Tracing the journey from 1910s snake venom injections for epilepsy to today’s venom-derived ion channel modulators for treating seizures and pain.
How Did a Self-Aware Mind Evolve?
Meditations on mind, myth, and evolution. Cast the scales from your eyes!
TL;DR
- Symbolic thought emerged ~50,000 years ago, yet the universal human symbol, “I,” or the ego appears globally entrenched only in the Holocene ~10 kya.
- According to Eve Theory of Consciousness, women invented serpent-venom initiation rituals that reliably taught subject-object separation, producing powerful gene-culture evolution towards understanding “I am’” at a young age.
- The memory of this awakening is preserved worldwide in creation myths (cf. Lucifer, Nüwa, Quetzalcoatl) and was transmitted globally via bullroarer mystery cults (cf. the rites of Dionysus or Australian Dreamtime).
Topics
About
I’m Andrew Cutler, a Machine Learning engineer researching human origins. My work connects psychology, comparative mythology, and AI to trace how recursive self-awareness evolved. Snakecult.net is a place for me to put lightly-edited AI-generated essays that explore niche questions (usually produced with OpenAI’s Deep Research or o3-Pro).
Research Articles
Recursive Eve: EToC Meets Suddendorf–Corballis on the Last 100,000 Years
EToC and Suddendorf–Corballis converge: human recursion and autonoetic time-travel coalesced over the last 100k years, leaving archaeological and mythic fingerprints.
Bristol’s Hunt for Hy-Brasil: Pre-Columbian Rumors and Atlantic Voyages
Bristol’s late-15th-century hunts for the phantom isle “Brasil”: what the sources say, what they imply, and how rumor primed England’s leap across the Atlantic.
The Serpent Without a Self: A Deep History of Buddhism
From Paleolithic serpents and female self-making to the Buddha’s deathless: tracing a cultural-blood chain—from Mal’ta to the Ganges—that flowers as Buddhism.
Heracles, the Great Mother, and Eve Theory: Amazon Girdles, Eleusis, and Initiation
Reading Heracles’ labors—especially Hippolyta’s girdle and the Eleusinian initiation—as ritual memories where male consciousness apprentices to the Great Mother’s sovereignty.
Masks Before Masks: A Diffusionist History of the Ritual Face
A diffusionist deep dive tracing masked ritual from a single Levantine hearth—stone masks and plastered skulls—to a global grammar of spirit embodiment.
The Great Mother and Sacred Prostitution: a phenomenology of hieros gamos and cultic eros
How older scholars stitched the Great Mother to temple sexuality—through hieros gamos, consecrated personnel, and fertility rites—using Greek, Near Eastern, and Roman evidence.
Sahul in Speech: PNG–Australian Language Connections
A synthesis of evidence for Australia–PNG linguistic ties—Torres Strait contact, Sahul-era areality, and who argued for them—with primary citations.
Greek and Buddhist Philosophy: Contacts, Parallels, and Third Sources
Neutral survey of contacts between Greek and Buddhist philosophy—documented encounters, plausible doctrinal links, and Near Eastern/Indo-Iranian third sources—with primary citations.
Ñawi: the Eye as Aperture (A Follow‑Up to Proto‑Sapiens ŋAN)
How Quechua ñawi—eye, opening, portal—complements the Proto‑Sapiens *ŋAN ‘breath/soul,’ from textiles to star‑lore, and why that matters for consciousness.