The Cosmic Serpent   by Jeremy Narby      

The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the origins of knowledge

Jeremey Narby, Penguin Putney, New York, 1998.

P8:       ‘I sit down and he resumes his song. I have never heard more beautiful music, these slender staccatos that are so high pitched they verge on humming. I follow the song, and take flight. I fly in the air, thousands of feet above the earth, and looking down, I see an all-white planet. Suddenly, the song stops, and I find myself on the ground, thinking: “He cant stop now”. All I can see are confused images, some of which have an erotic content, like a woman with twenty breasts. He starts singing again, and I see a green leaf with its veins, then a human hand, with its veins, and so on relentlessly ….’

P 14:    ‘In the Tungus language, a saman is a person who beats a drum, enters into trance and cures people.’

P15:     From the early twentieth century onward, anthropologists progressively extended the use of the siberian term  and found shamans in Indonesia, Uganda, the Arctic, and Amazonia. Some played drums, others drank plant decoctions and sang; some claimed to cure, others cast spells. They were unanimously considered neurotic, epileptic, psychotic, hysterical or schizophrenic’

P15:     ‘For Levi Strauss, the shaman is above all a creaor of order,  who cures people by transforming their “incoherent and arbitrary pains” into an ordered and intelligible form’.

P17:     ‘Wherever these “technicians of ecstacy” operate, they specialise in  a trance during which they leave the body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld.’

P24:     ‘That is how nature talks, because in nature, there is god, and god talks to us in our visions.”

P27:     ‘Early one morning, the day after the new moon, I drank the Sanago tea. After twenty minutes, a wave of cold submerged me. I felt chilled to the bone. I broke out into a profuse cold sweat and had to wring out my sweatshirt several times …’

P29:     ‘One day at Carlos’s house, I witnessed an almost surreal scene. A man called Sabino appeared with a sicj baby in his arms and two peruvian cigarettes in his hand. He asked Carlos to cure his child. Carlos lit one of the cigarettes and drew on it deeply several times. Then he blew smoke on the baby and started sucking at a precise spot on its belly, spitting out what he said was the illness. After about three minutes, he declared the problem solved. Sabino thanked him profusely and then departed.”

P48:     ‘We do not know how our visual system works. As you read these words you do not really see ink, the paper, your hands, and the surroundings but an internal three-dimensional image that reproduces them almost exactly and that is constructed by your brain.

P95:     ‘One of the best known variants of the axis mundi is the caduceus, formed by two snakes wrapped around an axis … The Taoists of China represent the caduceus with the yin-yand, which symbolises the coiling of two serpentine and complementary forms into a single androgynous vital principle.’

P108    Shamanism is ‘a series of defocalisation techniques: controlled dreams, prolonged fasting, isolation in the wilderness, ingestion of hallucinogenic plants, hypnosis based on a repetitive drum beat, near death experience, or a combination of the above’.

P166:   ‘The word shaman comes from the Tungustic word saman, the original etymology of which may be foreign. Different authors have proposed a chinese origin (sha-men = witch).

            Tungustic root sam signifies the idea of body movement

            Tunguistuc root sa (- to know) saman means the one who knows