I also find the characterisation of snakes in mythology across the world fascinating, and I find your thesis here and in your earlier articles quite convincing.
I sometimes wonder about a couple of hard-to-understand references to snakes in the old Testament, Numbers 21 where the Lord said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” and Exodus 7 where the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “When Pharaoh says to you, ‘Perform a miracle,’ then say to Aaron, ‘Take your staff and throw it down before Pharaoh,’ and it will become a snake.” I think there must be more to understand in both these cases.
I also would like to understand more about the snake symbolism in Egyptian mythology, such as the snake god Nehebkau, and the so-called Uraeus or cobra on the front of the pharaoh’s crown, and the many snake-related images I’ve seen for myself in Egyptian tombs, which could be very informative in general, and perhaps in relation to your thesis.
Raising the snake on the pole may have been part of the tradition of Asherah, who was later rewritten as Eve. The New Testamanet also says that Christ on the cross represents a snake on a pole (I reference that in EToC v3).
The Egyptian hieroglyph for goddess is actually a serpent. And the mystery cult of Isis had a secret box, which may have contained grain and a snake.
Lots of interesting themes that emerge over and over.
Very interesting, thanks! Yes, Egyptian hieroglyphs I12, cobra, & I13, cobra with basket, are used to name the goddesses Wadjet and Nesret respectively, or as a determinative for any goddess. Probably more could be learnt from a close study of texts where these and the other goddesses are mentioned.
Specifically relevant I think to your ‘Primordial Matriarchy’ idea are the many Indian Tantric texts which indicate that Śakti, the active female principle, gives awareness of multiplicity to the passive male principle, Śiva … which is then depicted as the god Śiva, with a snake around his body.
Hi Andrew, fascinating theory, thank you! Can you recommend a reference on what pre-sapient mental states must have been like? Your conjecture that they must have been essentially schizophrenic really intrigues me.
The classic text on this is Julian Jaynes' Bicameral Breakdown, and I think he gets a lot right. Jung's Archaic Man is also good. I have only skimmed it but Up from Eden by Ken Wilbur is another relevant text. Tim Crow's idea of a "Big Bang" of consciousness and psychosis may also interest you: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18502103/
In a modern population, my guess is the closest to the earlier mindset is the Piraha people described in most detail by Dan Everett in his book Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes. There are also a couple good docs on them.
What intrigues you about the relation to schizophrenia?
Excellent, thank you very much! I do not know anything about pre-sapience and little about schizophrenia, based only on the general stuff I was taught in med school almost 20 years ago, so this is going to sound ignorant. However, I do vividly remember many of these very unfortunate patients because of how strikingly aberrant their thinking was. Their loss of connection to reality and society was so profound it was wrenching and hard to forget. But emotions aside, it is difficult for me to imagine how anything socially stable could arise out of such a grossly disordered substrate. To my uneducated eye, if the baseline, pre-sapient mental state was schizophrenic then it would be a social anti-foundation. Alas, I need to actually study this topic before opining, so thank you again for the detailed reading list!
I've been heavily influenced by your articles on the Snake Cult hypothesis and have been using it as a foundation for speculative fiction. One framework I've found complementary is Joseph Jordania's hypothesis on the evolution of music.
Briefly: Jordania argues that when our ancestors moved out of the trees, they developed the precursors of modern music as collective display — both to deter predators and to aggressively scavenge from them. This explains a number of peculiarities in the fossil record. Early hominids appear to become better-fed, slower, less physically robust, and more conspicuous rather than more cryptic — all around the same time, and shortly before the acceleration of brain size in the human line. Jordania's hypothesis frames this as a new predator-defense and meat-acquisition strategy built on loud, coordinated group display.
The key mechanism is emotional contagion through collective display, and I think this fits the Snake Cult well. It may have built many of the neurological pathways that snake venom activates, and the pre-existing contagion machinery might have made relatively rare venom-exposure events far more transmissible as shared experience than they'd otherwise be — the collective substrate was already in place when the snake cult showed up to supply a new payload.
In the creative-writing context, I've been treating this as an interesting explanation for why humans are uniquely able to develop material culture. Crows, elephants, pigs, and other apes all have some degree of tool use, social structure, and strategy, and it isn't obvious that the traditional body-plan explanations (bipedalism, opposable thumbs, etc.) are upstream rather than downstream of whatever made hominids cognitively distinctive. If the pattern was Jordania's emotional contagion first, then increasing brain size and cultural learning, followed much later by the snake cult as catalyst, the arc of evolution is relatively clean. Any evo-psych hypothesis can be made to explain "everything," so take this with appropriate salt — but the combined sketch seems to me cleaner than either piece on its own.
Love to hear the Snake Cult is helpful with your writing; what is the premise of the story?
I'm familiar with Jordania via Simler (who also happens to be a Jaynes fan). In general I don't have strong opinions about the millions of years where human brain capacity expanded dramatically. The new abilities must have had a lot to do with social cognition. Linguists like Steven Pinker have laid out a lot of pre-recursive-language skills that may have selcted for modern human cognition, music being one of them.
One thing I've never seen explained is that the oldest musical instruments actually belong to Neanderthals. Now, we don't see full modern cognition until after mixing with Neanderthals, and I don't think that's just an accident. Likely they had some cognitive strengths that we didn't, and human culture emerged in the Upper Paleolithic out of that mixture.
>Crows, elephants, pigs, and other apes all have some degree of tool use, social structure, and strategy, and it isn't obvious that the traditional body-plan explanations (bipedalism, opposable thumbs, etc.) are upstream rather than downstream of whatever made hominids cognitively distinctive.
Don't some birds dance? Their songs are certainly distinctive.
I think the Jordania hypothesis is that human musicality serves a different function from most animals, with the collective defense aspects not being used by birds and most other animals with vocal mating displays. That is why a songbird wouldn't have the emotional contagion and battle trance, despite having superior vocal abilities compared to early hominids.
On my own story. The conceit I use is that the snake cult hypothesis was true, but more mystical than material. Psychedelic contact actually does produce contact with something objective, which is the self-report of virtually everyone who has ever used psychedelics.
The cosmology is that there is a constant broadcast that we filter from our attention, because we filter anything constant. When that filtering breaks down, with psychedelics being a relatively reliable example, we can perceive the Signal. The core problem is that by definition, when we are perceiving the Signal, something is wrong with our brains, so we also tend to hallucinate at the same time. In the Neolithic, the human range overlapped with a particular snake, the bites from this snake were of a good frequency for triggering semi-regular perception of the Signal, and this embedded itself in culture, with the Signal giving practical instructions which transformed culture into the Neolithic Revolution.
Once the culture had embedded the low-hanging fruit of the Signal's contact, actual contact became much less desirable, as it tended to involve psychedelics or comparably dangerous practices. The decline of Signal contact events, the incredible amount of folklore and mythology humans produce by default, and resistance to psychedelic research creates the gap of "we don't realize this happened in our history" that lets the timeline exist as an unknown part of our history.
I also expanded this concept with the Jordania ideas I mentioned. All animals can have perception of the Signal, but the human emotional contagion and battle trance instincts made us more likely to believe it when others made contact.
The more fantasy aspects are that the Minoans of Crete continued Signal contact for longer than most cultures, and reached higher sophistication in their methods. This led to a divergence point with an alternate timeline, which has less to do with the snake cult hypothesis elements. The alternate timeline diverges heavily, with extensive Signal contact and alternate magic/technology. I have more details, but the core ideas of the snake cult hypothesis are used here to combine "our archeologists aren't idiots" with "we missed practices we would consider 'magic' in modern fantasy terminology." This helps me create something I find interesting. The general style of your snake cult essays, looking at the out-of-favor frameworks in archeology, helped me build up the timeline style.
...also this is all back story to a weird magical game show that wizards from another dimension stage with people they kidnap from our world, but I love the contrast involved with the detailed world building and the trashy premise.
This is the third time I've read this magnificent thesis. I find it very convincing and absolutely fascinating. I also love your writing! I've told many people about your theory. Thank you!
I'd like it if you sent this over to David Roman, who does the History of Mankind substack, and get his take on it. Would be very interesting for both your subscribers (I follow you both).
Reaching out to him would probably be better coming from you! I just read his piece on Australia, which was quite nice, and would be helped along with a bit of snake cult diffusion.
Has someone thought about how maybe all those ancient cave paintings were made by children? They look quite like the stuff that a 5-year-old would draw. And I think I read somewhere if you add up all the offspring of Adam and Eve in the bible you end up 6k-7,6k years ago. I’m sold on the snake cult aswell, but where does one get the proper venom oder peptides to make my brain evolve into the next level ?
Cave drawings include many hand stencils or hand prints, which are often women and children. Maybe kids are more creative and so at that time and in that culture were more given to cave painting? Maybe it was more organized and seen as a rite of passage? We may never know
As for venom peptides, raising consciousness is the primary concern of religion, and they play with paleolithic grammar. Buddha received enlightment under a tree, shielded from a strom by a snake. Christ was lifted up on a cross, which is directly compared to Moses doing the same with a serpent. IMO best way to raise consciousness is the old paths right in front of us
Please be careful not to conflate the Neolithic Revolution with the Axial Age. They are two distinct step changes in human cognition, separated by thousands of years. The Eleusinian Mysteries were a feature of the Axial Age, and happened thousands of years after the changes of the Neolithic Revolution were fully disseminated. The Axial Age was less about developing 'consciousness' and more about empathy or a modern theory of mind.
It is likely that both changes were spread mimetically, and that they both used entheogens. It is possible that snake venom was one of the substances used (although I suspect that the Greeks had access to better things). But they are different phenomena.
I follow Joseph Campbell and his Atlas of World Mythology. Axial Revolution is a riff on the earlier themes.
Agree that Greeks likely also had better entheogens. My guess is venom would have mostly been grandfathered in. It's very interesting that it seems to still have been used, though.
Spend more time talking about more recent examples because we have more evidence. I try to make the case for Paleolithic and early Neolithic use in the longer Eve Theory of Consciousness
The shape/span of a human being from its conception until their death (in the direction of time as the fourth dimension) also resembles the shape of a snake. From a a shape of a sperm with its tail (ending in a singular point), through its development (three dimensional form we have at any singular point in time) it "grows in size", before it starts narrowing down again through old age. Upon ones death, the body also decomposes and ceases to exist in form and shape/indistinguishable from nature.
But the human snake also travels in space (traveling around our lovely planet), as much as it travels from one moment to another in time. If seen through this scope, humanity with all its constituents is just a collection of such four dimensional snake like formations squiggling, overlapping, and slithering on Earth (and its near vicinity in some, nowadays, not so rare cases).
This was the thought that I immediately was drawn while reading the original post, as well as this one, in the last couple of days.
This part: "I have consumed venom in many different occasions…at one time I died because of a snake bite at another time I have come alive." made me think of my interpretation of the many world interpretation of quantum mechanics.
You live on parallel branches based on the probability of an event occurring. In this specific brain you become like the Schrödinger's cat - dead in one branch and alive in another. How I would like to think that this works is that when you die in one branch, you merge back in the next locally closest branch - the branch where you survived. You cannot know a part of which branch you were initially, and it doesn't really matter.
Unless the branches are so far apart - I would like to theorize that in that case one experiences the "life flashing before your very eyes" as natures way to give you a "crash course" of the branch one is merging into. Again, if you were a part of that branch originally this is just a mind provoking experience, but necessary if you are now merging from a branch far far away. One could think of this as a way of "backtracking the graph into the next node where the person is alive".
I had some similar experiences to this and this is my way of explaining of what happened. Also trying to put things into equations - scientific rigor requires me to as a theoretical physicist.
This somehow connects to something I read in "When we cease to understand the world" - in many worlds there is only two main postulates: there is a universal function of the universe (1) that evolves as predicts the Schrödinger equation. Heisenberg's/Bohr's approach then got widely accepted, even though the Schrödinger equation of the wave function is "interdimensional" and/or could be applied also to other parallel worlds.
Just a mention of Mochizuki's inter universal Teichmüller theory whose geometry could be useful to described this, but have to wrap my head around this non-abelian "new mathematics" theory first.
The Jungian archetype or neuro module thesis is a fairly good explanation for why snakes so often appear in mythology. But why so often associated with consciousness? Further, there are a lot of worldwide mythological patterns that can't be explained without diffusion, such as the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades or the Bullroarer. Interestingly, the cluster of associations about snakes is often related to those other ideas that have better evidence of diffusion. I go over a few of them here: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/evidence-for-global-cultural-diffusion
I also find the characterisation of snakes in mythology across the world fascinating, and I find your thesis here and in your earlier articles quite convincing.
I sometimes wonder about a couple of hard-to-understand references to snakes in the old Testament, Numbers 21 where the Lord said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” and Exodus 7 where the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “When Pharaoh says to you, ‘Perform a miracle,’ then say to Aaron, ‘Take your staff and throw it down before Pharaoh,’ and it will become a snake.” I think there must be more to understand in both these cases.
I also would like to understand more about the snake symbolism in Egyptian mythology, such as the snake god Nehebkau, and the so-called Uraeus or cobra on the front of the pharaoh’s crown, and the many snake-related images I’ve seen for myself in Egyptian tombs, which could be very informative in general, and perhaps in relation to your thesis.
Raising the snake on the pole may have been part of the tradition of Asherah, who was later rewritten as Eve. The New Testamanet also says that Christ on the cross represents a snake on a pole (I reference that in EToC v3).
The Egyptian hieroglyph for goddess is actually a serpent. And the mystery cult of Isis had a secret box, which may have contained grain and a snake.
Lots of interesting themes that emerge over and over.
Very interesting, thanks! Yes, Egyptian hieroglyphs I12, cobra, & I13, cobra with basket, are used to name the goddesses Wadjet and Nesret respectively, or as a determinative for any goddess. Probably more could be learnt from a close study of texts where these and the other goddesses are mentioned.
Specifically relevant I think to your ‘Primordial Matriarchy’ idea are the many Indian Tantric texts which indicate that Śakti, the active female principle, gives awareness of multiplicity to the passive male principle, Śiva … which is then depicted as the god Śiva, with a snake around his body.
Hi Andrew, fascinating theory, thank you! Can you recommend a reference on what pre-sapient mental states must have been like? Your conjecture that they must have been essentially schizophrenic really intrigues me.
The classic text on this is Julian Jaynes' Bicameral Breakdown, and I think he gets a lot right. Jung's Archaic Man is also good. I have only skimmed it but Up from Eden by Ken Wilbur is another relevant text. Tim Crow's idea of a "Big Bang" of consciousness and psychosis may also interest you: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18502103/
In a modern population, my guess is the closest to the earlier mindset is the Piraha people described in most detail by Dan Everett in his book Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes. There are also a couple good docs on them.
What intrigues you about the relation to schizophrenia?
Excellent, thank you very much! I do not know anything about pre-sapience and little about schizophrenia, based only on the general stuff I was taught in med school almost 20 years ago, so this is going to sound ignorant. However, I do vividly remember many of these very unfortunate patients because of how strikingly aberrant their thinking was. Their loss of connection to reality and society was so profound it was wrenching and hard to forget. But emotions aside, it is difficult for me to imagine how anything socially stable could arise out of such a grossly disordered substrate. To my uneducated eye, if the baseline, pre-sapient mental state was schizophrenic then it would be a social anti-foundation. Alas, I need to actually study this topic before opining, so thank you again for the detailed reading list!
I've been heavily influenced by your articles on the Snake Cult hypothesis and have been using it as a foundation for speculative fiction. One framework I've found complementary is Joseph Jordania's hypothesis on the evolution of music.
Briefly: Jordania argues that when our ancestors moved out of the trees, they developed the precursors of modern music as collective display — both to deter predators and to aggressively scavenge from them. This explains a number of peculiarities in the fossil record. Early hominids appear to become better-fed, slower, less physically robust, and more conspicuous rather than more cryptic — all around the same time, and shortly before the acceleration of brain size in the human line. Jordania's hypothesis frames this as a new predator-defense and meat-acquisition strategy built on loud, coordinated group display.
The key mechanism is emotional contagion through collective display, and I think this fits the Snake Cult well. It may have built many of the neurological pathways that snake venom activates, and the pre-existing contagion machinery might have made relatively rare venom-exposure events far more transmissible as shared experience than they'd otherwise be — the collective substrate was already in place when the snake cult showed up to supply a new payload.
In the creative-writing context, I've been treating this as an interesting explanation for why humans are uniquely able to develop material culture. Crows, elephants, pigs, and other apes all have some degree of tool use, social structure, and strategy, and it isn't obvious that the traditional body-plan explanations (bipedalism, opposable thumbs, etc.) are upstream rather than downstream of whatever made hominids cognitively distinctive. If the pattern was Jordania's emotional contagion first, then increasing brain size and cultural learning, followed much later by the snake cult as catalyst, the arc of evolution is relatively clean. Any evo-psych hypothesis can be made to explain "everything," so take this with appropriate salt — but the combined sketch seems to me cleaner than either piece on its own.
Love to hear the Snake Cult is helpful with your writing; what is the premise of the story?
I'm familiar with Jordania via Simler (who also happens to be a Jaynes fan). In general I don't have strong opinions about the millions of years where human brain capacity expanded dramatically. The new abilities must have had a lot to do with social cognition. Linguists like Steven Pinker have laid out a lot of pre-recursive-language skills that may have selcted for modern human cognition, music being one of them.
One thing I've never seen explained is that the oldest musical instruments actually belong to Neanderthals. Now, we don't see full modern cognition until after mixing with Neanderthals, and I don't think that's just an accident. Likely they had some cognitive strengths that we didn't, and human culture emerged in the Upper Paleolithic out of that mixture.
>Crows, elephants, pigs, and other apes all have some degree of tool use, social structure, and strategy, and it isn't obvious that the traditional body-plan explanations (bipedalism, opposable thumbs, etc.) are upstream rather than downstream of whatever made hominids cognitively distinctive.
Don't some birds dance? Their songs are certainly distinctive.
I think the Jordania hypothesis is that human musicality serves a different function from most animals, with the collective defense aspects not being used by birds and most other animals with vocal mating displays. That is why a songbird wouldn't have the emotional contagion and battle trance, despite having superior vocal abilities compared to early hominids.
On my own story. The conceit I use is that the snake cult hypothesis was true, but more mystical than material. Psychedelic contact actually does produce contact with something objective, which is the self-report of virtually everyone who has ever used psychedelics.
The cosmology is that there is a constant broadcast that we filter from our attention, because we filter anything constant. When that filtering breaks down, with psychedelics being a relatively reliable example, we can perceive the Signal. The core problem is that by definition, when we are perceiving the Signal, something is wrong with our brains, so we also tend to hallucinate at the same time. In the Neolithic, the human range overlapped with a particular snake, the bites from this snake were of a good frequency for triggering semi-regular perception of the Signal, and this embedded itself in culture, with the Signal giving practical instructions which transformed culture into the Neolithic Revolution.
Once the culture had embedded the low-hanging fruit of the Signal's contact, actual contact became much less desirable, as it tended to involve psychedelics or comparably dangerous practices. The decline of Signal contact events, the incredible amount of folklore and mythology humans produce by default, and resistance to psychedelic research creates the gap of "we don't realize this happened in our history" that lets the timeline exist as an unknown part of our history.
I also expanded this concept with the Jordania ideas I mentioned. All animals can have perception of the Signal, but the human emotional contagion and battle trance instincts made us more likely to believe it when others made contact.
The more fantasy aspects are that the Minoans of Crete continued Signal contact for longer than most cultures, and reached higher sophistication in their methods. This led to a divergence point with an alternate timeline, which has less to do with the snake cult hypothesis elements. The alternate timeline diverges heavily, with extensive Signal contact and alternate magic/technology. I have more details, but the core ideas of the snake cult hypothesis are used here to combine "our archeologists aren't idiots" with "we missed practices we would consider 'magic' in modern fantasy terminology." This helps me create something I find interesting. The general style of your snake cult essays, looking at the out-of-favor frameworks in archeology, helped me build up the timeline style.
...also this is all back story to a weird magical game show that wizards from another dimension stage with people they kidnap from our world, but I love the contrast involved with the detailed world building and the trashy premise.
This is the third time I've read this magnificent thesis. I find it very convincing and absolutely fascinating. I also love your writing! I've told many people about your theory. Thank you!
I love to hear it, thank you!
I'd like it if you sent this over to David Roman, who does the History of Mankind substack, and get his take on it. Would be very interesting for both your subscribers (I follow you both).
Reaching out to him would probably be better coming from you! I just read his piece on Australia, which was quite nice, and would be helped along with a bit of snake cult diffusion.
Has someone thought about how maybe all those ancient cave paintings were made by children? They look quite like the stuff that a 5-year-old would draw. And I think I read somewhere if you add up all the offspring of Adam and Eve in the bible you end up 6k-7,6k years ago. I’m sold on the snake cult aswell, but where does one get the proper venom oder peptides to make my brain evolve into the next level ?
Cave drawings include many hand stencils or hand prints, which are often women and children. Maybe kids are more creative and so at that time and in that culture were more given to cave painting? Maybe it was more organized and seen as a rite of passage? We may never know
As for venom peptides, raising consciousness is the primary concern of religion, and they play with paleolithic grammar. Buddha received enlightment under a tree, shielded from a strom by a snake. Christ was lifted up on a cross, which is directly compared to Moses doing the same with a serpent. IMO best way to raise consciousness is the old paths right in front of us
Please be careful not to conflate the Neolithic Revolution with the Axial Age. They are two distinct step changes in human cognition, separated by thousands of years. The Eleusinian Mysteries were a feature of the Axial Age, and happened thousands of years after the changes of the Neolithic Revolution were fully disseminated. The Axial Age was less about developing 'consciousness' and more about empathy or a modern theory of mind.
It is likely that both changes were spread mimetically, and that they both used entheogens. It is possible that snake venom was one of the substances used (although I suspect that the Greeks had access to better things). But they are different phenomena.
I follow Joseph Campbell and his Atlas of World Mythology. Axial Revolution is a riff on the earlier themes.
Agree that Greeks likely also had better entheogens. My guess is venom would have mostly been grandfathered in. It's very interesting that it seems to still have been used, though.
Spend more time talking about more recent examples because we have more evidence. I try to make the case for Paleolithic and early Neolithic use in the longer Eve Theory of Consciousness
Your work got me reading “The Good and Evil Serpent”. Keep these going man
Long time reader - I'm interested in letting a snake bite me to have a controlled brush with morality
I'm afraid that, mythically speaking, this often backfired. Hercules went mad and killed his wife and kids after his trip to Hades and back
The shape/span of a human being from its conception until their death (in the direction of time as the fourth dimension) also resembles the shape of a snake. From a a shape of a sperm with its tail (ending in a singular point), through its development (three dimensional form we have at any singular point in time) it "grows in size", before it starts narrowing down again through old age. Upon ones death, the body also decomposes and ceases to exist in form and shape/indistinguishable from nature.
But the human snake also travels in space (traveling around our lovely planet), as much as it travels from one moment to another in time. If seen through this scope, humanity with all its constituents is just a collection of such four dimensional snake like formations squiggling, overlapping, and slithering on Earth (and its near vicinity in some, nowadays, not so rare cases).
This was the thought that I immediately was drawn while reading the original post, as well as this one, in the last couple of days.
Thank you for the thought provoking writings!
This part: "I have consumed venom in many different occasions…at one time I died because of a snake bite at another time I have come alive." made me think of my interpretation of the many world interpretation of quantum mechanics.
You live on parallel branches based on the probability of an event occurring. In this specific brain you become like the Schrödinger's cat - dead in one branch and alive in another. How I would like to think that this works is that when you die in one branch, you merge back in the next locally closest branch - the branch where you survived. You cannot know a part of which branch you were initially, and it doesn't really matter.
Unless the branches are so far apart - I would like to theorize that in that case one experiences the "life flashing before your very eyes" as natures way to give you a "crash course" of the branch one is merging into. Again, if you were a part of that branch originally this is just a mind provoking experience, but necessary if you are now merging from a branch far far away. One could think of this as a way of "backtracking the graph into the next node where the person is alive".
I had some similar experiences to this and this is my way of explaining of what happened. Also trying to put things into equations - scientific rigor requires me to as a theoretical physicist.
This somehow connects to something I read in "When we cease to understand the world" - in many worlds there is only two main postulates: there is a universal function of the universe (1) that evolves as predicts the Schrödinger equation. Heisenberg's/Bohr's approach then got widely accepted, even though the Schrödinger equation of the wave function is "interdimensional" and/or could be applied also to other parallel worlds.
Just a mention of Mochizuki's inter universal Teichmüller theory whose geometry could be useful to described this, but have to wrap my head around this non-abelian "new mathematics" theory first.
The Jungian archetype or neuro module thesis is a fairly good explanation for why snakes so often appear in mythology. But why so often associated with consciousness? Further, there are a lot of worldwide mythological patterns that can't be explained without diffusion, such as the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades or the Bullroarer. Interestingly, the cluster of associations about snakes is often related to those other ideas that have better evidence of diffusion. I go over a few of them here: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/evidence-for-global-cultural-diffusion