Why Genesis pairs a snake with an apple: a Paleolithic antivenom-and-vision ritual encoded in myth.
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
Snake Cult of Consciousness and the Sapient Paradox
The Snake Cult of Consciousness reframes the Sapient Paradox: behavioral modernity emerged ~15 kya through memetic—not genetic—diffusion of selfhood.
Venom As Elixir Of Life
Why serpent venom microdosing sits at the root of alchemical, Daoist, and New‑Age quests for an elixir of life—and what that implies about early biotech.
Enoch, Hermes Trismegistus, and Joseph Smith’s Book of Moses
Comparative analysis of Joseph Smith’s Enoch revelations and the Hermetic Poimandres vision, exploring the Enoch-Hermes tradition.
Knower Self And The Gn Erosion Hypotheses
A deep dive into two speculative etymologies linking the global N-pronoun to ‘knowing’—either semantically (knower = self) or phonetically (ǵn- > n-).
Eve Theory of Consciousness v4
A comprehensive interdisciplinary theory proposing that human consciousness originated as a cultural invention in prehistoric times, likely pioneered by women and spread through ritual and language.
Global Epidemiology of Schizophrenia: Incidence & Prevalence by Sex and Ethnicity
The best-available numbers on how schizophrenia strikes men vs women and different ethnic groups, with full tables and primary citations.
Pleiades And The Bullroarer Meme-Plex
How a naked-eye star cluster and a whirring plank became entangled in creation lore, initiation rites, and weather magic from Arnhem Land to Arizona.
Upper Paleolithic Gender Imbalance In Human Depictions
New counts show that roughly four out of five Ice-Age human images are female, overturning ideas that “Venus” figurines were an isolated fertility cult.
Campbell the Diffusionist: Boats, Not Brainwaves
Joseph Campbell’s own words show that he traced mythic parallels to trade-routes and sea-lanes, not Jungian Wi-Fi.