Jeremy Narby

Jeremy Narby is a Canadian-Swiss anthropologist whose 1998 book The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge proposed a highly speculative but widely read hypothesis: that the serpent imagery seen in ayahuasca visions by Amazonian shamans corresponds, at some functional level, to DNA, and that shamanic traditions may constitute a way of accessing information encoded in the biochemistry of living cells. The hypothesis has been embraced in some quarters as a bridge between indigenous knowledge and modern science and rejected in others as a category error dressed in suggestive analogies. Narby’s significance lies less in settling the question than in formulating it with enough anthropological and scientific detail to force a serious reckoning with why Western epistemology has categorically refused to take hallucinatory plant knowledge seriously.

Life and Context

In early 1985, Narby arrived in the community of Quirishari in the Pichis Valley of the Peruvian Amazon, aged twenty-five, beginning two years of doctoral fieldwork in anthropology for Stanford University. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) His research concerned Ashaninca ecology and land use, and it was not politically neutral. International development agencies were channeling hundreds of millions of dollars into projects for “developing” the Peruvian Amazon, and Narby’s work was designed to argue for the rationality and ecological coherence of Ashaninca resource management — a case for indigenous rights grounded in demonstrable knowledge. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

Throughout his fieldwork, Ashaninca people routinely attributed their botanical and ecological knowledge to ayahuasca visions, pointing to shamans as the original source of what they knew about plants, animals, and the forest. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) Narby suppressed this thread in his research. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) Emphasizing a hallucinatory origin for indigenous knowledge would have been counterproductive to the main argument underlying his research. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

But the question would not go away. Ruperto Gomez, an ayahuasquero who had trained with the Shipibo — spending months in the forest ingesting large quantities of hallucinogens under close supervision (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) — described ayahuasca to Narby as “the television of the forest”: “You can see images and learn things.” (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) Narby himself drank ayahuasca with the community and in his first session experienced visions of two enormous boa constrictors communicating to him nonverbally that he was “just a human being.” (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

During fieldwork Narby also underwent a direct therapeutic encounter with Ashaninca plant medicine. Abelardo Shingari administered a sanango tea treatment for Narby’s chronic back pain; within twenty minutes Narby experienced a wave of cold and profuse sweating, followed by brief hallucinations, followed by forty-eight hours of discoordination. On the third day, the pain was gone and did not return. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

At the 1992 Earth Summit, international recognition of indigenous ecological knowledge occurred alongside complete silence on the hallucinatory origin that indigenous peoples themselves attributed to that knowledge. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) Ethnobotanists at Rio estimated that 74 percent of modern pharmacopoeia plant-based remedies were first discovered by traditional societies, yet less than 2 percent of all plant species have been fully tested in laboratories. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) The knowledge was being acknowledged, but its source was not. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

The Hypothesis and Its Argument

The Enigma of Indigenous Pharmacological Knowledge

The Cosmic Serpent opens from a real puzzle in ethnobotany. Ayahuasca requires the combination of two plants that must be boiled together for hours. One plant contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a potent hallucinogen — but DMT is inactivated by stomach enzymes when swallowed. The second plant contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors that block precisely those enzymes, allowing DMT to reach the brain. Richard Evans Schultes, described by Narby as the foremost ethnobotanist of the twentieth century, asked what many ethnobotanists had wondered: how did peoples with no knowledge of chemistry or physiology discover this combination? “Pure experimentation? Perhaps not.” (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

The same puzzle applies to curare, the Amazonian blowgun poison that entered modern surgery. Forty types of curare exist, made from seventy plant species; the variety used in modern medicine requires combining several plants, boiling them for seventy-two hours while avoiding toxic vapors, and produces a paste that is lethal only when injected — swallowing has no effect. The chemical specificity and the number of steps involved make accidental discovery by trial and error difficult to credit. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) By one inventory, there are seventy-two ayahuasca-using cultures in Western Amazonia alone. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) Schultes himself documented a Colombian medicine man, Salvador Chindoy, who stated that his knowledge of medicinal plants had been taught to him by the plants themselves through hallucinatory experience. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

Narby’s fieldwork provided him with firsthand evidence of the problem. Carlos Perez Shuma, the Ashaninca shaman who became his principal interlocutor, identified the virtues of the jergon plant — an antidote to the bite of the fer-de-lance snake — by the plant’s visual features, calling them “the sign that nature gives.” (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) Carlos attributed his botanical knowledge, and the knowledge of the maninkari spirits who guard it, directly to ayahuasca. He described these spirits as analogous to radio waves: invisible, but receivable through ayahuasca and tobacco, just as a radio picks up signals that are always present. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) The maninkari, as documented by ethnographer Gerald Weiss, are also called ashaninka (“our fellows”) and are considered ancestors present in plants, animals, and landscape features; the Ashaninca therefore understand themselves as kin with herons, otters, and hummingbirds. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) Carlos stated that the owner of these plants is “the maninkari,” and that the mother of ayahuasca itself is a snake. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

Luis Eduardo Luna’s parallel study of mestizo shamanism in the vegetalismo tradition documented the same claim from a different angle: Amazonian shamans describe ayahuasca as an intelligent being capable of teaching, but Luna, writing “in a rational language for a rational public,” stopped short of interpreting this claim literally. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

Narby identified two axioms of Western epistemology that prevent engagement with this claim: first, hallucinations cannot be information sources by definition, because treating them as such is the clinical definition of psychosis; and second, plants do not communicate in the form of mental images. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) Narby identifies the “blind spot” of rational science as its categorical refusal to consider plants as possible sources of communicable information. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

Defocalization and the Central Hypothesis

Narby’s methodological response to this impasse was what he called defocalization: holding both the scientific and the indigenous perspectives simultaneously, without resolving the contradiction by forcing one into the terms of the other — like the technique for seeing stereogram images, which requires relaxing the focused gaze. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) He developed the hypothesis in a series of steps, each of which he presents as a move from one body of evidence to another.

The first step was noticing that serpentine imagery is the most common hallucination under ayahuasca — reported by Tukano Indians, urbanized shamans, anthropologists, and Western researchers alike. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) An early clue came from anthropologist Michael Harner’s 1961 account of drinking ayahuasca with the Conibo of Peru. Harner saw what he described as “giant reptilian creatures” resting at the lowest depths of his brain, projecting scenes before him; in a footnote written years later, he added: “In retrospect one could say they were almost like DNA, although at that time, 1961, I knew nothing of DNA.” (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) A parallel pattern appeared in Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff’s fieldwork among the Desana of the Colombian Amazon, where the brain is depicted as housing a cosmic anaconda within its fissure, and a second drawing shows two intertwined serpents — an anaconda and a rainbow boa — representing a female/male binary opposition that must be resolved for individual awareness. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

Additional evidence came from neuroscience: as of Narby’s writing, it was known that since 1979 human brain cells secrete dimethyltryptamine, the same hallucinogenic compound active in ayahuasca, though clinical research on the substance remained sparse. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

The second step was reading Mircea Eliade’s synthesis of shamanic traditions worldwide, which documented that across all five continents, shamans describe traveling an axis connecting earth and sky — a vine, ladder, rope, or spiral stairway — often guarded by a serpent. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) Eliade had catalogued “countless examples” of such shamanic ladders — spiral ladders, stairways, braided ropes — on all five continents, and interpreted this structure as the earliest form of the axis mundi connecting sky and earth. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) The third step was noticing that in Aztec, the word coatl means both “serpent” and “twin,” making Quetzalcoatl interpretable as “Magnificent Twin” — a twin serpent of cosmic origin. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) The fourth was examining Joseph Campbell’s documentation of a Mesopotamian seal from approximately 2200 BCE depicting a deity whose caduceus emblem is a double helix. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

Narby also submitted the hypothesis to the formal analysis of a molecular biologist friend, who was shown Pablo Amaringo’s ayahuasca vision paintings. The scientist identified representations of collagen triple helixes, chromosomes at a specific phase, DNA from afar “looking like a telephone cord,” and DNA spools in nucleosome structure — without being told what context the paintings came from. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) These convergences led Narby to the interpretive claim that the double helix of DNA has functioned as a universal symbol of the life principle for millennia across world mythologies — Aztec, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hindu, Australian, and Amazonian — though no one had previously made this connection. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

The argument also drew a structural parallel with Francis Crick, whose “directed panspermia” hypothesis proposed that DNA arrived on Earth from extraterrestrial space — a scientific speculation that, Narby noted, mirrors ancient shamanic claims about a cosmic serpent that created life from the sky. Crick had not recognized the correspondence. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

The central hypothesis of chapter eight is that DNA is the source of shamanic knowledge (Narby, Jeremy, 1998). Narby defines shamanism as a series of defocalization techniques including prolonged fasting, hallucinogen ingestion, isolation, and drumbeat-induced trance (Narby, Jeremy, 1998). The Ashaninca maninkari, “those who are hidden,” are identified with DNA itself: the instructions for building visual systems, invisible to the very systems they create (Narby, Jeremy, 1998).

Narby stated the working hypothesis in its most direct form in chapter nine: “In their visions, shamans take their consciousness down to the molecular level and gain access to information related to DNA, which they call ‘animate essences’ or ‘spirits.’ This is where they see double helixes, twisted ladders, and chromosome shapes.” (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

A further structural correspondence Narby developed was between DNA and what the Yaminahua shamans of the Colombian Amazon call tsai yoshtoyoshto — “twisted language.” Yaminahua shamans compose songs in deliberately metaphorical speech to communicate with spirits without “crashing into” them directly. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) Narby proposed that this form of language — doubly double, wrapping around itself — corresponds structurally to the DNA double helix, which is itself a doubly doubled text coiling around itself millions of times. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) On this reading, both content and form align: DNA is a “language-twisting-twisting,” and so is shamanic speech. Taken together, these comparisons produced what Narby described as the recognition that DNA “is a snake-shaped master of transformation that lives in water and is both extremely long and small, single and double. Just like the cosmic serpent.” (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

At the time of writing, only 3 percent of the human genome was understood to code for proteins; the remaining 97 percent, labeled “junk DNA,” included endlessly repeated sequences and palindromes of unknown function. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

The proposed mechanism is biophoton emission. DNA emits ultra-weak photons at rates up to 100 units per second per square centimeter, across a wavelength band spanning visible light; Fritz-Albert Popp, a physicist who researched this phenomenon, confirmed to Narby that the emission is coherent, like a laser, and speculated that consciousness might be constituted by the sum of these electromagnetic fields. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) Narby proposed that in states of defocalization, the human nervous system becomes receptive to this biophoton emission from the global network of DNA-based life. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

The Critique of Molecular Biology

The final section of the book turns on what Narby called biology’s “blind spot” — symmetrical to anthropology’s. Molecular biology’s language is pervasively intentional: DNA is a “text,” proteins are “miniature robots,” ribosomes are “molecular computers.” (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) Roman Jakobson had pointed out that coding systems — like the genetic code’s four-letter alphabet forming meaningful three-letter words — were previously considered exclusively human phenomena requiring intelligence to generate. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) Yet molecular biology uses this language while officially maintaining Jacques Monod’s “postulate of objectivity”: the systematic denial that nature has purpose or intention. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) Narby argued this is not neutrality but a stipulated constraint that forecloses investigation before it begins.

His critique of the term “junk DNA” — applied to the 97 percent of the genome that does not code for proteins — exemplifies his broader point. Calling it “junk” reveals the extent to which science is “prepared to belittle the unknown”; honest usage would be “mystery DNA.” (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

Contestation

Narby’s hypothesis proposes that the global network of DNA-based life emits ultra-weak radio waves (biophotons) receivable in states of defocalization such as hallucination and dreams, and that serpentine imagery in these states reflects the double-helix form of DNA. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) Narby himself acknowledges that his explanation is “speculative.” (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

Within the book Narby also addressed the standard neuroscientific account of why serpents dominate ayahuasca visions: the venom-phobia hypothesis, which attributes the imagery to an innate primate fear of dangerous snakes. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) Narby noted that in Amazonia the serpents venerated as sacred are the nonvenomous anacondas and boas, not the bushmaster and fer-de-lance, which pose genuine daily threats but are never worshipped. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

Several specific steps in the argument have drawn criticism. The cross-cultural serpent symbolism that Narby assembles — Aztec, Mesopotamian, Aboriginal Australian, Amazonian — reflects his reading of secondary sources (Eliade, Campbell, Levi-Strauss, Reichel-Dolmatoff), not direct fieldwork across these traditions. The inference from visual resemblance (ayahuasca visions look like DNA) to causal connection (they are DNA communicating) is the book’s central leap and is not established by the evidence. One instance Narby himself flagged: on seeing Aboriginal rock paintings that appeared to show chromosomes in anaphase, he wrote, “I rubbed my eyes, telling myself that I had to be imagining connections” — and the claim was rated low confidence in extraction for this reason. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) The Popp biophoton data, while factually reported, does not establish the reception mechanism Narby requires; Popp himself qualified his speculation about electromagnetic consciousness as preliminary.

On returning to Quirishari after nine years, Narby told Carlos Perez Shuma that the things Carlos had explained were scientifically true, to which Carlos responded: “What took you so long?” (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

Narby himself acknowledged in the book’s final chapter that his biological framing is reductive: shamanism involves music, cosmology, psychology, and medicine simultaneously, and presenting it primarily in molecular biological terms distorts its multidimensionality. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) He offered the framing as a translation accessible to Western institutional science. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

Sympathetic readers, including the World Bank anthropologist Shelton Davis and Francis Huxley, emphasized the book’s genuine contribution: forcing attention to the epistemological prejudices that prevent Western science from engaging with indigenous knowledge claims on their own terms, rather than either romanticizing or dismissing them. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) The anthropological critique of the discipline’s history — that portrayals of shamans have mirrored anthropology’s own identity crises rather than shamanism’s nature (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) — is the book’s most clearly supported argument, and the one that requires no speculative hypothesis to stand. That history begins in the discipline’s founding premise: nineteenth-century anthropology was built on a comparative framework that ranked races by evolutionary development, treating indigenous societies as earlier stages of European civilization; Edward Tylor, one of the field’s founders, described “savages” as “exceedingly ignorant” and ineffective. (Narby, Jeremy, 1998)

Influence and Later Work

Narby drew out the policy implications of his hypothesis directly. If his argument is correct, indigenous Amazonian peoples possess not only knowledge of specific plants and remedies but access to a source of biomolecular information that is, in his phrase, “financially invaluable and mainly concerns tomorrow’s science.” (Narby, Jeremy, 1998) This framing positions indigenous knowledge not as a historical curiosity but as a potentially active contributor to future pharmacology and molecular biology — a claim that aligned with but exceeded what the 1992 Earth Summit had been willing to acknowledge.

See Also

• Ayahuasca
• Amazonian Shamanism
• Indigenous Knowledge
• DNA
• Richard Evans Schultes
• Mircea Eliade
• Defocalized Attention

Sources

Evidence cards: narby-cosmic-serpent-1998/ (front, ch01 through ch11). All claims derive from this source. The book is written in the first person as intellectual autobiography; claims marked primary_direct reflect Narby’s own fieldwork and reasoning as reported in his text. Cross-cultural claims about shamanic traditions draw from the secondary scholarship Narby cites (Eliade, Campbell, Levi-Strauss, Reichel-Dolmatoff) and are marked primary_via_secondary in evidence cards accordingly.

Editorial Notes

Gaps the encyclopaedia compiler flagged for future evidence work.