The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby

that they contain only 2 percent genetic information. The role of these introns remains mysterious. 25
    The proportion of introns and exons in the human genome is not yet known, because so far, only half of all the genes it contains have been identified, out of a total estimated at 100,000. 26
    Along the DNA filament, “junk” and genes alternate; within genes, introns intermix with exons, which are themselves expressed in a language where almost every word has a synonym.
    As far as both its content and its form are concerned, DNA is a doubly double language that wraps around itself.
    Just like the twisted language of the spirits of nature.
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    WHAT DO THESE CONNECTIONS between DNA and the cosmic serpent, the axis of the world, and the language of the spirits of nature, mean?
    The correspondences are too numerous to be explained by chance alone. If I were a member of a jury having to pronounce itself on the matter, I would have the conviction that the same reality is being described from different perspectives.

    â€œThe cosmic serpent, provider of attributes.” From Clark (1959, p. 52).
    Take the cosmic serpent of the Ancient Egyptians, the “provider of attributes.” The signs that accompany it mean “one”“several”“spirit, double, vital force”“place”“wick of twisted flax”and “water”Under the chin of the second serpent, there is an Egyptian cross meaning “key of life.” 27
    The connections with DNA are obvious and work on all levels: DNA is indeed shaped like a long, single and double serpent, or a wick of twisted flax; it is a double vital force that develops from one to several; its place is water.
    What else could the Ancient Egyptians have meant when they talked of a double serpent, provider of attributes and key of life, if not what scientists call “DNA”?
    Why are these metaphors so consistently and so frequently used unless they mean what they say?

Chapter 8
    THROUGH THE EYES OF AN ANT

    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