“The cosmic serpent” is the idea at the heart of the anthropologist Jeremy Narby’s book The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge: that the twin serpents seen in Amazonian shamans’ visions, and found in creation stories around the world, correspond to the double helix of DNA, and that in trance shamans may gain knowledge from it, including their knowledge of plant medicines. Some reviewers have praised its spirit of personal discovery, and others say it mistakes enthusiasm for evidence. Therapeutic Shamanism shares its respect for plants as teachers, reads shamanic imagery as mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this, and does not use psychoactive plants.
Who is Jeremy Narby? #
A Canadian anthropologist, born in Montreal in 1959, who grew up in Canada and Switzerland. He studied history at the University of Kent and took a doctorate in anthropology at Stanford University. From 1984 he lived with the Asháninka people in the Pichis Valley of the Peruvian Amazon, cataloguing how they used the forest’s resources as part of an effort to defend their land against destruction. From 1989 to 2024 he directed Amazonian projects for Nouvelle Planète, a Swiss non-governmental organisation.1
The Asháninka live mainly by subsistence farming, clearing forest plots by slash-and-burn to grow crops such as manioc, sweet potato and maize, and they also hunt, fish and gather in the forest.2 They are farmers who still forage, not hunter-gatherers.
What is the idea of the cosmic serpent? #
A proposal about where shamanic knowledge comes from. Narby’s starting point was the botanical knowledge of Amazonian peoples, and their own account that it came from visions in ayahuasca trance. He describes taking ayahuasca himself and seeing two enormous snakes, which he later came to associate with DNA. He then gathers serpent imagery from creation stories in many cultures, often twinned or entwined, and sets it beside the double helix of DNA, arguing that Amazonian shamans knew in their own terms, for thousands of years, things that molecular biology has only recently described, and that their knowledge, learned in trance and ritual, may in some way come from DNA itself.13
He took the inquiry further in Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry into Knowledge (2005), which looks at intelligence and communication in plants and animals, down to the molecular level, and later in Plant Teachers: Ayahuasca, Tobacco, and the Pursuit of Knowledge (2021), written with Rafael Chanchari Pizuri. In the film Night of the Liana he took three molecular biologists to the Peruvian Amazon to explore these ideas with Amazonian knowledge and ayahuasca.1 See Is the living world intelligent?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism meet the idea? #
In taking plants seriously as teachers. In Therapeutic Shamanism every Plant has a healing gift and a teaching that it gives freely when asked, without any agenda,4 and the poisonous Plants that many indigenous cultures knew as Power Plants are great teachers about death and transformation. When people in the West turned their backs on shamanism, the knowledge of how to work with these plants safely was lost, and Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer journeys offer a safe way of beginning to piece it back together.5 The idea that people learned about plants from the plants themselves, through a relationship and not only through trial and error, sits comfortably with this. See What are Plant People, and what gifts do they bring?
The book has a further link. The Cosmic Serpent is one of the books listed in the bibliographies of all three of Paul Francis’s published books, in a list of books that played a part in shaping his shamanic journey.
How does Therapeutic Shamanism read visions like Narby’s? #
As mythos. In Therapeutic Shamanism mythos is what is true as metaphor but not literally, and logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this is what is literally true.6 Journeys are co-created between us and Spirit. What we experience is real, but to make sense of it we give it imagery and form we can comprehend, shaped by what we already know and believe. Journeys are never objectively true; “They are mythos, not logos”, more like great paintings, music or poems that try to convey something mysterious.7 In Therapeutic Shamanism the imagery of any vision or journey is held in this way, as mythos, true in the way a story or a painting is true, and factual questions are taken to factual research. See How does Therapeutic Shamanism sit with science?
Does Therapeutic Shamanism use ayahuasca? #
No. Some Amazonian cultures use ayahuasca and other hallucinogens as their main way into the shamanic state, but across the world the drum and the rattle have been far more common.8 Shamanic cultures had powerful ways of shocking people into a deep shamanic state, hallucinogenic plants amongst them, and these can work dramatically in the short term; for domesticated modern people, though, the effects usually wear off within weeks or months of ordinary life, so Therapeutic Shamanism builds a daily practice around the drum and the journey instead.9 See Do you need psychedelics or plant medicines to practise shamanism? and What is ayahuasca, and what part do psychoactive plants and plant spirit medicine play in shamanism?
Is the cosmic serpent idea disputed? #
Yes. Reviewers have been divided. Writing in Ascent Magazine, Swami Gopalananda praised the book’s “spirit of personal discovery”. The Publishers Weekly review found that Narby treats any helical or snake-like shape as evidence that the serpent is DNA, and proposes that trance produced Amazonian plant knowledge without testing the claim: “Throughout, Narby appears to mistake enthusiasm for evidence.” The biophysicist Jacques Dubochet also criticised him for not testing his hypothesis.13 On the other side, the same review called his defence of indigenous peoples’ rights “admirable” and credited him with fairly questioning the narrowness of mechanistic science, and Narby himself went on to put his ideas in front of molecular biologists in the Amazon.13
