The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby

who are “the two central characters in Yagua cosmogonic thought.” 17
    These correspondences seemed very strange, and I did not know what to make of them. Or rather, I could see an easy way of interpreting them, but it contradicted my understanding of reality: A Western anthropologist like Harner drinks a strong dose of ayahuasca with one people and gains access, in the middle of the twentieth century, to a world that informs the “mythological” concepts of other peoples and allows them to communicate with life-creating spirits of cosmic origin possibly linked to DNA. This seemed highly improbable to me, if not impossible. However, I was getting used to suspending disbelief, and I had decided to follow my approach through to its logical conclusion. So I casually penciled in the margin of Chaumeil’s text: “twins = DNA?”
    These indirect and analogical connections between DNA and the hallucinatory and mythological spheres seemed amusing to me, or at most intriguing. Nevertheless, I started thinking that I had perhaps found with DNA the scientific concept on which to focus one eye, while focusing the other on the shamanism of Amazonian ayahuasqueros.
    More concretely, I established a new category in my reading notes entitled “DNA Snakes.”

Chapter 6
    SEEING CORRESPONDENCES

    The following morning my wife and children left for a vacation in the mountains. I was going to be alone for ten days. I set about classifying my notes on the practices and beliefs of both indigenous and mestizo ayahuasqueros. This work took six days and revealed a number of constants across cultures.
    Throughout Western Amazonia people drink ayahuasca at night, generally in complete darkness; beforehand, they abstain from sexual relations and fast, avoiding fats, alcohol, salt, sugar, and all other condiments. An experienced person usually leads the hallucinatory session, directing the visions with songs. 1
    In many regions, apprentice ayahuasqueros isolate themselves in the forest for long months and ingest huge quantities of hallucinogens. Their diet during this period consists mainly of bananas and fish, both of which are particularly rich in serotonin. It also happens that the long-term consumption of hallucinogens diminishes the concentration of this neurotransmitter in the brain. Most anthropologists are unaware of the biochemical aspect of this diet, however, and some go as far as to invent abstract explanations for what they call “irrational food taboos.” 2
    As I classified my notes, I was looking out for new connections between shamanism and DNA. I had just received a letter from a friend who is a scientific journalist and who had read a preliminary version of my second chapter; he suggested that shamanism was perhaps “untranslatable into our logic for lack of corresponding concepts.” 3 I understood what he meant, and I was trying to see precisely if DNA, without being exactly equivalent, might be the concept that would best translate what ayahuasqueros were talking about.
    These shamans insist with disarming consistency on the existence of animate essences (or spirits, or mothers) which are common to all life forms. Among the Yaminahua of the Peruvian Amazon, for instance, Graham Townsley writes: “The central image dominating the whole field of Yaminahua shamanic knowledge is that of yoshi —spirit or animate essence. In Yaminahua thought all things in the world are animated and given their particular qualities by yoshi . Shamanic knowledge is, above all, knowledge of these entities, which are also the sources of all the powers that shamanism claims for itself.... it is through the idea of yoshi that the fundamental sameness of the human and the non-human takes shape.” 4
    When I was in Quirishari, I already knew that the “animist” belief, according to which all living beings are animated by the same principle, had been confirmed by the discovery of DNA. I had