The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby Page B

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 . 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:

    â€œThe ancestral anaconda ... guided by the divine rock crystal.” From Reichel-Dolmatoff (1981, p. 79).
    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.

    â€œThe Serpent Lord Enthroned.” From Campbell (1964, p. 11).
    This figure is taken from a Mesopotamian seal of c. 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