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The Cosmic Mystery of the Serpent and Jaguar
Ayahuasca lore celebrates serpents, jaguars, and panthers. But why do visions of these majestic jungle animals occur in the first place?
By Damon Orion
It’s impossible to know what visions will unfold before you when you drink ayahuasca. You might see intergalactic arcades, alien cocoons, or otherworldly creatures like elves or fairies. You might enter a waking dream that’s set in a hospital room, battlefield, casino — you name it. (At the start of one ceremony, I was more than a little taken aback by the first image that materialized for me: the disembodied head of Charles Manson. Yikes!)
There are, however, certain visions that pop up with curious regularity during ayahuasca experiences. At the very top of that list are the superstars of the Aya universe: the serpent and the jaguar. These two creatures can appear in people’s aya journeys whether the journeyer is near the brew’s region of origin or not.
In the Peruvian shamanic view, the spirit of ayahuasca most commonly reveals itself to the journeyer as a snake or jaguar. Some propose that the serpent represents the snakelike twines of the aya vine, while the jaguar represents the DMT-bearing leaves that go into the brew.
Needless to say, that notion is a little too exotic for many adherents of the Western reductionist perspective, who tend to view these “visitations” as projections of the psyche. This framework, however, does not explain the ubiquity of these jungle creatures in aya visions. Are they simply a testament to the power of suggestion, or perhaps something more profound?
Snaking the Drain
Renowned psychologist and psychedelic pioneer Ralph Metzner once wrote: “Snakes and serpentine forms are frequently if not universally, encountered in ayahuasca experiences. The Amazonian shamans say, ‘The mother of ayahuasca is a snake.’”
The phenomenon of the snake vision is so well known that it has inspired at least one book. In The Cosmic Serpent, anthropologist Jeremy Narby, Ph.D, proposed that the entwining serpents seen in ayahuasca sessions represent none other than DNA helices.
Ayahuasca ceremony participants frequently have the perception that they’re either swallowing a serpent whole or being swallowed whole by a serpent.
“The snake began rapidly darting around the inside of my stomach, gobbling dark matter with his mouth as he moved …” an anonymous writer for Psymposia reported. “I knew that whatever he was eating was foreign energy, and I was glad to be rid of it.”
The snake in this person’s journey was an anaconda. It then expanded in size, occupying the writer’s entire frame.
“He was shaking little black bugs loose from my body. All different kinds of insects — worms, spider-looking creatures, beetles — were flying off my energetic body and into the ether. I knew that whatever these parasitic creatures represented, I did not want them inside me any longer.”
When the writer told an inquisitive ceremony facilitator, “I have a snake inside me,” the facilitator laughed and replied, “That’s good. It’s the spirit of Ayahuasca.”
Author and educator Chris Kilham tells a similar story. He says he often sees anacondas during aya ceremonies. Though he admits he was alarmed when he first perceived being swallowed by a serpent, he now describes the anaconda as an ally.
Kilham also recounts a ceremony in which his serpent ally pulverized his chest with beams of energy for several hours.
“As the snake was doing this, I was feeling in every cell and every part of my body — all of these diminished spaces, all of these empty, sad places that had been so afflicted by the grief over my mother’s death — this filling up with energy, this increasing force and strength.”
He goes on to say that after that experience, he regained all the energy that his grief had been draining from him for the past 14 months.
Cat Power
Rak Razam, a journalist and entheogenic researcher, published a book and accompanying movie called Aya: Awakenings in which he recounts a visit from a jaguar immediately after purging on ayahuasca. He writes in his book that he remembers seeing a “curious opalescent film” on the surface of his regurgitation “like oil rainbows on water, or the eyes from the other side of the mirror.” As he gazes into this magic mirror, “the eyes become spots, and the spots move with the shape of a large cat, a jaguar stalking the jungle.” The jaguar then pounces on an ayahuasca vine wrapped around a grandfather tree, shredding the vine and nibbling its leaves.
“Then he starts tripping out, rolling around with glazed eyes, and then he’s vomiting too, and I realize it’s me, me in the jaguar skin, and it’s me who’s vomiting once again into the sink.”
Razam is one of many ayahuasca explorers who has had the perception of becoming the jaguar. (Interestingly, he had a lucid dream about a jaguar a couple of weeks before his first trip to the Amazon. It’s also worth noting that real-life jaguars sometimes really do nibble and shred the ayahuasca vine.)
In an interview I did with Razam in 2014, he observed that in the Peruvian shamanic view, the jaguar is an ally that can be a valuable protector when befriended. “They’re very powerful shamanic avatars, and perhaps they’re patrolling the astral jungles,” he offered.
National Geographic published a story potentially supporting this idea. Journalist Chip Brown contends that most of the workers at Mayantuyacu, a Peruvian healing retreat, had seen jaguars in ayahuasca visions but never in the everyday world. “For them, the cat existed only in the spirit world,” the author explained.
Biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance appears to have influenced one popular speculation about the jaguar as a shamanic avatar. In this video, Joe Rogan succinctly breaks down this principle as it applies to the jaguar encounter in ayahuasca visions: “The theory is that the more people take a psychedelic drug, the more their experience and who they are becomes a part of the psychedelic experience for the next person. So when these people are tripping on ayahuasca where [others] have been tripping on ayahuasca for 10,000 years, they see things that these people who have tripped before them were terrified of, like snakes and jaguars.”
Animal Guide?
I once asked the psychotherapist Meriana Dinkova what she made of the entities that countless voyagers claim to have encountered on DMT. Her answer was that these are simply the “animals” that inhabit the realms one can access while on that substance. In other words, when you take a trip to Africa, you’re likely to see zebras, lions, cheetahs and other such creatures. Similarly, when you take a trip to DMT hyperspace, there’s a fair chance you’ll see machine elves, trickster harlequins, insectoid surgeons and/or other such denizens of that terrain. Perhaps the same sort of thing applies when someone crosses paths with a serpent or jaguar on ayahuasca, whose primary psychoactive ingredient, lest we forget, is DMT.
Or maybe it’s all just a mighty impressive group hallucination, or a symbolic encounter with an archetypal aspect of the collective unconscious, or perhaps it’s something else the human mind can’t yet conceive of.
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