Herakles, Adam, and Krishna were initiated in the snake cult at Göbekli Tepe

Though the serpent bit his heel, he crushed it's skull

Hercules, John Singer Seargent (1921). Hercules’ second labor was to slay the Lernaean Hydra.

Homo Sapiens have been around for about 200,000 years but didn’t do much for the first 185,000 or so. At the end of the Ice Age, there was a “revolution of symbols,” as archeologist Jacques Cauvin calls it. Then, soon after, agriculture popped up in a dozen civilizations worldwide. (Surprisingly, the academic consensus holds this was independent each time; cultural diffusion is really unpopular.)

Agriculture started about 12,000 years ago. In the grand scheme of things, that is not so long ago. Some cognates are that old, as well as many myths. Our current myths—particularly the fundamental and ancient—can help us understand the symbolic innovations 12,000 years ago. I have outlined such a theory-of-everything in the Eve Theory of Consciousness. This post is more modest. I may have discovered a phrase used during initiation at Göbekli Tepe, the first temple.

The Historical Genesis

In the Snake Cult of Consciousness, I interpreted Genesis as making a claim. The text says the story is from the Agricultural Revolution. Remember God’s words when casting Adam from the Garden of Eden:

Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food

Genesis 3: 17-19

Mid-12th century Italian Mural

According to Genesis, there was a religious innovation involving snakes just before agriculture. In fact, we find that in Göbekli Tepe. It was built by those at the vanguard of the agricultural revolution, and it has twice as many snakes carved in it as any other animal. It’s a surprising thing to get right. How did the authors of Genesis know that snakes were such a big part of the religious experience 9,000 years earlier? The simplest answer is that Judaism is an unbroken cultural chain back to Göbekli Tepe. This is not such a wild claim. Many comparative mythologists have made phylogenies of snake myths and creation myths that include Genesis and extend back to the Ice Age.

If the Judeo-Christian creation myth is so old, then other details are likely of Neolithic provenance. Besides Adam, God made promises to Eve and the Serpent. He tells Eve that childbirth will be painful and that she will be subservient to Adam. This reads more as a justification for social organization than a prediction, so we’ll skip that.

In Genesis 3:15, God promises the snake, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” Here is Caravaggio’s depiction of Jesus and Mary fulfilling that prophecy:

Virgin and Child with Saint Anne

The phrase could be a generic “Bad snake! You’ve really done it now, a pox on your children!” but the Jews who committed the oral tradition to writing understood it as a sacred knowledge that stretched back to the beginning of time. Have you ever heard debates on the Talmud? The words were chosen carefully. So I propose we look for a child of Eve with his foot on the head of a serpent at Göbekli Tepe.

The Pole Star

The most interesting objects in the sky, roughly in order, are:

1. The Sun

2. The Moon

3. Venus

4. Sirius

5. Polaris

The first four are the brightest objects in the sky; the fifth is interesting for an entirely different reason. Once humans started using the stars to navigate and keep track of the seasons, they would notice there was one star around which everything else rotated, the pole star. Today that is Polaris, but the earth’s rotation is like a wobbling top over long time spans. There is a procession of the axis, which points to a different star every few millennia. 

At 10,000 BC (12 kya), Iota Herculis was the pole star

When Göbekli Tepe was constructed 11,600 years ago, the pole star was Herakle’s left foot (near the -10,000 label), which is being bit by a serpent. Both constellations can be seen in this illustration:

Draco bites Heracles

What are the odds that this would happen by chance? There are about 5,000 visible stars in the night sky. Let’s be generous and say one of those is going to represent the foot of a half-god half-man being bit by a serpent. Then it’s a one-in-5,000 chance that story will occupy the prime real estate of the pole star. More generously, one could only count stars as bright as Iota Herculis, which is 411.

One-in-411 is very unlikely, but I’m not feeling generous. Like Adam, Herakles occupies a liminal space between mortality and immortality. In the vast universe of possible mythic ideas, it is not a foregone conclusion that a snake will bite such a hero on the heel, and that will be included in one of the 88 recognized constellations. If you put a monkey on a typewriter with keys for story elements, do you expect one of the first 88 random stories to be such a close match? Would it take more like 1,000 tries? A million? If so, then the odds of that story being included in the constellations and that specific star being the pole star are vanishingly small. But, of course, this is a subjective claim about how unlikely that story is. Maybe there is a module in our brain for stepping on snakes.

The major uncertainty is if the constellations were recognized 11,600 years ago at Göbekli Tepe. To form a prior, we can look for the shelf-life of other constellations. Is there precedence for static meaning since the end of the Ice Age? Well, there are correspondences between Babylonian and Chinese astrology, which implies some connection in the deep past. Similarly, variants of the Cosmic Hunt myth are found from North Africa to the Americas, where similar constellations represent similar characters. Finally, the Pleiades star cluster represents seven sisters in cultures worldwide, even though only six stars are visible. This implies there is a common origin. The earliest representations of the constellation are in shamanic cave art complexes going back 21,000 and 17,000 years in France.

So, it’s reasonable that astrological and mythic knowledge could survive 8,000 years from Göbekli Tepe and be remembered by ancient Greeks and Hebrews. The congruence of the heel-on-head theme makes that exceedingly likely. The following section argues Herakles fits with Genesis and Göbekli Tepe in other surprising ways, making it less likely the three are independent.

Herakles

Hercules fights the Lernaean Hydra. Italian terra cotta plaque from the Roman period, 1st century AD

Herakles is one of the most celebrated heroes in Greek mythology. Son of Zeus and a mortal woman, he is a victim of Hera’s rage from infancy. Angry at Zeus’s infidelity, she sends two vipers to kill Herakles in his crib, which he strangles. As a man, he must perform 12 labors. Some say to prove he was worthy of becoming a god. Others say for atonement after Hera drove him mad, causing him to kill his wife and children. The labors are impossible tasks he accomplishes through bravery and cunning—slaying hydras, wrestling lions, and seducing Amazons. Classicist Walter Burkert argues that these are hunter-gatherer themes that were handed down from Ice Age Shamanism¹.

The penultimate labor is to steal an apple of immortality from Hera’s garden. After succeeding, she transformed the dragon into the constellation that bites Herakle’s heel². There are apples from a woman, eternal life, forbidden fruit, and a snake in a tree. The constellation immortalizing this moment features the heel of Herakles on a serpent’s head. There are many reasons to think this shares a common root with Genesis. Framing this statistically will be left as an exercise for the reader. Until then, I simply ask: how do you like them apples?

But in fact, the labor that best matches heel-on-serpent is the second. In it, Herakles battles the Lernaean Hydra, which wraps its coils around his foot and leg. Hence, the Roman depiction above and this Greek piece below:

Lerna Greece, 2nd century BC. Marble relief of Heracles and the Hydra of Lerna.

I can’t find a text that specifies Herakles kneeling on the hydra, but it is part of the imagery. Here is another Roman piece, this time from Spain, where the hydra is depicted as a woman-headed serpent crowned with a ring of six smaller serpents.

3rd century AD, Valencia, Spain

The mural is reminiscent of Medusa, which we’ll come back to. It’s also quite a close match with the constellation Herakles, which the Greeks knew as “The Kneeling One.” Recall that below his constellation is Draco, on whose head he would have been crouched.

From Urania's Mirror, published in 1824. Herakles holds the golden apples he stole from the Hesperides. Sister constellation Cerberus is depicted as a three-headed snake. Ras Algethi is Arabic for “Head of the Kneeler,” reflecting a Babylonian root.

The examples of Herakles atop the hydra are legion. I’ve tucked a few into this footnote³, but I don’t want to belabor the point. I propose the original Herakles had a dramatic conflict with a serpent (and women), which fractured into many different encounters over thousands of years of retelling. This ur-serpent became the vipers in his cradle, the Lernaean Hydra, Ladon guarding the apple in the garden, Cerberus in the underworld, and the venom-soaked cloak that eventually killed him. The final labor presents the clearest vision of the spiritual significance of the clash. In it, he must go to Hell and defeat Cerberus in unarmed combat.

In preparation, Herakles sought initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries⁴. I’ve often written about their importance, content, and ancient provenance. It was said to have been passed down from when Zeus made the world and to explain how man was civilized. The bullroarer, a sacred instrument, was used in the Mysteries at Eleusus and Göbekli Tepe; physical evidence links the two.

Achieving altered states of consciousness is basic to shamanism, and this would have applied to the skull cult⁵ at Göbekli Tepe. The 12th labor is a perfect death and rebirth sequence in which he fights his inner demons. After receiving the Mysteries, Herakles enters Hades and finds Medusa. However, she is a mere phantom, and he proceeds to find Cerberus. He then wrangles the three-headed dog with his bare hands, sustaining injuries from the beast’s dragon-headed tale.

It’s unclear why Göbekli Tepe even exists. Why did nomadic hunter-gatherers invest so much time, energy, and organization into stone buildings they would not use most of the year? The going explanation is that it was a regional rendevous point, and many tribes would gather together periodically. Fitting this to the Herakles story, the first ten labors are acts of bravery. Maybe they could have been part of the preparation for the gathering. Or perhaps held as preparatory games before the main event. Young men could compete to bring the biggest boar to the feast or run the fastest in the race. Then would come the Mysteries.

Most of you are here because of the Snake Cult of Consciousness, where I argued the earliest male initiations involved gorging on apples, an effective antivenom, and then tripping on snake venom. The final two labors are such a good match! I’d tentatively like to add something about man’s best friend. If you’re more interested in the heel-on-head motif, skip to the next section on Krishna.

The pillars at Göbekli Tepe are thought to represent initiates, and they are wearing loin clothes that look like fox pelts. In the image below, hands are carved just above the waist belt.

From National Geographic The Birth of Religion

Herakle’s first labor was killing the Nemean lion; after that, he wore its pelt wherever he went. But his final labor—the one I think took place at the temple—involved Cerberus. His snake attributes are accounted for, but I wonder if the dog/fox/lion aspect was meant to symbolize the initiate themselves⁶. They would enter an altered state of consciousness and be confronted with themselves, something they would have to subdue in single unarmed combat. It’s quite a good metaphor to describe a psychedelic trip to drug-naive hunter-gatherers⁷. Further, dogs that guard the spirit world are one of mythology's most widespread and researched themes. It’s documented back to the Ice Age. (Recommended: Dan Davis’s video on this.) And, because dogs were domesticated fairly recently, that motif must have spread with them.

We are lucky enough to have Willem Dafoe playing the master of ceremonies at such an initiation among the Vikings in The Northman. It’s worth a watch. Notice the initiate acting the dog and that the sacred knowledge is said to come from women.

Before initiation, a neolithic boy could navigate and tell the season by looking to Iota Herculis, the pole star. It situated him in time and space. At initiation, he would be taught about the constellation Herakles. Even more, he would battle the dragon himself, conquering death. He would experience the spirit realm in a way he never had before and understand there was a symbolic layer of life. Henceforth, looking to the stars, he would remember the night the master of ceremonies promised, “The serpent may bruise your heel, but you will crush his skull.” More than a navigation tool, the pole star became the Axis Mundi, situating Man in the cosmic and social order.

I think these ceremonies are the human species coming to terms with the symbolic nature of life. This is why civilization started all at once about 15,000 years ago. A version of this snake cult initiation was preserved in the Eleusinian Mysteries, where snake venom was likely used as a hallucinogen. Fittingly, the beer brewed at Göbekli Tepe had particularly good antivenom properties. Further, the Greeks were clear their Mysteries were about how Zeus made Man and that they went back to the beginning of time. Given the bullroarers and the Herakles constellation, they at least hailed back to Göbekli Tepe.

Moving from speculation about function back to the heel-to-head motif, one way to sanity-check the connection between Bronze Age Mediterranean cultures and Göbekli Tepe is to frame the question in the reverse. If heel-to-head was important in Neolithic religion, the motif should be highly diffused now. Can it be found outside the Mediterranean?

Krishna

Krishna dances on the Kaliya naga. Vintage print from a Jain publication

Krishna is a central figure in Hindu mythology. Born as the eighth son of Devaki and Vasudeva, Krishna's life is marked by miraculous events and divine interventions, reflecting his role as an avatar of Vishnu, one of the principal deities of Hinduism tasked with preserving the universe. One of the most beloved stories from Krishna's youth involves his encounter with Kaliya Naga, a poisonous serpent residing in the Yamuna River. The river's waters had become toxic due to the serpent's venom, endangering the lives of the people and animals of Vrindavan, where Krishna was raised. Taking it upon himself to rid the river of this menace, young Krishna confronted Kaliya, leaping into the Yamuna and engaging the serpent in a dramatic battle. Displaying his divine prowess, Krishna eventually danced on the hoods of Kaliya, subduing the serpent without killing it.

Krishna’s infancy parallels that of Herakles. Hera sent two snakes to kill Herakles when he was a babe in his crib. Compare that to Krishna’s welcome to the world.

The demoness Putana was sent by Kamsa, the tyrannical king, who was prophesied to be killed by the eighth child of his sister Devaki. Fearing his impending doom, Kamsa sought to kill all newborns who could pose a threat to him. Krishna was miraculously saved and transported to Gokul, where he was raised by his foster parents, Nanda and Yashoda.

Putana, known for her magical abilities to assume different forms, transformed into a beautiful woman and entered Gokul. She planned to kill infant Krishna by feeding him poisoned milk. She smeared her breast with deadly poison and took Krishna to nurse him. However, Krishna, being divine, saw through her disguise and accepted her offering. As he sucked the milk, he also sucked out her life force, ultimately causing her death.

This story also contains elements of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy, was almost put to death for revealing that snake venom and breast milk were used in the secret rituals. Ovid’s Metamorphosis tells us Herakles suckled on the breasts of Hera, the same who tried to kill him many times with snakes, including as an infant⁸.

There are also elements of Jesus’s birth. The Wise Men from the East came to worship Jesus, the prophesied Messiah. King Herod got word and ordered all male children under two years of age to be killed just to be safe. Joseph, Jesus’s earthly adopted father, was warned in a dream and escaped with his family to Egypt.

Such far-flung similarities were recognized in antiquity⁹. In the second century AD, after returning from travels to India, the Greek historian Arrian said Herakles was worshipped there¹⁰. The paper Heracles in the East: The Diffusion and Transformation of His Image in the Arts of Central Asia, India, and Medieval China, explains:

“Heracles became Vajrapani, guardian of Sakyamuni. There is a wealth of material and studies on the subject... to explain how Heracles went from being a purely classical Greek figure to being a guardian god in the Buddhist pantheon.”

Wikipedia adds that Vajrapani is often depicted with a third eye¹¹ and treading on personages wrapped in snakes.

Indian religion, in turn, had influence in more distant parts of the world. In an X thread, anon connects Herakles to Krishna and Balrama using examples from Indonesia. It concludes: “Greek Hercules, Indian Balrama, Roman Iorgovan, Persian Barham & many other Demigods of different cultures were the same person.” Perhaps! I offer the heel-to-head motif as another tool to check.

Mafdet

There aren’t any compelling images of Mafdet online, so I used MidJourney

Thus far, all of the heroes have been male, and the women have been on Team Snake. Hera sent the vipers. The hydra had a woman’s face. Herakles hallucinated Medusa in Hades. Eve collaborated with Lucifer. And Putana was a trained baby-assassin. However, if we go back far enough, women would not be the villains. I think women invented the snake rituals to help men, but those stories were later adapted to suit the patriarchal Bronze Age. Despite this, we still have clues of women’s original role; Herakles means “glorified by Hera” even though she is hellbent on his destruction, and Eve is the Mother of All Living despite introducing death. Mafdet is interesting because her story was carved in stone before the Bronze Age and may reflect an earlier tradition.

Mafdet is an Egyptian goddess who was popular at the beginning of the Dynastic Period, about 5,000 years ago. She was the deification of legal justice, with auxiliary responsibilities of protecting the pharaoh’s chambers from venomous creatures. Fittingly, her avatars are the mongoose and the snake. The mongoose has adaptations on the brain’s nicotinic acetylcholine receptor, which venom binds to, making them resistant to venom. Tobacco uses the same pathway, which is why you never see mongooses smoking. They’re immune. Cats, on the other hand, rely on their superior reaction time to avoid snakes and cigarettes.

The Pyramid Texts date back to 2,500 BC, making them some of the oldest religious documents in the world. They contain anti-snake spells a deceased Pharoah (in this case, Unas) can use to call upon Mafdet. Her signature move seems to be placing a paw on the head of the snake:

“This foot of mine [which I put on you] is the foot of Mafdet; this hand of mine which I lay on you is the hand of Mafdet. . . . O snake, crawl away!”

Faulkner, Pyramid Texts, 128-29

“The panther-cat (Mafdet) springs on the neck of the serpent She-who-brought-her-gift (poison).
She repeats it (the attack) on the neck of the serpent holy-head.
Who is he who will be spared?
Unas is who will be spared.”

Pyramid Text 438

That WWE move, on top of her feline features, draws parallels to Herakles, who wore a lion’s skin. Let me know if you find any other heroes with their heels on the head of a serpent. I can only devote so much time to trawling the Pyramid Texts.

Conclusion

The argument in this essay is straightforward.

1. Many myths, constellations, and rituals have lasted 10,000 years

2. Some myths, constellations, and rituals have probably lasted from Göbekli Tepe

3. Genesis, Herakles, and the Eleusinian Mysteries are good candidates to go back to Göbekli Tepe because they are known to be ancient, even in antiquity

   1. Genesis and the Eleusinian Mysteries claim to be passed down from the beginning of time, or at least from the Agricultural Revolution

   2. Herakle’s labors include elements of Ice Age hunter-gather shamanism

4. When Göbekli Tepe was constructed, the pole star was right where a snake bites Herakle’s heel, as predicted by Genesis. As at Eleusis, bullroarers were used in their rituals. All four are woven together in ways that are hard to explain by chance.

5. Therefore, Genesis, Herakles, and the Mysteries hail back to the same culture at the cusp of the Agricultural Revolution. “He shall crush thy skull” was an anti-snake phrase in Stone Age initiations.

The kneejerk reaction to a project like this is to assume it is fanciful. Many have tried to bend the Bible to their vision of the world, and many have offered grand theories about the Agricultural Revolution. Putting those together seems like it would compound the biases.

But if you think statistically, the method is quite promising. Rituals are more important to culture than floods, no matter how big. Many cultures remember the sea level change following the Ice Age, so we should expect memories of Neolithic religion. Comparative mythologists argue a phylogeny of snake myths stretches back 10,000 or even 100,000 years. Therefore, the snake-fighting heroes recorded in antiquity—Herakles, Adam, Krishna, Mafdet—can help us understand the snake cult at Göbekli Tepe less than eight thousand years earlier. This could be as granular as discovering phrases from the original initiation: the snake may bruise your heel, but you shall crush his skull.

Others make similar claims¹². After writing most of this essay, I stumbled on the blog CogniArchae, which connects Herakles to Gobekli Tepe and the pole star 12,000 years ago. The main argument is a concordance between the 12 labors and the 12 zodiac signs in Chinese astrology. The first labor is the slaying of the Nemean lion, which corresponds with Leo in the zodiac. It was the age of Leo 12,000 years ago. Additionally, they point out the pole star was Iota Herculis at the time. Hard to be original on the internet; talk about being scooped. However, the EToC framing answers the million-dollar question of why these memes have dispersed so far and been preserved for so long. Humans were beginning to understand inner life, and those ideas spread like wildfire. For a more thorough investigation, check out my pieces, the Snake Cult of Consciousness and the Eve Theory of Consciousness.

Bonus MidJourney

AI art is too much fun with stuff like this, so here’s a tour of what AI thinks of the latent space we explored. I used the prompt, “The serpent shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.::1 Hercules standing on a dragon::1 Krishna dancing on the hoods of the Kaliya Naga::1 Neolithic initiate fights the viper of Göbekli Tepe::1” Each “::” indicates a paragraph, which MidJourney interprets in an isolated fashion. The result is a ton of variety in the images it dreams up.

These last two are what they call in the business ithyphallic.

1. The Herakles story was ancient even to the Ancient Greeks. Strong parallels in Hebrew and Sumerian myths suggest an ancient root in the Near East. Classicist Walter Burkert argues it goes back much further:

The core of the Heracles complex, however, is probably considerably older still: the capture of edible animals points to the time of the hunter culture, and the relation to the world beyond with cattle of the sun, a red island, and man-eaters probably belongs to shamanistic hunting magic — something which also seems to be reflected in the cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic. It is the shaman who is able to enter the land of the dead and the land of the gods: Heracles fetches Cerberus, the hound of Hades, from the underworld, even if only for a short time, and from the garden of the gods in the distant West he wins the golden apples — a fruit which can be interpreted as the fruit of immortality.

Greek Religion, Walter Burkert, 1985 (page 209)

That would put the origin at least 10,000 years before the Greeks. It’s a long time to last, but such claims are common in comparative mythology. For example, the Rainbow Serpent is recognized by Aboriginal people across Australia; hence, it is often considered ~50,000 years old. Similarly, Asian and Native American shamanism bear resemblances that may go back to the Ice Age.

2. The Greeks had multiple accounts of the origins of the constellation Draco. Eratosthenes identified Draco as Ladon, the dragon who guarded the golden apples. Though Lucifer is not much a guard but more of an apple salesman, the association of many other elements of the story implies a connection between the two.

In other origin stories, Draco fought on the side of the Titans in the Gigantomachy, the war where the Olympians defeated the Elder gods. After being defeated by Athena, she placed him in the stars. Herakles does not kill Draco, though he is pivotal in the Gigantomachy. Perhaps this detail was lost to time. Herakles fights snakes from the cradle to the grave. It would be strange if the one biting his foot had nothing to do with him.

3. Herakles battles the hydra. From the Habsburg’s palace in Vienna.

Villa Farnesina, Rome. The Loggia of Galatea. Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra. Cancer. Italy.

HERACLES AND THE HYDRA. Attic black-figured vase, 500 B.C.

Hercules and the Hydra, Pollaiuolo, Antonio, 1460

Roman mosaic of Hercules slaying the 9-headed Lernaean Hydra, his second labour, from the Labours of Hercules mosaic in the House of the Labours of Hercules, 1st century AD, Volubilis, Northern Morocco.

Hercules slaying the Hydra. Detail of an Italian colored woodcut title-page, 1550.

4. Classicist Carl Ruck says the Lernaean Hydra is, in fact, a metaphor for the hallucinogenic substance used in the Mysteries: “The mythical Hydra was a zoomorphism of a psychoactive drug that figured in the very ancient Mystery rites that were still being enacted at the sacred lake well into Roman times.”

5. Perhaps hinted at in the 11th labor. Herakles went to Libya “where Antzos the son of Poseidén reigned, who was wont to kill all strangers by forcing them to wrestle with him, and to hang their skulls on the temple of his sire.” from The mythology of ancient Greece and Italy, Thomas Kneightly, 1906

6. Interestingly, there is also a serpent-dog connection in the second labor. In Euripides tragedy Herakles, he says Herakles “seared each deadly hydra head of Lerna's thousand-headed hound.” The hydra is sometimes depicted with canine heads. The inverse is true of Cerberus, who is sometimes depicted with serpent heads.

7. The EToC interpretation is that this moment was about pushing a boy’s theory of mind to its limit. A boy would know no mind as well as his dog’s, so that may be a good place to start. Pretend to be the dog. Howl at the moon, lap up the potion the priestess has prepared, look in the mirror. There is more to you than an animal. What’s this self-reflective inner life you can also experience? It’s what makes you as the gods, knowing good and evil.

8. For a detailed explanation, see Carl Ruck’s The Beast Initiate: The Lycanthropy of Heracles. It also develops the idea that Herakles thought he was a dog/lion, which is also remembered in the PIE warrior cult initiations. Ruck and I came to that conclusion independently.

9. From an explanatory note in the 1893 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses:

“As Ovid has here cursorily taken notice of the labours of Hercules, we may observe, that it is very probable that his history is embellished with the pretended adventures of many persons who bore his name, and, perhaps, with those of others besides. Cicero, in his ‘Treatise on the Nature of the Gods,’ mentions six persons who bore the name of Hercules; and possibly, after a minute examination, a much greater number might be reckoned, many nations of antiquity having given the name to such great men of their own as had rendered themselves famous by their actions. Thus, we find one in Egypt in the time of Osiris, in Phœnicia, among the Gauls, in Spain, and in other countries. Confining ourselves to the Grecian Hercules, surnamed Alcides, we find that his exploits have generally been sung of by the poets, under the name of the Twelve Labours; but, on entering into the detail of them, we find them much more numerous.”

He also quotes The mythology of ancient Greece and Italy, by Thomas Kneightly, 1906:

We may perceive, by the twelve tasks, that the astronomical theory was applied to the mythus of the hero, and that he was regarded as a personification of the Sun, which passes through the twelve signs of the Zodiac…

In his view of the life of Hercules, it is a mythus of extreme antiquity and great beauty, setting forth the ideal of human perfection, consecrated to the weal of mankind, or rather, in its original form, to that of his own nation. This perfection, according to the ideas of the heroic age, consists in the greatest bodily strength, united with the advantages of mind and soul recognised by that age. Such a hero is, he says, a man; but these noble qualities in him are of divine origin. He is, therefore, the son of the king of the Gods by a mortal mother.

10

“The Hercules who penetrated so far, the Indians tell us, was a native of their country. He is particularly worshipped by the Suraseni, who have two great cities, Methora and Cleisoborus, and the navigable river Jobares, passes through their territories. This Hercules, as Megasthenes asserts, and the Indians themselves assure us, uses the same habit with the Theban Hercules" Arrian, Indica, Chapter viii, Eberhard (1885). 

11. Treatment of the Third Eye motif found in EToC v3.

12. One such is this tour agency relating Göbekli Tepe to the Legend of the Shahmaran, a Turkish mythic snake-woman who lives in a cave. Among other things, she teaches a young man the history of Mankind. She ends up being captured and eaten. “As I am about to die, I will give you my secret. Whoever eats my tail will attain wisdom beyond measure and long life but whoever eats my head will die.”  Reminiscent of the two trees in the Garden of Eden.

Citing a tour company leaves some rigor to be desired, but surprisingly few people think about how Göbekli Tepe may be relevant to modern culture, and this is the only version of that theory I could find in writing. Separately, a Turkish reader reached out to me about Shahmaran after the Snake Cult piece. If the Snake Cult was about receiving Mysteries, Shahmaran seems to be part of it. An exciting part of having this blog is other people making those connections.