Passage: The Plants Told Us

“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. But he was not smiling.”

The passage: '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. But he was not smiling.'

Why this passage: It is one of the most important sentences in the ethnobotanical literature, because it marks the moment when an epistemological collision between two knowledge systems becomes visible.

Narby is a Stanford-trained anthropologist. He has been trained to identify what cultural informants mean versus what they say, to find the rational empirical process that underlies mythological explanation. When an Ashaninca man says 'we learned from the plants,' the standard interpretive move is to understand this as: 'we learned from careful observation of plant effects over many generations, and we have encoded this knowledge in a narrative framework that attributes it to the plants themselves.'

But the man is not using a mythological framework. He is making a literal claim. And Narby, precisely because he is trained to hear the difference, notices: this is the literal claim.

The passage is important because it marks the beginning of a decade of investigation that The Cosmic Serpent documents. Narby does not accept the claim uncritically. He also cannot, after years of fieldwork, dismiss it as metaphor. The combinatorial pharmacology of ayahuasca, the identification of two specific plants from 80,000 candidates whose combination creates oral DMT activity, is not adequately explained by 'careful observation over many generations.'

The man was not joking. He was reporting what he knew. The question the book investigates is what his knowledge means.

Sources

• Narby, The Cosmic Serpent (1998)