The Cosmic Serpent (16 page)

One sunny afternoon that spring I was sitting in the garden with my children. Birds were singing in the trees, and my mind began to wander. There I was, a product of twentieth-century rationality, my faith requiring numbers and molecules rather than myths. Yet I was now confronted with mythological numbers relative to a molecule, in which I had to believe. Inside my body sitting there in the garden sun were 125 billion miles of DNA. I was wired to the hilt with DNA threads and until recently had known nothing about it. Was this astronomical number really just a “useless but amusing fact,”
¹
as some scientists would have it? Or did it indicate that the dimensions, at least, of our DNA are cosmic?

Some biologists describe DNA as an “ancient high biotechnology,” containing “over a hundred trillion times as much information by volume as our most sophisticated information storage devices.” Could one still speak of a technology in these circumstances? Yes, because there is no other word to qualify this duplicable, information-storing molecule. DNA is only ten atoms wide and as such constitutes a sort of ultimate technology: It is organic and so miniaturized that it approaches the limits of material existence.
²

Shamans, meanwhile, claim that the vital principle that animates all living creatures comes from the cosmos and is
minded
. As ayahuasquero Pablo Amaringo says: “A plant may not talk, but there is a spirit in it that is conscious, that sees everything, which is the soul of the plant, its essence, what makes it alive.” According to Amaringo, these spirits are veritable beings, and humans are also filled with them: “Even the hair, the eyes, the ears are full of beings. You see all this when ayahuasca is strong.”
³

During the past weeks, I had come to consider that the perspective of biologists could be reconciled with that of ayahuasqueros and that both could be true at the same time. According to the stereoscopic image I could see by gazing at both perspectives simultaneously, DNA and the cell-based life it codes for are an extremely sophisticated technology that far surpasses our present-day understanding and that was initially developed elsewhere than on earth—which it radically transformed on its arrival some four billion years ago.

This point of view was completely new to me and had changed my way of looking at the world. For instance, the leaves of trees now appeared to be true solar panels. One had only to look at them closely to see their “technological,” or organized, aspect (
see top of page 105
).

This revelation was troubling. I started thinking about my eyes, through which I was looking at the plants in the garden. Over the course of my readings, I had learned that the human eye is more sophisticated than any camera of similar size. The cells on the outer layer of the retina can absorb a single particle of light, or photon, and amplify its energy at least a million times, before transferring it in the form of a nervous signal to the back of the brain. The iris, which functions as the eye's diaphragm, is automatically controlled. The cornea has just the right curvature. The lens is focused by miniature muscles, which are also controlled automatically by feedback. The final result of this visual system, still imperfectly understood in its entirety, is a clear, colored, and three-dimensional image inside the brain that we perceive as external. We never see reality, but only an internal representation of it that our brain constructs for us continuously.
⁴

What troubled me was not so much the resemblance of the human eye to an organic and extremely sophisticated technology born of cosmic knowledge, but that they were
my
eyes. Who was this “I” perceiving the images flooding into my mind? One thing was sure: I was not responsible for the construction of the visual system with which I was endowed.

I did not know what to make of these thoughts. Staring blankly at the lawn in front of me, I started following a shiny, black ant making its way across the thick blades of grass with the determination of a tank. It was heading toward the colony of aphids in the tree at the bottom of the garden. This was an ant belonging to a species that herds aphids and “milks” them for their sweet secretions.

I began thinking that this ant had a visual system quite different from my own that apparently functioned every bit as well. Despite our differences in size and shape, our genetic information was written in the same language—which we were both incapable of seeing, given that DNA is smaller than visible light, even to the eyes of an ant.

I found it interesting that the language containing the instructions for the creation of different visual systems should be itself invisible. It was as if the instructions were to remain hidden from their beneficiaries, as if we were wired in such a way that we could not see the wires....

Why?

I tried reconsidering the question from a “shamanic” point of view. It was as if these beings inside us wanted to hide....
But that's what the Ashaninca say! They call the invisible beings who created life the “maninkari,” literally “those who are hidden”!

 

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, I returned to my office and started rereading the passages concerning the maninkari in Gerald Weiss's exhaustive study on Ashaninca cosmology. According to Weiss, the Ashaninca believe that the most powerful of all maninkari is the “Great Transformer” Avíreri, who created life on earth, starting with the seasons and then moving on to the entirety of living beings. Accompanied sometimes by his sister, at others by his nephew, Avíreri is one of the divine trickster twins who create by transformation and are so common in mythology.

It was in reading the last story about the end of Avíreri's trajectory that I had a shock. Having completed his creation work, Avíreri goes to a party where he gets drunk on manioc beer. His sister, who is also a trickster, invites him to dance and pushes him into a hole dug in advance. She then pretends to pull him up by throwing him a
thread,
then a
cord
—but neither is strong enough. Furious with his sister, whom he transforms into a tree, Avíreri decides to escape by digging a hole into the
underworld
. He ends up at a place called
River's End,
where a
strangler vine
wraps around him. From there, he continues to sustain to this day
his numerous children on earth
.
⁵

How could I have missed the connections between the twin being Avíreri, the Great Transformer, and the DNA double helix, first creating the breathable atmosphere (“the seasons”), then the entirety of living beings by transformation, living in the microscopic world (“underworld”), in cells filled with seawater (“River's End”), taking the form of a thread, a cord, or a strangler vine which wraps around itself, and, finally, sustaining to this day all the living species of the planet?

For weeks I had been finding connections between myths and molecular biology. I was not even surprised to see that the creation myth of an indigenous Amazonian people coincided with the description made by today's biologists of the development of life on earth. What shook me, and even filled me with consternation, was that I had had this evidence under my nose for years without giving it the slightest importance. My gaze had been too narrow.

Sitting in my office, I remembered the time Carlos Perez Shuma had told me, “The maninkari taught us how to spin and weave cotton.” Now the meaning seemed obvious; the two ribbons of the DNA double helix wrap around each other 600 million times inside each human cell: “Who else could have taught us to weave?” The problem for me was that I had not believed him. I had not considered for one moment that his words corresponded to something real.

Under these circumstances, what did my title “doctor of anthropology” signify—other than an intellectual imposture in relation to my object of study?

These revelations overwhelmed me. To make amends, I resolved then and there to take shamans at their word for the rest of my investigation.

 

WHAT HAD BECOME of the investigation that posed the enigma of the hallucinatory knowledge of Western Amazonia's indigenous people? Why had it ended up with cosmic serpents from around the world entwined with DNA molecules?

For some weeks now, I had been in a sort of trance, my mind flooded with an almost permanent flux of strange, if not impossible, connections. My only discipline had been to note them down, or to tape them, instead of repressing them out of disbelief. My worldview had been turned upside down, but I was slowly coming back to my senses, and the first question I asked myself was: What did all this mean?

I was now of the opinion that DNA was at the origin of shamanic knowledge. By “shamanism,” I understood a series of defocalization techniques: controlled dreams, prolonged fasting, isolation in wilderness, ingestion of hallucinogenic plants, hypnosis based on a repetitive drumbeat, near-death experience, or a combination of the above. Aboriginal shamans of Australia reach conclusions similar to those of Amazonian ayahuasqueros, without the use of psychoactive plants, by working mainly with their dreams. What techniques did Chuang-Tzu, the Egyptian pharaohs, and the animists of Benin use, to name but a few? Who could say? But they all spoke, in one form or another, of a cosmic serpent—as did the Australians, the Amazonians, and the Aztecs.

By using these different techniques, it therefore seemed possible to induce neurological changes that allow one to pick up information from DNA. But from which DNA? At first I thought that I had found the answer when I learned that, in each human cell, there is the equivalent of “the information contained in one thousand five hundred encyclopedia volumes”
⁶
—in other words, the equivalent of a bookcase about ten yards long and two yards high. There, I thought, is the origin of knowledge.

On reflection, however, I saw that this idea was improbable. There was no reason why the human genome, no matter how vast, should contain information about the Amazonian plants necessary for the preparation of curare, for example. Furthermore, the ayahuasqueros said that the highly sophisticated sound-images that they saw and heard in their hallucinations were
interactive,
and that it was possible to communicate with them. These images could not originate from a static, or textual, set of information such as 1,500 encyclopedia volumes.

My own experience with ayahuasca-induced hallucinations was limited, but was sufficient to suggest a trail.
Ayahuasquero
Ruperto Gomez, who had initiated me, had called the hallucinogenic brew “the television of the forest,” and I had indeed seen sequences of hallucinatory images flashing by at blinding speed, as if they were truly transmitted from outside my body, but picked up inside my head.
⁷

I knew of no neurological mechanism on which to base this working hypothesis, but I did know that DNA was an aperiodic crystal that traps and transports electrons with efficiency and that emits photons (in other words, electromagnetic waves) at ultraweak levels currently at the limits of measurement—and all this more than any other living matter.
⁸
This led me to a potential candidate for the transmissions: the global network of DNA-based life.

All living beings contain DNA, be they bacteria, carrots, or humans. DNA, as a substance, does not vary from one species to another; only the order of its letters changes. This is why biotechnology is possible. For instance, one can extract the DNA sequence in the human genome containing the instructions to build the insulin protein and splice it into the DNA of a bacterium, which will then produce insulin similar to that normally excreted by the human pancreas. The cellular machines called ribosomes, which assemble the proteins inside the bacterium, understand the same four-letter language as the ribosomes inside human pancreatic cells and use the same 20 amino acids as building blocks. Biotechnology proves by its very existence the fundamental unity of life.

Each living being is constructed on the basis of the instructions written in the informational substance that is DNA. A single bacterium contains approximately ten million units of genetic information, whereas a microscopic fungus contains a billion units. In a mere handful of soil, there are approximately ten billion bacteria and one million fungi. This means that there is more order, and information, in a handful of earth than there is on the surfaces of all the other known planets combined.
⁹
The information contained in DNA makes the difference between life and inert matter.

The earth is surrounded by a layer of DNA-based life that made the atmosphere breathable and created the ozone layer, which protects our genetic matter against ultraviolet and mutagenic rays. There are even anaerobic bacteria living half a mile beneath the ocean floor; the planet is wired with life deep into its crust.
¹⁰