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shamanic traditions the world over. According to Eliade, the axis mundi gives access to the Otherworld and to shamanic knowledge; there is a ‘paradoxical passage,’ normally reserved for the dead, that shamans manage to use while living, and this passage is often guarded by a serpent of a dragon. For Eliade, shamanism is the set of techniques that allows one to negotiate this passage, reach the axis, acquire the knowledge associated with it, and bring it back. [...] According to my hypothesis, shamans take their consciousness down to the molecular level and gain access to biomolecular information. (p. 93) However, it may not be quite so simple. A distinction needs to be made between the “Serpent” and the serpentine representation of DNA. Throughout the material in the Primitive, Oriental and Occidental volumes of this work, myths and rites of the serpent frequently appear and in a remarkably consistent symbolic sense. Wherever nature is revered as self- moving, and so inherently divine, the serpent is revered as symbolic of its divine life.*° Campbell dwells on two crucial turning points for the cosmic serpent in world mythology. The first occurs ‘in the context of the patriarchy of the Iron Age Hebrews of the first millennium B.C., [where] the mythology adopted from the earlier Neolithic and Bronze Age civilizations... became inverted, to render an argument just the opposite to that of its origin.’ In the Judeo- Christian creation story told in the first book of the Bible, one finds elements which are common to so many of the world’s creation myths: the serpent, the tree, and the twin beings; but for the first time, the serpent, ‘who had been revered in the Levant for at least seven thousand years before the composition of the Book of Genesis,’ plays the part of the villain. Yahweh, who replaces it in the role of the creator, ends up defeating ‘the serpent of the cosmic sea, Leviathan. [...] Campbell writes regarding the twin beings in the Garden of Eden: ‘they had been one at first, as Adam; then split in two as Adam and Eve. However, ‘the legend of the rib is clearly a patriarchal inversion’ as the male begets the female, which is the opposite of previous myths and of biological reality. Meanwhile, the damnation of the serpent is particularly ambiguous; Yahweh accuses it of having shown Eve the tree that allows one to tell the difference between good and evil... According to Campbell, these patriarchal inversions ‘address a pictorial message to the heart that exactly reverses the verbal message addressed to the brain; and this nervous discord inhabits both Christianity and Islam as well as Judaism, since they too share in the legacy of the Old Testament’*® 203 High Strangeness — Part Three Joseph Campbell discusses the ubiquitous snake symbols saying: But, as Dr. Narby notes: * Campbell, 1968, p. 154 *° Narby, 1998, pp. 65, 66; Campbell, 1964, pp. 17, 9, 22, 29, 30