Hermeticism reads the cosmos as a living, self‑transforming image of the Divine—both a classroom and crucible designed to awaken the soul through embodied experience.
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
Samsara vs Demiurge
A concise yet rigorous comparison of the Gnostic vision of the cosmos as a carceral construct and the Indian notion of samsara as an endless wheel of rebirth.
What’s In A Name? The Deluge Lexical Hypothesis
Survey of the unique lexemes cultures coined for the Great Flood—and, rarer still, for the age before it—spanning Sumer to Māori, Hebrew to Quechua.
Reconciling Darwin and Genesis: A Hegelian Synthesis of Evolution and Myth
Integrating Darwinian evolution with ancient creation myths to trace the physical and psychological origins of humanity.
When I Means the Same Thing Everywhere: How Pronouns Hint at a Proto Sapiens
Exploring how ultra-stable words like pronouns and numerals preserve deep traces of linguistic ancestry across continents.
A Case for Proto-Sapiens Roots: hankwa and henkwi Across World Languages
Commentary on Nicolas Bruneteau’s Proto-Sapiens glossary, focusing on the globally persistent roots hankwa (breath, life) and henkwi (snake, dragon).
Linguists of the Word, Unite!
How the Soviet Union’s unique mix of ideology and academia produced an outsized cadre of linguists obsessed with linking the world’s languages.
Cognates in Australia
Examining linguistic cognates and proposed Proto-Australian vocabulary across Aboriginal languages, exploring evidence for deep genetic relationships despite extreme linguistic diversity.
Flood Myths
A comprehensive global survey of flood myths and their heroic survivors, from Noah and Utnapishtim to lesser-known deluge heroes across cultures worldwide.
New World Serpent Myths
Explores ancient serpent myths across the Americas, their deep antiquity, and links to the evolution of human consciousness.