The Anthropologist and the Snake

“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 combinatorial problem is this: in an Amazon containing approximately 80,000 plant species, indigenous peoples identified two specific plants whose combination creates oral DMT activity. The vine, Banisteriopsis caapi, contributes beta-carboline compounds that inhibit monoamine oxidase. The leaf, Psychotria viridis, contributes dimethyltryptamine. Neither plant alone produces the sustained visionary state that the combination produces, because DMT is ordinarily metabolized before it can cross the blood-brain barrier. The combination defeats this metabolism. This requires knowing both plants and knowing their interaction.

How was this discovered? Richard Evans Schultes spent twelve years in the Amazon and never answered the question satisfactorily. When Jeremy Narby asked his Ashaninca hosts in the Peruvian Amazon in 1984, they answered without hesitation: the plants told us.

The Cosmic Serpent (1998) is Narby's decade-long investigation of what that answer might mean. It is not a credulous book, despite what its critics suggest. Narby is a Stanford-trained anthropologist who spent years trying to dismiss the answer and eventually found he couldn't. The evidence he assembled, from molecular biology, from cross-cultural mythology, from the pharmacology of DMT, from the history of scientific discovery, doesn't prove the shamanic claim. But it makes the Western dismissal of that claim look increasingly like willful blindness.

Narby's central argument operates on two tracks. The first is epistemological: Western science has two built-in assumptions that prevent engagement with the shamanic knowledge claim. First, that hallucinations are internal productions of the mind, projections, not perceptions. Second, that plants cannot communicate with humans through imagery or language. Both assumptions are cultural, not empirical. Both foreclose exactly the investigation that would be needed to evaluate the shamanic claim.

The second track is structural: the serpent. In shamanic traditions across all inhabited continents, including Siberia, where there are no serpents, the primary visionary entity is a snake or pair of snakes. Mircea Eliade documented this pattern across his life's work; Narby extended it. The double helix of DNA, visualized by Francis Crick in a structural model that resembles, in striking ways, the twin-serpent image that appears in shamanic iconography, in the caduceus of Western medicine, in creation myths from Sumer to the Pacific, is Narby's proposed referent. The shamans are seeing DNA, he suggests. Not metaphorically. Literally, at some level he cannot specify but cannot dismiss.

The critics are not wrong that this is a difficult hypothesis to test. Jacques Dubochet, a biophysicist who later won a Nobel Prize, criticized Narby for not designing an experimental test. Publishers Weekly accused him of mistaking enthusiasm for evidence. The accusation has merit: Narby's argument frequently proceeds by analogy and parallel rather than demonstration. A hexagonal pattern in an indigenous artwork does not prove knowledge of benzene rings.

But the dismissal also has a problem: the knowledge is real. Indigenous Amazonian pharmacology has produced compounds now used in Western medicine, tubocurarine from curare, which Schultes studied, is a standard surgical muscle relaxant. The pharmacological accuracy of hundreds of plant preparations has been verified by laboratory analysis. Whatever the mechanism of the knowledge, the knowledge itself is not in question. Narby is asking a question that the dismissal doesn't answer: how did they know?

Ten years after publication, Narby organized an expedition of three molecular biologists to the Peruvian Amazon to undergo ayahuasca sessions under shamanic guidance. The biologists, skeptical and methodologically rigorous, found themselves inside experiences they could not explain by their existing frameworks. The documentary Night of the Liana captures what happened. It doesn't resolve Narby's hypothesis. It demonstrates why the hypothesis is harder to dismiss than its critics suggest.

The combinatorial problem remains. The knowledge is there. The mechanism is not explained. Narby's contribution is to have held that space open, insisting that the unexplained does not become explained by being ignored, while documenting the pressures of biopiracy, deforestation, and cultural erosion that are eliminating the knowledge faster than any research program can document it. The snake is real. What it represents is the question.

Sources

• Narby, Jeremy. The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (1998)
• Schultes, R.E. & Hofmann, A. Plants of the Gods (1979)
• Wikipedia, Jeremy Narby
• Publishers Weekly review, The Cosmic Serpent (1998)
• Newswise, The Cosmic Serpent press release (1998)