Free The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby Page A

cell, whether animal, plant or microbial, contains a version of it.” 19
    Crick compares a protein to a paragraph made up of 200 letters lined up in the correct order. If the chances are infinitesimal for one paragraph to emerge in a billion years from a terrestrial soup, the probability of the fortuitous appearance, during the same period, of two alphabets and one translation mechanism is even smaller.
    Â 
    WHEN I LOOKED UP from Crick’s book, it was dark outside. I was feeling both astonished and elated. Like a myopic detective bent over a magnifying glass while following a trail, I had fallen into a bottomless hole. For months I had been trying to untangle the enigma of the hallucinatory knowledge of Western Amazonia’s indigenous people, stubbornly searching for the hidden passage in the apparent dead end. I had only detected the DNA trail two weeks previously in Harner’s book. Since then I had mainly developed the hypothesis along intuitive lines. My goal was certainly not to build a new theory on the origin of life; but there I was—a poor anthropologist knowing barely how to swim, floating in a cosmic ocean filled with microscopic and bilingual serpents. I could see now that there might be links between science and shamanic, spiritual and mythological traditions, that seemed to have gone unnoticed, doubtless because of the fragmentation of Western knowledge.
    With his book, Francis Crick provided a good example of this fragmentation. His mathematics were impeccable, and his reasoning crystalline; Crick was surely among twentieth-century rationality’s finest. But he had not noticed that he was not the first to propose the idea of a snake-shaped vital principle of cosmic origin. All the peoples in the world who talk of a cosmic serpent have been saying as much for millennia. He had not seen it because the rational gaze is forever focalized and can examine only one thing at a time. It separates things to understand them, including the truly complementary. It is the gaze of the specialist, who sees the fine grain of a necessarily restricted field of vision. When Crick set about considering cosmogony from the serious perspective of molecular biology, he had long since put out of his analytical mind the myths of archaic peoples.
    From my new point of view, Crick’s scenario of “directed panspermia,” in which a spaceship transports DNA in the form of frozen bacteria across the immensities of the cosmos, seemed less likely than the idea of an omniscient and terrifying cosmic serpent of unimaginable power. After all, life as described by Crick was based on a miniature language that had not changed a letter in four billion years, while multiplying itself in an extreme diversity of species. The petals of a rose, Francis Crick’s brain, and the coat of a virus are all built out of proteins made up of exactly the same 20 amino acids. A phenomenon capable of such creativity was surely not going to travel in a spaceship resembling those propelled containers imagined by human beings in the twentieth century.

    â€œA painting on hardboard of the Snake of the Marinbata people of Arnhem Land.” From Huxley (1974, p. 127).
    This meant that the gaze of the Western specialist was too narrow to see the two pieces that fit together to resolve the puzzle. The distance between molecular biology and shamanism/mythology was an optical illusion produced by the rational gaze that separates things ahead of time, and as objectivism fails to objectify its objectifying relationship, it also finds it difficult to consider its presuppositions.
    The puzzle to solve was: Who are we and where do we come from?
    Lost in these thoughts, I started wondering about the cosmic serpent and its representation throughout the world. I walked over to the philosophy and religion sections in my colleague’s library. Fairly rapidly I came across a book by Francis Huxley entitled The way of the sacred, filled with