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'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
I don't find this thesis convincing. More compelling would be something to do with inborn phobias, such as fear of snakes. Quoting Emil Kirkegaard:
> Phobias are interesting from an evolutionary perspective because they track ancient dangers, not modern ones. Snakes and spiders are high on the list, but Brits do not die or get injured from snakes or spiders basically ever.
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
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.
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'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
I don't find this thesis convincing. More compelling would be something to do with inborn phobias, such as fear of snakes. Quoting Emil Kirkegaard:
> Phobias are interesting from an evolutionary perspective because they track ancient dangers, not modern ones. Snakes and spiders are high on the list, but Brits do not die or get injured from snakes or spiders basically ever.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-155360681
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
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
i’m sold
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.