Embrace of the Serpent

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT tells the epic story of the first contact, encounter, approach, betrayal and, eventually, life-transcending friendship, between Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman, last survivor of his people, and two scientists that, over the course of 40 years, travel through the Amazon in search of a sacred plant that can heal them. Inspired by the journals of the first explorers of the Colombian Amazon, Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes.[1]

This movie is generally understood in terms of another damning indictment of modern civilization, its exploitation of nature and destruction of indigenous people, through a historical view of Colonialism. This interpretation may therefore elicit more feelings of regret or ruefulness about how our necessary advances in knowledge carry such a heavy cost for our forbears. But what if the movie is not only reminding us of our dreadful past? What if, “between the lines” as it were, the voice of an old shaman is speaking to us of our own imminent demise and what if, against all odds, he wants to help us?

Thematic reviews of this movie could draw on many similar art forms that seek to address the disastrous consequences of modern civilizations on indigenous people, or our natural habitat. You could think of The Mission (1986) for example. Some critics have also compared it to Apocalypse Now (1979) for a darker view of “the worst of both worlds” as embodied here in a Christ figure, a European man who “goes native”, as Colonel Kurtz did during the Vietnam horror. We could liken the search for the mysterious Yakruna flower to the quest for the legendary Fountain of Youth. From a thematic point of view, then, this movie offers another, well-produced reminder of what we modern, civilized, people have done to others and, as well, to our spiritual and natural heritage, in our greedy search for natural resources to exploit, here rubber and the indigenous population which became enslaved or killed off.

But this movie also can become transparent as an image of OUR time, right now: the Indians, the Yakruna flower, the history, everything, as a speech of our times, showing “where we are at” now, from a perspective that is little heard or heeded today—the depth perspective![2] There are a number of threads to consider from this perspective. I’ll list them as they occur to me. The old shaman Karamakate is standing before a huge rock cliff face which is covered with sacred symbols. However, he no longer knows what they mean. He has no memory, he says. Furthermore the animals and plants have fallen silent. They no longer speak to him. He is now chullachaqui, a hollow spirit, like the photographs his American companion takes of him. He also says, by way of an explanation, “the line is cut”. He seems to amplify his meaning when he describes Evan: “You are two!” Evan, and his German forbear (Theo) have forgotten how to dream, and the shaman tells him (and us) that he has therefore forgotten a reality more real than the maps and possessions he privileges. Both Evan and Theo are chullachaqui, according to Karamakate.

As a young shaman, Karamakate believes his soul task is to preserve the tradition of his people by guarding the mystery of the Yakruna flower, but he discovers his own people have desecrated the mystery and simply are using the potency of the flower to get high. He therefore destroys one sacred Yakruna tree and sets about destroying all of them over the next 40 years before he meets Evan, the American explorer who is following the journey of Theo. We learn later, near the end, that he knows where the Yakruna originates, high in the mountains and, although he has destroyed most of the plants, there is one left. He prepares it for Evan, telling him that he, Karamakate, had been mistaken. He was not meant to preserve the mystery for his own people, after all. He was to initiate Evan with the last plant. He then gives Evan a blast of white powder (the Sun’s semen) up the nose. The camera shows him approaching us in the audience, getting closer and closer. The initiation is for us too, and we are taken into a psychedelic ride, reminiscent of the Jupiter gateway scene of 2001 (1968).

What does all these mostly unmentioned cinematic details say to us, about us, about who we are and what our current trajectory is into the future?

“You are two!” Yes our modern consciousness is two. Shamanic consciousness is one. He was “in the know” but did not, could not, know in the way that we know. He is a receiver of knowledge. The rocks, plants, and animals speak to him, instructing him, making a claim on his being. He remains “inside” a living world that embraces him in life and in death as the great serpent. For him the line is a circle, endless like the river and the anaconda snake. We are now outside this knowing and we can thus know the world, not as a living subject or intelligence, to be sure, but as an object. We can have maps, tools, representing the world to ourselves in an amazing variety of ways. The shaman’s structure of consciousness can never create the complex music or the equally complex machine to play it, as we saw when Evan played a symphony on an old phonograph in the middle of the jungle.[3]

The shaman’s “dreaming” is not based on two. There is no need to fall asleep. He can slip into “dreaming” as he gazes at a junction in the river, making the claim that here is where the anaconda descends to earth. He does not say “as if” or that the river is a metaphor for the spirit of the anaconda. No, he lives in the one. What he claims is just so—a claim based on perception more than thinking or belief. This knowing is given to him as the passive, open, human receiver.

The line is now cut. The rocks and plants fall silent; the shaman loses access to living memory and becomes a hollow spirit—image only, no longer transparent to spirit, or meaning. We are chullachaqui as well. He tells us so. He knows the cost of disconnection from “dreaming” and he understands we have paid that price too. We know, but in an important sense we no longer live, as spiritual beings “in the know”. We are hollow spirits.

The shaman has seen the utter destruction of a way of being: his people and his tradition—all gone! His efforts to save them have failed. He slowly realizes that in fact he has been given a new task. He is not to preserve a way of being that has passed. He is to transmit that former way of being to modern human beings whose technological way of being is utterly alien, indeed toxic, to everything that he values. The Yakruna plant holds the mystery of the one. Amazingly, both European men prove to be immune to the plant mysteries—the line has been cut! But the shaman persists, and at the end, Evan opens up to the initiatory powers of the Yakruna. We, in the audience are shown a chullachaqui version of this initiation—a cinematic simulation that can make no spiritual claim on us.

But the lesson is clear anyway. We who are now two have lost connection with our primeval origin of the one. It’s a double catastrophe, as Corbin reminds us.[4] The shaman has been sent to remind us, through the cultural medium that we most value today, that of the cinema. After the shaman initiates Evan into the one, he disappears. Evan is left alone, as we each are left alone, leaving the movie theatre and returning to our lives. Do we each go on as before, alone as Evan is, or more accurately, isolated from just about everything? We cannot return to the one in the same way that the shaman was “in the know”. As he said, the line is cut and that is final. We did not do the cutting. The opening up of the uroboric serpent is a spiritual act that lies beyond human powers.[5] It was done to us by powers whose “intentions” we can scarcely grasp. Indigenous peoples throughout the world are wailing as the animated world falls silent for them too.

What does this cut in the seamless world “achieve”? What claim is being made on us from the cutting of the line? So far, we mostly have reveled in the newfound freedom from the yoke of necessity (that very necessity that the shaman and his people would call freedom). The old Jesuit priest who thrashed the pagan out of the tribal boys is showing what it takes to overcome our natural way of being one. The early Christian centuries show the enormous spiritual effort required to overcome the body’s desires: fasting, flagellation, mortification, self-torture, etc. All these cultural forms were a human response to something given—an ontological claim made on us. The cut in the line, opening up of the circle, or straightening out the serpent, produced a host of binaries, among them the spirit/body binary, with a consequent valuation of spirit over body.

The power that invoked the spirit/body binary, along with a privileged valuation of “spirit”, has, with our help, produced a civilization whose signature comprises all those cultural forms reflecting such privileging. This power, called Chaapi by Karamakate, or lets call it simply the alien other for now, has an incredibly, breathtakingly ruthless aspect, at least from any modern human perspective. When it wants to make a cut in its oneness, it simply does so and a whole way of being throughout the world gets consigned to oblivion ontologically.[6] The question that Karamakate raises for me, as he blows Sun semen up my nose is, do you think Chaapi is done with his self-transformations? I am returning to you now, in 2016, to remind you that what happened to me is now happening to you. Chaapi is on the move once again. With your civilization’s help, he has come to know himself as external other, rather than simply being other as was true in my time. He is done with that adventure and he has sent me to tell you this:

In the same way that I, Karamakate, disappeared, Chaapi has lost himself and now wishes to find himself, i.e., not know himself but find himself. You must find me, Karamakate, to help Chaapi find himself. Finding me requires an initiation. An initiation whose form belongs to your time, not mine. But you need me to help you. My task is to give you an initiation into the one, without destroying the two which is, after all, another gift of Chaapi. You do not know what initiatory form is required yet, but I will help you. My people misused the Yakruna plant as they celebrated the end of the world and you are also misusing your gifts from Chaapi and, in turn, are celebrating the end of the world. There is one Yakruna plant left. Will you use it to further your own ambitions or will you take it as a gift of Chaapi to initiate you into a new way of being, one that you cannot imagine at present any more than my people could imagine your civilization?

The Yakruna plant may be best understood by your modern culture simply as the dream, the kind of dream that those who are two can dream. You will find me there, in your dreams, and there too you will find the initiatory path to the one-as-two. Are you immune to Chaapi? Is it too late for you to help Chaapi on his next adventure towards finding himself? Are you ready for the catastrophe that will follow if Chaapi is thwarted? Open yourself to the Yakruna, your dreams; submit to being taught, to an ontological claim made on your life. Remember this warning as I leave you: Chaapi cut the line and my people lost their meaning. What the Colonials did to us is a mere afterthought compared to the catastrophic loss we endured as the world fell silent. We could not survive as one. Now, at this time, Chaapi no longer supports your current way of being with its cultural practices, based as they are on the knower and the known. Chaapi now wishes to find himself.

and thus you must seek me

for I am you

and always have been

you will find me

where the dream

becomes the dreaming

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ff7TcnqHUc. For a more in-depth review see Roger Ebert: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/embrace-of-the-serpent-2016

[2] The script blends a mixture of fiction and history in typical postmodern literary fashion. The depth perspective is able to interpret modern literary forms as a reflection of background movements of the objective psyche.

[3] Haydn’s The Creation.

[4] We have lost the keys to the kingdom—a spiritual catastrophe, yes, but we have now lost any sense of that loss—a double catastrophe, longer felt as such.

[5] “Uroborus”: tail-eating serpent or river stream that begins and ends in itself. The world-encircling serpent binds us to each moment of reality and to our mortality.

[6] I am not talking here about what humans do to humans (e.g. colonialism) though that is terrible enough. I am speaking about ways of being and their cultural practices springing into form as expressions of a “background” configuration of consciousness (what I loosely call the one and the two, for example). We could think analogously of the catastrophic end of the dinosaur age and the “sudden” emergence of mammals. Who is to blame for this sudden switch in “direction”?