Works by
Jeremy Narby, Ph.D.
(Anthropologist, Writer)

Books

• Intelligence in Nature (2005)
  Continuing the journey begun in his acclaimed book The Cosmic Serpent, the noted anthropologist ventures firsthand into both traditional cultures and the most up-todate discoveries of contemporary science to determine nature's secret ways of knowing.
  
  Anthropologist Jeremy Narby has altered how we understand the Shamanic cultures and traditions that have undergone a worldwide revival in recent years. Now, in one of his most extraordinary journeys, Narby travels the globe-from the Amazon Basin to the Far East-to probe what traditional healers and pioneering researchers understand about the intelligence present in all forms of life.
  
  Intelligence in Nature presents overwhelming illustrative evidence that independent intelligence is not unique to humanity alone. Indeed, bacteria, plants, animals, and other forms of nonhuman life display an uncanny penchant for self-deterministic decisions, patterns, and actions.
  
  Narby presents the first in-depth anthropological study of this concept in the West. He not only uncovers a mysterious thread of intelligent behavior within the natural world but also probes the question of what humanity can learn from nature's economy and knowingness in its own search for a saner and more sustainable way of life.

• Shamans Through Time: 500 Years On The Path To Knowledge (2001) by Francis Huxley and Jeremy Narby
  An anthology of excerpts from 64 previously published works to illustrate how shamanism has been perceived through the centuries. The essays are divided into seven parts, each including an introductory essay that identifies the prejudices of the researchers and shows how preconceived notions influenced both their methodology and the evolution of the study of shamanism. Many of the authors included in this anthology, such as Black Elk and Claude Lévi-Strauss, are familiar to those interested in the subject. What makes this work unique is that it also includes translations of relevant materials that were previously available only in foreign languages.

• The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (1999), Francis Huxley and Jeremy Narby eds.


A personal adventure, a fascinating study of anthropology and ethnopharmacology, and, most important, a revolutionary look at how intelligence and consciousness come into being.

This adventure in science and imagination, which the Medical Tribune said might herald "a Copernican revolution for the life sciences," leads the reader through unexplored jungles and uncharted aspects of mind to the heart of knowledge.

In a first-person narrative of scientific discovery that opens new perspectives on biology, anthropology, and the limits of rationalism, The Cosmic Serpent reveals how startlingly different the world around us appears when we open our minds to it.

• Resource Development and Indigenous Peoples: A Comparative Bibliography (1983)

See also:

• Visionary Plant Consciousness: The Shamanic Teachings of the Plant World (2007), J. P. Harpignies, ed.
  23 leading experts reveal the ways that psychoactive plants allow nature’s “voice” to speak to humans and what this communication means for our future
   

  • Presents the specific “human-plant interconnection” revealed by visionary plants

  • Explores the relevance of plant-induced visions and shamanic teachings to humanity’s environmental crisis

  • With contributions from Alex Grey, Andrew Weil, Charles S. Grob, Dale Pendell, Dennis McKenna, Edison Saraiva, M.D., Ethan Nadelmann, Ph.D., Florencio Siquera de Caralho, Francis Huxley, Jeffrey Bronfman, Jeremy Narby, John Mohawk, Kat Harrison, Katsi Cook, Luis Eduardo Luna, Ph.D., Marcellus Bear Heart Williams, Michael Pollan, Michael Stewartt, Paul Stamets, Terence McKenna, and Wade Davis.

  Visionary plants have long served indigenous peoples and their shamans as enhancers of perception, thinking, and healing. These plants can also be important guides to the reality of the natural world and how we can live harmoniously in it.
  
  In Visionary Plant Consciousness, editor J. P. Harpignies has gathered presentations from the Bioneers annual conference of environmental and social visionaries that explore how plant consciousness affects the human condition. Twenty-three leading ethnobotanists, anthropologists, medical researchers, and cultural and religious figures present their understandings of the nature of psychoactive plants and their significant connection to humans. What they reveal is that these plants may help us access the profound intelligence in nature--the “mind of nature”--that we must learn to understand in order to survive our ecologically destructive way of life.

• Hallucinogens: A Reader (2002) by Charles Grob
  It's been forty years since Timothy Leary sat beside a swimming pool in Cuernavaca, Mexico, ingested several grams of the genus Stropharia cubensis, and experienced a dazzling display of visions that led him to herald the dawning of a New Age. And yet, from the counterculture movement of the 1960s, through the War on Drugs, to this very day, the world at large has viewed hallucinogens not as a gift but as a threat to society.
  
  In Hallucinogens, Charles Grob surveys recent writings from Donald M. Topping, Gary Fisher, Glenn H. Shepard, Huston Smith, Jeremy Narby, Lawrence Bush, Myron J. Stolaroff, Ralph Metzner, Rick J. Strassman, Roger Walsh, Terence McKenna, and Thomas Riedlinger -- illustrating that a reevaluation of the social worth of hallucinogens-used intelligently-is greatly in order.