74: Serpent Tales

photo: Jeremy Narby/ Rak Razam overlay art: Andy Debernardi In a landmark meeting experiential journalist Rak Razam interviews The Cosmic Serpent author and anthropologist Jeremy Narby, in the gardens of Greenwich University at the UK's premier psychedelic and consciousness event, Breaking Convention, July, 2013. In which these two ayahuasca commentators discuss the commodification of ayahuasca and the impact of the spiritual tourism boom in South America, the drive of the U.N.'s INCB to criminalize the growing entheogenic revival around the world, the nature of culture clash and the power of 'isms' to dichotomize worldviews and keep us separate. Narby relates his Marxist-anthropology origins and efforts to tackle the World Bank's damaging effect on tribal peoples; his first ayahuasca experiences and shape-changing into a jaguar; the UV spectrum and seeing 'spirits'; the double-helix DNA shape and the ubiquity of snakes in shamanic iconography; molecular biology, plant sentience and the Gaian worldview that such a paradigm opens up, and much, much more... With thanks to Joshua Wickerham of the Ayahuasca Sustainability Initiative.