Survey of textual clues and modern hypotheses that ancient mystery cults may have used snake venom in controlled rites, with sources and cautions.
The “Snake Venom Entheogen” Theory in Ancient Mystery Cults
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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Ghosts of the Ice Age: The Ancient North Eurasians and Their Global Legacy
Ancient North Eurasians: who they were, what their Ice Age culture looked like, and how far their genes and cultural innovations reach today.
Stories, Then the Story of ‘I’: EToC across the Late Pleistocene and Holocene
A two-stage account of consciousness: language and stories coalesce ~60 ka; the narrative ‘I’ emerges in the Holocene via women-led serpent ritual networks and pronoun tech.
New Experiments Upon Vipers — Chapter X (Modernized Transcript)
Modernized transcript of Chapter X of Moyse Charas’s 1673 English edition, with brief context and link to the Internet Archive source.
Female‑Led Cosmogenesis vs. the Great Mother
Defines ‘female‑led cosmogenesis’ and argues that Paleolithic art and cross‑cultural myth patterns support multiple active female creators over a monolithic Great Mother, with phylogenetic and archaeological evidence.
The Atman Question
A philosophical science fiction novella exploring AI consciousness through the lens of the first-person discovery and the recursive nature of self-awareness.
The Incest Taboo as a Decisive Human Technology
A speculative synthesis: an early, enforced incest taboo scaled exogamy and alliance networks, raised effective population size and heterozygosity, and helped H. sapiens outcompete archaic cousins.
Dunggul: snake, bullroarer, and the making of men
On Cape York, dunggul names both ‘snake’ and ‘bullroarer.’ What this polysemy reveals about initiation, being ‘snake‑bitten,’ and the ritual voice.
How The Self Went Viral: Eve Theory, Snake Cults, And The Late-Pleistocene Explosion Of Consciousness
A long-form exploration of how the discovery of reflective selfhood radiated through late-Ice-Age cultures, with the Eve Theory of Consciousness and the Snake Cult hypothesis as the most coherent narrative frame.
Shared Etymology of Jñāna, Know, and Gnosis
Tracing the Proto‑Indo‑European root *ǵneh₃‑ that links Sanskrit jñā‑, English know, and Greek gnō‑/gnosis.