Eve Theory of Consciousness v3.0
How humans evolved a soul
“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” Genesis 3:6-7
By some accounts, Homo Sapiens evolved 200,000 years ago. However, there is little evidence of sapient behavior for most of that time period. Stone tools remained the same for tens of thousands of years, meaning countless generations lived and died without any innovation. There was no art and likely no storytelling. About 50,000 years ago, a distinctly human culture emerged. The tools became more complex. Styles and methods of production changed over the course of hundreds of years rather than tens of thousands. Art, religion, and calendars were invented. From then on, change has been the only constant. Many scientists think language evolved around this time. It looks like the dawn of inner life.
Much of the disagreement on when we became human is disagreement about what makes us human. Ironically, one of our clearest quirks is the need for narrative, especially for who we are and where we came from. All cultures answer these questions. The scandal of Darwinian evolution was contravening religion to explain them by material causes—natural selection degree by degree. Instead of being created in the image of God, man and beast henceforth belonged to the same family tree. We undoubtedly share a common ancestor with other animals. But this elides the deeper question of what makes us human. We may share 99% of our DNA with chimps, but on the meaningful traits humans are categorically different. We have language and symbolic thought. We are native dualists who feel that, at the core, we are made of spiritual stuff. A dog has never had an existential crisis1. More than unique, these attributes seem to be binary; an organism either has them or doesn’t. How did we evolve these defining features bit by bit? Were there times when humans were only half capable of symbolic thought? What would that even look like? This is one of the great open questions of science.
The tension between anatomical modernity 200 kya (thousand years ago) and Behavioral Modernity 50 kya permeates the study of human origins. See, for example, Michael Corballis’s The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization. He makes the case that recursive thinking undergirds self-awareness, language, counting, and imagining the future. The whole human package tightly wound up by a single principle. But the timeline is confusing. He’s “certain” that a Homo Sapien from 200 kya raised today could become a lawyer, artist, or scientist without any problem. He claims there are no cognitive differences on these time scales but later spends several paragraphs detailing how, starting 40 kya, there was a flowering of culture that sure looks like the emergence of recursion, and maybe it evolved then. In some ways, it’s an optimistic ideology. “Yes, there are no signs of sapience 200-40 kya, but if an early Homo Sapien were raised in the modern school system, they’d be completely normal. Evolution can’t touch the brain in a mere 200,000 years.” But the flip side of that coin denigrates the human spark. It implies that in the Stone Age, things we consider fundamental simply didn’t develop. The impulse to make art and search for meaning was not always found in our species. Rather, it’s a tic of whatever environments humans have been living in over the last 50,000 years. If everyone else stopped asking existential questions—or even doodling—you would, too. Or at least a child would if raised in that barren world. Not only is it a bleak vision of human nature, but if language had evolved by 200 kya, then understanding that moment is hopeless. Time gobbles up evidence. However, if it started to emerge 50 kya, we may be able to reconstruct the story. The finishing touches of linguistic thinking could have been evolving fairly recently.
I choose to frame human origins in terms of a soul. This essay’s subtitle could be “How humans evolved an irreducible self-referential ‘I’,” but that would divorce my project from thousands of years of thinkers and the grounding power of natural language. The meaning of “soul” is an agreement between millions of people about the essence of a self, the seat of agency, and connection to the divine. When grappling with what it means to be human, common language offers a guardrail.2 And in this case, a target for what must be explained. Where did souls come from?
Given that and the reference to Eve, I should clarify the relationship to Christianity. I think that Genesis and many other creation myths are remarkably good phenomenological accounts of the first man to think, “I am.” Based on the archeological and genetic data, this may have happened about 50 kya. Comparative mythologists tell us some stories have lasted that long, and if any story would be preserved for millennia, it would be our genesis.
My thesis is that women discovered “I” first and then taught men about inner life. Creation myths are memories of when women forged humans into a dualistic species. That sounds fantastic, but we have to have evolved at some point (and it must have been fantastic). Further, weaker versions of the idea are still interesting. For example, I hold that snake venom was used in the first rituals to help communicate “I am.” Hence the snake in the garden, tempting Eve with self-knowledge. Even if those rituals do not figure in human evolution or our discovery of consciousness, it would be extraordinary if a psychedelic snake cult from the Paleolithic is remembered in Genesis as well as by the Aztecs. I’d watch that Netflix series!
In several blog posts, I have developed what it would look like to discover “I, ” how it could have been communicated to others, why women would have been the vanguard, how it could evolve by degrees, and what sort of cultural and genetic marks such a process would leave. But these arguments are scattered across posts, and in the meantime, I’ve found more supporting evidence. For example, earlier, I mused that snake venom could have been used as a hallucinogen. It turns out that this is well documented in ritual settings, including among the architects of Western civilization.
This essay starts with a discussion of what it means to be human. This is essential to establish a common framework but, unfortunately, buries the lede. The most original research is on the worldwide Snake Cult. If you’re short on time, you could start there. Or, if you prefer audio, there is a narration available by Askwho Casts AI. (And if you enjoy it, consider buying them a coffee on Patreon.)
One last bit of business. Rationalists often start an essay by signaling how seriously one should take the argument. Epistemic status: Human origins are inherently speculative, and this is a passion project outside my area of expertise (psychology and AI). For this post, I’ve read maybe a dozen books and 100 papers. One way to think about this theory is interpreting data by asking, “How recently could humans have become sapient?” rather than using the institutional bias that seeks to push that date back as far as possible3. So, proceed with caution, but that’s par for the course for this subject.
Outline
What makes us human? Recursive self-awareness.
Weak EToC, without any reference to mythology. Recursive culture spread, and this caused genetic selection for recursive abilities wherever it went.
The Snake Cult of Consciousness: giving the Stoned Ape Theory fangs.
What makes us human?
“In the beginning, there was only the Great Self in the form of a Person. Reflecting, it found nothing but itself. Then its first word was: “This am I!” whence arose the name “I” (Aham).” Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.1
“I” is the beginning of many creation myths. This is made explicit in the Hindu verse quoted above. Or consider the Egyptian account where Atum rises out of the primordial ocean of chaos by saying his name. There are echoes in the Bible as well. After eating the Fruit of Knowledge, Adam and Eve became self-aware—self-conscious even—and realized their nakedness. The ability to reflect on oneself then produced alienation. Adam could no longer live in unity with God and nature. He had to leave the Garden.
The New Testament can be read as a development of this idea. John begins his gospel with a nod to Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Word here refers to Christ, the answer to the alienation wrought by The Fall of Adam and Eve. Jesus began his ministry by claiming to be the great “I Am,” one of the Jewish names of God (John 8:56–59). It is a passage that goes over the heads of many English readers but not his Jewish audience, who immediately took up stones to kill him. They understood the claim to be “I Am God, the Self-Existing One, who appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” I hope it’s not an abuse of the transitive property to say, “In the beginning was the I Am.”
These myths teach that living started with “I,” that God is ultimately self-referential, and that this same divine spark exists within man. Beyond “I,” creation myths also cite ritual, language, and technology as what separates man from beast.
In Australia, Aboriginal legend holds that civilizing spirits brought the first people language, ritual, and technology. Thus, Dreamtime ended, and time began. Similarly, the Aztecs teach that before modern humans, there lived a race of man built of wood, lacking soul, speech, calendars, and religion. A great flood wiped out this penultimate race, and humanity only survived by temporarily transforming into fish. Clearly, these myths cannot be taken literally. However, their core has held up remarkably well. When scientists answer what makes humans unique, they point to self-awareness, language, religion, and our relationship to time and technology. Many even suppose that all of these form a tight package that can be explained by “recursive” thought. It follows that, in reality, the whole package would have evolved more or less at once.
The fact that creation myths are phenomenologically accurate doesn’t need explaining. The narrative landscape is competitive, and only the most psychologically true survive, particularly in the crowded space of cosmogony. However, details in the world’s creation myths suggest they share a common root deep in the past. In fact, they seem to hail from about the time humans first started expressing “recursive” behaviors. This opens the possibility that they aren’t accurate by accident or in spite of themselves. They could be memories of the transition to sapience.
Recursion is useful
Natural selection works because traits are passed down from parent to child. If a trait allows a parent to have more children, then that trait will become more common in the population. So, if the ability to digest cow’s milk or think abstract thoughts is useful, these traits will become more prevalent with each generation. Given that, what abilities does recursive thinking enable?
Recursion is a process in which a function or procedure calls itself either directly or indirectly. In other words, it's a method where the solution to a problem depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem. This can be as simple as standing between two mirrors and looking at the reflection of the reflection of your reflection. The last reflection depends on those that came before it. The concept is widely used in computer science and mathematics for solving complex problems by breaking them down into simpler, more manageable parts.
In computer science, a recursive function applies itself to its own output. Often, each successive application will be a sub-routine, where the input gets simpler and simpler until reaching some stop condition. If that is too technical, don’t worry. Just know that algorithmically speaking, recursion is a superpower. Consider the fractal below. The most straightforward way to store the image is to enumerate the color of each pixel. But there are lots of pixels, and because there is structure in most images, they can be stored far more efficiently with some tricks. Under the hood, JPEG uses recursion to compress images, without which the algorithm would be orders of magnitude slower.4
One can go one step further for this image because it is generated with a recursive process. Therefore, the image can be losslessly encoded with the few bytes required to write the recursive program that originally produced the image—a few lines of code. Not only that, but one could zoom in to any edge and see the fractal recapitulate itself forever on increasingly finer scales. Recursion is almost alchemical in producing so much from so little. In the words of the legendary computer scientist Niklaus Wirth:
The power of recursion evidently lies in the possibility of defining an infinite set of objects by a finite statement. In the same manner, an infinite number of computations can be described by a finite recursive program, even if this program contains no explicit repetitions.
But humans aren’t computers. How does the brain use recursion? In the 1950s, the linguist Noam Chomsky departed from the blank-slate behaviorists by positing that a Universal Grammar constrained all languages. That is, humans have an instinct for language. Just as spiders weave webs of a certain design, human cognitive hardware comes wired to learn a particular type of grammar. This isn’t grammar in the sense of how to conjugate verbs, which varies by language. Rather, Universal Grammar is a meta-rule that applies to every language due to the design of the brain. In his 2002 article "The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?" co-authored with Marc Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch, Chomsky argued recursion was the key feature of the human language faculty. Every language uses recursion as the basis of its grammar.
As in other domains, linguistic recursion means that sentences may be parsed via self-referential subroutines. For example, the sentence “Watson wrote that Holmes deduced the body was in the shed” can be divided into three parts:
X1 = Watson wrote
X2 = Holmes deduced
X3 = the body was in the shed
What did Watson write? To know, one must first parse X2, which in turn requires parsing X3. There is a recursive hierarchy. The sentence’s meaning completely changes with each additional clause, which can go on indefinitely. We can prepend Jane said that John said that Harold said that… to X1 + X2 + X3 forever. Even though there is a finite set of words, there is no longest grammatical sentence. Recursion pries infinity out of finite building blocks. Not that we go about speaking infinitely long sentences. But in practice, it does greatly increase the complexity of ideas that can be expressed. The Universal Grammar is built on the same rule as fractals.
Astute readers may be reeling at the potential bait and switch. Just because we use recursion to describe all these things doesn’t mean they are the same. And that’s fair. There probably are some differences. But it’s entirely in the mainstream to lump many types of recursion. It is an active area of research to test the degree to which recursion in processing music, language, vision, or motor planning uses the same neural architecture.5 Or consider the work of psychologist and linguist Michael Corballis. Along with language, he adds several other recursive superpowers in his book The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization. These include the ability to introspect, count, and think about the future. As this is an imagined future, it also implies the ability to create fiction, worlds that do not exist. This is the beginning of art, spiritual life, and the human condition.
So, recursion is useful. With it, humans became culture-dependent beings with a language instinct. But more importantly, for individuals, recursion is the basis of consciousness. That dual purpose (pardon the pun) is important to remember, even though consciousness and evolutionary fitness are often treated separately.
Recursion is essential for consciousness
Introspection requires recursion by definition. If the self perceives itself, that is recursion. So the phrase “I think, therefore I am” is recursive on multiple levels. Recursive grammar connects the two phrases, and the mind is directed at itself.
Descartes reasoned that the reality of anything could be doubted, with one exception. You stretch out your hand and feel a table? Well, some have been known to hallucinate such things. It may not be there. The self is the only thing he could not reason away, for it exists by definition if there is a thinker doing the doubting. "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am."
There is an even subtler layer of recursion in that phrase. “I” is recursive at rest, not just when it is perceiving itself. One way to think of this is in terms of abilities. The division between your conscious and subconscious mind is that which you can and can’t introspect, not what you are currently introspecting. Similarly, the limits of “I” can be defined by what can recursively reference itself, not whether it is performing that operation at any moment.
More sophisticated arguments can be made. Douglas Hofstadter’s classic I Am a Strange Loop presents the idea that “I” is a result of the same type of self-referential paradox that Gödel used to “break” mathematics. The paper Consciousness as recursive, spatiotemporal self-location includes a dozen citations connecting recursion to consciousness, as does the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness. Many bright people hold that the core of what we call “living” requires recursion.
We take our relationship to duality and time for granted, but these are both built on the foundation of recursion. It’s worth trying to understand that before moving on.
Disruptions of self are also disruptions of subjective time. Diseases that affect the ego, such as Schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s, also disrupt the experience of time. Anyone can dabble in this arena by taking psychedelics which produce ego-death. Such a trip can be 15 minutes on the clock and feel like decades. A more mundane example is the flow state, which seems to draw out time.
As mentioned earlier, mental time travel—thinking about the future or past—is useful. It’s not an exaggeration to call it time travel, given you are simulating the future, which allows one to flexibly plan for it. This is different from instinctive behavior, like a squirrel burying food for the winter. In fact, humans can use mental time travel to think themselves out of instincts. Humans had followed their prey for eons. Imagine the first hunter-gatherers to settle down. They must have had some idea of the next season and reasoned that they didn’t need to follow the herds because they had planted some crops (or had some other alternative).
Living outside the moment is a new kind of alienation from the material world. Many know Joseph Campbell for the Hero’s Journey, the idea that there is a basic template to which all (most?) stories conform. This has been popularized as a list of actions a hero takes to transcend himself and society and then reintegrate. In Campbell’s last book, he described how all stories blossomed out of recursion:
in the old creation myth from the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad of that primordial Being-of-all-beings who, in the beginning, thought “I” and immediately experienced, first fear, then desire. The desire in that case was not to eat, however, but to become two, and then to procreate. And in this primal constellation of themes—first, of unity, albeit unconscious; then of a consciousness of selfhood and immediate fear of extinction; next, desire, first for another and then for union with that other—we have a set of "elementary ideas,” to use Adolf Bastian’s felicitous term, that has been sounded and inflected, transposed, developed, and sounded again through all the mythologies of mankind through the ages. And as a constant structuring strain underlying the everlasting play of these themes, there is the primal polar tension of a consciousness of duality against an earlier, but lost, knowledge of unity that is pressing still for realization and may indeed break through, under circumstances, in a rapture of self-loss.
Narrative is predicated on self-awareness. This was recognized in antiquity and further developed by the likes of Campbell and Jung in the 20th century. With self-reference, our animal drives became fractal symphonies of yearning and imagination.6 Before “I,” there were no stories, and there was no such thing as “living”.
In psychology and linguistics, it is a dominant view that recursion underlies humans’ most overpowered competitive advantages. In philosophy, it is widely held to be a requirement for consciousness, at least of the sort humans have. The next section tries to weave utility and subjectivity into a unified model.
The Original Spin: some models of the first recursive thought
In The Faculty of Language, Steven Pinker and Ray Jackendoff discuss why recursive thought evolved: “Here the problem is not a paucity of candidates for evolutionary antecedents but a surfeit.” Still, they offer some possibilities: music, social cognition, the visual decomposition of objects into parts, and the formulation of complex action sequences. I’d like to offer one more: that the driving recursive thought was “I am.”
Describing this epiphany brings to mind a group of blind men feeling an elephant, declaring it consists of tree-trunk legs, ivory spears, or flaps of rough skin. Like them, I will give several related models that I hope describe humans’ transition to sapience.
The first model draws from Freud, dividing the psyche into id, ego, and superego. The id is basic animal nature to meet physical needs. The first bacteria must have had something like this: navigate towards a comfortable salinity. In humans, this is expanded to food, sex, shelter, and the like. The superego is unique to humans. It is your model of society’s expectations. What others—whether abstracted as “society” or particularly people such as mother or chief—expect. The ego is also unique to humans and mediates between these two often contradictory forces. This implies that it evolved after the superego.
Theory of Mind preceded recursive self-awareness. Before recursion, the superego was made up of models of how others would behave and expect, just as it is now. However, a pre-recursive ego is a different beast: a proto-ego. The proto-ego, too, was a model of mind (in this case, one’s own). As a mediator, it would have been well connected to both the superego and the interoceptive system, keeping track of the body’s needs (an important part of the id). The first “I am” corresponds to the ego becoming self-referential, receiving itself as input. The self finally perceived the self and, in so doing, was born.
In other words, we built a map of our mind, and the map became the territory “I.” Or, as Joscha Bach put it, “We exist inside the story that the brain tells itself.” This suggests a straightforward answer to the ancient question of what language has to do with consciousness. Consciousness requires self-reference, which in turn allows full grammatical language. Both come from recursion. (It’s worth noting words existed before full grammatical language or self-reflection. Adam named the animals while in Eden, after all.)
One shortcoming of this model is that it makes the transition seem like the emergence of a thing, the ego. It’s more rightly understood as discovering a new space or dimension. My favorite analogy is thousands of years old and common to many religions. With recursion, humans evolved a new eye that can perceive symbolic space. A Third Eye, if you will. Just as our eyes allow us to see the electromagnetic spectrum, this new self-referential architecture in our brain allows us to perceive the symbolic realm. The abstract world of art, math, (Platonic) ideals, and the future.
Richard Dawkins said there were two great evolutionary moments. The first was the emergence of DNA, which marked the beginning of biological evolution. The second was the emergence of memes. Just as genes propagate themselves by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain. We receive ideas, refine or mutate them, and pass them on. Over the long run, the best ideas win. At this point, humans are wholly dependent on the highly evolved memes distributed over countless human brains (and now books and computers). The memetic universe is our natural habitat to a much greater degree than the material world. This comes with the territory of existing “inside the story the brain tells itself.” A brain that can produce such an “I” has a privileged view of the memetic universe. We are the only species that can “see” most memes—that is, hold and perceive abstract or symbolic ideas. The first person to think “I am” was, in a very real sense, stumbling into a new dimension. Since then, we have built castles in the sky and on earth as well. Humans reign supreme in the material world because we are the sole natives of the memetic niche.
The final model I present is the one that led me down this rabbit hole to begin with. Many scientists say language has evolved in the last 100,000 years. Why, then, is the inner voice such a core feature of conscious thought? How has language been so fully integrated into thinking if consciousness goes back a hundred million years?
Consider the thought experiment: what did the first inner voice say? In Consequences of Conscience, I reasoned that, given the social nature of our species, the first inner voice may have been a moral injunction like “Share your food!” But the content doesn’t matter so much. It could also have said “Run!” when one of our ancestors’ unconscious noticed that the birds had gone too quiet. The question is, would she have identified with the first inner voice? I think not. Identity is complex and requires recursion. Hallucination does not and is still common. This suggests reframing “When did recursion first evolve?” as “When did humans first identify with their inner voice?”
While writing a piece on inner voices (Consequences of Conscience), I struggled to convey the phenomenological significance of this moment. It struck me that I could do no better than Genesis, which reads a lot like Adam being taught his inner voice is him. Before that understanding, what would the hallucinated voices of the superego have been, if not the gods, doling out advice or commands? It follows that Satan told the truth when he said Eve’s eyes would be opened and she would become as the gods.
That would necessitate Genesis hailing from the beginning of phenomenological time. Taking that idea seriously has all the hallmarks of a wild flight of fancy. But I think mostly by convention. Fundamentally, the question is how long information can be preserved in myth and how long ago humans first demonstrated inner life. Surprisingly, there is strong evidence that myths can survive from about the time humans started doing anything that indicates recursive thoughts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no scientifically-minded person has tried to put two and two together in a very long time. That is this fool’s errand.
Eve Theory of Consciousness (EToC)
Whether Genesis could be a cultural memory of the discovery of the human condition comes down to two questions:
How long can a myth last?
When did we become human?
If those are about the same length, then Genesis could be a memory of our genesis. Both questions are difficult but not totally intractable. I write about the first question here, giving several examples of global memes that were first evidenced about 30,000 years ago. For statistical reasons, the simplest example is the Seven Sisters. In dozens of cultures from Greece to Australia to North America, the Pleiades star cluster is said to represent Seven Sisters, even though only six stars are visible. The discrepancy is often a plot point in the story: a missing sister. Given this detail, Seven Sisters myths worldwide must share a common root. It’s not a plot that would independently emerge.
The seven stars are painted on cave walls in France 21 kya and Australia in the mid-Holocene, where they are also part of the Dreamtime creation myth. Most researchers interpret this to mean the myth is around 100,000 years old. As I’ll explain later, there is no need to posit anything much more than 30,000 years. In large part because, in relation to question 2, there is no compelling evidence of recursive thinking (including fiction) before Behavioral Modernity 40-50 kya. That transition is debated, which we will return to. But for now, all that needs to be established is that there is considerable overlap between mainstream estimates of 1 and 2. I’ll outline a weak and strong version of how recursive culture could have spread. Starting with the weak, which does not rely on any religious text, and then moving to the strong, which interprets common details of creation myths as meaningful.
Weak EToC
Humans today have a fairly seamless construction of self. There are cracks around the edges, particularly if you do drugs, meditate, or have schizophrenia. But many get through life taking “I” for granted from the time they are about 18 months old. In the beginning, this would not have been the case. Recursive loops are inherently unstable. There are steady configurations, but it’s unlikely our cognitive wiring lept from no recursion to recursion as a load-bearing infinite loop without significant evolution. This would take generations of natural selection for the seamless construction of self at a young age.
It’s instructive to imagine the first person to think, “I am.” Modern humans become self-aware as toddlers, it seems. They can at least use “I” correctly, pass a mirror test, and brain scans no longer look like they’re on an acid trip. My guess is the first sapient person was not a toddler because they aren’t particularly introspective or good with Theory of Mind. In that case, the first sapient person would have been an adult who had lived their life up until that moment in non-reflective unity. Let’s call her Eve. It’s possible that she was either pregnant or going through puberty when she had the realization, as those are periods of great brain reorganization, particularly related to social cognition. At any rate, once “I am” was obtained by adults or adolescents, selection for recursion would mean developing “I” younger and younger. Eventually, this drove the age down to ~18 months.
There also would have been selection for more functional recursion. By this, I don’t mean more intelligent or better at grammar, though that is part of it. The clearest lens is phenomenological. The evolution of a soul opens up the whole spirit world, much of which is haunted. The first humans would have been far more schizophrenic, not knowing exactly where “I” started and other imagined specters began. Hallucinating voices is the best-known symptom, but schizophrenia also includes a loss of sense of agency and a feeling that one’s body (or some part) does not belong to them. Go back far enough, and this would have been the norm. And farther still, there would be no “owner” at all. There is a spectrum of how smoothly recursion runs as the default mode. Modern disruptions like epilepsy or schizophrenia map onto that spectrum but are minor compared to the variation that existed in the past. The first thousand light bulbs were extremely faulty by today’s standards. The same is true of the light of consciousness. As I’ve written before, the intermediate evolutionary period could be called the Valley of Insanity. The longer recursion took to evolve, the more time humans spent as Homo Schizo.
The first thousand people to have thought “I am” may have lost that train of thought and gone on living in unity with the universe. If they had such a concept, “altered states of consciousness” would have referred to duality—ego birth, not ego death. Imagine the first person for whom “I am” stuck for any length of time. What would it be like to explain the situation to the rest of the tribe? Absolute lunacy. Like describing the taste of “salt” to a silicon-based alien who only speaks Spanish. Nobody understood the first Eve, and the evolutionary meat grinder kept churning. Given recursion is devilishly useful, those who tended to have the “I” epiphany may have also tended to be better at other (proto-)recursive tasks, such as social navigation or counting, causing them to have more children. Even a small correlation between “I” and these tasks would be sufficient for a temporary experience of “I” to be more common hundreds of generations after the first epiphany. And there likely was a correlation, given the extent to which the brain uses recursive networks for many tasks.
At some point, critical mass would be reached. Enough people would experience “I”—though perhaps only sporadically—to build a culture around it. This would create a steep fitness gradient for those who can participate in recursive culture. In other words, the less-recursive folks died or had fewer kids. Consider all the ways, over many thousands of years:
Language becomes recursive, with it, the jokes around the campfire, instructions on making an ax, and the endless small-tribe gossip.
Shamanism and the entire spiritual plane are only appreciated by those who can experience duality.
More sophisticated deceit requires recursion. With duality, one must learn to wear a mask. Everyone else is a sitting duck to the social technology of saying one thing and meaning another.
Recursion changes one’s relationship with time, allowing more flexible planning for the future. This is expressed in language with past and future tenses, further complicating grammar.
Music and dance use recursive structures.
This selection process could have happened fairly quickly. Let’s say “seamless construction of self” is about as heritable as schizophrenia (~50%) and is correlated r = 0.1 with fitness (surviving number of children). This is fairly conservative, as nowadays people with schizophrenia only have about 50% as many children (a huge fitness penalty). The law of the Paleolithic jungle may have been even harsher on those with a fractured grip on reality.
Plugging those conservative parameters into the Breeder Equation, recursive ability (uninterrupted function and acquisition at younger ages) could increase one standard deviation every 20 generations or ~500 years.7 Here is how far recursion would shift in a population over 2,000 or 5,000 years:
In 2,000 years, there is almost no overlap between the populations. By comparison, this is about the same as the difference in height between 8- and 12-year-old boys. By 5,000 years, there is no overlap. Those are cognitively distinct populations. Now consider 20,000:
There are a lot of assumptions that go into a model like this, but the primary one that needs to hold is consistent selection for recursion. That is, those with a seamless construction of self need to have ever slightly more children than those who do not. That seems perfectly reasonable. A correlation of r = 0.1 is barely perceptible in real life, and there are advantages to recursive thinking. Remember, Dawkins said the emergence of memes is one of two great evolutionary moments. Only recursive thinkers could access that great well of knowledge. The ability to understand recursive culture is completely overpowered as a strategy to pass on one’s genes. In the last 50,000 years, we have used this tool to conquer the world, driving many species to extinction and enjoying exponential population growth along the way. Who was having more kids then? Those who were marginally better at recursion. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where there wasn’t selection in that time period.
So, when I say “evolutionary time scales,” I mean long enough to have no overlap between the recursive abilities of two populations. Long enough to be cognitively foreign. Tribes where men develop consciousness as infants vs. during puberty or have schizophrenia rates of 1% vs. 10%. It turns out that may be as short as a few thousand years. And this estimate is well within the bounds of mainstream answers. In fact, Noam Chomsky says it took just one generation.
Chomsky and another linguist named Andrey Vyshedskiy have both proposed theories where a single mutation 50-100 kya enabled recursion, and we are all descendants of that fortunate forbear. This solves the question of degrees (it was a single gene, like a light switch) and scraps the Valley of Insanity. It is also almost certainly wrong. Recursive functions are liable to be unstable, so it would be a great surprise if that were worked out in one fell swoop. Thousands of genes influence schizophrenia and language ability. The evolution of inner life must implicate just as many. Moreover, we have now sequenced the genes of millions of people, including hundreds of prehistoric humans. In the words of population geneticist David Reich, if there was a “single critical genetic change,” it is “running out of places to hide.” Much of what I write is speculative, but I don’t see a way to get around the transition to sapience being very psychologically strange. There must have been a time when inner life was far more fractured. Once recursion started to evolve, it was such a competitive advantage that it would have made up for any fitness loss, including unpleasant side effects like demonic possession and cluster headaches, which would have been passed along with it. Often, human self-domestication is discussed in terms of becoming more pro-social and feminine. Yes, but I think the steepest selection gradient must have been for the “seamless construction of self.” A cleanly delineated “I” and feeling as though one is in control of one’s body. And for this to develop young.
This is a model of what was evolving, now let’s consider the when. Below is a timeline that will be familiar to most, put together by an Evolutionary Anthropologist for The Conversation:
It acknowledges that the evidence for human behavior really only starts around 65 kya with the “Great Leap.” However, art, language, music, marriage, and storytelling are projected back to 300 kya. The reasoning is that these are cultural universals among living humans, so they must go back to our genetic root. Branches of humanity have been separated for 300,000 years, so art must go back at least to then. As the article puts it:
“We inherited our humanity from peoples in southern Africa 300,000 years ago. The alternative – that everyone, everywhere coincidentally became fully human in the same way at the same time, starting 65,000 years ago – isn’t impossible, but a single origin is more likely.”
This is simply not true, given culture can spread. If recursive culture diffused at the cusp of sapience, it would change the fitness landscape wherever it went. Non-recursive or semi-recursive people could have evolved into the memetic niche in the subsequent thousands of years. It’s also wrong about genetic isolation. Humanity’s most recent common ancestor—the most recent person everyone alive is related to—is much more recent than 300 kya. Scientific American cites studies that estimate this to be just 2-7 kya. Genes get around. If there were genes important for recursion, they could have spread starting 50 kya. In the footnote, I go into other problems with the 300 kya date8. But I don’t want to spend too much time on it. The purpose of this essay is to separate our cultural and genetic roots. Recursive culture could spread and then cause selection for modern human cognition. In theory, this could happen even without genetic contact between groups.
This anthropologist’s framing embeds another common assumption: humans must have been fully human from the moment there is evidence of art or other modern behavior. But the point I have been trying to hammer home is that it would have taken time for recursion to evolve. The first person to think “I am” was not like us. Nor were the first artists 40 kya. If we were to establish a trans-temporal adoption agency, children from 40 kya would not grow up to be lawyers, doctors, or engineers. They would be conscious, but in a modern city would very well end up institutionalized. Evolving something as subtle as a Third Eye takes time.
The best way to understand when humans came online is to look at the archeological record, and for evidence of natural selection in our genomes. Starting with archeology, the date 65 kya used in the graphic is quite generous. The most impressive art from this period looks like:
This is not very good evidence of recursive thinking. I would be surprised if a magpie made that, but it would not be the most clever thing I’ve seen an animal do. It doesn’t require a notion of the self, the future, or fiction. Compare that to the Venus figurines produced from Europe to Siberia starting 40 kya:
There are many interpretations of Venus statues, all of which require recursion. Most poignantly, these may have been self-portraits, which is about the art one would expect to be produced with the discovery of “I.” Moreover, at about this time, all over the world, one can find sure examples of recursion. As mentioned earlier, counting requires recursion. The oldest tally stick dates back 44 kya in South Africa. Notably, there are 28 notches, and it has been suggested that this was made by a woman to keep track of her menstrual cycle, though it could also have been the lunar cycle. Tracking these cycles is one of the first technologies one would expect to develop with the discovery of subjective time. Finally, Indonesia is home to the oldest known narrative art, a cave painting dated 45 kya. Like other early examples of recursion, there is a connection to women. Much of the earliest cave art is of hand prints. The digit ratios indicate that women left three-quarters of these.
These artifacts tick all the recursive boxes: counting, art, storytelling, and interest in selfhood, duality, and time. In the literature, this transition is referred to as Behavioral Modernity. The idea that our minds took their now-current form 40-20 kya was dominant up until the 1990s. For example, the current curator of paleoanthropology at the Harvard Peabody Museum wrote:
“The time between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago saw the spread of modern man out of his hypothetical "Garden of Eden" until, through a process of swamping and replacing older and more archaic subspecies of H. sapiens, he inherited the earth.” ~ The Ascent of Man, David Pilbeam
Ascent was written in 1972 and reprinted in 1991, not all that long ago. As recently as 2009, psychologist Frederick L. Coolidge and anthropologist Thomas Wynn wrote: “The most parsimonious interpretation is that modern executive functions did not emerge much earlier than 32,000 years ago.”9
However, in the last several decades, evidence of deep genetic splits within Africa has complicated this view, and more inclusive definitions of humanity (sometimes without recursive language) have become popular. But again, one of the advantages of EToC is that it allows for separate genetic and memetic roots for humanity. Demonstrating deep genetic splits does not mean that someone 300,000 years ago had the genetic endowment for recursion, much less stable recursion.
Most readers are probably aware of the transition to Behavioral Modernity 40-50 kya. Less well-known is that transition was a process. The cultural level reached in Eurasia 40 kya was not achieved worldwide until much later. For example, a 2005 paper argues that hallmarks of the symbolic revolution are only evidenced in Australia in the last 7,000 years.10 Further, before the Holocene (12 kya), the Australian cultural toolkit most closely resembles Europe and Africa in the Lower and Middle Paleolithic (3,300-300 kya and 300-30kya, respectively). In other words, the tools were millions of years out of date. In evolutionary time, this was before Homo Sapiens or Neanderthals, or Denisovans even existed. Homo Erectus called, and he wants his stone tools back.11 (It’s important to note that the authors use this to argue against Behavioral Modernity. They don’t think it represents a significant evolutionary change, given its recency.)
More broadly, the archeologist Colin Renfrew proposed the Sapient Paradox, which asks: If humans have been cognitively modern for 50k, 100k, or 300k years, why isn’t modern behavior widespread until roughly the end of the Ice Age? According to Renfrew, “From a distance and to the non-specialist anthropologist, the Sedentary Revolution [12 kya] looks like the true Human Revolution.”
He is not alone. Michael Corballis presents two possible periods for the evolution of recursion: 400-200 kya and 40-10 kya.12 Just last year, linguist George Poulos argued that “language, as we know it today, probably began to emerge about 20,000 years ago.” Likewise, linguists Antonio Benítez-Burraco and Ljiljana Progovac propose a four-stage model for the evolution of language, with recursion only present in the last 10,000 years. By their analysis, it was not until then that humans demonstrated behavior complex enough to need recursive language. In addition to social complexity, they point to the global shift to a more globular skull shape in the last 35,000 years. It’s a quirk of the term “Anatomically Modern Human.” This is applied to humans 200 kya, but it doesn’t mean “could pass for a modern human.” It means “has features like a gracile skeleton and a reduced brow ridge that are now common to humans and distinguish us from extinct members of the genus Homo.” Our skulls are not the same as even 50 kya!
If there were a rewiring of the brain for recursion in the last 50 kya, then one would expect:
Changes in skull shape
Lots of new genetic mutations related to cognition
As previously mentioned, skulls were becoming more feminine and globular in this period. Turning to the second question, the paper Genetic timeline of human brain and cognitive traits is instructive. Below is a plot of new genes entering the gene pool. Notice the surge peaking 30 kya, many of which are cognitive genes. Like the archeological record, not much is going on 200 kya. When does it look like we entered a new niche and encountered new problems that required new genetic material to solve?
The authors highlight that “genes containing recent evolutionary modifications (from around 54,000 to 4,000 years ago) are linked to intelligence (P = 2 x 10-6) and neocortical surface area (P = 6.7 x 10-4), and that these genes tend to be highly expressed in cortical areas involved in language and speech (pars triangularis, P = 6.2 x 10-4).”
A 2022 paper found signals of strong selection for brain and behavior-related genes in the last 45 kya, as well as from 80-45 kya. They suggest these are adaptations to handle the relatively colder environment of Saudi Arabia as humans left Africa:
“While neurological functions initially appear surprising, it is possible that this observation mostly relates to the critical role the nervous system and brain play in coordinating, integrating, and subsequently regulating diverse physiological processes, which are impacted by cold environments.”
One wonders if Saudi Arabia was cold enough to cause such significant changes in brain function.13 They also mention that, “provocatively,” it could indicate cognitive evolution for sociality.14 (And I would add recursion, which is first evidenced around this time.)
So, the weak version of EToC is that recursive culture spread and changed the fitness landscape. Recursion was not always evenly distributed over the world, but a rough timeline is that there were moments of duality 50-100 kya15, and recursion was “put to work” 50 kya when it was psychologically integrated enough to begin building culture around recursive skills. Given recursion is found all across the world soon after, this culture must have spread. At that time, “I” was not necessarily a constant, uninterrupted fixture. Individual’s relationship with their inner voice could have been wildly different. At some point, perhaps fairly recently, the seamless construction of self became the norm worldwide, and disruptions are now pathologized.
The bulk of selection would have been in the last 50,000 years. How could there have been selection for symbolic thinking before there was symbolic culture? Selection would have happened little by little at first. It must have started with barely recursive humans producing barely recursive culture. Perhaps this was a stable equilibrium for some time, given all of the problems recursion causes. At a certain point of cultural complexity, recursive thinking would become table stakes, creating a steep selection gradient.
The question of what makes us human goes back thousands of years. Most of what I present is a review. From the many competing theories I chose to emphasize recursion (rather than, say, symbolic thought) because it is a natural way to show that the human transition was both practical and phenomenological. We evolved a soul, and that allowed us to conquer the world. Most accounts of self-domestication emphasize getting along and non-aggression, the difference between wolves and dogs. For humans, however, the change has been categorical. Homo Sapiens means “Thinking Man.” Non-recursive humans were not sapient. Their relationship with time and the material world is as different from ours as water is from ice. Humans are absolutely singular as a species. This isn’t really a contribution, as it’s been said for thousands of years. My contribution is how I think this transition could have played out over evolutionary time scales. Also noteworthy is that my (very incomplete) model of what makes humans special is not required for the rest. If you don’t agree with recursion, substitute “symbolic thinking,” “language,” “higher-order thinking,” or your preferred definition of “soul.” The only real requirement is that it is a phase change.
Many researchers think something biological changed ~50 kya, and language (or recursion) is on the shortlist. Where I diverge somewhat is the emphasis on the gene-culture interaction and how long the process could have taken. Even if there were moments of sapience 50 kya, fully modern psychology could have been obtained much later. The weak version of EToC posits that “recursive culture” spread in the last 50,000 years. To defend that idea, it’s easiest to say exactly what that was. The strong version of EToC holds that women, by and large, first understood “I am.” Later, they developed psychedelic snake rituals to aid in that epiphany, and those rituals spread. The male perspective is preserved in many creation myths, including Genesis. This is why I emphasized the phenomenological implications of recursion. Stories worth retelling concern changes in consciousness, not technology. Therefore, if recursion evolved within the reach of oral tradition, what would be passed down with the most reverence are the changes to do with time, self-awareness, agency, and duality. Not utilitarian concerns of more complex grammar or stone tools (though their introduction is also remembered).
The Snake Cult of Consciousness
“And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Genesis 3:5
The expulsion of Adam and Eve was the result of natural law, not a capricious god doling out contradictory commandments. Once Eve perceived herself as an agent and the voice in her head as her own, she could no longer dwell in blissful ignorance. She became responsible for her actions and aware of her mortality. Others have offered this interpretation. Julian Jaynes even related it to identifying with the inner voice. But what’s with the snake?
If you took a time machine to visit humans at the cusp of recursion, could you teach them about “I”? What would you try? I would embed “I” into a horror ritual. An escape room where the only way out was in. This would pull on many biological levers, including psychedelics, given their ability to help change one’s mind. The acute effects include opening the mind and enabling novel thoughts. Particularly affected are functions related to introspection and consciousness.
It’s a bit odd that a class of drugs known most for ego death could be involved with ego birth. But the proposed mechanism is more a “brain reset” during which an initiate has many new ideas—hopefully including “I am”—followed by weeks of increased brain plasticity where those can be integrated. This is not my idea. Terence McKenna proposed the Stoned Ape Theory in his book Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge.
For McKenna, the relationship between consciousness and psychedelics was practical. When he tripped, he saw consciousness being constructed in his mind. One of his most eloquent expositions is on entities he described as self-transforming machine elves—fantastical creatures made of language. “I don't know why there should be an invisible syntactical intelligence giving language lessons in hyperspace. That certainly, consistently, seems to be what is happening.” Based on his schooling in hyperspace, he figured that language was fundamental to consciousness and that psychedelics could help in obtaining it.
McKenna argued the Food of the Gods was psilocybin mushrooms. But they only play a minor role in religious history. In fact, a much better candidate is in Genesis itself: snakes.16 Their venom is a psychedelic that contains large amounts of nerve growth factor. Not only that but they are worshiped as consciousness-granting globally and have been over evolutionary time scales. I propose the original Fruit of Knowledge was snake venom.
This section starts with a chemical investigation and then moves backward in time, from modern snake venom rituals to antiquity to the Stone Age.
Snake Venom as Entheogen
"Venom worked out for me very well a long time ago. It took my life away, but it gave me something more precious than life." ~Sadhguru, “Why I drank snake venom”
In the 1970s, the classicist Carl Ruck coined the term entheogen (literally, “god within”) to refer to hallucinogens used to induce altered states of consciousness. Importantly, this is not just any alteration; they must be used to access the “divine within.” Most cultures seem to have at least one entheogen of choice, be that opium, cannabis, coca-leaves, iboga root, salvia, ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms, betel nut, acacia, or bufo toad, to name a few. Often left off this list is snake venom. A glaring hole in the literature I aim to address here.
The first question is chemical. Can snake venom function as an entheogen? There are a few papers—enough to merit a review article—on snake venom as a recreational drug. The case reports are similar to those of psilocybin mushrooms. In one, the venom is intravenously delivered from fang to tongue by the neighborhood snake charmer. With a single dose, the patient reports changing long-ingrained behaviors. Following a decade of dependence on alcohol and opiates, he gave both up cold turkey after one kiss of the cobra. Vice also has a mini-doc about the phenomenon in India and a one-off case in the UK.
Psychedelics stimulate the production of Nerve Growth Factor (NGF), which allows for greater brain plasticity. Therefore, if you want to Change Your Mind, as Michael Pollen puts it, then psychedelics are an excellent tool. The medical field is currently in a psychedelic boom where these drugs are being tested to treat pretty much any psychiatric issue.
Snake venom does more than just stimulate the production of NGF; it brings its own to the party. In the 1950s, laboratories sourced NGF from brain tumors in mice. When snake venom was used to process the tumors, the resulting NGF was much more effective. Upon investigation, the researchers found that snake venom by itself contains NGF 3,000-6,000 times as potent as that derived from tumors, the previous best source.
The induced plasticity is not just acute, nor solely to do with NGF. One recent paper argues that snake venom could be a cornerstone of treatment in neurodegenerative diseases: “a component of the Indian Cobra N.naja17 venom with no significant similarity to nerve growth factor, is shown to induce sustained neuritogenesis [growth of connections between neurons].” It is currently being researched to treat Alzheimer’s Disease and depression. This is heartening, but modern medicine is young yet. Most of the potential remains unknown. One recent paper put it: “snake venoms can be considered as mini-drug libraries in which each drug is pharmacologically active. However, less than 0.01% of these toxins have been identified and characterized.”
There is the question of delivery. I’m not sure if NGF is bioavailable when injected on the tongue or taken orally mixed with milk, as Sadhguru did. This paper finds the tongue is an excellent location to pass the blood-brain barrier (even without injection). But there is more than one way to skin a cat and even more to puff the magic dragon. Classicist David Hillman suggests snake venom concoctions were administered as anal suppositories at Greek temples. Delivery does not seem to be a limiting factor.
The final criterion is whether venom is ritualized in a spiritual setting. There are dozens of YouTube videos of the Hindu guru Sadhguru discussing why he drank snake venom. In his words:
“Venom has a significant impact on one’s perception if you know how to make use of it…It brings a separation between you and your body… It is dangerous because it may separate you for good.” The Unknown Secret of how Venom works on your body [practical experience]
Venom’s spiritual use is not limited to one guru. The next sections will look at the mythological and archeological evidence around the world. This is organized in an ever-expanding radius: proto-Indo-European, Eurasia and America, and then worldwide.
Proto Indo European
“Serpents were milked to access their venom as psychoactive toxins, both to serve as arrow poisons, but also as unguents in sub-lethal dosages to access sacred states of ecstasy.” ~Carl Ruck, The Myth of the Lernaean Hydra
The Romans copy-pasted as much of Greek culture as they could. Looking back at that effort, the Roman orator Cicero waxed eloquent about the Eleusian Mysteries:
“For it appears to me that among the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has produced and contributed to human life, nothing is better than those Mysteries. For by means of them we have been transformed from a rough and savage way of life to the state of humanity, and have been civilized. Just as they are called initiations, so in actual fact we have learned from them the fundamentals of life, and have grasped the basis not only for living with joy, but also for dying with a better hope.” M. Tullius Cicero, De Legibus, ed. Georges de Plinval, Book 2.14.36
The Eleusinian Mysteries were the quintessential Greek celebration of death and rebirth. They told the story of Persephone’s abduction to the underworld and the grief-stricken search by her mother, Demeter, for her return. At the heart of this tale was said to be the secret of life. Or, in the words of the Greek poet Pindar, “Blessed is he who, having seen these rites, goes beneath the hollow earth; for he knows the end of life, and he knows its god-sent beginning.” What was revealed about the beginning of life is, well, a mystery. It was a mystery cult, and the punishment for revealing their secrets was death. But even more, words do not seem adequate for the task. Homer, not one to be at a loss for words, nevertheless demurs in his description: “Great awe of the gods makes the voice falter.” What happened at Eleusis had to be experienced to be understood.
Still, there are some hints. In 1978 Ruck’s The Road to Eleusis scandalized the field of classics by making a case that the core of the initiation was psychedelic. Brian Muraresku revisited that argument in his recent best-seller The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. (Check out Sam Harris’s interview.) Muraresku interprets the promise “If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die” as a reference to ego death induced by fungus. As an engineer, I think of these possibilities in mechanical terms. Psychedelics are a powerful cognitive tool. It’s not surprising that the most powerful religious technology enlisted their charms. Still, there are better candidates for the entheogen at Eleusis.
In the second century AD, the emperor Marcus Aurelius was initiated into the Mysteries. He is reportedly the only lay person ever allowed inside the holy of holies within the main temple. As emperor, he rebuilt the temple after it was nearly destroyed by the barbarian Kostovoks in AD 170. His bust rests in the courtyard, with a snake emblazoned on his chest.
Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy, was also an initiate, and many of his plays dealt with the Mysteries. In one, he seems to have flown too close to the sun and was almost executed for revealing too much. Consider Hillman’s interpretation.
“Before ancient seers summoned spirits like Allecto from the underworld—an arcane practice known as necromancy—they invoked Bacchus, the god of ecstatic dance. The worship of this mystery cult divinity, known variously as Dionysus, Bromius, and Zagreus, was connected in classical literature and art with the handling of the European horned viper (Vipera ammodytes)...It appears that the priestesses of Hecate, Priapus, and Demeter/ Persephone were involved in the consumption of viper venom. [Aeschylus was nearly executed for revealing the secrets of the Eleusinian mysteries in his plays on Orestes. One of these plays (The Cup-bearers) contains a dream of a “dragoness” in which her breast milk is injected with the venom of a snake.]...Some of them are even called “dragonesses,” and are involved with the “burning off” of human mortality.”
Direct quote, “[]” inclusive, from the book chapter Drugs, Suppositories, and Cult Worship in Antiquity
The playwright Aristophanes also profaned the mysteries, which Hillman connects to snake venom in another paper that discusses the dragonesses/drakaina:
“The Drakaina, or δρακαινα , was said to bring about her powers by mixing/preparing drugs in potable or consumable form. There are numerous named Drakainai, among the most famous being Clytemnestra. Aristophanes was accused of profaning (revealing) the Mysteries in his trilogy on Orestes. In his Libation Bearers, Aeschylus records that the Drakaina produced and administered a mixture of blood and milk after being bitten in the breast by a snake/dragon (514 ff.) Orestes even describes his own “snakeification” or transformation into the Dragon. (Line 549: ἐκδρακοντωθεὶς δ᾽ ἐγὼ, “I myself too have brought out the dragon.”)
…
Dragon priestesses entered an ecstatic or Bacchic state of mania, during which they claimed to experience and influence transdimensional forces or “daimones” (demons) by manipulating “waves” of timespace distortions produced by “darkened stars.” The Greeks used the word ἔνθεος [entheos, literally “god within”] to describe this strange star-induced ecstasy, and mystics claimed it was part of a process of manifesting the “god within the breast” of the initiate.”
This was the subject of his dissertation. He explicitly states that the Mysteries used snake venom as an entheogen, and he provides dozens of primary references.18 Still, it’s nice to have a second opinion, this one about the oracle at Delphi (where the high priestess was called the Pythoness):
“The Sioux believed that if a young, dancing man was bitten by a snake and didn’t die, he would experience a universal awakening. (Since ancient times, dancing was felt to be an ecstatic mimesis of the mystical and is still seen as the means by which mysteries are disclosed.) Snake venom was lapped to induce trances at Delphi. Even some scientists testify to experiencing altered states from snakebite, seeing visions and feeling enormous capabilities.” Drake Stutesman, Snake, 2005
We will return to snake dances. For now, the fact that Ancient Greeks used venom as an entheogen appears to be common knowledge among at least a subfield of classicists19. At least it is well-documented that various temples housed snakes20. And though it may be a salacious rumor, Clemens, an Egyptian pagan philosopher who converted to Christianity circa 200 AD, wrote that the Mysteries included snake orgies dedicated to Eve.21 At any rate, given the Mysteries extend back to prehistory, it is prudent to look to sister civilizations for corroborating evidence that snake venom was used as an entheogen.
In the 1580s, the Florentine merchant Filippo Sassetti noted that the Sanskrit words for God, serpent (!), and some numbers sounded like his native Italian. So began the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) hypothesis: India and Europe were part of the same cultural stock, sharing a root deep in the past. In the subsequent centuries, no prehistoric group has been the subject of more linguistic and archeological interest. The PIE people are thought to have lived 6-9,000 years ago somewhere around the Black Sea. Their descendants have spread over much of Eurasia, taking their language, religion, and customs with them. Today 46% of the world’s population is native in a PIE language.
Having established the connection, we turn from Greece to India to triangulate venom use among the PIEs. There, the potion of enlightenment is called Soma, and it, too, has mythic associations with snakes and milk.
“Snakes (often symbolizing women) perform an alchemy that women perform by turning blood into milk. In the village ritual, milk is fed to a snake; the snake then turns this into poison, which in turn is rendered harm less by Soma (or by the shaman, who controls Soma, drugs and snakes). Yogis, the inverse of mothers in terms of fluid hydraulics, drink poison, which they regard as Soma, and thus have power over snakes. A yogi can also drink poison and turn it into seed, and he can turn his own seed into Soma by activating the (poisonous?) coiled serpent goddess Kundalini” Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, 1980, page 54.
Once again, snake venom and milk are symbolically mixed up with life itself. This theme pervades Indian religion. After obtaining enlightenment, the Buddha is sheltered from a storm by the Naga king. And Naga enlightenment is not a dead religion. The venom-drinking Sadhguru has millions of followers and a penchant for resurrecting esoteric rituals involving snakes. There are many videos of him on YouTube discussing the ritual significance in perfect entheogenic language. And, like Aeschylus, he combines snake venom with milk. I don’t think anyone has argued for a PIE tradition of snake venom Soma, even though it seems to be well documented in sacred rites in Greece and India. (Or, as we’ll discuss later, Soma could have been the antivenom consumed before the encounter with a snake.)
But my claim is not about the Proto-Indo-Europeans. It is about the world. And it is not about ego death in Ancient Greece but the evolutionary origins of ego. We have to go deeper.
Eurasia and the Americas
The Pyramid Texts are among the earliest written religious texts in the world, dating back to Egypt's Old Kingdom, around 4.5 kya. They consist of a vast body of spells, prayers, and incantations inscribed on the walls and sarcophagi of the pyramids at Saqqara, intended to protect and guide the pharaohs in the afterlife. The Pyramid Texts offer invaluable insights into ancient Egyptian beliefs regarding the cosmos, creation, and the gods.
Like many other traditions, Egyptians held that there was only chaos in the beginning, often represented as an ocean. Earlier, I referenced an Egyptian tradition where Atum emerged from the ocean by saying his name. This passage reflects another tradition where the first being is Neheb-ka:
“I am the outflow of the Primeval Flood, he who emerged from the waters. I am the "Provider of Attributes” serpent with its many coils. I am the Scribe of the Divine Book, which says what has been and effects what is yet to be.” ~Pyramid Text 1146, Egypt 2,500 BC
Neheb-ka is translated as “Provider of Attributes”, though it could also be “That which gives Ka” or “He who harnesses/yokes the Ka,” where Ka is spirit, soul, or double. So there it is, carved in stone; souls were originally harnessed by a snake. By them, man was made double. Or at least the Egyptians thought so.
Figure 38 below, taken from Robert Clark’s Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, shows that idea lived on until the 12th century BC during Rameses VI’s reign, where Time and Form are shown to emerge from the Cosmic Serpent. (Remember, the experience of time directly results from recursion.)
In ancient Egypt, wisdom and perception were often symbolized or even bestowed by snakes. For example, Neheb-ka gives the Eye of Ra22 to the Pharoah:
But back to the matter at hand, establishing a common root between American and Eurasian snake myths. Phylogenetic relationships between Greece and India are to be expected, given they both hail from PIE culture 6-9 kya. Going deeper in time meets many methodological issues. However, snake myths are a rare exception where much larger and deeper phylogenies are accepted. How does one square the Egyptian, Hebrew, and PIE conception of life-giving snakes with that of the Chinese, for example? Below is the creator goddess Nuwa with her consort Fuxi, intertwined as serpents:
In the 1880s, Miss A. W. Buckland noted the similarities of serpent worship on either side of the Bering Strait and argued that it, along with sun worship, agriculture, weaving, pottery, and metalwork, spread from Eurasia to the New World with the earliest settlers. Over a hundred years later, comparative mythologist Michael Witzel echoes the claims about snakes. He argues that a creation cosmogony was developed in Eurasia from 40-15 kya, which then spread to the New World. Drawing from traditional cultures in China, Hawaii, Meso-America, Egypt, Greece, England, Japan, Persian, and India, he proposes the proto-creation myth included the slaying of a great dragon, often with the help of a “heavenly drink” such as Soma. After completing this deed, humans were given (or stole) culture: “It is only after the earth has been fertilized by the Dragon’s blood that it can support life.”23
His methods are comparative; extant myths are so similar in Japan, Greece, and Mexico that they must share an ancient root. To see what he meant, let’s look back to prehistoric examples with an eye toward entheogenic use.
In Texas circa 500 AD, a man ate a rattlesnake, fangs, scales, and all. We know this because archeologists found and analyzed his poop (er… coprolite). This is interpreted as being part of a ritual because people usually don’t eat fangs or the rattle. Further, the creation stories in this region are teeming with horned or feathered serpents, a tradition that seems to go back thousands of years based on cave art. For example, see the Serpent Cave in Baja California, dated 7.5kya. It features an eight-meter-long mural:
The Bradshaw Foundation adds: “The motifs shown on the site's rock art are associated with concepts that refer to creation myths; death and the cyclical renewal of life and the seasons. The central figure of the horned serpent is present throughout the American continent and prevails in the worldview of several native cultures.” Aspects survived 7,000 years to Aztec times:
Or, consider rock art found in what is now Utah and Colorado. This snake shaman on the Colorado Plateau is dated24 5-9 kya:
Or these from 1.5-4 kya from the San Rafael Swell in Utah:
Or this from the Buckhorn Wash panel in Utah:
Okay, one more:
Psychedelic, right? The last image is particularly interesting. What better way to represent a venom-induced trip than a spiraling two-headed serpent entering a maze? The same symbols are common in Eurasia, where the labyrinth has long been used as a metaphor for inner discovery. Here, for example, adopted by a New Age artist:
In Egypt, Nehebkau, Provider of Doubles, is sometimes depicted with two heads. Once again, from Clark:
I’m not necessarily suggesting a phylogenetic relation between mazes or two-headed snakes in the New and Old World. Employing venom as an entheogen could cause these metaphors to be naturally reinvented. I contend the hallucinogenic practice that produced them spread with the original snake cult. It’s also worth noting that such a practice could evolve as less dangerous entheogens were found (particularly in the Americas), and the snake connection would only live on in legend. Peyote was used in rituals as early as 6 kya, for example.
The paper that analyzed Texas coprolite was published in 2019 and claimed to be the first to discuss archeological evidence of the ritual digestion of a venomous snake. The next year, a paper published in Nature analyzed a collection of snake bones found in an Israeli cave, deposited 15-12 kya. They do not discuss ritual but do observe that the venomous snakes were more likely to be digested than the non-venomous ones.
These Near Eastern snake-eaters are Natufians who genetically cluster with the much later Egyptians. They are a culturally important group that presaged the coming Agricultural Revolution with their own revolutions. The Broad spectrum revolution (exploiting a wider range of food sources, including smaller animals such as fish, snakes, and rabbits) is hypothesized to have allowed the Natufians to adopt a sedentary lifestyle. Staying put, in turn, led to agriculture.
Archeologist Jacques Cauvin argues that the beginnings of agriculture were not so mundane; they marked a change in human consciousness. The Natufians and others in the Near East experienced a “revolution of symbols,” a conceptual shift that allowed humans to imagine gods—supernatural beings resembling humans—that existed in a universe beyond the physical world. It’s worth emphasizing that for Cauvin, this is a cultural, not neurological, change.
His ideas have been given new life by the excavation of Göbekli Tepe, the world’s oldest temple. Klaus Schmidt oversaw the excavation for two decades and said that Cauvin’s central point was proven right: religion preceded agriculture25. The EToC reading is that recursion was becoming more natural, and along with it, duality and thinking about the future. Agriculture was the result, in part due to the Snake Cult.
It’s difficult to show the entheogenic use of venom 11 kya. However, a full 28.4% of the carved animals at Gobekli Tepe are snakes, double the second most commonly depicted animal, the fox, at 14.8%. And this counts groups of animals as just one occurrence. Snakes, which are often carved in bunches, account for half of all identifiable animals if you break them up as individuals.
Göbekli Tepe is sometimes treated as coming out of nowhere. But from the view of the Snake Cult, it fits nicely into a well-accepted phylogeny of snakes used in rituals of death and rebirth. Snake figurines are a dominant theme in many archeological sites near Göbekli Tepe, including Körtik Tepe, which precedes it by a thousand years. Further north, in a burial in Siberia, a boy was buried 24 kya at the height of the Ice Age. In his burial, we find mammoth ivory carved with snakes that look like cobras. Cobras (or any snakes?) did not live in such a frigid climate. These were likely foreign gods that had traveled with these people. Clearly, they had staying symbolic power. (Similarly, this culture carved many Venus Statues, which were common in Europe at the same time.)
Back in Venus’s motherland, they performed headless snake rituals as far back as 17 kya. Two decapitated snake skeletons were found in a Pyrenees cave decorated with headless bison. Imagine what it would be like to enter that cave by firelight after days of fasting. It would be abundantly clear to an initiate they were about to lose their head. The link above is to an Indo-European specialist who describes it as evidence of Europe’s first dragon ritual.
Finally, though figures are what gets attention, most cave art consists of abstract symbols. There are 20 or so symbols that are found in cave art the world over. These are thought to be a form of proto-writing whose meaning was consistent across time. Of those, serpents and birds are the only two animal forms, with the serpentiform first appearing 30 kya. The snakes at Göbekli Tepe don’t just pop out of nowhere. They are part of a deep and widely shared cultural heritage remembered from Egypt to China to Mexico.
Many scholars, such as Buckland, Witzel, d’Huy, and White, treat serpent myths in the Americas and Eurasia as stemming from the same root deep in the past. Separately, others argue snake venom was used as an entheogen in Greece and India (and tentatively America). I suggest combining these ideas: snakes are associated with creation because their venom served as the entheogen in the original Eurasian religion, which spread to the Americas. Establishing venom as the primordial Soma is a worthy goal. But for this to be a human story, the whole world must be gathered into the Cult.
Worldwide
Everything discussed so far requires a phylogeny of about 30,000 years rooted in Eurasia. A snake cult could have developed there and spread to the Americas with the Clovis culture about 13 kya. (This is when art and sophisticated stone tools are first evidenced, despite the Americas being inhabited by at least 23 kya, and perhaps much earlier.)26 This covers most of the world, but there are still the troublesome regions of Sub-saharan Africa and Australia. These are often treated as cultural islands, and yet, surprisingly, they have similar myths about snakes and creation. When Witzel wrote Origins of Mythology, he set out to find a global root for creation myths. This put him in a tricky situation. If he posits a root ~30 kya, he must claim that the foundation of Australian and African culture was imported from Eurasia. This is obviously not very popular with Aboriginal activists, for whom “50,000 years of continuous culture” is a rallying cry. But the world’s cosmogonies are truly very similar. What to do? Like the anthropologists who project art and marriage back 300,000 years, Witzel’s solution is to posit a truly ancient root in Africa. In this case, 100-160 kya27. I don’t think that holds. 100,000 years is a long time for a story to last. Do we expect to recognize a myth after 100,000 years of telephone? This is well into evolutionary time scales by anyone’s reckoning; it’s not clear if humans 100,000 years ago had souls, much less an explanation for them. Further, it’s not hard to believe that Australians and Africans, like other humans, have engaged in cultural exchange in the last 30,000 years. Culture can spread! It does now. We have to remember that at some point in the past, some tribes had creation stories, pronouns, and rituals, and other tribes did not. The first good explanation for consciousness would have been particularly prone to spread because it was not displacing native creation myths. It was filling a void. If all of that is not enough, we can turn to the creation myth of the San Bushmen, which implies diffusion.
The Bushmen of South Africa speak of a creator, Cagn, who “caused all things to appear, and to be made” (Orpen 1874, 3).
“Cagn gave us the song of this dance and told us to dance it, and people would die from it, and he would give charms to raise them again. It is a circular dance of men and women, following each other, and it is danced all night. Some fall down; some become as if mad and sick; blood runs from the noses of others whose charms are weak, and they eat charm medicine, in which there is burnt snake powder.” ~Qing, a Bushmen man from the Drakensberg, interviewed in 1873 by Joseph Orpen
The trance dance is the center of San ritual life. Apparently, it was established when someone showed up, gave them ground-up snake powder, and told them to start dancing. A trance dance involving snakes is reminiscent of the Snake Dances found all across the Americas. (The Hopi’s is described in the footnote28.) As in the Americas, San rock art offers a glimpse into the role of snakes in religious life thousands of years ago.
Joseph Campbell describes this image as a scene of human sacrifice (below), with a goddess among the clouds (above). The EToC reading is that She and the Cosmic Serpent are facilitating death and rebirth.
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This would have been doubly true for the first magicians. Imagine introducing the psycho-social technology of religion to pre-religious (and potentially pre-recursive) tribes. If the first shamans came offering psychedelics, they would be remembered as demigods.29
Of course, “visiting teacher” is not the only mode of cultural contact. How religion first spread gets at the heart of what it means to be human. Were there peaceful missionaries of consciousness? Did the first shamanic tribe conquer the world at spearpoint? Or were the rites picked up transactually through trade networks? Knowing humans, probably a bit of each. However, Cagn sounds like a missionary. As does the Great Goddess of Dreamtime.
Australia has many creation stories, but the arrival of a Great Goddess is a common theme.30 In North Australia, they tell of the Djanggawul Sisters, who came from a mythic island to the East on canoes. In other versions, “Our Mother” is also a Rainbow Serpent who swallows the men. She brought language, initiation rites, art, and law. Such a profound shift would leave traces, so let’s consider the physical evidence.
The Rainbow Serpent is worshipped over the entirety of Australia, so it makes sense to think that it must be a truly ancient tradition going back to the first humans there. However, the earliest documented Rainbow Serpent is dated 6 kya, with a possible 10 kya outlier. This is much later than the first documented humans in Australia, 50-65 kya. Given there is a phylogeny of serpent worship accepted in the rest of the world, it’s plausible that the Rainbow Serpent was brought to Australia from Eurasia.
There are many other examples of such diffusion. The Dingo, for example, was indisputably brought by humans. For a long time, this was thought to have happened 4-8 kya, but the most recent evidence indicates it was only 3 kya. So, it would be a different wave than the proposed Snake Cult, but it proves the possibility. Further, several iconic Australian rock art styles emerge 6-9 kya. Like the example above, these often depict civilizing spirits in an “x-ray” style. Even Witzel, who argues that Australian religion is 160,000 years old and was brought with the first humans on the continent 65 kya, concedes that the x-ray style is an import in the Holocene. To these examples, Joseph Campbell adds “spear throwers, boomerangs and shields, fine pressure flaking, unifacial and bifacial points, microliths and blades.” He notes: “There can be no doubt that this whole new industry had arrived from elsewhere, probably from India.” Based on this, Campbell says that Australian religion was derived from Eurasian.31
Finally, there is a debated genetic inflow from India around 4 kya. Ostensibly, there was also genetic and cultural exchange with Papua New Guinea when it was one land mass with Australia 8,000 years ago. Australian Aboriginals universally recognize the Rainbow Serpent. If that were the case 20,000 years ago, it is strange that the tradition does not currently extend to Papua New Guinea.32 So, it is plausible that the Rainbow Serpent has only been in Australia in the last 10,000 years and is part of the Eurasian tradition of snake cults. In fact, that is what Occam’s Razor indicates. Many other cultural items made it to Australia in the last 10,000 years; why not Rainbow Serpents? Recall that Moore and Brumm argued against the concept of Behavioral Modernity by pointing out that it is only found in Australia starting 7 kya.
There are other explanations. Both d’Huy and Witzel contend that Australian myths are similar to the rest of the world because of a shared root 100+ kya. But, as I point out in Contra d’Huy, this leaves 90,000 years with no evidence of the Australian lineage worshiping snakes. And 60,000 years with no sign of shamanism anywhere in the world, much less snake shamanism. The thing that most boggles my mind is this explanation requires one to believe information can be preserved in myth for 100,000 years but that there is no cultural memory of the introduction of x-ray style art, dingos, and more sophisticated stone tools in the last 10,000 years. Even when the Dreamtime narrative states that art, religion, and technology were brought to Australians by people who showed up on canoes from an island to the East of North Australia. Papua New Guinea is right there, accessible by canoe. Looking beyond Australia, art, calendars, and religion are only 40,000 years old. If stories can last 100,000 years, then surely we would have some about the Venus Statues, a prized religious object produced for tens of thousands of years. My theory is we do with Eve, Demeter, and the Djanggawul Sisters. Other than political sensibilities, what reason is there to push snake worship back 100,000 years? To claim such a long and exact game of telephone, the onus is on those paleo-diffusionists to show a shred of evidence for snake worship 60,000 years before the first art.
I hope to have demonstrated that serpent worship worldwide is plausibly a connected tradition that goes back at least 30,000 years. Compared to other researchers, this is a conservative claim. I also hold that snakes had such symbolic staying power because of venom’s utility as an entheogen. If that is true, one would expect antivenoms to be part of the tradition as well.
Antivenoms
In the case study cited earlier, an Indian man went to a local snake charmer to get his venom fix. This was applied directly, fang to tongue. My guess is our ancestors took some precautions and gorged themselves on antivenoms in preparation for battling the serpent. This could be preserved in mythology as well. In fact, one of the first things I noticed in my research was how often mythological snakes appear next to potential antivenoms. In the PIE canon, for example, taking a draught before fighting a serpent is a common theme. Indra drinks Soma to prepare for battle against the serpent Vritra who occupies the same role as Jörmungandr of Norse myth, Typhon of Greek myth, and Veles of Slavic myth.
In the best-known story in the world, a snake tempts Eve to eat an apple, which is a rich source of rutin, a functional antivenom. Granted, the Bible itself does not mention apples. However, the Greeks do on several occasions. Before descending to the underworld to fight the serpent-tailed Cerberus, Herakles must fetch an immortality-granting apple from Hera’s garden, guarded by a dragon. Additionally, he prepares for Hades by receiving the Eleusinian Mysteries, which, among other things, celebrate the death and rebirth of Dionysus. Dionysus was lured to his death by the Titans, who showed him a snake, a mirror, a bullroarer (a sacred instrument we’ll return to), and an apple. He is often shown holding a scepter of fennel, another good source of rutin. As is his sacramental drink, wine.
Rutin is also found in the lotus flower, a symbol of creation in Egypt, and held by Vishnu on his bed of Nagas above. Sadhguru consecrated the Naga temple by washing the statues of serpents in turmeric, an antivenom (1,2,3,4). The tree the Buddha sat under, wrapped in a Naga, is an antivenom (1,2,3).
One of the first things humans did after inventing writing was to record snake antivenoms. In both Akkadia and Egypt, this was beer mixed with various herbs. They have found over 10,000 grinding stones at Göbekli Tepe, along with Einkorn wheat, which was used to make beer. In this piece, I discuss how Einkorn beer is particularly effective as an antivenom. At Göbekli Tepe, there are vessels that can store up to 200 liters of liquid.
The Smithsonian recounts a story reminiscent of the Eleusinian Mysteries, Soma, and Sadhguru. A herpetologist in the Congo was spit on by a snake. In a pinch, he turned to traditional medicine and found a nursing mother to wash his eyes out with milk. This is reported as efficacious.
Snakes often appear next to functional antivenoms in myths about death, rebirth, and consciousness. This makes a lot of sense if their venom was ritualized as an entheogen. The object of the first religion would not have been literal death.
Etymological Interlude
Word associations, like myths, can last a long time. Some linguists hold it is even possible to reconstruct the original language. Bengtson and Ruhlen have proposed a few dozen global cognates. Accordingly, Proto-Sapiens “to think” is mena, surviving today in forms such as man (one who thinks), Minerva (Goddess of wisdom), or mantra. Or in other languages as munak for “brains” (Basque), mèn for “to understand” (Malinke), and mena preserved as “to think” among the Lake Miwok Native Americans. It’s a romantic notion that modern culture is steeped in the Mother Tongue, that the words of the first humans still flow from our lips. In my view, this research suffers from the same problem as comparative mythology: anything global is assumed to be 100+ kya. If that is the timeline, then these similarities must be coincidence. It’s too long for a cognate to last, and there is not much evidence of thinking 100 kya.
My goal in this section is more limited; the etymology of snake words can tell us what concepts were associated with snakes ~10 kya. Starting with dragon, it stems from PIE *derk- “to see.” Similarly, Lucifer, the snake who tempted Eve, literally means “bringer of light.” Strange name for the devil, right?
Zmeya is the Russian feminine noun meaning snake. This derives from the PIE *dʰéǵʰōm meaning “earth” or “human.” The Latin Homo—as in Homo Sapiens—has the same root. Interestingly, “Adam” has a parallel etymology in Hebrew, meaning either “earth” or “human”, literally “(the one formed from the) ground.” If snakes were involved in that process, maybe the same etymology also stuck to them.
“Eve” comes from the Hebrew name Chawwah, which derives from chawah “to breathe” or chayah “to live.” Unsurprisingly, there are also connections to “serpent” which is hivei in Aramaic. Quoting Hebrew specialist Robert Alter:
“It has been proposed that Eve's name conceals very different origins, for it sounds suspiciously like the Aramaic word for ‘serpent.’ Could she have been given the name by the contagious contiguity with her wily interlocutor, or, on the contrary, might there lurk behind the name a very different evaluation of the serpent as a creature associated with the origins of life?” ~The Five Books of Moses, 2004, commentary on Genesis iii.20
For more depth and another angle, see the Master’s Thesis of Wendy Golding33.
The Semitic root nhš signifies both serpent and divination, specifically connoting a libation offering—a drink dedicated to a deity34. Recall that “In his Libation Bearers, Aeschylus records that the Drakaina produced and administered a mixture of blood and milk after being bitten in the breast by a snake/dragon.” The classicist Hillman argues this portrayal is what resulted in Aeschylus’s trial for profaning the mysteries. In both the Greek and Hebrew traditions, snakes are associated with libations. This suggests their venom was a holy drink in the ancient past.
Other snake research
"Serpent worship unfortunately fell years ago into the hands of speculative writers, who mixed it up with occult philosophies, Druidical mysteries, and that portentous nonsense called the ‘Arkite Symbolism,’ till now sober students hear the very name of ophiolatry with a shiver. Yet it is in itself a rational and instructive subject of inquiry, especially notable for its width of range in mythology and religion." Edward B. Tylor, 1871
From the founding days of anthropology, it was understood that snakes were used in mythology around the world to represent duality, subjectivity, and the creation of humans. Back in 1888, C. Staniland Wake observed that the Aztecs, Incas, Scythians, Zohak, Abyssians, and Chinese said they sprang from the union of a First Mother and a snake (often associated with the sun). A century later, anthropologists were still beating the same drum (though with updated verbiage). The serpent's children: semiotics of cultural genesis in Arawak and Trobriand myth starts with a discussion of how Egyptians, Hebrews, and Greeks saw themselves as the serpent’s children, before exploring the theme in the Amazon (Arawak) and Papua New Guinea (Trobriand).
Many have sought to explain the phenomenon. By sales, the most successful is the anthropologist Jeremy Narby. He was living with a tribe in the Amazon, studying shamanism. The host shaman said they got the recipe for ayahuasca from the great serpent. During an ayahuasca trip, Narby met the cosmic serpent. He then read creation myths around the world and concluded the snake serpent was real and had granted molecular knowledge of plants to the shaman. It’s not a coincidence that DNA looks like a double-helix snake, he argued, which inspired the cover of his book:
This has a 4.7 rating on Amazon, with 2,200 reviews. “The snakes are real” is a lively industry with titles such as:
Proving the Temptation and Fall of Man by the Instrumentality of a Serpent Tempter
Aliens in ancient Egypt : the Brotherhood of the Serpent and the secrets of the Nile civilization
The Serpent Grail: The Truth Behind the Holy Grail, the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life
In the more staid venue of comparative mythology, the dominant explanation is that snake myths aren’t based on anything in particular, but they do form a phylogeny. Witzel, as discussed, proposes 40,000 or so years for snake stories outside Africa and Australia. For a global root of cosmogonies, he proposes 100-160 kya and cites snake shamanism among the San in Africa and Aboriginals in Australia as evidence the root precedes the Out of Africa migration. Similarly, d’Huy proposes 100,000 for a global root of snake myths. Genesis is both a snake myth and a cosmogony; Witzel and d’Huy claim it retains significant elements from stories told 100+ kya. These timelines are every bit as fantastic as the serpents being ancient aliens. Rationalist Tyler Cowen puts alien contact at ~10% likelihood; what odds would you give Genesis being 100,000 years old?
For a myth to last thousands of years, it must have social or psychological hooks. The most common armchair explanation is that snakes are a metaphor for life and rebirth because they shed their skin. This is often followed by the argument that they are associated with the underworld because they slither on their bellies, close to the ground. I’d wager this is the sort of metaphor that flies in English class but not a skull cult (such as Gobekli Tepe, the first snake temple). Further, entheogenic use obviates this explanation. Psilocybin mushrooms are also close to the ground but are thematically related to the spirit world because five grams can send you to another dimension.
Snakes have been a favorite of Jungian psychologists, who do not necessarily look for a reason a psychological hook exists. To them, the mythic record is enough evidence that the human psyche has a module that connects snakes to consciousness. Biologists are less prone to accept this and have proposed several versions of the snake detection hypothesis. This holds that snakes were our main predators for thousands of years, and so occupy an outsized place in our subconscious. In the same way you see faces in clouds, you see snakes in stories (and therefore tend to repeat dragon tales). This can explain why there are a lot of snake myths, but it doesn’t address their role. Serpents don’t primarily dole out death. The one in the garden killed Eve, but only like your mother, who sentenced you to death the day you were born. Snakes are about creation; destruction is ancillary. Further, why are snakes more common in more primitive religions? Christ on the cross symbolizes a serpent. But you could go your whole life as a Christian without knowing this. If snake symbolism is hardwired into our brains, why is it used so infrequently by modern religions? And why aren’t horror films dominated by snakes? Predation can’t explain the consistent symbolic function of snakes.
There is also some work that comes close to my own. Hillman has published multiple papers arguing the Greeks used snake venom as an entheogen, but he has not expanded that vision to the rest of the world (or even PIE, as far as I’m aware). Sadhguru also describes snake venom as an entheogen, but his explanation for their prevalence is closest to Jeremy Narby’s. He says serpents understand the mysteries of the universe; Nagas exist as spirits and are contacted independently by each culture’s shamans. Linguist Daniele Cocice blogs that a battle with a snake could have produced the Proto Indo-European “I am”.35
Perhaps the closest is the work of anthropologist Chris Knight, who says the global phylogeny of snake myths is a memory of when women first created culture. He notes that this would have been the beginning of subjectivity. However, as a dedicated Marxist, this was not interesting enough in and of itself. Instead, the book he writes aims to show that culture was invented by women banding together to deny men sex, proving a communist revolution is viable. I’m not making that up!36
I don’t know of any other subject people from so many ideological stripes agree on. For centuries, poets, conspiracy theorists, druidic revivalists, Aryan enthusiasts, Christian apologists, Marxists, and anthropologists of all stripes have said the cultural significance of snake symbolism has to do with consciousness. For millennia, religionists of all sorts—Jews, animists, polytheists, and cannibals—have said the same. Serpents are part of the symbolic air we breathe, so it is difficult to think of their original significance in chemical terms. To get out of that rut, it’s helpful to imagine a world where the snake in the garden was more obviously an entheogen.
A brief detour to the alternate universe explored by psychonaut Terrence McKenna
Imagine if, everywhere in the world, mushrooms were said to be the progenitors of the human condition. Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Fungus, put a soul in the first couple. Indra obtained the Nectar of Immortality by churning the ocean of milk with a staff of shitake. Mother Mycelia offered Eve self-knowledge. The most sacred rituals in Australia were established by the Cosmic Truffle, whose spores became the Pleiades. The first Greek poets ran afoul of an ancient mystery cult by revealing psilocybin as their entheogen of choice. The pyramid texts depict Space and Time emanating from the Eternal Cap, the binder of souls. The etymological root of “fungus” is human, life, or sacrament in half a dozen languages. On every continent, rock art contained variations of:
This piece was recovered with the help of MidJourney v6.0 from a cave 11 kya in Brazil. Treasure it because flouting the laws of physics is dangerous stuff. Many men died to capture this image deep in the Caucasus 30 kya:
One last one from the Andaman Islands 6 kya:
If not clear, these are generated by AI. In that imagined timeline, it wouldn’t be out of left field to say psychedelic mushrooms were used in Shamanism v1.0. The claim I’d like to meme into the cultural fabric is we live in that world, but the hallucinogen was snakes. Their venom works as an entheogen, is used as an entheogen, and the oldest stories in every culture connect snakes to consciousness. It’s also one of the few entheogens that literally find you. The first dose would not have been willing; snakes press the issue in a way that mushrooms don’t.
When introducing the Eleusinian Mysteries, I quoted Pindar hinting that the end is like the beginning: “Blessed is he who, after beholding this, enters upon the way beneath the earth: he knows the end of life and its beginning given by Zeus!” The classicist Károly Kerényi adds, “‘End’ and ‘beginning’ are seemingly colorless words. But they reminded the initiates of a vision in which the two were united.” EToC holds that is literally true. The Mysteries preserved psychedelic snake-venom rites from the Paleolithic when the human psyche was still forming. These rites were not an incidental part of culture. Those who could learn sapience realized their potential and, among other things, had more children. It changed the fitness landscape. At Eleusis, you could experience ego death the same way Adam experienced ego birth.
Thus far, I have used 30,000 years, as that is the oldest evidence of the snake myth. Shamanism and the Seven Sisters first appear starting about then, supporting this timeframe. Or perhaps the stories are much older, but the evidence has just been destroyed. Either way, the last 40,000 or so years are commonly treated as the period when humans self-domesticated. In other words, a 30,000-year-old myth exists on evolutionary time scales. Human psychology could have been different when these stories were first told. If there was a rewiring of the brain over this time period, snake venom is an almost perfect drug to help those at the cusp fully realize their cognitive capabilities. It grants an entheogenic experience and then sets one up to grow new connections. Further, snakes literally find us, so it makes sense that their venom would be used as an early entheogen. The first Eve may not have had a choice.
EToC posits that self-domestication was primarily about duality, the discovery of the interior symbolic realm, and the construction of the recursive symbol “I”. Much of this hangs on whether there really was a snake in Eden (or Australia or Iberia), tempting Eve with the knowledge of the Gods. One way to test this is to look at other unlikely details in the story. Namely, that Eve was self-aware before Adam. Why was that acknowledged in such a patriarchal text? Does that fit with evolutionary theory? Is there evidence in archeology and cosmogonies outside the Near East?
In summary, the evidence for snake venom as the primordial Soma:
Societies worldwide associate snakes with the creation of humans and the beginning of culture.
Acute effects of snake venom are described like other entheogens: giving up addiction, separating body and mind, and ego death. It’s currently used as an entheogen in India. Literary and circumstantial evidence it was used in the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Venom contains Nerve Growth Factor, which could help rewire the brain.
Archeological evidence venomous snakes were ritually eaten thousands of years ago in Texas.
A 30,000-year phylogeny of snake myths is accepted by various comparative mythologists, which is close to the beginning of Behavioral Modernity
The Primordial Matriarchy
“After the day of rest, Sophia sent Zoe, her daughter, who is called Eve, as an instructor to raise up Adam, in whom there was no soul, so that those whom he would produce might become vessels of the light. When Eve saw her male partner cast down, she pitied him, and she said, “Adam, live! Rise up on the earth!” Immediately her word became an accomplished deed. For when Adam rose up, immediately he opened his eyes. When he saw her, he said, “You will be called the mother of the living, because you are the one who gave me life.” On the Origin of the World, Gnostic text from the Nag Hammadi library written in the 3rd century AD.
Genesis was written by a man who longed for his mother’s womb. Women, snakes, and anything else that had granted consciousness were on his shit list. The gnostic author quoted above gets closer to the truth, recognizing the pure love expressed by Eve in uplifting Adam. The Nag Hammadi Library is a collection of Coptic Christian texts written in the 2nd-4th centuries but only discovered in 1945. The passage about Sophia preserves (or at least echoes) traditions in Egypt that precede the Old Kingdom (2,500 BC), where the Great Mother was the first conscious entity.37 As with snakes precipitating the first “I am,” one can make the case that Woman was self-aware before Man without recourse to religious texts.
All humans survive by depending on others, but women particularly. Consider the period of pregnancy and nursing. More food must be obtained at a time when she is less able. The community helps her, and those relationships must be managed with words and social skills. This exerts evolutionary pressure for language and social intelligence. The female brain cut its teeth in the social niche, out of which the memetic niche grew.
Social finesse is not only required during pregnancy. The average male is stronger than an elite female athlete. There is no physical contest between the sexes, and yet the female of the species is no less deadly than the male. Her methods, however, are more subtle. AI picks up on this. Below are the AI images produced with the prompt “gossip.”
This is controversial in the realm of Machine Learning, where models can be trained to ignore such patterns38. However, in Biological Anthropology, gossip is not a bad thing. It’s how we became human. You may know of Robin Dunbar for his idea that we evolved to hold about 150 social relationships in our heads. More broadly, he is an advocate of the Social Brain Hypothesis—that general human intelligence grew out of social thinking. In Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, he discusses those at the vanguard of this evolutionary process:
“If females formed the core of these early groups, and language evolved to bond these groups, it naturally follows that the early human females were the first to speak. This reinforces the suggestion that language was first used to create a sense of emotional solidarity between allies…This would be consistent with the fact that, among modern humans, women are generally better at verbal skills than men, as well as being more skilful in the social domain.”
— Dunbar, 1996. Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. p. 149.
Three years earlier, in the Food of the Gods, McKenna noted the same:
Women, the gatherers in the Archaic hunter-gatherer equation, were under much greater pressure to develop language than were their male counterparts…Language may well have arisen as a mysterious power possessed largely by women-women who spent much more of their waking time together—and, usually, talking—than did men, women who in all societies are seen as group-minded, in contrast to the lone male image, which is the romanticized version of the alpha male of the primate troop.
In a recent article for Quillette, evolutionary psychologist David C. Geary explains the neural basis of these differences:
Disproportionately (controlling for brain size) larger brain areas in women than men support language, social cognition (sometimes called emotional intelligence), emotional processing and reactivity, and contextual and spatial memory, among others.
…
The language system is integrated with brain areas that support the processing of social information. These include several areas that support the recognition of faces and the processing of emotions conveyed through facial expressions and body language, as well as sensitivity to the direction of gazes and the location of sounds, such as utterances. Many of these areas are also integrated with the default mode network that provides “a self-centered predictive model of the world.” The network contributes to feelings of agency, self-awareness, personal memories, thinking about the world in self-referential ways (see here also), and theory of mind (mentally and emotionally putting oneself in another’s shoes).
These cognitive differences are the result of genes. The most natural place to look is the X and Y chromosomes, which determine sex. Do they have an outsized influence on the brain?
Genes that influence the brain are basically randomly distributed across the chromosomes. So, chromosomes that are longer have more genes and, therefore, more influence on the brain. Simple enough. The one exception is the X chromosome, which has about three times the expected effect on brain structure. This fact produces dramatic charts like the one below:
This is about brain anatomy. What about function? Another paper puzzles over why the X and Y chromosomes, despite having very few shared genes and opposite effects on brain size in general, have similar effects on networks related to social processing:
“Convergent sex chromosome dosage effects preferentially impact centers for social perception, communication, and decision-making. Thus, despite an almost complete lack of sequence homology [genes that appear on both X and Y chromosomes], and opposing effects on overall brain size [Y produces a larger brain], X- and Y-chromosomes exert congruent effects on the proportional size of cortical systems involved in adaptive social functioning.”
They also note: “X- and Y-chromosome effects are significantly enriched among imaging studies concerned with socio-communicative and socio-emotional processing.” Sex chromosomes influence the exact areas necessary to realize “I am,” possibly producing sex differences in that ability when it emerged.
Tim Crow, a psychiatrist at Oxford, has theorized for decades that the sex chromosomes are critical to the evolution of schizophrenia. In one paper, he proposed a ‘big bang’ model for the origin of our species with the intertwined development of psychosis, language, and brain lateralization coded by the sex chromosomes.39
If that is so, one would expect selection on the sex chromosomes when language emerges. In fact, there has been “extraordinary” selection on the X chromosome in the last 50,000 years. One paper analyzed the function of the genes under selection. Among the top candidates, they found “a global enrichment of neural-related processes.” In the footnote40, I explore the function of TENM1, the gene with the strongest signal of selection on the X chromosome. It is essential for brain plasticity and the production of Brain-derived neurotrophic factor, the brain’s version of nerve growth factor found in snake venom. TENM1 is expressed in dopaminergic neurons that are key to the brain’s reward system and which interact with snake venom (1,2). Now, finding where the brain stores consciousness and which genes code for that is well beyond the scope of this article. (As well as being a silly framing, many genes and brain regions are implicated in complex ways.) But I include it to point out that there are fruitful avenues for future research. In that vein, I have previously written about the possibility of extraordinary selection on the Y chromosome from 4-25 kya.
Sex chromosomes make up about 5% of the total genome but represent 20% of the effect sizes on neuroanatomy. This underestimates their effects because they can also change how genes on other chromosomes are expressed. Testosterone and estrogen levels are knobs that affect many biological processes. To wit, neuroticism levels and Caudate nucleus volume are particularly influenced by sex-specific genes (that is, genes with different effects based on sex). The Caudate nucleus is part of the Theory of Mind network, and neuroticism is related to self-perception.
So, there are theoretical and empirical reasons to believe women, by and large, would have recursive thoughts before men. At least enough to be culturally recognized and encoded in roles such as “priestess” and in myth as a primordial matriarchy or a Great Goddess. (Perhaps in the same way “tall” codes male.) Interestingly, one of the founding questions of anthropology was whether women invented culture (which requires recursion). Johann Jakob Bachofen published The Mother Right in 1861, a decade before Darwin’s Descent of Man. Bachofen proposed that the genesis of culture was rooted in the mother-child relationship, asserting that women's roles in these early social structures were fundamental to the development of humanity. This was long before carbon dating, and so one knew how far back prehistory stretched. Biblical timelines of five or ten thousand years seemed plausible, and a popular approach to understand this period was to draw from mythology. (A method I have unwittingly returned to.)
Bachofen wrote before the Nag Hammadi Library was discovered and so does not find anything as explicit as Eve putting a soul in Adam. Instead, he submits example after example from Egypt, Greece, Crete, India, and Persia. The naming of Athens is typical of the evidence. The city voted whether they would take on the name of Athena or Neptune. Athena won, enraging Neptune. Quoting Varro:
“To placate Neptune, the men imposed a threefold punishment upon the women: the women lost their right to vote; children would no longer take the names of their mothers; and women lost their privilege of being named Athenians.”
Bachofen interprets this as evidence that women, at some point, had more political power, including the right to vote and give their surname to their child. Or, consider the Greek poet Hesiod’s history of man from the beginning. The Golden Age is equivalent to pre-recursive life in Eden, living in unity with nature. This was followed by the Silver Age when agriculture was introduced. In those days Hesiod tells us “a child was brought up at his good mother's side an hundred years, an utter simpleton, playing childishly in his own home.”
In these stories, Bachofen heard echoes of matriarchy. Amazingly, as European anthropologists collected myths from the rest of the world, the theme proved global, recounted in far more explicit terms. In Australia, there are mystery cults said to have been established in the Dreamtime. Men now dominate, but as they explain:
“But really we have been stealing what belongs to them (the women), for it is mostly all woman’s business; and since it concerns them it belongs to them. Men have nothing to do really, except copulate, it belongs to the women. All that belonging to those Wauwelak, the baby, the blood, the yelling, their dancing, all that concerns the women; but every time we have to trick them. Women can’t see what men are doing, although it really is their own business, but we can see their side. This is because all the Dreaming business came out of women – everything… In the beginning we had nothing, because men had been doing nothing; we took these things from women.” (Berndt 1951: 55). Kunapipi: a study of an Australian Aboriginal religious cult
You don’t have to read between the lines to see a primordial matriarchy. And tales of such a coup form a global pattern. The Berezkin database is a collection of 37,500 myths from diverse cultures meticulously organized themes found within each myth. Theme F38 is found in 85 cultures spanning South America, Oceania, Australia, Asia, and Africa. It states: Women were possessors of the sacred knowledge, sanctuaries, or ritual objects which are now taboo for them. Berezkin uses this and related themes to correlate different cultural super-groups with genetic structure in the New World. Quoting from the paper:
“Another group includes a number of motifs centered around F38. Women Lose their High Position: in the beginning of times or during a certain period in the past, women's social and/or ritual position was higher than that of the men; women played the role of intermediaries between men and spirits…
This cluster of motifs also includes First ancestor men kill women who behave against social norms (F41); in the community of first ancestors, women kill, try to kill, or transform men (F43A); and Men deprive women of their leading position in the ancestral community (F39).
Delving into some examples, the Xingu of the Amazon tell of a time when women reigned. At the beginning of the current age, the men banded together, deposed and raped them, and stole their secrets41. The same is true to the south, in Tierra Del Fuego, where only the young girls survived, to be taken as wives42. For a more palatable case, look no further than the film The Northman43. The chief’s son is instructed from whence Odin’s wisdom came: “Tell me, how did Odin lose his eye? To learn the secret magic of women. Never seek the secrets of women, but heed them always. It is women that know the mysteries of men.”
To learn more, you can watch the initiation scene from the movie or follow the footnotes above. But no one is in disagreement that myths of a primordial matriarchy are a global phenomenon. The debate is in the analysis. The major argument against granting these stories a kernel of truth is that there are zero matriarchies now. Therefore, the dominant explanation for the myths is that they serve as a social charter for the subjugation of women: “Women ruled in the times of chaos, and things got better when men took over.” This doesn’t make sense to me. Giving storied beginnings to the oppressed is not an effective strategy for maintaining control. Imagine if slavery in the United States had been justified with myths of a long-lost Afrocracy. In the before times of bedlum, men like Columbus and Jesus were black, and we see how that ended up. To avoid such confusion, their descendants can now be bought and sold. It would be surprising if that narrative had emerged. Moreso if the Romans, Turks, Egyptians, and the Comanche also told their slaves variations of the same. Further, there are other classes of subjugated people, such as children or untouchables. Why is it only women’s place in society that is justified by myths of their previous power? The standard explanation in anthropology strikes me as a just-so story.
In 2024, most of the people who believe there was a primordial matriarchy view Darwinian evolution with distrust. They want a political message that the patriarchy is a choice, and that might does not make right. However, once you accept that myths can last over evolutionary time scales, our matriarchal beginning becomes plausible, expected even. Women were likely the vanguard of consciousness. If they tended to achieve Behavioral Modernity before men did, then they would have had more political and religious power than men. This doesn’t have to be a strict matriarchy. Men were killing mammoths, so they were quite capable in their own sphere. The claim is that culture, our defining feature, was primarily a female invention.
On its face, “primordial matriarchy as social charter for patriarchy” is a strange strategy to emerge so consistently. But even more, there are details in the myths for which this fails to account. In cultures all over the world, sacred rites are said to have been stolen from women. Sacred rites that use the same instrument, the bullroarer.
Bullroarer: totem of the diffusionists
“Perhaps the most ancient, widely-spread, and sacred religious symbol in the world” ~Alfred C. Haddon, 1898
Dionysus, like many of Zeus’s children, was not born to his wife Hera. Jealous, she plied the elder gods, the Titans, to kill him when he was but a child. They lured him with various implements—a mirror, an apple, a snake, a spinning top, and a bullroarer—and dismembered him. But, like many gods, he rose again. Demeter (or sometimes Rhea or Athena) found him and reassembled his scattered parts. This cycle is reenacted in the Eleusinian Mysteries.
As previously mentioned, cultures from around the world have myths where the Pleiades star cluster represents Seven Sisters, including Greece and Australia. In Australia, the Seven Sisters songline is closely associated with the female initiation rituals the men are said to have stolen. As in Eleusis, the bullroarer is used. This is a remarkable set of facts. For statistical reasons, we can be sure the Seven Sisters story in both places shares a common cultural root. Similarly, both cultures have Mysteries that reveal how the world was made and which employ the same physical implements. The simplest answer is this shares the same cultural root as the Seven Sisters.
In Australia, women are now barred from this bullroarer-swinging cult. This is fairly typical. Robert H. Lowie wrote back in 192044:
“The question is not whether the bull-roarer has been invented once or a dozen times, nor even whether this simple toy has once or frequently entered ceremonial associations. I have myself seen priests of the Hopi Flute fraternity whirl bull-roarers on extremely solemn occasions, but the thought of a connection with Australian or African mysteries never obtruded itself because there was no suggestion that women must be excluded from the range of the instrument. There lies the crux of the matter. Why do Brazilians and Central Australians deem it death for a woman to see the bull-roarer? Why this punctilious insistence on keeping her in the dark on the subject in West and East Africa and Oceania? I know of no psychological principle that would urge the Ekoi and the Bororo mind to bar women from knowledge about bull-roarers and until such a principle is brought to light I do not hesitate to accept diffusion from a common center as the more probably assumption. This would involve historical connection between the rituals of initiation into the male tribal societies of Australia, New Guinea, Melanesia, and Africa.” ~Robert H. Lowie Primitive Society, p313
You would be forgiven for thinking this is taken out of context, or Lowie was some sort of crank. Not at all. He twice served as editor of the flagship journal American Anthropologist45, and there are many quotes by others to this effect. It is the case that bullroarers are considered sacred all over the world and that it is often taboo for women to view them. The EToC interpretation is that women invented ritual, including male initiation rituals, and the first form that spread used the bullroarer. A failure mode of women being involved in male initiation is men violently kicking them out of the boys’ club, which played out in many places.
After a century, one would think anthropologists would have answered the bullroarer conundrum. However, the instrument’s existence is an uncomfortable fact, and it has languished in obscurity. Bethe Hagen, an authority on bullroarers, wrote in 2009:
The bullroarer and buzzer were once well-known and well-loved by anthropologists. They functioned within the profession as hallmark artifacts that symbolized the cultural relativist commitment to independent invention even as evidence (size, shape, meaning, uses, symbols, ritual) stretching tens of thousands of years across human history pointed to diffusion. In virtually every part of the world, even today, these artifacts continue to be invented (?) and re-symbolized in many of the ancient ways.
Note that Hagen is not a diffusionist (hence proposing their re-invention). Still, she points out that the most natural explanation is diffusion, which has not been seriously pursued due to ideological commitments. Consider another non-diffusionist, Thomas Gregor, who spoke along the same lines in 1973:
“Interest has long since waned in ‘diffusionist’ anthropology, but recent evidence is very much in accord with its predictions. Today we know that the bullroarer is a very ancient object, specimens from France (13,000 B.C.) and the Ukraine (17,000 B.C.) dating back well into the Paleolithic period. Moreover, some archeologists—notably, Gordon Willey (1971)—now admit the bullroarer to the kit-bag of artifacts brought by the very earliest migrants to the Americas. Nevertheless, modern anthropology has all but ignored the broad historical implication of the wide distribution and ancient lineage of the bullroarer.” ~Anxious Pleasures: The Sexual Lives of an Amazonian People
I think that the bullroarer was part of the original religion that women invented to help initiates have the epiphany “I am.” Consider a strange tale found in both Greece and Egypt. Demeter, sometimes identified with the Great Mother of the Gods, arrived at Eleusis disguised as an old woman. The King and Queen took her in, and she became their son Demophon’s nurse. To reward their hospitality, she planned to bestow immortality upon him. This involved placing him in a fire each night and suckling him on ambrosia. One night, his mother walked in to find him thus ablaze and stopped the ritual. Demeter then revealed herself as a god and left the Eleusinian mysteries as a parting gift. (Remember the Mysteries were administered by “‘dragonesses,’ who are concerned with ‘burning off’ of human mortality.”) Demophon’s elder brother, Triptolemus, also learned the Mysteries and the art of agriculture. Demeter gave him a serpent-drawn chariot to spread these to the rest of the world.
The Egyptians tell a strikingly similar story about Isis, their Great Goddess of the Mysteries. Isis becomes the nurse to the prince of Byblos, Lebanon, places him in the fire each night, is stopped by the queen, and then reveals her divinity.
Anthropologists find no trope as galling as claims of lost tribes of Israel, but it strikes me as reasonable that Australians, and many others, are lost converts of Triptolemus or Demeter. I don’t mean that Australia was visited by Greeks or Egyptians. The diffusion of the snake cult long precedes those civilizations. Bullroarers have been found at Gobekli Tepe (11 kya), for example. But once you grant that myths can last 10,000 or 100,000 years, then that suggests a kernel of truth to Triptolemus’s missionary work. Snake myths, along with their rites, did, in fact, diffuse the world over. Those myths are remembered. Why not their spread? The bullroarer is a long-overlooked clue in understanding when and why snake myths diffused.
The Australian Dreamtime can be interpreted as receiving the Mysteries. The Seven Sisters, Great Mother, or Rainbow Serpent brought culture that solidified inner life through sacred rituals. (Sometimes literally rites of burning.)
Such a drastic cultural change would affect language. In The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns I explored the idea that the word for “I” could have traveled along with these rituals. This would explain why the first person singular is either ni or na in many language families throughout the world: Australian, Trans Papua New Guinea, Basque, Caucasian, Sino-Tibetan, Khoisan (San Bushmen), Andean, Niger-Congo, Korean-Japanese-Ainu, Etruscan, Kordofanian, Gilyak, Almosan, Hokan, Chibchan, and Paezan. Note that this is a conservative list. Australian and Trans Papua New Guinea could be broken into dozens of smaller language families that use na.46
Finally, the bullroarer may have even been an active ingredient in the rite’s epiphany. When twirled it produces a frequency that San Bushmen have used to achieve altered states of consciousness as far back as 9.5 kya. As mentioned earlier, their trance dance was established when the demiurge Cagn came to them, gave them snake powder, and told them to start dancing. They would die, but after rise renewed. This sequence is foundational to cultures throughout the world.
Death and rebirth
“How can a man be born when he is old?" Nicodemus asked. "Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!” John 3:4
Precipitating “I” would involve a lot more than snake venom. There would have been an entire ritual designed to help someone realize they are not just their body, something that must be experienced to be understood. This would have involved death and rebirth. Mechanistically, this makes sense. The body produces DMT when you die (or come near), and stressful situations cause a lesson to stick. But also, if the foundations of culture did spread, the mythological record indicates it included ritual death and rebirth47.
Mircea Eliade is one of the fathers of modern comparative religion. Near the end of his life, he wrote about initiations. Eliade argued that the oldest forms of initiation are a reenactment of the beginning of time when gods, demiurges, or culture heroes established ways to be “born to spirit.” Invariably, this is preceded by ritual death.
The interest of initiation for an understanding of archaic mentality lies predominantly in its showing us that the true man – the spiritual man – is not given, is not the result of a natural process. He is “made” by the old masters, in accordance with the models revealed by the divine beings and preserved in the myths. ~Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth, 1984
Eliade is not concerned with biological evolution. For him, the beginning of time is when we became human by engaging in ritual and culture. Like other writers of that time (and many now), he held that the most primitive forms of religion were developed in Eurasia 30-40 kya and diffused from there. In the book he shows that religion—particularly of the most primitive cultures—is backward-looking to the mythic moment when spiritual life was introduced. After comparing initiations in Australia and South America, Eliade explains that around the world, they are introduced by:
mythical figures that are in some way connected with a terrible but decisive moment in the history of humanity. These beings revealed certain sacred mysteries or certain patterns of social behavior, which radically altered men’s mode of existence and, consequently, their religious and social institutions. Although supernatural, in the time of beginnings these mythical beings lived a life in some sort comparable to the life of men; more precisely, they experienced tension, conflicts, drama, aggression, suffering, and, generally, death – and by living all this for the first time on earth, they instituted mankind’s present way of being. Initiation reveals these primordial adventures to the novices, and they ritually reactualize the most dramatic moments in the mythology of the supernatural beings.
I have sought to cite the best scholars. People like Kerényi or Eliade who spoke half a dozen languages and lived and breathed the past. It’s not on my authority that primitive cultures worldwide say that in the beginning, the mysteries of life were taught by visitors. If Behavioral Modernity—including creation stories and rituals—is 40,000 years old and myths can last about that long, then it may be an actual memory. My modest contribution is suggesting the foundation was developed by women who used snake venom as an entheogen. My grand contribution would be showing that this changed the fitness landscape—that creation myths are tales from cognitively foreign times when the matriarchs put a soul in Man.
To be clear, I think the most likely outcome is the weak EToC, where recursive self-awareness was a driving force in human self-domestication over the last 50,000 years, and women had an early advantage. In that uncanny valley, the Snake Cult emerged with an explanation for spiritual life, and the Mysteries spread. Those are novel ideas worth developing. The strongest form of EToC holds that associated rituals helped men “catch up,” which should be reflected by strong selection on the Y chromosome in the last 15,000 years or so. That is considerably less likely but worth discussing because it’s a prediction to falsify.
Conclusion
The city of Troy was thought to be a myth until some madman went and dug it up. My project is similar, but what must be unearthed are questions that are difficult to answer without the EToC. Why are the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades, the bullroarer, the primordial matriarchy, and myths of serpents found all over the world? Why are these so often connected with the origin of consciousness? If the cultural root that ties these together is 100,000 years old, why is evidence for recursive thinking just 50,000 years old? If we had recursive thinking 200 kya, why didn’t our species conquer the world then? Art first appeared at about the same time Homo Sapiens absorbed or outcompeted the Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo Florensis, Homo Longi, and Homo Luzonensis—that we know of so far. At the same time, human skulls were changing shape and there was selection for genes related to intelligence, language, and brain plasticity.
Undeniably, the stakes are higher than with Troy. Every culture must answer who we are and where we came from. As an article of faith, many scientists hold that humans have not evolved significantly in the last 50,000 years. This has led to an uneasy compromise where we start acting human in that time period, but those abilities must have been latent deep in our past. The human mind is a blank slate and 50 kya humans discovered chalk, as it were. This did not change the fitness landscape in any fundamental way. The slate on which culture writes is impervious to the forces of natural selection. How it came into being is an ineffable mystery, but we can be sure that, cognitively, humans are the same as our caveman forebears 200 kya. Evolution doesn’t operate on such meager time scales.
I suppose that could be true. But it grates how glib the proponents of this model are as they reject 40,000 years of tradition concerning our origins. Pop science drips with disdain for religion and the soul. For example, in The Recursive Mind, Corballis wrote, “The idea that we might be possessed of a spiritual transcendence was given scientific and religious respectability by Réné Descartes, sometimes considered the founder of modern philosophy.” He then bewails the fact that a full 90% of Americans believe in God. In the end, he throws his religious readers a bone:
“We should also not judge religion too harshly, since there are sound reasons to suppose that religious belief may itself have been a product of natural selection—not directly, perhaps, but as a consequence of selection for the survival of groups. We humans are fundamentally social creatures, and religion provided one mechanisms for ensuring group cohesion. Religion does pose problems for the theory of evolution, as we shall see below, and the ultimate irony may be that the explanation for religion lies in evolution itself.”
Of course, I would invert the framing. The ultimate irony may be that the answer to how we evolved may be found in the Bible. If women were self-aware first, Genesis’s account of human beginnings may have been passed down over evolutionary time scales. There is copious evidence that some stories have lasted that long. When this is about a “great flood,” it is offered as a feel-good story of indigenous knowledge preserving stories of sea level rise following the Ice Age. What, then, can we learn about the Symbolic Revolution, which happened in the Near East at the same time? That region invented writing five thousand years ago; the story would only have to be orally passed down for half as long. The snake in Eden and the Sumerian She-dragon Tiamat may very well be avatars of the snakes on the pillars of Göbekli Tepe.48 Or what about the transition to Behavioral Modernity in Australia in the last 10,000 years? If stories about climate change can last 10,000 years, we can also learn about ancient cultural and maybe even psychological changes. Dreamtime may not have been so long ago; it could be remembered.
The dilemma of human evolution is that we are marvelously and categorically different from any other animal, but natural selection works by degrees. To solve this, one can minimize the distance between humans and animals (e.g., Corballis) or posit a step change in cognition (e.g., Chomsky). Instead of taking humans down a notch49 or playing fast and loose with biology, EToC addresses the conundrum with a straightforward gene-culture interaction. Recursive culture spread, and with it, selection for recursive self-awareness. The strong version makes all sorts of predictions—primordial matriarchy, snake venom as an entheogen, the Sapient Paradox50, and the global diffusion of male initiation rituals—which are supported by a wide range of data. And, even if the primordial snake cult did not affect evolution, its existence is still worth understanding. If venom was consumed for enlightenment in India, Texas, and Eleusis, then Genesis describes a truly ancient tradition.
I fell down this rabbit hole by wondering why Genesis is such a good description of identifying with one’s inner voice. It seemed a viable path to consciousness, the type of thing women would discover first, and snake venom could have helped. Plenty of researchers say the Seven Sisters, serpent myths, or the world’s cosmogonies go back 50,000-100,000 years. Behavioral Modernity seems to go back 7,000-40,000 years, depending on the region, so Genesis could be a memory of Homo becoming sapient. As such, EToC should be taken seriously. Meaning it should be critiqued, subjected to falsification, and all the rigors of the scientific method. As always, this is a group effort, so please join.
A wise man once said most books should be blog posts. However, the best format for this post is really a book. I’d like more space to demonstrate the connection between the primordial matriarchy, snakes, and bullroarers, for example. Or to discuss the case for Homo having symbolic thought 200 kya or even a million years ago. I’d also like to develop these ideas in the context of AI safety, which is closer to my background. We have n=1 example of the emergence of general intelligence, and we’re about to build another. That worked out well for Eve and Prometheus, right? However, I need eyes on these ideas to do either of those things. Please share this piece if you’d like to see more: every time someone asks why humans didn’t do much from 200-10 kya, every time Stoned Ape Theory comes up, every time someone wonders what’s up with all these goddam snakes. Also, leave a comment on what you think works or doesn’t in EToC. Reader feedback has been immensely helpful going from EToC v2 → v3.
To bark or not to bark, that is the question—
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The squirrels and the mailmen of outrageous fortune,
Or to raise a leg against a sea of troubles
And by pissing end them
The Lexical Hypothesis argues that the most complete model of personality differences is embedded in the language we use to describe one another. Further, the job of a personality psychologist is not to theorize about all the facets of personality but to empirically identify them in natural language. As such, the Big Five were identified by analyzing the distribution of personality adjectives. In their most successful model of personality, psychologists gave up theorizing and deferred to the masses. The collaborative project of language can find the shape of seemingly incomprehensible abstractions, including about what sets humans apart. Hence using “soul.”
I adopt this bias because it is implied by creation myths being informative. If information in cosmogonies has lasted for evolutionary time scales, then the evolutionary time scales must be fairly short. Archeologists are explicit that they adopt the opposite bias. This is often for political reasons, although it can also be justified by a strong prior for long evolutionary timelines.
Technically, the jpeg is a lossy algorithm, so it’s not storing exactly the same information.
Many recursive processes share the same cognitive resources. Recursive music elucidates neural mechanisms supporting the generation and detection of melodic hierarchies:
“The ability to use recursive hierarchical embedding (RHE) has been demonstrated in the domains of language (Perfors et al. 2010), music (Martins et al. 2017), vision (Martins et al. 2014a, b, 2015) and in the motor domain (Martins et al. 2019). While behavioural research suggests that RHE is instantiated by similar cognitive resources across these domains (Martins et al. 2017), it is not clear to what extent it is also supported by similar neural mechanisms.”
You can hear echoes of the Upanishad in Aella’s definition of good sex:
“But here, [good sex] means something like 'losing yourself in the experience'. When I look back on sexual experiences I consider great, they all have the commonality of me sort of becoming the sex, if that makes sense? Like I'm no longer Aella's brain, doing thinky things, I am Aella's body, doing orgasmy things. I've lost the plot, I don't remember what the plot was, I'm just sex creature emitting a constant stream of noises.”
The primal constellation of themes: unity, then selfhood, then desire for union with another. It’s not an accident that Enkidu is civilized in the Epic of Gilgamesh by the prostitute Shamhat. She is better understood as a priestess; sex rewrites the boundary of self. This has been harnessed from the beginning.
If a trait is fit, its frequency in the population will increase each generation according to the Breeder’s Equation:
where Δz represents the change in the phenotype per generation, h^2 is the narrow-sense heritability (i.e., the additive genetic contribution to the trait), and β is the selection gradient. In our case, the heritability (h^2) of the trait in question is approximately 0.50.
To estimate the selection gradient (β), we consider the correlation between the trait and fitness. With r = 0.1, and considering that the standard deviation of fitness (like the number of surviving children) is normalized to 1 for simplicity, the selection gradient can be approximated as:
β=r×Standard Deviation of Fitness = 0.1 * 1 = 0.1
Plugging these values into the Breeder’s Equation, the change in the phenotype per generation (Δz) is calculated as:
Δz=0.50×0.1=0.05
This implies that the trait would change by 0.05 standard deviations per generation. To determine the number of generations needed for a one standard deviation change, we calculate:
Number of generations = 1 / 0.05 = 20
This means it would take 20 generations to change by one standard deviation. Given that a generation is typically considered to be about 25 years, it would take approximately 500 years (20 generations * 25 years/generation) to change by one standard deviation.
Now, let's calculate how far the trait would shift in a population over 2,000 and 5,000 years:
For 2,000 years: 2000 / 500 * 1 standard deviation = 4 standard deviations.
For 5,000 years: 5000 / 500 * 1 standard deviation = 10 standard deviations.
These calculations suggest that the trait could shift by 4 standard deviations in 2,000 years and by 10 standard deviations in 5,000 years under the given assumptions.
The purpose of this essay is to separate our cultural and genetic roots. However, even if you assume our genetic and cultural roots are identical, there is no need to go back 300,000 years. Consider another model. This recent paper finds genetic evidence of a Back to Africa group:
AA is ancient African, XAFR is a “ghost” population that mixed with Africans, and ASN is Asian. XAFR, along with Neanderthals and Denisovans, are modeled to have separated from humans 600+ kya. At 71 kya, the Out of Africa group breaks away from ancient Africans. At 58 kya, a Back to Africa group separates from Eurasians and wipes out the ancient Africans, as well as XAFR. “Our method predicted the admixture proportion from back to Africa to be as high as 91% (CI 90.28–91.57), suggesting a massive replacement of the ancient African population.”
This kind of makes sense. If the Out of Africa group had some advantage that let them absorb/conquer the Neanderthals and Denisovans, this would also apply in Africa. To be clear, this is also another model and should not be taken as ground truth. And again, the object of this essay is to separate our memetic and genetic origins; we could have become human after the earliest splits. But it’s useful in thinking about humanity’s most recent common ancestor (MRCA) and how that informs these debates. This model has the MRCA at no more than 58kya. In reality, it is more recent as the complete human tree resembles more of a bramble in the last 50,000 years. It’s not as if Europe and Asia were genetically separated for 33,000 years; as the model shows, there was plenty of mixing across continents.
Turning to other evidence for sapience going back 200,000 years. Early dates often rely on maternal and paternal MRCA: Y chromosomal Adam, or mitochondrial Eve. This gives dates of ~200,000. But consider the scenario where XAFR, Neanderthal, or Denisovans had surviving Y chromosomal or mitochondrial DNA lineages in modern humans. Would that suddenly make our species 600,000 years old? Would it make universals like marriage, art, and storytelling that old?
The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking, page 238
Carl Ruck gives the same date in Entheogens, Myth, and Human Consciousness: “Humans have left a record of cognitive experiences dating back to the first emergence of Homo sapiens in the late Paleolithic Age roughly 32,000 years ago.” He even muses that initiation rites performed worldwide hearken back to the cave temples where we find the earliest art, something we will return to:
“Among indigenous people today who still enact cave rites, women and men have separate caves. The cave is seen as the site of their tribe’s primordial emergence from the ground, the home of their ancestors, and the place where their most secret myth is retold. The handprints are interpreted as proof of their ancient ancestry, and new ones are traced in the course of bloody puberty rituals. If there is a common theme in all these paintings worldwide, it is probably religious ceremonies of a shamanic or initiatory type.”
Regarding evidence for Behavioral Modernity:
“We will argue that this evidence in Australia is patchy and that many of the hallmarks do not emerge until the middle to late Holocene. The evidence for symbolic activity in the Australian Pleistocene most closely resembles the European and African Lower and Middle Palaeolithic.”
“The Australian archaeological record is rarely considered in debates regarding the nature and emergence of early symbolic behaviour (but see Holdaway & Cosgrove 1997); this article has attempted to redress this imbalance. As we have discussed, before the rapid, continent-wide cultural changes of the middle to late Holocene period, the tempo of cultural change in Australia was slow and sporadic and the distribution of symbolic activity was patchy in time and space. We believe there are broad similarities between patterning in the Pleistocene and Holocene Australian archaeological record and patterning in the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic archaeological records of Africa and Europe, similarities that cannot be comfortably ignored. Applying the archaeological signature of modern human behaviour advocated by ‘short-range’ proponents to Pleistocene Australia indicates that the ancestors of Aboriginal people were not behaviourally modern until relatively recently, perhaps only the last 7000 years. If one rejects this conclusion — as we do — problems are raised with both the logic and validity of the ‘short-range’ model of modern behavioural origins.” ~ Symbolic revolutions and the Australian archaeological record, 2005
The anthropologist’s framing is false in this way as well. A date later than 300 kya does not require that “everyone, everywhere coincidentally became fully human in the same way at the same time, starting 65,000 years ago.” Fully human behavior is not evidenced 65 kya, nor is it evenly distributed when it emerges 40-50 kya. Archeology indicates it was a process of tens of thousands of years, not an event.
The end date is difficult to ascertain. A major thesis of his work is that evolving recursion would take many thousands of years. This is part of his preference for the 400-200 kya window; it’s ample time for natural selection. However, he acknowledges there is not much evidence of recursion then, and therefore suggests it may have emerged 40 kya without saying when that process would have finished. He writes: “The Upper Paleolithic marked nearly 30,000 years of almost constant change, culminating in a level of modernity equivalent to that of many present-day indigenous peoples.” Given his emphasis on evolution taking time, and the process starting at 40 kya, I interpret that to mean modern levels of recursion were obtained 30,000 years later, which is 10 kya. This is similar to the timing suggested by Poulos, Benítez-Burraco, Progovac, and Renfrew. It’s the end of the Sapient Paradox.
It is rather popular to explain neural evolution with environmental factors. For example, the 2016 paper A genomic history of Aboriginal Australia found signatures of selection. They report:
Among the top ranked peaks (Extended Data Table 2) we found genes associated with the thyroid system (NETO1, seventh peak in the global scan, and KCNJ2, first peak in the local scan) and serum urate levels (eighth peak in the global scan). Thyroid hormone levels are associated with AboriginalAustralian-specific adaptations to desert cold39 and elevated serum urate levels with dehydration40. These genes are therefore candidates for potential adaptation to life in the desert. However, further studies are needed to associate putative selected genetic variants with specific phenotypic adaptations in Aboriginal Australians.
However, many of the candidates are also related to neural processes (e.g., CBLN2, NETO1, SLC2A12, and TRPC3). Maybe further studies can see if these have to do with the symbolic revolution.
The 2023 paper The landscape of genomic structural variation in Indigenous Australians also reports evidence of selection since separation from Eurasians.
In the supplement, they go a bit harder. Section 3.6 Neurological function as an underappreciated adaptive target in humans:
“Around one third of the 32 ancient Eurasian candidate genes that could be assigned a clear physiological role are associated with neurological function (Tables 1, S6). Our temporal analyses indicate that most of those neuronal genes (82%; 9/11) were under selection during the Arabian Standstill period of ~80-50ka, with the remaining two genes (WWOX and DOCK3) arising immediately afterwards during the Initial Upper Paleolithic (~47-43ka). Neuronal adaptations therefore appear to have been essential components of the selective environment during the Arabian Standstill and during the early phase of AMH dispersal across Eurasia. Again, this is provocative given archaeological suggestions of rapid cognitive development during this period.”
This recent paper argues the earliest symbolic behavior of any sort is 6 notches made in Auroch bones 120 kya in Israel. From 100 kya on there is scattered evidence of burials.
It’s not an accident that McKenna does not look to the Bible. Many in his generation (and ours) have a blind spot for the Western tradition. He put considerable effort into predicting the world's end from the Mayan calendar but did not give much credence to the apocalyptic Book of Revelation. A prophet has no honor in his own country. After arguing that reality is constructed by language and that archaic shamanism understood this, McKenna writes:
If language is accepted as the primary datum of knowing, then we in the West have been sadly misled. Only shamanic approaches will be able to give us answers to the questions we find most interesting: who are we, where did we come from, and toward what fate do we move?
But the Bible makes it clear: in the beginning was the Word! This is basic stuff. To give a recent example, Jordan Peterson interviewed Christian apologist and mathematician John Lennox, whose main argument was that the Bible is correct about the universe being language-based, which science failed to appreciate.
I assumed the cobra genus Naja was cognate with the Hindu Naga, but as per Wikipedia, this is controversial. ChatGPT fought me on it as well. But on the bright side, if this post gets enough traction, future versions of ChatGPT will be trained on this essay and will acquiesce. SEO epistemology: may the best memes win.
Honorable mention quotes from Hillman:
“Medea’s ritual communion was the combination of one particular ios (arrow toxin) and its “antidote,” aptly named Galene, or “Calm.” Medea’s ios was the product of an ἔχις, a frustratingly general Greek term for “viper.” Ancient medical sources tend to group all vipers into a single family of snake-derived drug sources; envenomation by any species of viper was treated simply as “viper-strike.” To make matters more confusing, receiving the sacrament from an Echidna priestess was referred to as being “struck by the viper.”
“In addition to viper venom, psychotropic mushrooms, and meadow saffron, Medea’s ios contained the famous “purple,” or πορφυρα , a textile dye obtained from marine mollusks (murex).”
“Medea’s meadow saffron-containing compound was also called the “drug of Prometheus,” and was closely associated with the color of the meadow saffron and the stunning purple dye of the murex.”
I found several blogs that make this claim, though unfortunately without sources. To prevent link rot, here are the relevant passages: “Others have suggested that the oracle’s trances might have been brought on by upon by snake venom, particularly that of the cobra or krait snake, which is known to be hallucinogenic, which the seer might have mistaken for divine visions.” From the blog: Cleopatra’s Affairs Were a Political Gamble… that Failed
Or, from Root Circle:
“Other indications strongly suggest that the oracles induced a trance by using snake venom. There is solid evidence of snake worship, snake tending, and divinatory rites that involved live snakes as well as mythical serpents. Many sacred temples and centers of worship housed various species of snakes that were cared for by the priests and priestesses that operated the temples.
‘Among the Romans a serpent-cult is mainly connected with the animals as embodying the genius, and snakes were kept in large numbers in temples and houses. The Greek cult of the serpent Asklepios probably influenced the Romans……A more native aspect of the cult is seen in serpent cave Lanuvium, whither virgins were taken yearly to prove their chastity.’ ~Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics”
Also repeated at The Oracle of Delphi – mutterhood
The God who Comes: Dionysian Mysteries Revisited, page 34
“…the Temple of Demeter, which may have housed sacred snakes. One of the species known to have been kept and revered by the Greeks was the Cyprian catsnake, a lovely dun-yellow creature mottled with purplish-brown, whose venom — otherwise harmless to humans — is reputed to be psychoactive; the venom of the African purple-glossed snake is said to have a similar effect. All Mystery festivals which appear to have utilized serpents, such as the Agrai, Thesmophoria, and Arrhephoria ceremonies, may have been feeding times for just such sacred reptiles.” ~Rosemarie Taylor-Perry
The Writings of the Fathers, page 27
“And what if I go over the mysteries? I will not divulge them in mockery, as they say Alcibiades did, but I will expose right well by the word of truth the sorcery hidden in them; and those so-called gods of yours, whose are the mystic rites, I shall display, as it were, on the stage of life, to the spectators of truth. The bacchanals hold their orgies in honour of the frenzied Dionysus, celebrating their sacred frenzy by the eating of raw flesh, and go through the distribution of the parts of butchered victims, crowned with snakes, shrieking out the name of that Eva by whom error came into the world. The symbol of the Bacchic orgies is a consecrated serpent. Moreover, according to the strict interpretation of the Hebrew term, the name Hevia, aspirated, signifies a female serpent.”
This is similar to the Greek poet Catullus’s description of a Bacchic orgy:
They then excitedly were raging everywhere with frenzied mind, shouting madly "Evoe! Evoe!" as they shook their heads. Some of them were waving thyrsi with covered points, some were tossing about the limbs of a mangled steer, some were girding themselves with writhing serpents; some were bearing in solemn procession dark mysteries enclosed in caskets, mysteries which the profane desire in vain to hear. ~Catullus, 64.251-264 (translation adapted from that of F. W. Cornish in The Loeb Classical Library)
“Evoe” was shouted at orgies, and Clemens thought this meant “Eve.” Note most do not make the connection. The dictionary says it’s the cry of ecstasy used in Bacchic celebrations.
The Eye is also the Great Goddess. Robert Clark’s Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt page 218:
“The Eye is the commonest symbol in Egyptian thought and the strangest to us. Crawford has recently shown that the fertility goddess of the Neolithic world, both in Asia and Europe, was represented by an eye—or eyes. Egypt almost certainly came within the orbit of this primitive eye cult, but the Egyptian sacred ‘Eye’ was so complex and individual that it is as yet impossible to relate it with ideas in other parts of the world. One fact does stand out—the Egyptian Eye was always a symbol for the Great Goddess, whatever name she may have in any particular instance.”
Context of the quote from his paper Out of Africa: The journey of the oldest tales of humankind:
“Most prominent is the slaying of the primordial Dragon by the Great Hero, a descendent of Father Heaven. In India, it is Indra who kills the three-headed reptile, just like his Iranian ‘cousin’ ThraØtaona kills a three-headed dragon, or as their distant counterpart in Japan, Susa.no Wo, kills the eight-headed monster (Yamata.no Orochi). In the west, in England, it is Beowulf, in the Edda it is Sigurd, the Siegfried of the mediaeval Nibelungen Epic (used by Wagner for his opera), who perform this heroic feat. We may also compare Herakles’ killing of the Hydra of Lerna, and in Egyptian myth, the slaying ‘the dragon of the deep’ by the victorious Sun when it passes underground, each night, back towards the east, to rise again. There are even echoes as distant as in recent Hawai’ian, earliest Chinese and in Maya myth. It is only after the earth has been fertilized by the Dragon’s blood that it can support life.”
He identifies 15 elements of cosmogonies found in Eurasia and the Americas. The last few are quite a good match for the spread of a snake cult from a legendary core (Gravettian Europe? Siberia? Anatolia?) to local spheres of influence:
9 first humans and their (or semi-divine) first evil deeds; incest problem
10 heroes and nymphs/Apsaras/Valkyries
11 killing the dragon / use of the heavenly drink
12 bringing of fire / food / culture
13 spread of humankind / local nobility (“kings”)
Dates for rock art are difficult, as there is no organic matter on which to do carbon dating. Many of the dates are done by connecting a style of painting with a to a time period. Then everything in that style is assumed to be from that time. One doubt in my mind about the date for this one is how similar the style is to the following images, dates thousands of years later. However, the argument doesn’t hinge on the dates so I haven’t investigated any deeper.
See Schmidt’s interviews in National Geographic or The New Yorker
This would explain why Clovis culture spread through North and South America so quickly, and the previous inhabitants contributed so little genetic material. The same reason the Denisovans left little trace in Asia; they didn’t have recursion and so were wiped out or absorbed when sapient humans came through.
His reasoning for the 160 kya date is the genetic divergence of the San Bushmen. New research estimates that to be 300 kya; I wonder if he would update his model accordingly or allow for diffusion?
“But the Hopi Indians have an intimate relationship with the live snake and respect it as an avatar. They believe that dead sorcerers return as bull snakes, which, if killed, will free the soul. The Snake Clan conducts the ancient Snake Dance, an annual nine-day ceremony to induce rain, held in Arizona and New Mexico. Much of the event is secret but four days are spent hunting a rattlesnake species known as nuntius, meaning ‘messenger’ (one hundred can be caught). On the last day at sundown, after a washing rite, the priests, dressed as mythic figures, slowly dance in a ring, carrying live snakes in their mouths and replacing them periodically. After many hours, the priests run down the mesas into sacred areas where the snakes are freed to take messages to the gods.” ~Snake, Drake Stutesman
See, for example, the Polynesian cult that still worships an American GI as god.
In some ways, drugs cheapen the idea, making it seem more illusory or hallucinogenic. They could be helpful for altering recursive states, but I want to be clear that they aren’t essential. Worldwide, shamans move energy up the spine. This was likely part of the original package and is preserved in India with Kundalini (literally “snake”) yoga, the Americas with various Snake Dances, and South Africa with the trance dance. Shamanism is only about 40,000 years old. What would it have been like when a stranger came to the village and showed one how to dance or meditate in a way that could reach altered states of consciousness? Pretty wild, even if drugs were not included. Not hard to see how the teacher would be remembered as more than a mortal.
For example, the paper Earth Mother from Northern Waters reports, “Aboriginal opinion in the north of Australia is clear: the Mother of Us All came from across the sea. Her home was often a distant land.”
He words things slightly harsher. The Andamanese live on a string of Islands south of Myanmar. They are often treated as cultural relics of the first migration of people that also populated Australia (by Witzel, for example). About them, Campbell says:
“The earliest Andamanese knew neither pottery nor the pig. Both were imported c. 3000 B.C., and the prominence of the feral pig in their myths shows that an associated (Neolithic or Bronze Age) mythology must also have been brought in at that time. The pottery deteriorated, the domesticated pigs ran wild, and, as the mainland technology fell apart, a number of its elements became absorbed into the local hunting-and-gathering traditions.”
After relating several Andamanese stories to Greek and Near Eastern myths of the Great Goddess, he continues:
“We cannot, therefore, assume (as did Radcliffe-Brown) that these Andamanese stories of the pig hunt and of pigs are truly native to the islanders and as primitive as their culture. They are the fragments, rather, of a mainland mythology which has regressed—that is, run wild like the pigs themselves, and, like the associated pottery, has deteriorated, breaking up, as it were, into shards.”
Or consider his account of Sub-Saharan Africa (page 132): “The Bushmen are the last inheritors of the southerly extension of the great creative explosion of c. 30,000 B.C.”
This conundrum also holds for language. Why are Australian languages so similar to each other and different from PNG? See: Time, diversification, and dispersal on the Australian continent: Three enigmas of linguistic prehistory.
Perceptions Of The Serpent In The Ancient Near East: Its Bronze Age Role In Apotropaic Magic, Healing And Protection.
The Semitic name for Eve was Hawwa. This name has been linked etymologically to the words for serpent and life. Wallace (1985:148) tells us that the link between the names for Hawwa and serpent had been noted by early rabbinic interpreters. The link between Eve and the serpent and the possibility of her being a serpent goddess, or even a serpent was explored by scholars such as Nöldeke, Wellhausen and Gressman (Wallace 1985:148). More recently Wilson (2001:216) believes the serpent to be representative of Ašerah. The etymological serpent / life link is supported by Wilson (2001:210): ‘the serpent is not the agent by which life is taken from man; he is the protector of life…’.
She goes on to argue that Eve is the pan-Caananite snake goddess ‘Elat, who often appears with water lilies, a good source of rutin:
Nachash and Asherah: Serpent symbolism and death, life, and healing in the Ancient Near East, LS Wilson 1999
“This study investigates the Semitic root nhš, which signifies both the serpent and the practice of magic or divination. It is demonstrated that nhš has a connotation of libation offering rather that of generic magic or divination. The philological origins of nhš vis-à-vis its role in the Eden drama are examined.”
Worth noting he also connects serpent worship to human sacrifice (my thesis is human sacrifice grew out of violent snake-venom death and rebirth rituals):
“The role of the serpent as the agent of life, death and healing is demonstrated in the various cultures both individually and in combination. The Dravidian figure of snakes entwined in trees speaks to the attribute of life and fertility, as does the Egyptian Shaï or agathós daímón. The enigmatic though ubiquitous presence of Asherah in the Bible is discussed in detail. The ophidian characteristics of the goddess Asherah in the relevant Near Eastern cult systems are affirmed both from existing and newly discovered inscriptional and iconic material. From both Phoenicia, Carthage, and to some extent Mesopotamia, we learn of the rite of human sacrifice as an accepted practice and thus the serpent as agent of death.”
The Myth of the Serpent and the Birth of Mankind. A Projection into Proto-Indo-European Culture.
“The fight is total, the spirit is totally absorbed, fear and courage are one single thing, the blood pump inside the veins, someone loses his life, but the moment is so intense that in the mind of the first warrior of the history of men occurs a sensory explosion, in a moment all is clear, the sky, the earth, one’s essence, the serpent, affections, life, death. His perceptions see through. He defeated the serpent, he brutally slaughtered it, mercilessly – self-consciousness is directly proportional to willpower led by the heart. ,The fight is ended, the man can teach now the acquired conscience to the others, “I am” *h1e’smi, “you are” *h1e’sti. The battle is ended, mankind possesses the luxuriant springs and can settle down and with ease understanding the natural cycles throughout growth and death, the change of season, the function of a seed. He discovers the agriculture, the sheep-farming, the wheel, the car. The fire that Agni represents is the conscience that flows from the redeemed springs that from now on shall have many frames.”
“But the chief value of a study of human origins, from my political perspective, is that it demonstrates, firstly, that early life was communist (Engels 1972 [ 1 884}; Lee 1988). Secondly, it teaches us that revolution lies at the very heart of what we are.” ~Chris Knight, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture
“In this connection, the core of the evolving thesis and perhaps the most exciting ethnographic finding to which my model had led me was that what functionalist-minded fieldworkers of an earlier period had thought of as an Aboriginal construct symbolizing ‘sex’, ‘weather-change’, ‘water’, ‘phallus’, ‘womb’ or some other ready-made category familiar to Europeans – this so-called ‘Snake’ was nothing of the kind. Its meaning was not a thing. It referred not to something external to the human subject. It was – I decided when the first dawnings of understanding began to hit me – pure subjectivity. It was solidarity. It was my class struggle. It was the picket line, the blood-red flag, the many-headed Dragon of resistance. It was the overthrow of Primate Capitalism – the triumph of the great Sex Strike which had established the cultural domain.” ~Blood Relations
Also worth bringing up his timeline, on which we roughly agree:
“I think that this multilevelled intensity of sociality and mental sharing - and this is what I mean by 'culture' in the following pages - was universally and stably achieved at most 90, 000 and more probably some 40,000 to 45,000 years ago (Binford 1 989; Trinkaus 1 989). I also think that it emerged not gradualistically but in a massive social, sexual and political explosion - 'the creative explosion' , as it has been called (Pfeiffer 1982).” ~Blood Relations
See Robert Clark’s Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt. Page 76 “Does this mean that the separation of earth and sky, the beginning of calendrical time, marks the transference to male supremacy?” From the male perspective, this could be. They could only take charge after recursion (here, marked by duality and time) was second nature (first nature?) among men.
“So far the High God and the Primeval Waters have been considered as masculine or bisexual. There was, however, another tradition, about a Mother Goddess, which was probably ignored or suppressed during the Old Kingdom but emerged in the Coffin Texts, when the weakening of the central control allowed provincial cults to appear in the texts.” (Page 87)
Page 226 combines serpent, third eye, and mother goddess themes:
"Crown and Cobra and Mother Goddess (the 'Great Matter') are one. We remember that the enraged Eye became the cobra which Re wound around his head and that this is the first coronation. In the waters, the Eye had come from the High God, so he was its progenitor. The Eye is also the Mother Goddess because all mankind have come from the tears of the Eye when it became enraged. So the king’s mother—or primeval mother—is the Eye. But as the Eye is the cobra which decorates the crown and is part of it, we can see why the same goddess can adorn the king’s brow and be his mother at the same time. This ought to be complication enough, but even then the prayer has one further symbolic equation. There may be two eyes, one in the Primeval Waters and the other in the Horus and Seth story; but they, too, are one. The king is Horus who fought for the crown— i.e., the Eye—and who first lost and then regained his actual eye during the contest with Seth."
Note that this is not a feminist scholar, nor is the topic of the book about the Great Goddess or Primordial Matriarchy. Just as with Dunbar, these interpretations are offered by subject-area experts.
Such levers are used to great effect. For example, try getting Google’s Gemini to make an image of a white person.
Julian Jaynes (of “Bicameral” mind fame) and Ian McGilchrist both mention brain lateralization in relation to consciousness. There are large sex differences:
“Male brains are optimized for intrahemispheric and female brains for interhemispheric communication…The observations suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.”
According to the UniProtKB gene summary, TENM1: “Plays a role in the regulation of neuroplasticity in the limbic system.” and “Induces BDNF (Brain-derived neurotrophic factor) transcription inhibition in neurons.” (BDNF is similar to nerve growth factor found in snake venom.)
Other research has found that TENM1 is related to types of epilepsy that are characterized by age-dependent manifestations. I find this interesting, given that I think epilepsy is related to recursion and that it used to be developed at a later age. (Note that others have related epilepsy to a breakdown in the recursive cognitive architecture that produces consciousness: Epilepsy and Recursive Consciousness with Special Attention to Jackson's Theory of Consciousness)
According to the Human Gene Database, TENM1 is preferentially expressed in the Dopaminergic Neurons of the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA). These interact with the cholinergic system which is an integral part of the brain's behavioral reward system. The reason nicotine is so addictive is that it hijacks this system (1,2). Snake venom also targets the cholinergic system, though realistically this is now many steps removed from TENM1.
A catalog of single nucleotide changes distinguishing modern humans from archaic hominins (supplementary material) includes the functionally related TENM4 in the list of genes that separate humans from Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Anxious Pleasures: The Sexual Lives of an Amazonian People (1973)
It [the patriarchal order of society] was not always so, at least not in myth. We are told that the women of ancient times (ekwimyatipalu) were matriarchs, the founders of what is now the men's house and creators of Mehinaku culture. Ketepe is our narrator for this legend of Xingu "Amazons."
THE WOMEN DISCOVER THE SONGS OF THE FLUTE. In ancient times, a long time ago, the men lived by themselves, a long way off. The women had left the men. The men had no women at all. Alas for the men, they had sex with their hands. The men were not happy at all in their village; they had no bows, no arrows, no cotton arm bands. They walked about without even belts. They had no hammocks, so they slept on the ground, like animals. They hunted fish by diving in the water and catching them with their teeth, like otters. To cook the fish, they heated them under their arms. They had nothing-no possessions at all. The women's village was very different; it was a real village. The women had built the village for their chief, Iripyulakumaneju. They made houses; they wore belts and arm bands, knee ligatures and feather headdresses, just like the men. They made kauka, the first kauka: "Tak . .. tak . .. tak," they cut it from wood. They built the house for Kauka, the first place for the spirit. Oh, they were smart, those round-headed women of ancient times. The men saw what the women were doing. They saw them playing kauka in the spirit house. "Ah, said the men, "this is not good. The women have stolen our lives!" The next day, the chief addressed the men: "The women are not good. Let's go to them." From far off, the men heard the women, singing and dancing with Kauka. The men made bullroarers outside the women's village. Oh, they would have sex with their wives very soon.
The men came close to the village, "Wait, wait," they whispered. And then: "Now!" They leaped up at the women like wild Indians: "Hu waaaaaa!" they whooped. They swung the bullroarers until they sounded like a plane. They raced into the village and chased the women until they had caught every one, until there was not one left. The women were furious: "Stop, stop," they cried. But the men said, "No good, no good. Your leg bands are no good. Your belts and headdresses are no good. You have stolen our designs and paints." The men ripped off the belts and clothes and rubbed the women's bodies with earth and soapy leaves to wash off the designs. The men lectured the women: "You don't wear the shell yamaquimpi belt. Here, you wear a twine belt. We paint up, not you. We stand up and make speeches, not you. You don't play the sacred flutes. We do that. We are men." The women ran to hide in their houses. All of them were hidden. The men shut the doors: This door, that door, this door, that door. "You are just women," they shouted. "You make cotton. You weave hammocks. You weave them in the morning, as soon as the cock crows. Play Kauka's flutes? Not you!" Later that night, when it was dark, the men came to the women and raped them. The next morning, the men went to get fish. The women could not go into the men's house. In that men's house, in ancient times. The first one.
This Mehinaku myth of Amazons is similar to those told by many other tribal societies with men's cults (see Bamberger 1974). In these stories, the women are the first owners of men's sacred objects, such as flutes, bullroarers, or trumpets. Often, however, the women are unable to care for the objects or feed the spirits they represent. The men band together and trick or force the women to give up their control of the men's cult and accept a subordinate role in society. What are we to make of the striking parallels in these myths? Anthropologists are in agreement that the myths are not history. The peoples who tell them were likely to have been as patriarchal in the past as they are today. Rather than windows to the past, the tales are living stories that reflect ideas and concerns that are central to a people's concept of sexual identity. The Mehinaku legend opens in ancient times with the men in a precultural state, living "like animals." In conflict with many other myths and the received Mehinaku opinion about female intellect, the women were the culture creators, the inventors of architecture, clothes, and religion: "They were smart, those round-headed women of ancient times." The men's ascendance is achieved through brute force. Attacking "like wild Indians," they terrorize the women with the bullroarer, strip them of their masculine adornment, herd them into the houses, rape them, and lecture them on the rudiments of appropriate sex-role behavior.
Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (1958)
For among the Selknam the puberty initiation was long ago transformed into a secret ceremony reserved exclusively for men. An origin myth tells that in the beginning – under the leadership of Kra, moon woman and powerful sorceress – women terrorized men because they knew how to change themselves into “spirits”; they knew the arts of making and using masks. But one day Kran, the sun man, discovered the women’s secret and told it to the men. Infuriated, they killed all the women except little girls, and since then they have organized secret ceremonies, with masks and dramatic rituals, to terrorize the women in their turn. This festival continues for four to six months, and during the ceremonies the evil female spirit, Xalpen, tortures the initiates and “kills” them; but another spirit, Olim, a great medicine man, resuscitates them. Hence in Tierra del Fuego, as in Australia, puberty rites tend to become increasingly dramatic and especially to intensify the terrifying nature of the scenarios of initiatory death
Though one may ask, “What happened to Europe’s witches in Europe?”
The two pages preceding this go into more detail. To give an idea of how much documentation there is for the bullroarer, I bolded the different tribes below
Before leaving the subject of sex in relation to associations, I must briefly deal with a subject of apparent triviality but of the utmost ethnographic interest. In the sketch of Australian initiation rites mention was made of the bull-roarer, the buzzing musical implement tabooed to women. The care taken to prevent the uninitiated from learning that this simple device lies at the bottom of the weird sounds heard by them is extremely ludicrous; it appears as though the essence of all the mysteries centers in the production of the whirring noise, as if all the pother and pain of a protracted ritual came to a climax from the native point of view when the boys were told how to make a little slat boom through the air. It is sufficiently remarkable that the death penalty was inflicted on a woman who discovered the secret and on the man who divulged it. But far more striking is the occurrence of the same association of ideas in different regions of the globe. The following samples will suffice for illustration.
Among the Central Australian Urabunna the uninitiated are taught to believe that the sound is the voice of a spirit “who takes the boy away, brings out all his insides, provides him with a new set, and cuts him back an initiated youth. The boy is told that he must on no account allow a woman or child to see the stick, or else he and his mother and sisters will tumble down as dead as stones.” Farther north the Anula of the Gulf of Carpentaria tell their women that the whirring of the bull-roarer is made by a spirit who swallows and afterwards disgorges the boy in the form of an initiated youth. At the initiation of the Bukaua, who live about Huon Gulf, New Guinea, the novices’ mothers are told that the booming of the leaf-shaped slats is the voice of an insatiable ogre that swallows and then spews out young lads. In the Solomon and the French Islands the bull-roarer is likewise kept secret from women, who believe that the strange noise represents the voice of a spirit, and the Sulka of New Britain impress upon them the additional fact that this being occasionally devours the uninitiated. The foregoing illustrations are culled from the Australian and Oceanian literature. But what shall we say when similar conceptions appear in various parts of Africa? The Ekoi of Southern Nigeria allow no woman to see the bull-roarers or to know the cause of the sounds they produce, and similar regulations are reported from the far-off Nandi in East Africa. Among the Yoruba the women are indeed permitted to view and even handle the bull-roarers, but under no condition must they see one in motion. A jocular gesture of Dr. Frobenius' suggesting that he was about to whirl it through the air sufficed to throw the females into fits, and it is reported that in ancient times women who appeared during a procession of the men’s society when these implements were swung through the air were mercilessly put to death. Finally must be cited a South American instance. The Bororo of central Brazil have mortuary rites at which bull-roarers are swung, this being the signal for all the women to run into the woods or hide at home lest they die. Here the belief is shared by the men that the mere sight of a bull-roarer would automatically cause a woman’s death and Dr. von den Steinen was cautioned to avoid fatalties by never showing a purchased specimen to the women or children.
These resemblances are hardly of a character to be ignored. They aroused the interest of Andrew Lang, who explained them as the result of “similar minds, working with simple means towards similar ends” and expressly repudiated the “need for a hypothesis of common origin, or of borrowing, to account for this widely diffused sacred object.” In this interpretation he has been followed by Professor von der Steinen, who remarks that so simple a contrivance as a board attached to a string can hardly be regarded as so severe a tax on human ingenuity as to require the hypothesis of a single invention throughout the history of civilization. But this is to mistake the problem…
In fact, Lowie was important in developing the cultural relativism popular in anthropology today. In practice, this tends to downplay the importance of diffusion. Cultural relativists stress cultural specificity (e.g., the bullroarer has a different meaning in Greece and Australia), independent invention, and general skepticism of overarching theories (other than, you know, cultural relativism). So, his support for diffusion in this instance is not a matter of ideological convenience.
I’d like to return to the subject with an eye to Australia. The expansion of the Pama-Nyungen language family looks a lot like the spread of the Snake Cult. Consider this summary of a paper written by a team of linguists and geneticists:
“Both types of data [genetic and linguistic] also show that the population expanded from the northeast to the southwest. This migration occurred within the last 10,000 years and likely came in successive waves, Bowern says, in which existing languages were overlaid by new ones. This expansion also seems to correspond with a stone tool innovation called a backed edge blade. But the accompanying gene flow was just a trickle, suggesting that only a few people had an outsize cultural impact, Willerslev says. ‘It's like you had two men entering a village, convincing everyone to speak a new language and adopt new tools, having a little sexual interaction, then disappearing,’ he says. Then the new languages continued to develop, following the older patterns of population separation. ‘It's really strange but it's the best way we can interpret the data at this stage.’”
The spread of cosmogonies and initiation rituals can explain why such a process would occur. Both Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Australia use the bullroarer in male initiation and say they stole it from women long ago. Not only that, but both language families use “na” for the first person singular. Further, linguists in PNG estimate that the basis of all extant languages in the PNG family entered from Eurasia ~10 kya and swamped out what had been there previously (though some of that layer lives on as an “archaic substratum”). At that time, Australia and PNG were connected. Why would the diffusion process stop at the non-existent border to Australia? Lots of lines of evidence suggest it didn’t.
For example, Odin’s sacrifice to learn the runes:
I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows from where its roots run.No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn,
downwards I peered;
I took up the runes,
screaming I took them,
then I fell back from there.
This is the “hanged god” motif, which includes Odin, Jesus, Prometheus, the hanged man tarot card, and possibly Ixtab. The details of “myself to myself” and a spear are so similar to Jesus’s crucifixion—His sacrifice to Himself, God the Father—that New Testament influences are debated. See hook swinging for ritual parallels.
A recent example from an evolutionary biologist answering when we became human:
“People tend to assume that there’s something that makes us fundamentally different from other animals. Most people, for example, would tend to think that it’s okay to sell, cook or eat a cow, but not to do the same to the butcher. This would be, well, inhuman. As a society, we tolerate displaying chimps and gorillas in cages but would be uncomfortable doing this to each other. Similarly, we can go to a shop and buy a puppy or a kitten, but not a baby.
The rules are different for us and them. Even die-hard animal-rights activists advocate animal rights for animals, not human rights. No one is proposing giving apes the right to vote or stand for office. We inherently see ourselves as occupying a different moral and spiritual plane. We might bury our dead pet, but we wouldn’t expect the dog’s ghost to haunt us, or to find the cat waiting in heaven.
And yet, it’s hard to find evidence for this kind of fundamental difference.”
It asks why sapient behavior was not widely expressed before 10-15 kya. I had never heard of the Sapient Paradox before researching EToC. After having the idea for EToC, my first thought was that Genesis couldn’t be true because we must have been acting human for much longer than a myth could last. It was a shock to find out that at least some archaeologists hold sapience is recent and that this is an unsolved mystery. Similarly, I didn’t think there would be any evidence for snake venom as an entheogen, and in fact, I wrote the Snake Cult and EToC v2 pieces without any evidence. Turns out that it was probably used at Eleusis, is currently used in India, and may have been used in the Americas. Likewise, I had never heard of Bicameral Breakdown. At least from my first-person perspective, EToC has a great track record in the predictions it makes.
Please keep these going man. They’re always a great read
A Gday Andrew, from Tasmania
I think the time frame is way off (I think it is a slow grind in the paleolithic with a noticeable pay-off recently, I don’t think it is “I” arising however, more like “other-I” which magics why we should) but I like the story. It's Sunday and have more time, thanks for writing this.
My passion project on this theme started at https://www.academia.edu/40978261/Why_we_should_an_introduction_by_memoir_into_the_implications_of_the_Egalitarian_Revolution_of_the_Paleolithic_or_Anyone_for_cake
years later I started the blog here abouts at https://whyweshould.substack.com/
ⓐ also read thismorning c.f. https://www.razibkhan.com/p/the-longer-i-live-the-wronger-i-get
More thoughts/comments/notes as reading, I jump around a bit:
①"native dualism"
my position is that this is an outcome of the Janus dance, when it doubles-down on it's naive power -- even the yinyang symbol does this, (might be an outcome of bilateral symmetry...? or vice versa??) https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/the-janus-ratio
②"The impulse to make art and search for meaning was not always found in our species. …."
religion/art/performance/rites/routine/plays/staging/fashion/bodypaint/painting are an outcome of the (moral) worlding urge, or if recursively doubled-down it becmes a culture’s passion project as a the “world-building”’reality’(aside: we double-down a lot --- in some French philosophies (Deleuze) this is called intensifying or re-intensifying) this turns a routine into rite, the ritual into a doctrine, and a doctrine into dogma -- the medium of intensification is the social/political space created by the success of the routine in the first place) (if we do this internally we get identitarian politics -- from socially created identities -- unless one is autistic like me of course)
—thus your "Rather, it’s a tic of whatever environments humans have been living in over the last 50,000 years." is correct, the social landscape rather than the terrain mostly (In Australian Aboriginal culture (e.g. tjukurrpa) these are not separated out, they are the world,
③"Time gobbles up evidence. " we have to create a taphonomy of our social landscapes and strip back the intensifications (social ontologies, dogma, identities, build worlds) and see how they fossilise themselves: https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/divining-the-gap
④ "soul" https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/reading-the-relativistic-brain-how
⑤ oral history, millennia http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_9966-1
⑥ "My thesis is that women discovered “I” first"
(See also/ have you seen?) Ellen Dissanayake's stuff for an excellent frame on all this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Dissanayake More about special nurturing than feminine insight, in a negotiated multi-modal fitness landscape, raising empathically children into specialness and then breaking them with the reality principle without creating a psychopath/narcissists takes some doing... [[[[ much of the moral/worlding urge I go on about is geared to work policing non-empathic narcissists who break the cross-insurance of hunter-gatherer success paterns (Given Trump/Putin/Boris Johnson et al... we are currently not policing them very well) (multi-modal = where other animal species have one or two niches, humans exploit at least two and negotiate who does what, I suspect the crux you are pointing out has more to do with this being done more successfully allowing a quicker response time to change and so expansion into new geographic zones. Even before this doubles down into economies and stratified societies)
⑦ Epistemic status: me? about the same, I like to generate poetic rumination on the theme but...
⑧ I seemed to have missed Michael Corballis, will chase he is “certain” I suspect we are all wrong on these guesses, either way.
⑨ I’ve begun interrogating the I/we assumptions in ‘teh’ west at https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/games-in-the-hide-of-our-names (I’ll add here that ‘We’ is not prior to ‘I’).
⑩ “But these arguments are scattered across posts,” LOL
⑪ My how we load (double-down) on some pronouns and not other at times (why are we dicussing the plural you more)
______________________
⑫ What makes us human?
ⓐ stories need no accuracy because their primary power lies in organising, and negotiating that organising, those groups (of I’s or not-I or we-s or us-I) who do not even try to organise themselves are less likely to survive, this is why we have no organ for truth (maybe one for lies but that is another story) we just do stuff and feel we should, because there can be no iteration (routine or learning) with out starting the journey with a single (mist-)step.
Perhaps the I is a mistep.
⑬ Recursion is useful
yes
ⓐ “But Humans aren’t computers” again see https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/reading-the-relativistic-brain-how at least as a re-framer [ power of the first (mis-)step??] (I mention “I am in a strange loop” in introducing their book)
ⓑ Terrence Deacon is good on a non-Chomskyan non Steven-Pinker Language Acquisition Device (LAD) (black-box recursion). For what its worth I think this is the Janus dance of consciousness per se, so this power-up focussing on the “I” is great, but the “I” might be just an outcome of that doubling-down recursively (in a good way). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrence_Deacon
© I had a blog for a while riffing on the monomyth, using the Hans Christian Anderson story of Thumbelina as a contra-myth. The monomyth is just a hunter’s story, (there and back again, successfully connecting three vectors of movmeent, and retuning into balance) leaving out the other side of the paleolithic negotiating side, the gathering movement, which we see in Thumbelina as one damn WTF moment and circumstance after another.
Consciousness is a series of WTF moments that dance on the threshold…. — as I mentioned before
I’ve a side project on the seven sisters, excellent exhibition :
Neale, Margo and National Museum of Australia (Canberra). Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters : [Exhibition, Canberra, National Museum of Australia, 15 September 2017 - 25 February 2018 and Travelling, 2017.] ISBN 978-1-921953-29-3
This song line moves across Australia (the entire continent that is ) from West to East. Compare that to your Roman Empire maps at greatest extent. Across not just languages but language groups. Who needs a imperial government to generate a continental wide culture and negotiated world??
A nice coin too https://www.ramint.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020/Media_Release/2020-1-coloured-fine-silver-star-dreaming_the-seven-sisters-uncirculated-coin_rev.jpg
Weak EToC
See Dissanyake for another frame on this discussion.
I am beginning to repeat myself so I’ll lay off for now on the point by point responses.
_________final thoughts________
It might be, at your inflection point ~59-60K years ago, cultures could maintain and create better ‘I’s because they became better parents, and not that the ‘I’s first appeared fully formed like Athena from her father’s thigh.
I.E. what the primatologists and evolutionary anthropologists put forward (like de Waals). I think they are on the money. With Dissanyake on how it is done.
That we finally should on others, and in this way we can better police the non-empathic narcissists and pscyhopaths, and this lead to greater organisation capabilites, recursively, in organising the world by way of rasing better ‘I’s, a legacy that stratified societies have begun frittering away by raising structures that reward and double-down on promoting narcissism. (Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World)
Narcissists in a sense have no I, because they are the world, much more than just the center of it. They emotional toddlers for whom the reality principle (recognising there are other ‘I’s out there) has never been accessible (parental failure or biological impossibility --- e.g. psychopaths).
One can put it the other way too. Narcissists have no world, because they only have their I.
Being able to negotiated that I/world/I and world/I/World healthily is proabably more key than having as I per se.
The rest of us dance our consciousness like Janus on the threshld between inside me and outside me, between you and me, between us and them, between my body and the dirt, in a multi-modal range of movements (hunting/gathering/teching recursively) across a hyper-dimensional socially negotiated/constructed world united by the seven sisters above us. Between the I and the world we shouldily dream into place