took him literally?
• What if it were true that nature speaks in signs and that the secret to understanding its language consists in noticing similarities in shape or in form?
• I liked this idea and decided to read the anthropological texts on shamanism paying attention not only to their content but to their style.
• I taped a note on the wall of my office: “Look at the FORM.”

One thing became clear as I thought back to my stay in Quirishari.

• Every time I had doubted one of my consultants’ explanations, my understanding of the Ashaninca view of reality had seized up:
• Conversely, on the rare occasions that I had managed to silence my doubts, my understanding of local reality had been enhanced — as if there were times when one had to believe in order to see, rather than the other way around.

This realization led me to decide, now that I was trying to map the cul-de-sac of hallucinatory knowledge, that it would be useful not only to establish its limits from a rational perspective, but to suspend disbelief and note with equal seriousness the outline of the ayahuasqueros’ notions on the other side of the apparent impasse.

I read for weeks.

• I started by refreshing my memory and going over the basic texts of anthropology as well as the discipline’s new, self-critical vein.
• Then I devoured the literature on shamanism, which was new to me.
• I had not read as much since my doctoral examinations nine years previously and was pleased to rediscover this purely abstract level of reality.
• With an enthusiasm that I never had at university I took hundreds of pages of reading notes, which I then categorized.

Five months into my investigation, my wife and I visited friends who introduced us during the evening to a book containing colorful “three-dimensional images” made up of seemingly disordered dots.

• To see a coherent and “3-D” image emerge from the blur, one had to defocalize one’s gaze.
• “Let your eyes go”, our hostess told me, “as if you were looking through the book without seeing it. Relax into the blur and be patient.”
• After several attempts, and seemingly by magic, a remarkably deep stereogram sprang out of the page that I was holding in front of me.
• It showed a dolphin leaping in the waves.
• As soon as I focused normally on the page, the dolphin disappeared, along with the waves in front of it and behind it, and all I could see were muddled dots again.

This experience reminded me of Bourdieu’s phrase “to objectify one’s objectifying relationship,” which is another way of saying “to become aware of one’s gaze.”

• That is precisely what one had to do in order to see the stereogram.
• This made me think that my dissatisfaction with the anthropological studies of shamanism was perhaps due to the necessarily localized perspective of academic anthropologists, who failed to grasp shamanic phenomena in the same way that the normal gaze failed to see “three-dimensional images.”
• Was there perhaps a way of relaxing ones gaze and seeing shamanism more clearly?

During the following weeks I continued reading, while trying to relax my gaze and pay attention to the texts’ style, as much as to their content.

• Then I started writing a preliminary version of a second chapter on anthropology and shamanism.
• One afternoon, as I was writing, I suddenly saw a strikingly coherent image emerge from the muddle, as in a stereogram: Most anthropologists who had studied shamanism had only seen their own shadow.
• This went for the schizophrenics, the creators of order, the jacks-of-all-trades, and the creators of disorder.

This vision shook me. I felt that I had finally found a warm trail. Without wasting time, I continued in the same direction.

As I felt certain that the enigma of hallucinatory knowledge was only an apparent dead end, and as I was trying to suspend disbelief, I started wondering whether I might not be able to find a solution after all.

• The passage that led to the shamanic world was certainly hidden from normal vision, but perhaps there was a way of perceiving it stereoscopically. …

Speculating in this way, I realized that the hallucinations I had seen in Quirishari could also be described as three-dimensional images invisible to a normal gaze.

• According to my Ashaninca friends, it was precisely by reaching the hallucinatory state of consciousness that one crossed the impasse.
• For them, there was no fundamental contradiction between the practical reality of their life in the rainforest and the invisible and irrational world of ayahuasqueros.
• On the contrary, it was by going back and forth between these two levels that one could bring back useful and verifiable knowledge that was otherwise unobtainable.
• This proved to me that it was possible to reconcile these two apparently distinct worlds.

I also felt that I needed to improve my defocalization skills in order to succeed.

• I live not far from a castle that belonged to the family of Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes investigations.
• During my youth, I had often admired the famous detective’s “lateral” methods, where he would lock himself into his office and play discordant tunes on his violin late into the night — to emerge with the key to the mystery.
• In the wintry fogs of the Swiss plateau, I started following Holmes’s example. Once the children were in bed, I would go down to my office and get to work with hypnotically dissonant music playing in the background.^[1]

Some evenings I would go further.

• Given that walking makes thinking easier, I would dress up warmly and go for strolls in the misty darkness with my tape recorder.
• Accompanied only by the rhythm of my boot heels, I would think aloud about all the imaginable solutions to the enigma that was beginning to obsess me.
• The following day I would transcribe these nebulous soliloquies looking for new perspectives.
• Some passages truly helped me understand where I was trying to go:

“You must defocalize your gaze so as to perceive science and the indigenous vision at the same time. Then the common ground between the two will appear in the form of a stereogram. …”

My social life became nonexistent.

• Apart from a few hours in the afternoon with my children, I spent most of my time reading and thinking.
• My wife started saying I was absent even when I was in the room.
• She was right, and I could not hear her because I was obsessed.
• The more I advanced with this unusual methodology, the fresher the trail seemed.

For several weeks, I went over the scientific literature on hallucinogens and their supposed effects on the human brain.

Here is a fact I learned during my reading:

• We do not know how our visual system works.
• As you read these words, you do not really see the ink, the paper, your hands, and the surroundings, but an internal and three-dimensional image that reproduces them almost exactly and that is constructed by your brain.
• The photons reflected by this page strike the retinas of your eyes, which transform them into electrochemical information;
• The optic nerves relay this information to the visual cortex at the back of the head, where a cascade-like network of nerve cells separates the input into categories (form, color, movement, depth, etc.).
• How the brain goes about reuniting these sets of categorized information into a coherent image is still a mystery.
• This also means that the neurological basis of consciousness is unknown.^[2]

If we do not know how we see a real object in front of us, we understand even less how we perceive something that is not there. When a person hallucinates, there is no external source of visual stimulation, which, of course, is why cameras do not pick up hallucinatory images.

Strangely, and with few exceptions, these basic facts are not mentioned in the thousands of scientific studies on hallucinations;

• In books with titles such as Origin and mechanisms of hallucinations, experts provide partial and mainly hypothetical answers, which they formulate in complicated terms, giving the impression that they have attained the objective truth, or are about to do so.^[3]

The neurological pathways of hallucinogens are better understood than the mechanisms of hallucinations.

• During the 1950s, researchers discovered that the chemical composition of most hallucinogens closely resembles that of serotonin, a hormone produced by the human brain and used as a chemical messenger between brain cells.
• They hypothesized that hallucinogens act on consciousness by fitting into the same cerebral receptors as serotonin, “like similar keys fitting the same lock.” ^[4]

LSD, a synthetic compound unknown in nature, does not have the same profile as the organic molecules such as dimethyltryptamine or psilocybin.

Nevertheless, the great majority of clinical investigations focused on LSD, which was considered to be the most powerful of all hallucinogens, given that only 50-millionths of a gram brings on its effects.^[5]

In the second half of the 1960s, hallucinogens became illegal in the Western world.

• Shortly thereafter, scientific studies of these substances, which had been so prolific during the previous two decades, were stopped across the board.
• Ironically it was around this time that several researchers pointed out that, according to sciences strict criteria, LSD most often does not induce true hallucinations, where the images are confused with reality.
• People under the influence of LSD nearly always know that the visual distortions or the cascades of dots and colors that they perceive are not real, but are due to the action of a psychedelic agent.
• In this sense, LSD is “pseudo-hallucinogenic.” ^[6]

So the scientific studies of hallucinogens focused mainly on a product that is not really hallucinogenic. Researchers neglected the natural substances, which have been used for thousands of years by hundreds of peoples, in favor of a synthetic compound invented in a twentieth-century laboratory.^[7]

In 1979, it was discovered that the human brain seems to secrete dimethyltryptamine — which is also one of the active ingredients of ayahuasca.

• This substance produces true hallucinations, in which the visions replace normal reality convincingly, such as fluorescent snakes to whom one excuses oneself as one steps over them.
• Unfortunately, scientific research on dimethyltryptamine is rare. To this day, the clinical studies of its effects on “normal” human beings can be counted on the fingers of one hand.^[8]

As I read, the seasons turned. Suddenly winter gave way to spring, and the days began getting longer.

• I had just spent six full months focusing on other peoples writings.
• Now I felt the time had come to pause momentarily, and then to start writing my book.

Making the most of the first warm spell of the year, I took a day off and went walking in a nature reserve with my tape recorder.

• The buds were starting to open, springs were gushing everywhere, and I was hoping that my ideas would do the same.

It had become clear to me that ayahuasqueros were somehow gaining access in their visions to verifiable information about plant properties.

• Therefore, I reasoned, the enigma of hallucinatory knowledge could be reduced to one question: Was this information coming from inside the human brain, as the scientific point of view would have it, or from the outside world of plants, as shamans claimed?

Both of these perspectives seemed to present advantages and drawbacks.

On the one hand, the similarity between the molecular profiles of the natural hallucinogens and of serotonin seemed well and truly to indicate that these substances work like keys fitting into the same lock inside the brain.

• However, I could not agree with the scientific position according to which hallucinations are merely discharges of images stocked in compartments of the subconscious memory.
• I was convinced that the enormous fluorescent snakes that I had seen thanks to ayahuasca did not correspond in any way to anything that I could have dreamed of, even in my most extreme nightmares.
• Furthermore, the speed and coherence of some of the hallucinatory images exceeded by many degrees the best rock videos, and I knew that I could not possibly have filmed them.^[9]

On the other hand, I was finding it increasingly easy to suspend disbelief and consider the indigenous point of view as potentially correct.

• After all, there were all kinds of gaps and contradictions in the scientific knowledge of hallucinogens, which had at first seemed so reliable:
• Scientists do not know how these substances affect our consciousness,
• Nor have they studied true hallucinogens in any detail.
• It no longer seemed unreasonable to me to consider that the information about the molecular content of plants could truly come from the plants themselves, just as ayahuasqueros claimed.
• However, I failed to see how this could work concretely.

With these thoughts in mind, I interrupted my stroll and sat down, resting my back against a big tree.

• Then I tried to enter into communication with it. I closed my eyes and breathed in the damp vegetal scent in the air.
• I waited for a form of communication to appear on my mental screen — but I ended up perceiving nothing more than the agreeable feeling of immersion in sunshine and fertile nature.

After about ten minutes, I stood up and resumed walking.

• Suddenly my thoughts turned again to stereograms.
• Maybe I would find the answer by looking at both perspectives simultaneously, with one eye on science and the other on shamanism.
• The solution would therefore consist in posing the question differently: It was not a matter of asking whether the source of hallucinations is internal or external, but of considering that it might be both at the same time.
• I could not see how this idea would work in practice, but I liked it because it reconciled two points of view that were apparently divergent.

The path I was following led to a crystalline cascade gushing out of a limestone cliff.

• The water was sparkling and tasted like champagne.
• The next day I returned to my office with renewed energy.
• All I had to do was classify my reading notes on Amazonian shamanism and then I could start writing.
• However, before getting down to this task, I decided to spend a day following my fancy, freely paging through the piles of articles and notes that I had accumulated over the months.

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.

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).

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.

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]

The human brain. The fissure is occupied by an anaconda and a rainbow boa. (Redrawn from Desana sketches.) From Reichel-Dolmatoff (1981, p. 88).

Several pages further into the article, I came upon a second drawing, this time with two snakes.

According to Reichel-Dolmatoff, the drawing (at right) 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 following sentence:

“The Desana say that in the beginning of time their ancestors arrived in canoes shaped like huge serpents.” ^[16]

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.”

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 generic 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 he 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.

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

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:

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.

I seized the four volumes of Joseph Campbell’s comparative work on world mythology.

• A German friend had given them to me at the beginning of my investigation, after I had told him about the book that I wanted to write.
• Initially, I had simply gone over the volume called Primitive mythology. I didn’t much like the title, and the book neglected the Amazon Basin, not to mention hallucinogens.
• At the time, I had placed Campbell’s masterpiece at the back of one of my bookshelves and had not consulted it further.
• I began paging through Occidental mythology looking for snakes. To my surprise I found one in the title of the first chapter. Turning the first page I came upon the following figure.

“The Serpent Lord Enthroned." From Campbell (1964, p. 11)

This figure is taken from a Mesopotamian seal of ca. 2200 B.C. and shows “the deity in human form, enthroned, with his caduceus emblem behind and a fire altar before.” ^[9]

• The symbol of this Serpent Lord was none other than a double helix.
• The similarity with the representation of DNA was unmistakable!

I feverishly paged through Campbell’s books and found twisted serpents in most images representing sacred scenes.

Campbell writes about this omnipresent snake symbolism:

“Throughout the material in the Primitive, Oriental and Occidental volumes of this work, myths and rites of the serpent frequently appear, and in a remarkably consistent symbolic sense. Wherever nature is revered as self-moving, and so inherently divine, the serpent is revered as symbolic of its divine life.” ^[10]

In Campbell’s work I discovered a stunning number of creator gods represented in the form of a cosmic serpent, not only in Amazonia, Mexico, and Australia, but in Sumer, Egypt, Persia, India, the Pacific, Crete, Greece, and Scandinavia.

To check these facts, I consulted my French-language Dictionary of symbols under “serpent.” I read:

“It makes light of the sexes, and of the opposition of contraries; it is female and male too, a twin to itself, like so many of the important creator gods who are always, in their first representation, cosmic serpents. … Thus, the visible snake appears as merely the brief incarnation of a Great Invisible Serpent, which is causal and timeless, a master of the vital principle and of all the forces of nature. It is a primary old god found at the beginning of all cosmogonies, before monotheism and reason toppled it” (original italics).^[11]

Campbell dwells on two crucial turning points for the cosmic serpent in world mythology.

• The first occurs “in the context of the patriarchy of the Iron Age Hebrews of the first millennium , [where] the mythology adopted from the earlier neolithic and Bronze Age civilizations … became inverted, to render an argument just the opposite to that of its origin.”
• In the Judeo-Christian creation story told in the first book of the Bible, one finds elements which are common to so many of the world’s creation myths: the serpent, the tree, and the twin beings;
• But for the first time, the serpent, “who had been revered in the Levant for at least seven thousand years before the composition of the Book of Genesis,” plays the part of the villain.
• Yahweh, who replaces it in the role of the creator, ends up defeating “the serpent of the cosmic sea, Leviathan.” ^[12]

“Zeus against Typhon” From Campbell (1964, p. 239)

For Campbell, the second turning point occurs in Greek mythology, where Zeus was initially represented as a serpent; but around 500 B.C., the myths are changed, and Zeus becomes a serpent-killer.

• He secures the reign of the patriarchal gods of Mount Olympus by defeating Typhon, the enormous serpent-monster who is the child of the earth goddess Gaia and the incarnation of the forces of nature.
• Typhon “was so large that his head often knocked against the stars and his arms could extend from sunrise to sunset.”
• In order to defeat Typhon, Zeus can count only on the help of Athene, “Reason,” because all the other Olympians have fled in terror to Egypt.^[13]

At this point, I wrote in my notes: These patriarchal and exclusively masculine gods are incomplete as far as nature is concerned.

• DNA, like the cosmic serpent, is neither masculine nor feminine, even though its creatures are either one or the other, or both.
• Gaia, the Greek earth goddess, is as incomplete as Zeus.
• Like him, she is the result of the rational gaze, which separates before thinking, and is incapable of grasping the androgynous and double nature of the vital principle.

It was past 8 P.M. and I had not eaten. My head was spinning in the face of the enormity of what I thought I was discovering. I decided to pause. I took a beer out of the refrigerator and put on some violin music. Then I started pacing up and down my office. What could all this possibly mean?

I turned on the tape recorder and tried answering my own question:

• One, Western culture has cut itself off from the serpent/life principle, in other words DNA, since it adopted an exclusively rational point of view.
• Two, the peoples who practice what we call ‘shamanism’ communicate with DNA.
• Three, paradoxically, the part of humanity that cut itself off from the serpent managed to discover its material existence in a laboratory some three thousand years later.

People use different techniques in different places to gain access to knowledge of the vital principle.

• In their visions shamans manage to take their consciousness down to the molecular level.
• This is precisely what Reichel-Dolmatoff describes, in his running commentary into the tape recorder of his own ayahuasca-induced visions (“like microphotographs of plants; like those microscopic stained sections; sometimes like from a pathology textbook”).^[14]

This is how they learn to combine brain hormones with monoamine oxidase inhibitors, or how they discover forty different sources of muscle paralyzers whereas science has only been able to imitate their molecules.

• When they say the recipe for curare was given to them by the beings who created life, they are talking literally.
• When they say their knowledge comes from beings they see in their hallucinations, their words mean exactly what they say.

According to the shamans of the entire world, one establishes communication with spirits via music.

• For the ayahuasqueros, it is almost inconceivable to enter the world of spirits and remain silent.
• Angelika Gebhart-Sayer discusses the “visual music” projected by the spirits in front of the shaman’s eyes: It is made up of three-dimensional images that coalesce into sound and that the shaman imitates by emitting corresponding melodies.^[15]
• I should check whether DNA emits sound or not.

“… Ayahuasca visions …”

06-05 06-06 06-07 06-08 “… the spread-out form of DNA …” “… chromosomes at a specific phase …” “… triple helixes of collagen …” “… DNA from afar, looking like a  telephone cord …”

"Another way of testing this idea would be to drink ayahuasca and observe the microscopic images. …"

As I said this, it dawned on me that I could approach this experience by looking at the book of paintings by Pablo Amaringo, a retired Peruvian ayahuasquero with a photographic memory.

These paintings are published in a book called Ayahuasca visions: The religious iconography of a Peruvian shaman, by Luis Eduardo Luna and Pablo Amaringo.

• In this book, Luna the anthropologist provides a mine of information on Amazonian shamanism, giving the context for fifty paintings of great beauty by Amaringo.
• The first time I saw these paintings, I was struck by their resemblance to my own ayahuasca-induced visions.

According to Amaringo:

“I only paint what I have seen, what I have experienced. I don’t copy or take ideas for my paintings from any book.”

Luna says:

“I have shown Pablo’s paintings to several vegetalistas, and they have reacted with immediate interest and wonder — some have commented on how similar their own visions were to those depicted by Pablo, and some even recognize elements in them.” ^[16]

On opening the book, I was stupefied to find all kinds of zigzag staircases, entwined vines, twisted snakes, and, above all, usually hidden in the margins, double helixes, like the image at the top of this page.

Several weeks later, I showed these paintings to a friend with a good understanding of molecular biology.

He reacted in the same way as the vegetalistas to whom Luna had shown them:

“Look, there’s collagen. … And there, the axon’s embryonic network with its neurites. … 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.” ^[17]

Even without these explanations, I was in shock.

• I quickly went over the index of Ayahuasca visions, but found no mention of either DNA, chromosomes, or double helixes.

Was it possible that no one had noticed the molecular aspect of the images?

Well, yes, because I myself had often admired them and showed them to people to explain what the hallucinatory sphere looked like, and I had not noticed them either.

• My gaze had been as focalized as usual.
• I had not been able to see simultaneously molecular biology and shamanism, which our rational mind separates — but which could well overlap and correspond.

I was staggered. It seemed that no one had noticed the possible links between the “myths” of “primitive peoples” and molecular biology.

• No one had seen that the double helix had symbolized the life principle for thousands of years around the world.
• On the contrary, everything was upside down.
• It was said that hallucinations could in no way constitute a source of knowledge, that Indians had found their useful molecules by chance experimentation, and that their “myths” were precisely myths, bearing no relationship to the real knowledge discovered in laboratories.

At this point I remembered Michael Harner’s story. Had he not said that this information was reserved for the dead and the dying?

• Suddenly, I was overcome with fear and felt the urge to share these ideas with someone else.
• I picked up the phone and called an old friend, who is also a writer.
• I quickly took him through the correspondences I had found during the day:
• The twins,
• The cosmic serpents,
• Eliade’s ladders,
• Campbell’s double helixes,
• As well as Amaringo’s.

Then I added:

“There is a last correlation that is slightly less clear than the others. The spirits one sees in hallucinations are three-dimensional, sound-emitting images, and they speak a language made of three-dimensional, sound-emitting images. In other words, they are made of their own language, like DNA.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

Then my friend said,

“Yes, and like DNA they replicate themselves to relay their information.”

"Wait,” I said, “I’m going to jot that down.”

“Precisely,” he said, “instead of talking to me, you should be writing this down.” ^[18]

I followed his advice, and it was in writing my notes on the relationship between the hallucinatory spirits made of language and DNA that I remembered the first verse of the first chapter of the Gospel according to John:

“In the beginning was the logos” — the word, the verb, the language.”

That night I had a hard time falling asleep.

The next day I had to attend a professional meeting that bore no relationship to my research.

• I took advantage of the train ride to put things into perspective.
• I was feeling strange. On the one hand, entire blocks of intuition were pushing me to believe that the connection between DNA and shamanism was real.
• On the other hand, I was aware that this vision contradicted certain academic ideas, and that the links I had found so far were insufficient to trouble a strictly rational point of view.

Nonetheless, gazing out the train window at a random sample of the the Western world, I could not avoid noticing a land of separation between human beings and all other species.

• We cut ourselves off by living in cement blocks, moving around in glass-and-metal bubbles, and spending a good part of our time watching other human beings on television.
• Outside, the pale light of an April sun was shining down on a suburb.
• I opened a newspaper and all I could find were pictures of human beings and articles about their activities.
• There was not a single article about another species.

Sitting on the train, I measured the paradox confronting me.

• I was a resolutely Western individual, and yet I was starting to believe in ideas that were not receivable from a rational point of view.
• This meant that I was going to have to find out more about DNA.
• Up to this point, I had only found biological correspondences in shamanism.
• It remained to be seen whether the contrary was also true, and whether there were shamanic correspondences in biology.
• More precisely, I needed to see whether shamanic notions about spirits corresponded to scientific notions about DNA.
• Basically I had only covered, at best, half the distance.

Even though my bookshelves were well stocked in anthropology and ecology, I owned no books about DNA or molecular biology; but I knew a colleague trained in both chemistry and literature who was going to be able to help me on that count.

After the meeting, toward the end of the afternoon, I went over to my colleagues house.

• He had generously allowed me to look through his books in his absence.

I entered his office, a big room with an entire wall occupied by bookshelves, turned on the light, and started browsing.

• The biology section contained, among others, The double helix by James Watson, the co-discoverer with Francis Crick of the structure of DNA.
• I flipped through this book, looking at the pictures with interest, and put it aside.

Cover of Crick (1981), reproduced with permission from Little, Brown & Co.

A little further along on the same shelf, I came upon a book by Francis Crick entitled Life itself: Its origin and nature.

• I pulled it out and looked at its cover — and could not believe my eyes.
• It showed an image of the earth, seen from space, with a rather indistinct object coming from the cosmos and landing on it.

Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was suggesting that the molecule of life was of extraterrestrial origin — in the same way that the “animist” peoples claimed that the vital principle was a serpent from the cosmos.

I had never heard of Crick’s hypothesis, called “directed panspermia,” but I knew that I had just found a new correspondence between science and the complex formed by shamanism and mythology.

I sat down in the armchair and plunged into Life itself: Its origin and nature.

Crick, writing In the early 1980s, criticizes the usual scientific theory on the origin of life, according to which a cell first appeared in the primitive soup through the random collisions of disorganized molecules. For Crick, this theory presents a major drawback:

• It is based on ideas conceived in the nineteenth century, long before molecular biology revealed that the basic mechanisms of life are identical for all species and are extremely complex — and when one calculates the probability of chance producing such complexity, one ends up with inconceivably small numbers.

The DNA molecule, which excels at stocking and duplicating information, is incapable of building itself on its own.

• Proteins do this, but they are incapable of reproducing themselves without the information contained in the DNA.
• Life, therefore, is a seemingly inescapable synthesis of these two molecular systems.
• Moving beyond the famous question of the chicken and the egg, Crick calculates the probability of the chance emergence of one single protein (which could then go on to build the first DNA molecule).
• In all living species, proteins are made up of exactly the same 20 amino acids, which are small molecules.
• The average protein is a long chain made up of approximately 200 amino acids, chosen from those 20, and strung together in the right order.
• According to the laws of combinatorials, there is 1 chance in 20 multiplied by itself 200 times for a single specific protein to emerge fortuitously.
• This figure, which can be written 20²⁰⁰, and which is roughly equivalent to 10²⁶⁰, is enormously greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe (estimated at 10⁵⁰).

These numbers are inconceivable for a human mind.

• It is not possible to imagine all the atoms of the observable universe and even less a figure that is billions of billions of billions of billions of billions (etc.) times greater.
• However, since the beginning of life on earth, the number of amino acid chains that could have been synthesized by chance can only represent a minute fraction of all the possibilities.

According to Crick:

“The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time. These calculations take account only of the amino acid sequence. They do not allow for the fact that many sequences would probably not fold up satisfactorily into a stable, compact shape. What fraction of all possible sequences would do this is not known, though it is surmised to be fairly small.”

Crick concludes that the organized complexity found at the cellular level “cannot have arisen by pure chance.”

The earth has existed for approximately 4.5 billion years.

• In the beginning it was merely a radioactive aggregate with a surface temperature reaching the melting point of metal.
• Not really a hospitable place for life. Yet there are fossils of single-celled beings that are approximately 3.5 billion years old.
• The existence of a single cell necessarily implies the presence of DNA, with its 4-letter “alphabet” (A, G, C, T), and of proteins, with their 20-letter “alphabet” (the 20 amino acids), as well as a “translation mechanism” between the two — given that the instructions for the construction of proteins are coded in the language of DNA.

Crick writes:

“It is quite remarkable that such a mechanism exists at all and even more remarkable that every living cell, whether animal, plant or microbial, contains a version of it.” ^[19]

Crick compares a protein to a paragraph made up of 200 letters lined up in the correct order.

• If the chances are infinitesimal for one paragraph to emerge in a billion years from a terrestrial soup, the probability of the fortuitous appearance, during the same period, of two alphabets and one translation mechanism is even smaller.

When i looked up from Crick’s book, it was dark outside.

• I was feeling both astonished and elated. Like a myopic detective bent over a magnifying glass while following a trail, I had fallen into a bottomless hole.
• For months I had been trying to untangle the enigma of the hallucinatory knowledge of Western Amazonia’s indigenous people, stubbornly searching for the hidden passage in the apparent dead end.
• I had only detected the DNA trail two weeks previously in Harner’s book.
• Since then I had mainly developed the hypothesis along intuitive lines.
• My goal was certainly not to build a new theory on the origin of life; but there I was — a poor anthropologist knowing barely how to swim, floating in a cosmic ocean filled with microscopic and bilingual serpents.
• I could see now that there might be links between science and shamanic, spiritual and mythological traditions, that seemed to have gone unnoticed, doubtless because of the fragmentation of Western knowledge.

With his book, Francis Crick provided a good example of this fragmentation.

• His mathematics were impeccable, and his reasoning crystalline; Crick was surely among twentieth-century rationality’s finest.
• But he had not noticed that he was not the first to propose the idea of a snake-shaped vital principle of cosmic origin.
• All the peoples in the world who talk of a cosmic serpent have been saving as much for millennia.
• He had not seen it because the rational gaze is forever focalized and can examine only one thing at a time.
• It separates things to understand them, including the truly complementary.
• It is the gaze of the specialist, who sees the fine grain of a necessarily restricted field of vision.
• When Crick set about considering cosmogony from the serious perspective of molecular biology, he had long since put out of his analytical mind the myths of archaic peoples.

From my new point of view, Crick’s scenario of “directed panspermia,” in which a spaceship transports DNA in the form of frozen bacteria across the immensities of the cosmos, seemed less likely than the idea of an omniscient and terrifying cosmic serpent of unimaginable power.

• After all, life as described by Crick was based on a miniature language that had not changed a letter in four billion years, while multiplying itself in an extreme diversity of species.
• The petals of a rose, Francis Cricks brain, and the coat of a virus are all built out of proteins made up of exactly the same 20 amino acids.
• A phenomenon capable of such creativity was surely not going to travel in a spaceship resembling those propelled containers imagined by human beings in the twentieth century.

"A painting on hardboard of the Snake of the Marinbata people of Arnhem Land." From Huxley (1974, p. 127)

“A rock painting of the Walbiri tribe of Aborigines representing the Rainbow Snake.” Photo by David Attenborough, from Huxley (1974, p.126)

From Molecular biology of the Gene. Vol. 1, 4th ed., by Watson et al. Copyright © 1987 by James D. Watson, published by The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Co.

This meant that the gaze of the Western specialist was too narrow to see the two pieces that fit together to resolve the puzzle.

• The distance between molecular biology and shamanism/mythology was an optical illusion produced by the rational gaze that separates things ahead of time, and as objectivism fails to objectify its objectifying relationship, it also finds it difficult to consider its presuppositions.

The puzzle to solve was: Who are we and where do we come from?

Lost in these thoughts, I started wondering about the cosmic serpent and its representation throughout the world.

• I walked over to the philosophy and religion sections in my colleague’s library.

Fairly rapidly I came across a book by Francis Huxley entitled The way of the sacred, filled with pictures of sacred images from around the world.

• I found a good number of images containing serpents or dragons, and in particular two representations of the Rainbow Snake drawn by Australian Aborigines.
• The first showed a pair of snakes zigzagging in the margins. (see image top right)

The second was a rock painting of the Rainbow Snake. I looked at it more closely and saw two things:

• All around the serpent there were sorts of chromosomes, in their upside-down “U” shape, and underneath it there was a kind of ladder.

I rubbed my eyes, telling myself that I had to be imagining connections, but I could not get the ladder or the chromosomes to look like anything else.

Several weeks later I learned that U-shaped chromosomes were in “anaphase,” one of the stages of cellular duplication, which is the central mechanism of the reproduction of life;

• And the first image of the zigzag snakes looks strikingly like chromosomes in the “early prophase,” at the beginning of the same process.

However, I did not need this detail to feel certain now that the peoples who practice shamanism know about the hidden unity of nature, which molecular biology has confirmed, precisely because they have access to the reality of molecular biology.

It was at this point, in front of the picture of chromosomes painted by Australian Aborigines, that I sank into a fever of mind and soul that was to last for weeks, during which I floundered in dissonant mixes of myths and molecules.

Figure 07-01 Figure 07-02 The cosmic serpent, provider of attributes. From Clark (1959. p. 52) “Sito, the primordial serpent.” (1300 B.C.) From Clark (1959, p. 192)

Figure 07-03 Figure 07-04 “Ronín, the the two headed serpent.” From Gebhart-Sayer (1987, p. 42) “The serpent of the earth becomes celestial; with wings, it can fly, and allows the mummy to ascend to the stars.” From Jacq (1993, p. 99)

First, I followed the mythological trail of the cosmic serpent, paying particular attention to its form. I found that it was often double:

This Ancient Egyptian [Figure 07‑01] drawing does not represent a real animal, but a visual charade meaning “double serpent.”

Quetzalcoatl, the Aztecs’ plumed serpent, is not a real animal either.

• In living nature, snakes do not have arms or legs, and even less wings or feathers.
• A flying serpent is a contradiction in terms, a paradox, like a speaking mute.
• This is confirmed by the double etymology of the word -coatl, which means both “serpent” and “twin.”

The Ancient Egyptians also represented the cosmic serpent with human feet. [Figure 07‑02]

Here, too, the image suggests that the primordial divinity is double, both serpent and “non-serpent.”

In the early 1980s, ayahuasquero Luis Tangoa, living in a Shipibo-Conibo village in the Peruvian Amazon, offered to explain certain esoteric notions to anthropologist Angelika Gebhart-Sayer.

• Insisting that it was more appropriate to discuss these matters with images,^[1] he made several sketches of the cosmic anaconda Ronín, including this one: [Figure 07‑03]

It would be possible to give many examples of double serpents of cosmic origin associated with the creation of life on earth.

• But it is important to avoid too strict an interpretation of these images, which can have several meanings at once.
• For instance, the wings of the serpent can signify both a paradoxical nature and a real ability to fly, in this case in the cosmos. [Figure 07‑04]

Figure 07-05 Figure 07-06 “Here is the dragon that devours its tail.” From Maier (1965, p. 139). “Ouroboros: bronze disk, Benin art.” From Chevalier and Gheerbrandt (1982, p. 716)

Sometimes the winged serpent takes the form of a dragon, the mythical and double animal par excellence, which lives in the water and spits fire.

• According to the Dictionary of symbols, the dragon represents “the union of two opposed principles.”
• Its androgynous nature is symbolized most clearly by the Ouroboros, the serpent-dragon, which “incarnates sexual union in itself, permanently self-fertilizing, as shown by the tail stuck in its mouth” [Figure 07‑05]

In living nature snakes do not bite their own tails.Nevertheless, the Ouroboros appears in some of the most ancient representations of the world, such as the bronze disk from Benin shown at right. [Figure 07‑06]

• The Dictionary of symbols describes it as “doubtless the oldest African imago mundi, where its sinuous figure, associating opposites, encircles the primordial oceans in the middle of which floats the square of the earth below.” ^[2]

Mythical serpents are often enormous.

• In the image from Benin, the Ouroboros surrounds the entire earth.
• In Greek mythology, the monster-serpent Typhon touches the stars with its head.
• And the first paragraph of the first chapter of Chuang-Tzu, the presumed founder of philosophical Taoism, describes an extremely long fish, inhabiting the celestial lake, that transforms itself into a bird and mounts spiraling into the sky.
• Chuang-Tzu says that the length of this cosmic fish-bird is “who knows how many thousand miles.” ^[3]

Figure 07-07 Figure 07-08 Figure 07-09 “Vishnu and his wife Lakshmi resting on Sesha, the thousand-headed serpent of eternity, in an interval between the cycles of creation.” From Huxley (1974, pp. 188-189) "Cosmovision." From Gebhart-Sayer (1987, p. 26) “Aspects of Ronín.” From Gebhart-Sayer (1987, p. 34)

Hindu mythology also provides an example of a serpent of immeasurable proportions..

Known as Sesha, the thousand-headed serpent that floats on the cosmic ocean while the twin creator beings Vishnu and Lakshmi recline in its coils. [Figure 07‑07].

Mythological serpents are almost invariably associated with water.^[4]

In the drawing [Figure 07‑08] based on descriptions by ayahuasquero Laureano Ancon, the anaconda Ronín surrounds the entire earth, conceived as a “disc that swims in great waters”; Ronín itself is “half-submerged” — the anaconda being an aquatic species..

The cosmic serpent varies in size and nature. It can be small or large, single or double, and sometimes both at the same time [Figure 07‑09].

• This picture was drawn by Luis Tangoa, who lives in the same village as Laureano Ancon.
• These two shamans would have had all the time in the world to reach an agreement about the appearance of the cosmic anaconda.
• Yet the former draws it as a single sperm and a two-headed snake, while the latter describes it as an anaconda of “normal” appearance that completely encircles the earth.

As the creator of life, the cosmic serpent is a master of metamorphosis.

• In the myths of the world where it plays a central part, it creates by transforming itself; it changes while remaining the same.
• So it is understandable that it should be represented differently at the same time.

I went on to look for the connection between the cosmic serpent — the master of transformation of serpentine form that lives in water and can be both extremely long and small, single and double — and DNA.

I found that DNA corresponds exactly to this description.

• If one stretches out the DNA contained in the nucleus of a human cell, one obtains a two-yard-long thread that is only ten atoms wide.
• This thread is a billion times longer than its own width.
• Relatively speaking, it is as if your little finger stretched from Paris to Los Angeles.

A thread of DNA is much smaller than the visible light humans perceive.

• Even the most powerful optical microscopes cannot reveal it, because DNA is approximately 120 times narrower than the smallest wavelength of visible light.^[5]

The nucleus of a cell is equivalent in volume to 2-millionths of a pinhead.

• The two-yard thread of DNA packs into this minute volume by coiling up endlessly on itself, thereby reconciling extreme length and infinitesimal smallness, like mythical serpents.

The average human being is made up of 100 thousand billion cells, according to some estimates.

• This means that there are approximately 125 billion miles of DNA in a human body — corresponding to 70 round-trips between Saturn and the Sun.
• You could travel your entire life in a Boeing 747 flying at top speed and you would not even cover one hundredth of this distance.
• Your personal DNA is long enough to wrap around the earth 5 million times.^[6]

All the cells in the world contain DNA — be they animal, vegetal, or bacterial — and they are all filled with salt water, in which the concentration of salt is similar to that of the worldwide ocean.

• We cry and sweat what is essentially seawater.
• DNA bathes in water, which in turn plays a crucial role in establishing the double helix’s shape.
• As DNA’s four bases (adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine) are insoluble in water, they tuck themselves into the center of the molecule where they associate in pairs to form the rungs of the ladder; then they twist up into a spiraled stack to avoid contact with the surrounding water molecules.
• DNA’s twisted ladder shape is a direct consequence of the cell’s watery environment.^[7]
• DNA goes together with water, just like mythical serpents do.

From Watson (1968, p. 165)

The DNA molecule is a single long chain made up of two interwoven ribbons that are connected by the four bases.

• These bases can only match up in specific pairs — A with T, G with C.
• Any other pairing of the bases is impossible, because of the arrangement of their individual atoms: A can bond only with T, G only with C.

This means that one of the two ribbons is the back-to-front duplicate of the other and that the genetic text is double:

• It contains a main text on one of the ribbons, which is read in a precise direction by the transcription enzymes.
• And a backup text, which is inverted and most often not read.

The second ribbon plays two essential roles.

• It allows the repair enzymes to reconstruct the main text in case of damage.
• And, above all, it provides the mechanism for the duplication of the genetic message.
• It suffices to open the double helix as one might unzip a zipper, in order to obtain two separate and complementary ribbons that can then be rebuilt into double ribbons by the duplication enzymes.
• As the latter can place only an A opposite a T and vice versa, and a G opposite a C, and vice versa, this leads to the formation of two twin double helixes, which are identical in every respect to the original.
• Twins are therefore central to life, just as ancient myths indicate, and they are associated with a serpentine form.

Without this copying mechanism, a cell would never be able to duplicate itself, and life would not exist.

DNA is the informational molecule of life, and its very essence consists in being both single and double, like the mythical serpents.

DNA and its duplication mechanisms are the same for all living creatures. The only thing that changes from one species to another is the order of the letters.

• This constancy goes back to the very origins of life on earth.
• According to biologist Robert Pollack:

“The planet’s surface has changed many times over, but DNA and the cellular machinery for its replication have remained constant. Schrödinger’s ‘aperiodic crystal’ understated DNA’s stability: no stone, no mountain, no ocean, not even the sky above us, have been stable and constant for this long; nothing inanimate, no matter how complicated, has survived unchanged for a fraction of the time that DNA and its machinery of replication have coexisted.” ^[8]

At the beginning of its existence, some 4.5 billion years ago, planet earth was an inhospitable place for life.

• As a molten lava fireball, its surface was radioactive.
• Its water was so hot it existed only in the form of incondensable vapor.
• And its atmosphere, devoid of any breathable oxygen, contained poisonous gases such as cyanide and formaldehyde.

Approximately 3.9 billion years ago, the earth’s surface cooled sufficiently to form a thin crust on top of the molten magma.

• Strangely, life, and thus DNA, appeared relatively quickly thereafter.
• Scientists have found traces of biological activity in sedimentary rocks that are 3.85 billion years old, and fossil hunters have found actual bacterial fossils that are 3.5 billion years old.

During the first 2 billion years of life on earth, the planet was inhabited only by anaerobic bacteria, for which oxygen is a poison.

• These bacteria lived in water, and some of them learned to use the hydrogen contained in the H₂O molecule while expelling the oxygen.
• This opened up new and more efficient metabolic pathways.
• The gradual enrichment of the atmosphere with oxygen allowed the appearance of a new kind of cell, capable of using oxygen and equipped with a nucleus for packing together its DNA.
• These nucleated cells are at least thirty times more voluminous than bacterial cells.

According to biologists Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan:

“The biological transition between bacteria and nucleated cells … is so sudden it cannot effectively be explained by gradual changes over time.”

From that moment onward, life as we know it took shape. Nucleated cells joined together to form the first multicellular beings, such as algae.

• The latter also produce oxygen by photosynthesis.
• Atmospheric oxygen increased to about 21 percent and then stabilized at this level approximately 500 million years ago — thankfully, because if oxygen were a few percent higher, living beings would combust spontaneously.
• According to Margulis and Sagan, this state of affairs “gives the impression of a conscious decision to maintain balance between danger and opportunity, between risk and benefit.” ^[9]

Around 550 million years ago, life exploded into a grand variety of multicellular species, algae and more complex plants and animals, living not only in water, but on land and in the air.

• Of all the species living at that time, not one has survived to this day.
• According to certain estimates, almost all of the species that have ever lived on earth have already disappeared, and there are between 3 million and 50 million species living currently.^[10]

DNA is a master of transformation, just like mythical serpents.

• The cell-based life DNA informs made the air we breathe, the landscape we see, and the mind-boggling diversity of living beings of which we are a part.
• In 4 billion years, it has multiplied itself into an incalculable number of species, while remaining exactly the same.

Inside the nucleus, DNA coils and uncoils, writhes and wriggles.

• Scientists often compare the form and movements of this long molecule to those of a snake.

Molecular biologist Christopher Wills writes:

“The two chains of DNA resemble two snakes coiled around each other in some elaborate courtship ritual.” ^[11]

To sum up, DNA is a snake-shaped master of transformation

• that lives in water and
• is both extremely long and small, single and double.

Just like the cosmic serpent.

I knew that many shamanic peoples use images other than a “cosmic serpent” to discuss the creation of life, talking particularly of a rope, a vine, a ladder, or a stairway of celestial origin that links heaven and earth.

Mircea Eliade has shown that these different images form a common theme that he called the axis mundi, or axis of the world, and that he found in shamanic traditions the world over.

• According to Eliade, the axis mundi gives access to the Otherworld and to shamanic knowledge; there is a “paradoxical passage,” normally reserved for the dead, that shamans manage to use while living, and this passage is often guarded by a serpent or a dragon.
• For Eliade, shamanism is the set of techniques that allows one to negotiate this passage, reach the axis, acquire the knowledge associated with it, and bring it back — most often to heal people.^[12]

“Liana (Bauhinia caulotretus) ‘that goes from earth up to heaven.’” From Koch-Grünberg (1917, Vol. 2, Drawing IV)

Here, too, the connection with DNA is clear.

In the literature of molecular biology, DNA’s shape is compared not only to two entwined serpents, but also, very precisely, to a rope, a vine, a ladder, or a stairway — the images varying from one author to another. For instance, Maxim Frank-Kamenetskii considers that,

“in a DNA molecule the complementary strands twine around one another like two lianas.”

Furthermore, scientists have recently begun to realize that many illnesses, including cancer, originate, and therefore may be solved, at the level of DNA.^[13]

I set about exploring the different representations of the axis of the world, those images parallel to the cosmic serpent.

• The notion of an axis mundi is particularly common among the indigenous peoples of the Amazon.
• The Ashaninca, for example, talk of a “sky-rope.”

As Gerald Weiss writes:

“Among the Campas there is a belief that at one time Earth and Sky were close together and connected by a cable.

A vine called inkiteca (literally, “sky-rope”), with a peculiar stepped shape, was pointed out to the author as the cable that held Earth and Sky together.” ^[14]

According to Weiss, this vine is the same as the one indicated at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Taulipang Indians to Theodor Koch-Grünberg, one of the first ethnographers.

• In his work, Koch-Grünberg provided a skillful sketch of the Taulipang’s vine.

Strangely, the Taulipang live in Guyana, some three thousand miles from the Ashaninca, yet they associate exactly the same vine with the sky-rope.

Figure 07-13 Figure 07-14 Figure 07-15 The “sky ladder” drawing based on descriptions by ayahuasquero José Chucano Santos.

One of the best-known variants of the axis mundi is the caduceus, formed by two snakes wrapped around an axis.

• Since the most ancient times, one finds this symbol connected to the art of healing, from India to the Mediterranean.
• The Taoists of China represent the caduceus with the yin-yang, which symbolizes the coiling of two serpentine and complementary forms into a single androgynous vital principle.^[15] [Figure 07‑13]

In the Western world, the caduceus continues to be used as the symbol of medicine, sometimes in modified form.^[16] [Figure 07‑‑14]

Among the Shipibo-Conibo in the Peruvian Amazon, the axis mundi can be represented as a ladder.

• In the drawing based on descriptions by ayahuasquero Jose Chucano Santos, the “sky-ladder” is surrounded by the cosmic anaconda Ronín [Figure 07‑15].

The ladder that gives access to shamanic knowledge is such a widespread theme that Alfred Métraux calls it the “symbol of the profession.”

• He also reports that, as far as Amazonian shamans are concerned, it is by contacting the “spirits of the ladder or of the rungs” that they learn to “master all the secrets of magic.”

Métraux also points out that these shamans drink “an infusion prepared from a vine, the form of which suggests a ladder.” ^[17]

• Indeed, the ayahuasca vine is often compared to a ladder, or even to a double helix, as this photo taken by ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes indicates (see page 74 [Figure 07‑16]).

“Banisteriopsis caapi, a liana that tends to grow in charming double helices, is one of the primary ingredients in an entheogenic [hallucinogenic] potion known as … ayahuasca, yagé, caapi. … Those who know it call it ‘spirit vine’ or ‘ladder to the Milky Way.’ It is known also as ayahuasca [‘vine of the soul’].” (Howard Rheingold quote.). From Schultes and Raffauf (1992, p. 26)

Most of the connections I had found up to this point between the cosmic serpent and the axis of the world, and DNA, were related to form.

• This concurred with what Carlos Perez Shuma had told me: Nature talks in signs and, to understand its language, one has to pay attention to similarities in form.
• He had also said that the spirits of nature communicate with human beings in hallucinations and dreams — in other words, in mental images. This idea is common in “pre-rational” traditions.
• For instance, Heraclitus said of the Pythian oracle (from the Greek puthôn, “serpent”) that it “neither declares nor conceals, but gives a sign.” ^[18]

I wanted to go further than mere formal connections, however, and I knew, thanks to the work of Mircea Eliade, that shamans almost everywhere speak a secret language, “the language of all nature,” which allows them to communicate with the spirits.

• I started looking for information about this phenomenon to see if there were any common elements in content between the language of the spirits of nature that shamans learn and the language of DNA.

Unfortunately, there are not many in-depth studies of shamanic language, no doubt because anthropologists have never really taken it seriously.^[19]

• I found an exception in Graham Townsley’s recent work on the songs of Yaminahua ayahuasqueros in the Peruvian Amazon.

According to Townsley, Yaminahua shamans learn songs, called koshuiti, by imitating the spirits they see in their hallucinations, in order to communicate with them.

• The words of these songs are almost totally incomprehensible to those Yaminahua who are not shamans.

Townsley writes:

“Almost nothing in these songs is referred to by its normal name. The abstrusest metaphoric circumlocutions are used instead. For example, night becomes ‘swift tapirs,’ the forest becomes ‘cultivated peanuts,’ fish are ‘peccaries,’ jaguars are ‘baskets,’ anacondas are ‘hammocks’ and so forth.”

In each case, writes Townsley, the metaphorical logic can be explained by an obscure, but real, connection:

“Thus fish become ‘white-collared peccaries’ because of the resemblance of a fish’s gill to the white dashes on this type of peccary’s neck; jaguars become ‘baskets’ because the fibers of this particular type of loose-woven basket (wonati) form a pattern precisely similar to a jaguar’s markings.”

The shamans themselves understand very clearly the meaning of these metaphors and they call them tsai yoshtoyoshto, literally “language-twisting-twisting.”

Townsley translates this expression as “twisted language.”

• The word twist has the same root as two and twin. Twisted means, technically, “double and wrapped around itself.”

Why do Yaminahua shamans talk in twisted language? According to one of them:

“With my koshuiti I want to see — singing, I carefully examine things — twisted language brings me close but not too close — with normal words I would crash into things — with twisted ones I circle around them — I can see them clearly.”

For Townsley, all shamanic relations with the spirits are,

“deliberately constructed in an elliptical and multi-referential fashion so as to mirror the refractory nature of the beings who are their objects.”

He concludes:

“Yoshi are real beings who are both ‘like and not like’ the things they animate. They have no stable or unitary nature and thus, paradoxically, the ‘seeing as’ of ‘twisted language’ is the only way of adequately describing them. Metaphor here is not improper naming but the only proper naming possible.” ^[20]

I went on to look for the connection between the language of spirits described by Yaminahua ayahuasqueros and the language of DNA.

• I found that “double and entwined,” or “twisting-twisting,” or “yoshtoyoshto,” corresponded perfectly to the latter.

The genetic information of a human being (for example), called “genome,” is contained in 3 billion letters spread out along a single filament of DNA.

• In some places, this filament winds around itself to form 23 more compact segments known as “chromosomes.”
• We all inherit a complete set of chromosomes from each of our parents, and so we have 23 pairs of chromosomes.
• Each chromosome is made up of a very long thread of DNA which is already a double message to begin with — the main text on one ribbon, and the complementary duplicate on the other.
• Thus our cells all contain two complete genomes as well as their backup copies.
• Our genetic message is doubly double and contains a total of 6 billion base pairs, or 12 billion letters.

The DNA contained in the nucleus of a human cell is two yards long, and the two ribbons that make up this filament wrap around each other several hundred million times.^[21]

As far as its material aspect or its form is concerned, DNA is a doubly double text that wraps around itself.

• In other words, it is a “language-twisting-twisting.”

The transcription enzymes read only the parts of the DNA text that code for the construction of proteins and enzymes.

• These passages, called “genes,” represent only 3 percent of the human genome, according to various estimates.
• The remaining 97 percent are not read; their function is unknown.

Scientists have found spread out among the non-coding parts of the text a great number of endlessly repeated sequences with no apparent meaning, and even palindromes, which are words or sentences that can be read in either direction.

• They have called this apparent gibberish, which constitutes the overwhelming majority of the genome, “junk DNA.” ^[22]

In this “junk,” one finds tens of thousands of passages like this;

• ACACACACACACACACACACACACACACACAC …
• There is even a 300-letter sequence that is repeated a total of half a million times.
• All told, repeat sequences make up a full third of the genome. Their meaning, so far, is unknown.

Molecular biologists Chris Calladine and Horace Drew sum up the situation:

“The vast majority of DNA in our bodies does things that we do not presently understand.” ^[23]

Scattered among this ocean of nonsense, genes are like islands where the language of DNA becomes comprehensible.

• Genes spell out the instructions for lining up amino acids into proteins.
• They do this with words of three letters.
• “CAG,” for example, codes for amino acid glutamine in DNA language.

As all the words of the genetic code have three letters, and as DNA has a four-letter alphabet (A,G,C,T),
the genetic code contains 4 × 4 × 4 = 64 possible words.

• These words all have a meaning and correspond either to one of the 20 amino acids used in the construction of proteins or to one of two punctuation marks (“start,” “stop”).
• So there are 22 possible meanings for 64 words.
• This redundancy has led scientists to say that the genetic code is “degenerate.”
• In fact, it simply has a wealth of synonyms — like a language where words as different as “jaguar” and “basket” have the same meaning.^[24]

In reality, things are even more complex.

• Within genes, there are many non-coding segments called “introns.”
• As soon as the transcription enzymes have transcribed a given gene, editing enzymes eliminate the introns with atomic precision and splice together the true coding segments, known as “exons.”
• Some genes consist of up to 98 percent introns — which means that they contain only 2 percent genetic information.
• The role of these introns remains mysterious.^[25]

The proportion of introns and exons in the human genome is not yet known, because so far, only half of all the genes it contains have been identified, out of a total estimated at 100,000.^[26]

Along the DNA filament, “junk” and genes alternate; within genes, introns intermix with exons, which are themselves expressed in a language where almost every word has a synonym.

• As far as both its content and its form are concerned, DNA is a doubly double language that wraps around itself.

Just like the twisted language of the spirits of nature.

The cosmic serpent, provider of attributes. From Clark (1959. p. 52)

What do these connections between DNA and the cosmic serpent, the axis of the world, and the language of the spirits of nature, mean?

The correspondences are too numerous to be explained by chance alone. If I were a member of a jury having to pronounce itself on the matter, I would have the conviction that the same reality is being described from different perspectives.

Take the cosmic serpent of the Ancient Egyptians, the “provider of attributes.”

• The signs that accompany it mean “one” ( | ), “several” ( | | | ),
• “spirit, double, vital force” (), “place” (), “wick of twisted flax” (), and “water” ().
• Under the chin of the second serpent, there is an Egyptian cross meaning “key of life.” ^[27]

The connections with DNA are obvious and work on all levels:

• DNA is indeed shaped like a long, single and double serpent, or a wick of twisted flax;
• It is a double vital force that develops from one to several;
• Its place is water.

What else could the Ancient Egyptians have meant when they talked of a double serpent, provider of attributes and key of life, if not what scientists call “DNA”?

Why are these metaphors so consistently and so frequently used unless they mean what they say?

One sunny afternoon that spring I was sitting in the garden with my children. Birds were singing in the trees, and my mind began to wander.

• There I was, a product of twentieth-century rationality, my faith requiring numbers and molecules rather than myths.
• Yet I was now confronted with mythological numbers relative to a molecule, in which I had to believe.
• Inside my body sitting there in the garden sun were 125 billion miles of DNA.
• I was wired to the hilt with DNA threads and until recently had known nothing about it.
• Was this astronomical number really just a “useless but amusing fact,” ^[1] as some scientists would have it?
• Or did it indicate that the dimensions, at least, of our DNA are cosmic?

Some biologists describe DNA as an “ancient high biotechnology,” containing “over a hundred trillion times as much information by volume as our most sophisticated information storage devices.” Could one still speak of a technology in these circumstances?

• Yes, because there is no other word to qualify this duplicate, information-storing molecule.
• DNA is only ten atoms wide and as such constitutes a sort of ultimate technology:
• It is organic and so miniaturized that it approaches the limits of material existence.^[2]

Shamans, meanwhile, claim that the vital principle that animates all living creatures comes from the cosmos and is minded. As ayahuasquero Pablo Amaringo says:

“A plant may not talk, but there is a spirit in it that is conscious, that sees everything, which is the soul of the plant, its essence, what makes it alive.”

According to Amaringo, these spirits are veritable beings, and humans are also filled with them:

“Even the hair, the eyes, the ears are full of beings. You see all this when ayahuasca is strong.” ^[3]

During the past weeks, I had come to consider that the perspective of biologists could be reconciled with that of ayahuasqueros and that both could be true at the same time. According to the stereoscopic image I could see by gazing at both perspectives simultaneously,

• DNA and the cell-based life it codes for are an extremely sophisticated technology that far surpasses our present-day understanding
• And that was initially developed elsewhere than on earth — which it radically transformed on its arrival some four billion years ago.

A magnified section of a leaf illustrating its organized, technological aspect.

This point of view was completely new to me and had changed my way of looking at the world.

• For instance, the leaves of trees now appeared to be true solar panels.
• One had only to look at them closely to see their “technological,” or organized, aspect. (see image at right)

This revelation was troubling. I started thinking about my eyes, through which I was looking at the plants in the garden.

• Over the course of my readings, I had learned that the human eye is more sophisticated than any camera of similar size.
• The cells on the outer layer of the retina can absorb a single particle of light, or photon, and amplify its energy at least a million times, before transferring it in the form of a nervous signal to the back of the brain.
• The iris, which functions as the eyes diaphragm, is automatically controlled.
• The cornea has just the right curvature.
• The lens is focused by miniature muscles, which are also controlled automatically by feedback.

• The final result of this visual system, still imperfectly understood in its entirety, is a clear, colored, and three‑dimensional image inside the brain that we perceive as external.
• We never see reality, but only an internal representation of it that our brain constructs for us continuously.^[4]

What troubled me was not so much the resemblance of the human eye to an organic and extremely sophisticated technology born of cosmic knowledge, but that they were my eyes.

• Who was this “I” perceiving the images flooding into into mind?
• One thing was sure: I was not responsible for the construction of the visual system with which I was endowed.

I did not know what to make of these thoughts.

• Staring blankly at the lawn in front of me, I started following a shiny, black ant making its way across the thick blades of grass with the determination of a tank.
• It was heading toward the colony of aphids in the tree at the bottom of the garden.
• This was an ant belonging to a species that herds aphids and “milks” them for their sweet secretions.

I began thinking that this ant had a visual system quite different from my own that apparently functioned every bit as well.

• Despite our differences in size and shape, our genetic information was written in the same language — which we were both incapable of seeing, given that DNA is smaller than visible light, even to the eyes of an ant.

I found it interesting that the language containing the instructions for the creation of different visual systems should be itself invisible. It was as if the instructions were to remain hidden from their beneficiaries, as if we were wired in such a way that we could not see the wires. …

Why?

I tried reconsidering the question from a “shamanic” point of view. It was as if these beings inside us wanted to hide. … But that’s what the Ashaninca say! They call the invisible beings who created life the “maninkari,” literally “those who are hidden”!

Later that afternoon, I returned to my office and started rereading the passages concerning the maninkari in Gerald Weiss’s exhaustive study on Ashaninca cosmology.

• According to Weiss, the Ashaninca believe that the most powerful of all maninkari is the “Great Transformer” Avíreri, who created life on earth, starting with the seasons and then moving on to the entirety of living beings.
• Accompanied sometimes by his sister, at others by his nephew, Avíreri is one of the divine trickster twins who create by transformation and are so common in mythology.

It was in reading the last story about the end of Avíreri’s trajectory that I had a shock.

• Having completed his creation work, Avíreri goes to a party where he gets drunk on manioc beer.
• His sister, who is also a trickster, invites him to dance and pushes him into a hole dug in advance.
• She then pretends to pull him up by throwing him a thread, then a cord — but neither is strong enough.
• Furious with his sister, whom he transforms into a tree, Avíreri decides to escape by digging a hole into the underworld.
• He ends up at a place called River’s End, where a strangler vine wraps around him.
• From there, he continues to sustain to this day his numerous children on earth.^[5]

How could I have missed the connections between the twin being Avíreri, the Great Transformer, and the DNA double helix,

• First creating the breathable atmosphere (“the seasons”),
• Then the entirety of living beings by transformation,
• Living in the microscopic world (“underworld”),
• In cells filled with seawater (“River’s End”),
• Taking the form of a thread, a cord, or a strangler vine which wraps around itself,
• And, finally, sustaining to this day all the living species of the planet?

For weeks I had been finding connections between myths and molecular biology.

• I was not even surprised to see that the creation myth of an indigenous Amazonian people coincided with the description made by today’s biologists of the development of life on earth.
• What shook me, and even filled me with consternation, was that I had had this evidence under my nose for years without giving it the slightest importance.
• My gaze had been too narrow.

Sitting in my office, I remembered the time Carlos Perez Shuma had told me, “The maninkari taught us how to spin and weave cotton.” Now the meaning seemed obvious;

• The two ribbons of the DNA double helix wrap around each other 600 million times inside each human cell: “Who else could have taught us to weave?”
• The problem for me was that I had not believed him. I had not considered for one moment that his words corresponded to something real.

Under these circumstances, what did my title “doctor of anthropology” signify — other than an intellectual imposture in relation to my object of study?

These revelations overwhelmed me.

• To make amends, I resolved then and there to take shamans at their word for the rest of my investigation.

What had become of the investigation that posed the enigma of the hallucinatory knowledge of Western Amazonia’s indigenous people?

• Why had it ended up with cosmic serpents from around the world entwined with DNA molecules?

For some weeks now, I had been in a sort of trance, my mind flooded with an almost permanent flux of strange, if not impossible, connections.

• My only discipline had been to note them down, or to tape them, instead of repressing them out of disbelief.
• My worldview had been turned upside down, but I was slowly coming back to my senses, and the first question I asked myself was: What did all this mean?

I was now of the opinion that DNA was at the origin of shamanic knowledge. By “shamanism,” I understood a series of defocalization techniques:

• Controlled dreams
• Prolonged fasting
• Isolation in wilderness
• Ingestion of hallucinogenic plants
• Hypnosis based on a repetitive drumbeat
• Near-death experience
• Or a combination of the above.

Aboriginal shamans of Australia reach conclusions similar to those of Amazonian ayahuasqueros, without the use of psychoactive plants, by working mainly with their dreams.

• What techniques did Chuang-Tzu, the Egyptian pharaohs, and the animists of Benin use, to name but a few? Who could say?
• But they all spoke, in one form or another, of a cosmic serpent — as did the Australians, the Amazonians, and the Aztecs.

By using these different techniques, it therefore seemed possible to induce neurological changes that allow one to pick up information from DNA. But from which DNA?

• At first I thought that I had found the answer when I learned that, in each human cell, there is the equivalent of “the information contained in one thousand five hundred encyclopedia volumes” ^[6]
• In other words, the equivalent of a bookcase about ten yards long and two yards high.
• There, I thought, is the origin of knowledge.

On reflection, however, I saw that this idea was improbable.

• There was no reason why the human genome, no matter how vast, should contain information about the Amazonian plants necessary for the preparation of curare, for example.
• Furthermore, the ayahuasqueros said that the highly sophisticated sound-images that they saw and heard in their hallucinations were interactive, and that it was possible to communicate with them.
• These images could not originate from a static, or textual, set of information such as 1,500 encyclopedia volumes.

My own experience with ayahuasca-induced hallucinations was limited, but was sufficient to suggest a trail.

• Ayahuasquero Ruperto Gomez, who had initiated me, had called the hallucinogenic brew “the television of the forest,”
• And I had indeed seen sequences of hallucinatory images flashing by at blinding speed, as if they were truly transmitted from outside my body, but picked up inside my head.^[7]

I knew of no neurological mechanism on which to base this working hypothesis, but I did know that DNA was:

• An aperiodic crystal that traps and transports electrons with efficiency
• And that emits photons (in other words, electromagnetic waves) at ultra-weak levels currently at the limits of measurement
• And all this more than any other living matter.^[8]
• This led me to a potential candidate for the transmissions: the global network of DNA-based life.

All living beings contain DNA, be they bacteria, carrots, or humans.

• DNA, as a substance, does not vary from one species to another; only the order of its letters changes. This is why biotechnology is possible.
• For instance, one can extract the DNA sequence in the human genome containing the instructions to build the insulin protein and splice it into the DNA of a bacterium, which will then produce insulin similar to that normally excreted by the human pancreas.
• The cellular machines called ribosomes, which assemble the proteins inside the bacterium, understand the same four-letter language as the ribosomes inside human pancreatic cells and use the same 20 amino acids as building blocks.
• Biotechnology proves by its very existence the fundamental unity of life.

“Cosmovision” From Gebhart-Sayer (1987, p. 26)

Each living being is constructed on the basis of the instructions written in the informational substance that is DNA.

• A single bacterium contains approximately ten million units of genetic information,
• Whereas a microscopic fungus contains a billion units.
• In a mere handful of soil, there are approximately ten billion bacteria and one million fungi.
• This means that there is more order, and information, in a handful of earth than there is on the surfaces of all the other known planets combined.^[9]
• The information contained in DNA makes the difference between life and inert matter.

The earth is surrounded by a layer of DNA-based life that made the atmosphere breathable and created the ozone layer, which protects our genetic matter against ultraviolet and mutagenic rays.

• There are even anaerobic bacteria living half a mile beneath the ocean floor;
• The planet is wired with life deep into its crust.^[10]

When we walk in a field, DNA and the cell-based life it codes for are everywhere: inside our own bodies, but also in the puddles, the mud, the cow pies, the grass on which we walk, the air we breathe, the birds, the trees, and everything that lives.

This global network of DNA-based life, this biosphere, encircles the entire earth.

What better image for the DNA-based biosphere than Ronín, the cosmic anaconda of the Shipibo-Conibo?

• The anaconda is an amphibious snake, capable of living both in water and on land, just like the biosphere’s creatures.

Ayahuasquero Laureano Ancon explains the image above:

“The earth upon which we find ourselves is a disk floating in great waters. The serpent of the world Ronín is half-submerged and surrounds it entirely.” ^[11]

Here is, according to my conclusions, the great instigator of the hallucinatory images perceived by ayahuasqueros:

• The crystalline and biospheric network of DNA-based life,
• Alias the cosmic serpent.

During my first ayahuasca experience I saw a pair of enormous and terrifying snakes.

• They conveyed an idea that bowled me over and later encouraged me to reconsider my self-image.
• They taught me that I was just a human being.
• To others, this may not seem like a great revelation; but at the time, it was exactly what the young anthropologist I was needed to learn.
• Above all, it was a thought that I could not have had by myself, precisely because of my anthropocentric presuppositions.

I also felt very clearly that the speed and the coherence of certain sequences of images could not have come from the chaotic storage room of my memory.

• For example, I saw in a dizzying visual parade the superimposing of the veins of a human hand on those of a green leaf.
• The message was crystal clear: We are made of the same fabric as the vegetal world. I had never really thought of this so concretely.
• The day after the ayahuasca session, I felt like a new being, united with nature, proud to be human and to belong to the grandiose web of life surrounding the planet.
• Once again, this was a totally new and constructive perspective for the materialistic humanist that I was.

This experience troubled me deeply.

• If I was not the source of these highly coherent and educational images, where did they come from?
• And who were those snakes who seemed to know me better than myself?

When I asked Carlos Perez Shuma, his answer was elliptic: All I had to do was take the snakes’ picture the next time I saw them. He did not deny their existence — on the contrary, he implied that they were as real as the reality we are all familiar with, if not more so.

Detail from Pablo Amaringo’s painting “Pregnant by an Anaconda” reproduced in Luna and Amaringo (1991, p. 111)

Eight years after my first ayahuasca experience, my desire to understand
the mystery of the hallucinatory serpents was undiminished.

• I launched into this investigation and familiarized myself with the different studies of ayahuasca shamanism only to discover that my experience had been commonplace.
• People who drink ayahuasca see colorful and gigantic snakes more than any other vision ^[12] — be it a Tukano Indian, an urbanized shaman, an anthropologist, or a wandering American poet.^[13]
• For instance, serpents are omnipresent in the visionary paintings of Pablo Amaringo ^[14] (see image at right).

Over the course of my readings, I discovered that the serpent was associated just about everywhere with shamanic knowledge — even in regions where hallucinogens are not used and where snakes are unknown in the local environment.

• Mircea Eliade says that in Siberia the serpent occurs in shamanic ideology and in the shaman’s costume among peoples where “the reptile itself is unknown.” ^[15]

Then I learned that in an endless number of myths, a gigantic and terrifying serpent, or a dragon, guards the axis of knowledge, which is represented in the form of a ladder (or a vine, a cord, a tree …).

• I also learned that (cosmic) serpents abound in the creation myths of the world and that they are not only at the origin of knowledge, but of life itself.

Snakes are omnipresent not only in the hallucinations, myths, and symbols of human beings in general, but also in their dreams.

• According to some studies, “Manhattanites dream of them with the same frequency as Zulus.”

One of the best-known dreams of this sort is August Kekulé’s, the German chemist who discovered the cyclical structure of benzene one night in 1862, when he fell asleep in front of the fire and dreamed of a snake dancing in front of his eyes while biting its tail and taunting him.

According to one commentator,

“There is hardly any need to recall that this contribution was fundamental for the development of organic chemistry.” ^[16]

Why do life-creating, knowledge-imparting snakes appear in the visions, myths, and dreams of human beings around the world?

The question has been asked, and a simple and neurological answer has been proposed and generally accepted: because of the instinctive fear of venom programmed into the brains of primates such as ourselves. Balaji Mundkur, author of the only global study on the matter, writes,

“The fundamental cause of the origin of serpent cults seems to be unlike any which gave rise to practically all other animal cults; that fascination by, and awe of, the serpent appears to have been compelled not only by elementary fear of its venom, but also by less palpable, though quite primordial psychological sensitivities rooted in the evolution of the primates; that unlike almost all other animals, serpents, in varying degree, provoke certain characteristically intuitive, irrational, phobic responses in human and nonhuman primates alike; … and that the serpents power to fascinate certain primates is dependent on the reaction of the latter’s autonomic nervous system to the mere sight of reptilian sinuous movement — a type of response that may have been reinforced by memories of venomous attacks during anthropogenesis and the differentiation of human societies. … The fascination of serpents, in short, is synonymous with a state of fear that amounts, at least temporarily, to morbid revulsion or phobia … whose symptoms few other species of animals — perhaps none — can elicit” (original italics).^[17]

In my opinion, this is a typical example of a reductionist, illogical, and inexact answer.

• Do people really venerate what they fear most?
• Do people suffering from phobia of spiders, for instance, decorate their clothes with images of spiders, saying, “We venerate these animals because we find them repulsive”? Hardly.

Therefore, I doubt that Siberian shamans embellish their costumes with a great number of ribbons representing serpents simply because they suffer from a phobia of these reptiles.

• Besides, most of the serpents found in the costumes of Siberian shamans do not represent real animals, but snakes with two tails.
• In a great number of creation myths, the serpent that plays the main part is not a real reptile; it is a cosmic serpent and often has two heads, two feet, or two wings or is so big that it wraps around the earth.
• Furthermore, venerated serpents are often nonvenomous.

In the Amazon, the nonvenomous snakes such as anacondas and boas are the ones that people consider sacred, like the cosmic anaconda Ronín.

• There is no lack of aggressive and deadly snakes with devastating venom in the Amazon, such as the bushmaster and the fer‑de‑lance, which are an everyday threat to life — and yet, they are never worshipped.^[18]

The answer, for me, lies elsewhere — which does not mean that primates do not suffer from an instinctive, or even a “programmed,” fear of snakes.

My answer is speculative, but could not be more restricted than the generally accepted theory of venom phobia.

• It is that the global network of DNA-based life emits ultra-weak radio waves, which are currently at the limits of measurement, but which we can nonetheless perceive in states of defocalization, such as hallucinations and dreams.
• As the aperiodic crystal of DNA is shaped like two entwined serpents, two ribbons, a twisted ladder, a cord, or a vine, we see in our trances serpents, ladders, cords, vines, trees, spirals, crystals, and so on.
• Because DNA is a master of transformation, we also see jaguars, caymans, bulls, or any other living being.
• But the favorite newscasters on DNA-TV seem unquestionably to be enormous, fluorescent serpents.

This leads me to suspect that the cosmic serpent is narcissistic — or, at least, obsessed with its own reproduction, even in imagery.

My investigation had led me to formulate the following working hypothesis:

• In their visions, shamans take their consciousness down to the molecular level and gain access to information related to DNA, which they call “animate essences” or “spirits.”
• This is where they see double helixes, twisted ladders, and chromosome shapes.
• This is how shamanic cultures have known for millennia that the vital principle is the same for all living beings and is shaped like two entwined serpents (or a vine, a rope, a ladder …).

DNA is the source of their astonishing botanical and medicinal knowledge, which can be attained only in defocalized and “nonrational” states of consciousness, though its results are empirically verifiable.

• The myths of these cultures are filled with biological imagery.
• And the shamans’ metaphoric explanations correspond quite precisely to the descriptions that biologists are starting to provide.

I knew this hypothesis would be more solid if it rested on a neurological basis, which was not yet the case.

• I decided to direct my investigation by taking ayahuasqueros at their word — and they unanimously claimed that certain psychoactive substances (containing molecules that are active in the human brain) influence the spirits in precise ways.
• The Ashaninca say that by ingesting ayahuasca or tobacco, it is possible to see the normally invisible and hidden maninkari spirits.
• Carlos Perez Shuma had told me that tobacco attracted the maninkari.
• Amazonian shamans in general consider tobacco a food for the spirits who crave it “since they no longer possess fire as human beings do.” ^[1]
• If my hypothesis were correct, it ought to be possible to find correspondences between these shamanic notions and the facts established by the study of the neurological activity of these same substances.
• More precisely, there ought to be an analogous connection between nicotine and DNA contained in the nerve cells of a human brain.

The idea that the maninkari liked tobacco had always seemed funny to me.

• I considered “spirits” to be imaginary characters who could not really enjoy material substances.
• I also considered smoking to be a bad habit, and it seemed improbable that spirits (inasmuch as they existed) would suffer from the same kinds of addictive behaviors as human beings.
• Nevertheless, I had resolved to stop letting myself be held up by such doubts and to pay attention to the literal meaning of the shamans’ words, and the shamans were categorical in saying that spirits had an almost insatiable hunger for tobacco.^[2]

I started following this trail by spending a few days at the library.

• I even made several phone calls to a specialist in the neurological mechanisms of nicotine to deepen my understanding and make sure I was not establishing imaginary connections — neurology being the last of my competencies. Here is what I learned.

In the human brain, each nerve cell, or neuron, has billions of receptors on its outer surface.

• These receptors are proteins specialized in the recognition and trapping of specific neurotransmitters, or similar substances.
• A molecule of nicotine shares structural similarities with the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and fits like a skeleton key into its receptor on certain neurons.^[3]
• This receptor is embedded in the cell’s membrane and is a large protein that includes not only a “lock” (the docking site for the external molecule), but also a channel, with a gate that is normally shut.
• When a key is introduced into the lock — when a molecule of nicotine fits into the binding site at the top of the receptor — the channel’s gate opens, allowing in a selective flow of positively charged atoms of calcium and sodium.
• The latter trigger a (poorly understood) cascade of electric reactions inside the cell, which ends up exciting the DNA contained in the nucleus, causing it to activate several genes, including those corresponding to the proteins that make up nicotinic receptors.^[4]

The more you give nicotine to your neurons, the more the DNA they contain activates the construction of nicotinic receptors, within certain limits.

• Here, I thought, is the almost insatiable hunger of the spirits for tobacco: The more you give them, the more they want.

I was surprised by the degree of correspondence between shamanic notions of tobacco and neurological studies of nicotine.

• One only had to do a literal translation to pass from one to the other.
• However, scientific accounts in terms of “receptors,” “flux of positively charged atoms,” and “stimulation of the transcription of the genes coding for the subunits of nicotinic receptors” did not explain in any way the effects of nicotine on consciousness.
• How was it that shamans saw spirits by ingesting staggering quantities of tobacco?

Before continuing with this question, I will clarify two points.

First, the discovery that nicotine stimulates the construction of nicotinic receptors was only made at the beginning of the 1990s;

• The connection between this phenomenon and the addiction displayed by tobacco users seems obvious, but has yet to be explored in detail.

Second, there are fundamental differences between the shamanic use of tobacco and the consumption of industrial cigarettes.

• The botanical variety used in the Amazon contains up to eighteen times more nicotine than the plants used in Virginia-type cigarettes.
• Amazonian tobacco is grown without chemical fertilizers or pesticides and contains none of the ingredients added to cigarettes, such as aluminium oxide, potassium nitrate, ammonium phosphate, polyvinyl acetate, and a hundred or so others, which make up approximately 10 percent of the smokable matter.^[5]
• During combustion, a cigarette emits some 4,000 substances, most of which are toxic.
• Some of these substances are even radioactive, making cigarettes the largest single source of radiation in the daily life of an average smoker.

According to one study, the average smoker absorbs the equivalent of the radiation dosages from 250 chest X-rays per year.

• Cigarette smoke is directly implicated in more than 25 serious illnesses, including 17 forms of cancer.^[6]
• In the Amazon, on the other hand, tobacco is considered a remedy.
• The Ashaninca word for “healer,” or “shaman,” is sheripiári — literally, “the person who uses tobacco.” ^[7]
• The oldest Ashaninca men I knew were all sheripiári. They were so old that they did not know their own age, which only their deeply wrinkled skin suggested, and they were remarkably alert and healthy.

Intrigued by these disparities, I looked through data banks for comparative studies between the toxicity of the Amazonian variety (Nicotiana rustica) and the variety used by the manufacturers of cigarettes, cigars, rolling tobacco, and pipe tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum).

• I found nothing. The question, it seemed, had not been asked.
• I also looked for studies on the cancer rate among shamans who use massive and regular doses of nicotine: again, nothing.

So I decided to write to the main authority on the matter, Johannes Wilbert, author of the book Tobacco and shamanism in South America, to put my questions to him. He replied:

“There is certainly evidence that Western tobacco products contain many different harmful agents which are probably not present in organically grown plants. I have not heard of shamans developing cancers but that may, of course, be a function of several things like lack of Western diagnosis, natural life span of indigenous people, magico-religious restriction of tobacco use in tribal societies, etc.” ^[8]

It seems clear that nicotine does not cause cancer,