How a once‑secret magical philosophy slipped into everyday English, from ‘quintessential’ cocktails to the vacuum‑packed peanuts you bought yesterday.
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
Peri & Daʿat — The Hebrew Roots Behind the “Fruit of Knowledge”
A philological dive into the Hebrew words for “fruit” and “knowledge” in Genesis, how they shift in Greek and Latin, and the later myths they spawned.
Rooting Daʿat: From Proto‑Afroasiatic y/w‑d‑ʕ to Gnostic Gnosis
A philological safari that follows the Hebrew word for “knowledge” from a prehistoric Afroasiatic root through Akkadian, Aramaic, and Egyptian detours all the way to the Nag Hammadi codices.
Transmigration of Souls
From late‑Vedic karma cycles to New‑Age past‑life therapy, a longue‑durée history of metempsychosis—plus the murky, pre‑literate hints that the doctrine may be Ice‑Age old.
Debunking the So-Called 70,000-Year-Old ‘Python Rock’ of Botswana
Why the celebrated ‘python’ carving in Botswana’s Tsodilo Hills is almost certainly a geological quirk mis-sold as the world’s first ritual.
Human Self-Domestication: Major Lines of Evidence and Theory
Surveying genetic, anatomical, and cultural evidence that humans tamed themselves through “survival of the friendliest.”
The Bullroarer: A Global Marker of Cultural Diffusion and Male Initiation Ceremonies
How a simple whirled instrument traces the spread of male secret societies and ritual culture from the Late Paleolithic to the present.
The Primordial Matriarchy and the Gendered Evolution of Consciousness
Integrating Venus figurines, goddess myths, and X-chromosome sweeps to re-evaluate women’s possible leadership in early human culture.
Pronouns Across Africa: Shared Roots or Shared Contact?
Do the widespread 1sg n-/m- and 2sg b-/w- paradigms signal an African macro-family, or are they just the linguistic fingerprints of 12 000 years of contact?
Manly P Hall And The Eve Theory Of Consciousness
A deep exploration of how mystic philosopher Manly P. Hall might interpret the Eve Theory of Consciousness—the notion that human self-awareness (“I am”) arose relatively recently—by examining ancient allegories like Adam and Eve and the esoteric meaning behind humanity’s fall into the conscious mind.