In this post, I’d like to show that societies like Australian Aboriginals and the Navajo are similar in ways that require cultural diffusion. That is, central elements of their culture hail back to th…
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
February Subscriber Post
It’s been a while since the last subscriber post, figure it’s time to check in. I’m sitting on a couple of longer posts, including EToC v3; keep an eye out for them. In the meantime, there will be mor…
Forms vs. measures
IQ has a reputation for being the hard-nosed psychometric option. Those who are willing to accept facts over feelings will admit its supremacy. But this is stolen valor! Emotional intelligence is fund…
Genesis In Togo
In 1921, Leo Frobenius reported the creation myth of a Bassari tribe in Northern Togo:
Guess The Factor
This post steps back from grand claims and asks readers to make a few of their own. One of the most addicting parts of personality research is trying to understand the unifying theme of a factor when …
Herakles Adam And Krishna Were Initiated
Homo Sapiens have been around for about 200,000 years but didn’t do much for the first 185,000 or so. At the end of the Ice Age, there was a “revolution of symbols,” as archeologist Jacques Cauvin cal…
How To Prompt Chatgpt
My work has become dangerously close to a Prompt Engineer1. This is fine by me, as it combines my love of writing, psychometrics, and NLP. Here are some of the most overpowered prompting techniques:
If Social Intelligence Made Us Human
“Language may well have arisen as a mysterious power possessed largely by women—women who spent much more of their waking time together—and, usually, talking—than did men, women who in all societies a…
In The Beginning Was The Word
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Psychology, and the Word was Psychology” ~New Vector Translation
Jonah Davids Understanding Jordan
is a researcher and writer blogging about the science and politics of mental health at . In this episode, he joins me in dissecting the psychological and religious frameworks of Jordan Peterson, a fig…