A long-form comparative study of dismemberment-cosmogonies, snake-ash anthropogenies, esoteric water-mirrors, and the solar Herakles of the Orphic hymns.
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 latest reasoning model).
The Serpent Demands Your Judgment
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Old Woman ≘ Death Motif Across World Myth
![A fragmented, redacted genetic research log displays a schematic human genome map. A specific gene cluster, labeled "[REDACTED] - A1335.10-14", pulses …](/images/posts/old-woman-death-motif-v1.webp "AI-generated cover")
A source-heavy world survey of tales where a crone decides that humans must die.
She Who Brings Death: Female Agents of Mortality in World Myth
A source-checked world survey of tales in which a woman’s act unleashes mortality. Includes a brief note on the (thin) quantitative literature.
Weaving Humanity: Women as Civilizers in World Mythology
A phylogenetic exploration of myths where women introduce clothing and weaving, symbolizing humanity’s separation from nature.
Who Was Here First? Indigenous American Myths of Earlier Peoples
Across the Americas, Indigenous traditions recall ant-folk, giants, and shadow-people who occupied the land before humans arrived.
Consider the Chicken
Weighing archaeological, genetic, and historical evidence for whether chickens reached the Americas before Columbus.
Men From the Sea: Myths, Skepticism, and the Return of Trans-Pacific Contact
Why colonial tales of giants, 20th-c. positivism, and new genome data all matter for the debate over pre-Columbian Polynesian–American contact.
Hallucinogenic Atlas: A Continental Census of Ancient Entheogens
Continent-by-continent survey of archaeological, textual, and biochemical evidence for ancient entheogenic practices.
The Serpent’s Gift: Mythic Echoes of an Ancient Consciousness Cult
How a prehistoric serpent-goddess cult may have jump-started self-aware thought and spread its rites across the globe.
X Chromosome And Cognition
How recent sweeps, dosage compensation, and X-linked disorders reveal the chromosome’s outsized role in human brain evolution and sex-biased cognition.