La serpiente cósmica

For decades, the anthropologist Jeremy Narby has collaborated with the indigenous populations of the Amazon to obtain title to their lands. But, from his first stays in the deepest recesses of the Peruvian jungle, Narby also became aware of the extraordinary and extensive knowledge that shamans have not only about plants, but also about their biochemical and molecular interactions. How was this possible? Undoubtedly, this knowledge was real, to the point that the main pharmaceutical multinationals have appropriated it and recognized that they used it, for example, for the creation of the first anesthesia for surgical use. Narby wanted to find out how these men, oblivious to any scientific tool, had been able to learn biological information to which even Western chemists had not previously had access. The response he received from the shamans turned out to be as simple as it was unexpected: it was ayahuasca, a sacred hallucinogenic plant, who transmitted it to him. Despite his initial logical skepticism (we Westerners do not believe that plants communicate with humans), little by little he became obsessed with this mystery: was it possible that, thanks to the altered state of consciousness that ayahuasca facilitates, the shamans carried millennia accessing the biochemical knowledge stored in DNA (that same DNA that science discovered in 1953)? Was it possible that shamans and scientists were telling the same story in different words about the origin of life and knowledge? Narrated in the first person in the manner of a detective novel, as brilliant and provocative as it is extremely rigorous and documented, thus begins an investigation in which the author guides us through the limits of scientific knowledge and through the questions that science prefers not to answer. A cult book, translated into a dozen languages, and to read with caution: it could dislocate your concept of what we so lazily call "reality".