The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby Page A

learned in my high school biology classes that the molecule of life was the same for all species and that the genetic 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.
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    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 be 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