I posited the Snake Cult of Consciousness because it seems plausible that creation myths are distant memories of when humans started to grapple with our condition. These insights became institutionalized by women in their Snake Cult, or so I speculated.
Which is all well and good, but I needed to find a cult in the real world that spread just before the Neolithic, used snake venom as an entheogen, revealed secrets concerning how man became ensouled, and was founded by women. This sounds like an impossible task, but the worldwide bullroarer complex delivers on all fronts. After collecting thousands of data points, my best guess is that it spread from Ice Age Europe.
A Mediterranean Mystery
The founders of Western Civilization thought there was nothing as beautiful as whatever lay at the heart of the various mystery cults that populated the Mediterranean. The cults killed those that divulged their secrets, so we can only piece them together by the hints they allowed in exoteric myths. The Orphics, for example, say humans were made from the ashes of Dionysus, the twice-born.
Zeus came to Persephone as a serpent, and she bore him Dionysus. Jealous Hera sent the Titans to kill the child god. They lured him with toys: apples, a top, a mirror, and a bullroarer, before tearing him limb from limb, cooking, and eating him. When Zeus found out, he reduced the Titans to ashes. From their remains arose humanity. But the Titans had eaten Dionysus, so something of the god survives within us.
These toys were used in the rites themselves. Clement of Alexandria names them among the “symbols of this mystic rite” whose true meaning would be revealed. We have good reason to believe that in the rites initiates reenacted mythic scenes, becoming the gods of old, dying and being reborn. In fact, one standard reading says the art of theater grew out of these cultic practices.
Mother Right
Johann Bachofen first proposed the idea of a primordial matriarchy in 1861, suggesting that the cult of Dionysus was pivotal in the overthrow of women. “Dionysus appears at the head of the great combatants of mother-right,” and his religion brought “a new turn” to the struggle between the old promiscuity and Demeter’s ordered rule (pp. XXII–XXIII).
Now, Bachofen wrote before The Ascent of Man, before carbon dating, and in the infancy of science itself. There is a lot that he takes too far. However, he was also writing before anthropologists had visited much of the world. When these Europeans explored the Amazon, Outback, or Congo, they invariably found men saying their bullroarer mystery cult—often the center of ritual life—originally belonged to women. Curious. How did he get that right?
Around the World
I have collected over 1,500 bullroarer records in what aims to be an exhaustive atlas. Look at the 520 red dots, which correspond to “restricted” i.e., guarded by a tribal or mystery cult initiation. 354 of these bar women and many of those, strangely, say women originally controlled the cult or the bullroarer. It is such a coincidence that many specialists have said there must be a common root to all of these practices. Having read a thousand of these, it is hard to overstate what a bizarro world we would have to be living in for it all to be a coincidence. Only so many cult scenarios in the simulation?
Dating the Dream Time
You can learn a lot about the nature of the original bullroarer cult by comparing notes across continents. Common themes include snakes, women, revolt, death and rebirth, re-enacting the mythic past. But this cannot reveal when or where the Snake Cult began. The bullroarer as an artifact allows us to look into the past; here are all the catalogued roarers more than 15,000 years old:
You may have noticed they are all in Europe. The oldest samples (mostly in Central Europe) are not identified with confidence; they are fragmentary or could be pendants. The surest samples are limited to Basque country starting about 17,000 years ago. In the Neolithic, bullroarers are found globally (plotted below). Therefore, I think the route went something like:
The archeological record supports a root in Europe. Of course, science is never case closed and there could be older bullroarers elsewhere. But what we’ve uncovered thus far points to Europe. Further, such a root makes sense because 1) this was the most culturally productive place in the world at the time 2) we already accept a similar route of diffusion for the domesticated dog.
Readers have long asked for my timeline; it goes something like:
Symbolic thought starting ~50 kya, as evidenced by occasional crude figurative art. There could have been quite a long tail before then; 100 kya would not change the model.
Reflective self-awareness (the symbol “I”) starting in the Upper Paleolithic (40-12 kya), though likely extremely fragmentary and gendered (cf. Venus figurines). Admixture with Neanderthals may have helped.
The Snake Cult develops ~20 kya in Europe and spreads worldwide around the end of the Ice Age like a software patch.
There is plenty of uncertainty. The bullroarer may be a “late” addition to the Snake Cult which is itself far more ancient. Or, both it and the Snake Cult may go back to the Gravettian or Aurignacian. This would make worldwide diffusion trivially possible because the dog was domesticated no earlier than the Gravettian.
You can read an expanded version of this article on bullroarer.org, which includes more discussion of bullroarer cults globally as well as of the recent proposal for an African root (d’Huy, 2025). Or, consider the fine-grained Ages of Man precipitated by the Snake Cult, which I discuss here:
