The Serpents and the Desert

It's the 1980s, deep in the Peruvian Amazon. Anthropologist Jeremy Narby went to live with the Asháninka to learn how they identified which plants cured what and to document their knowledge. They said the plants themselves told them. At that point he decided to take a more emic approach to anthropology and delve into their customs to understand their claims a little better. He tried the concoction and followed their ceremony, and in one of his visions, he saw two enormous intertwined snakes. Upon reflecting on what visions meant, he made a leap of logic: the snakes stood for symbols of DNA, and considered shamans used their visions to learn about the composition of the plants around them. After thorough research in other cultures, and after finding serpents in creation stories worldwide, he wrote The Cosmic Serpent. He believed there was a deeper reality we could access, one more real than our everyday experience. With a little help (altered states of mind, or drugs), we might be able…