The Serpent Without a Self: A Deep History of Buddhism

TL;DR

• The “Snake Cult of Consciousness” (SCC) begins as Upper Paleolithic female self‑making (Venus figurines) and ophidian/spiral pedagogy (Mal’ta plaque with three snakes), a rite-tech for narrative self and cyclical time McDermott 1996; Lbova 2021.
• This transformation in consciousness—not farming per se—drives ritual aggregation, storage, and eventually agriculture (religion leading subsistence). Göbekli Tepe is the Old World poster child for ritual preceding domestication Banning 2011; niche-construction theory explains culture → ecology feedback Laland et al. 2016.
• A cultural–blood chain connects Mal’ta (ANE) to West Asia and, later, South Asia: ANE ancestry feeds Eastern European hunter-gatherers → Steppe pastoralists; South Asia receives steppe-derived lineages during 2nd millennium BCE while retaining Indus‑Periphery ancestry Raghavan 2014; Narasimhan et al. 2019. The chain is deep; nobody’s saying Siberians built Göbekli—only that strands of ancestry and symbol flow trace back to Mal’ta.
• Serpent religion persists across the Indus and Gangetic worlds (nagas, hooded cobras) and folds into śramaṇa practice; see Indus serpent motifs and later naga cults Parpola 2015; Kenoyer 1998.
• Buddhism arises as a SCC blossom that perfects the death‑and‑rebirth tech by dissolving the very self it once consolidated: ordination as a social death, meditation as engineered ego‑silencing, “Māra” (Death) defeated, and the naga Mucalinda sheltering the awakened one Udāna 2.1 (Mucalinda); Bronkhorst 2007; Wynne 2007.
• Modern science vindicates the mechanism class: meditative practice quiets the default‑mode network (DMN), induces self‑transcendent states, and yields durable prosocial effects Brewer et al. 2011; Goyal et al. 2014.

“There is an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned. Were there not this unborn… there would be no escape from the born.”
— Udāna 8.3 (tr. Thanissaro)

0) Frame: What counts as “snake tech”?#

• Iconics: serpent & spiral (death/renewal, shedding, time-loops).
• Rites: engineered awe → liminal ordeal → symbolic death → reconstitution.
• Pedagogy: myth + bodywork (breath, posture, fasting, dance) producing narrative identity (early) or transcending it (late).
• Institutions: from kin rites → sanctuaries → mysteries → renunciant orders.

We read Buddhism as late-stage SCC: same engine, different aim—dying before you die so that nothing at all remains to die.

I) Animal consciousness → story minds (Paleolithic prelude)#

Before 50–40kya, many animals (and hominins) likely had primary consciousness—perception/affect without autobiographical narrative Cambridge Declaration 2012; Birch 2020.
Upper Paleolithic art (Chauvet, 37–33kya) signals story-thinking—sequenced scenes, stylized agency Quiles et al. 2016.

Eve Theory: women generate first-person body stories (Venus figurines) and ritualize reproductive time → the portable I McDermott 1996; Soffer et al. 2000.

II) Mal’ta (c. 25kya): Serpent grammar + the ANE conduit#

At the Siberian site of Mal’ta, we find female figurines and a mammoth‑ivory plaque with three snakes; the reverse bears spiral/dimple motifs—an ophidian curriculum in miniature Lbova 2021.
Genetically, ANE ancestry (MA‑1) later threads into Eastern European hunter‑gatherers and Bronze Age steppe populations Raghavan 2014. This doesn’t mean “Mal’ta built everything”; it means some of the blood and—plausibly—symbol tech swell westward and southward over millennia.

Ritual first → farming later. As at Göbekli Tepe, ritual aggregation appears before plant/animal domestication, consistent with culture driving subsistence innovation Banning 2011; niche-construction models formalize this loop Laland et al. 2016.

III) From Göbekli’s stone circles to Mehrgarh’s granaries: the serpent goes urban#

Göbekli Tepe (c. 9600–8000 BCE) shows hunter‑gatherers building megalithic sanctuaries—snakes among the carved menagerie—before village agriculture in the region scaled up Banning 2011.
Downstream, Mehrgarh (Baluchistan, 7000–5500 BCE) exhibits South Asia’s earliest farming; domesticates likely arrived via trans‑Iranian exchange from the Near East, but the motivation—stable ritual feasts, storage, calendrics—fits SCC logics Gangal et al. 2014.

Indus civilization (c. 2600–1900 BCE): serpents are common in seals and terracottas; Parpola reads aspects of Indus religion as proto‑Śaiva/serpent coded (caveats apply) Kenoyer 1998; Parpola 2015.

IV) Blood and symbol into the Ganges: Steppe threads, local tapestries#

By the late 3rd–2nd millennium BCE, steppe-derived populations (with EHG/ANE‑related ancestry) mix into South Asia, especially the northwest → Gangetic corridor, contributing to “Ancestral North Indian” (ANI) ancestry and the Vedic cultural layer Narasimhan et al. 2019.
This does not erase the Indus substrate; early historic India is a palimpsest—Indus‑Periphery, steppe, and indigenous foragers. Serpents (nagas) flourish in this shared symbolic economy—river guardians, underworld royalty, rain‑givers—precisely the liminal beings SCC loves Parpola 2015.

V) Śramaṇa: turning the serpent inward#

Between ~700–400 BCE, the śramaṇa (“striver”) movements of the middle Ganges—Ajivikas, Jainas, early Buddhists—reject Vedic sacrificial orthopraxy for interior sacrifice: fasting, breath control, meditation, celibacy.

Bronkhorst’s “Greater Magadha” thesis situates Buddhism in a non‑Vedic intellectual zone with strong renunciant norms Bronkhorst 2007.

This is SCC’s axial pivot: keep the death‑and‑rebirth engine, but move the altar inside.

Instead of perfecting the ego‑self forged by earlier rites, śramaṇas aim to unbind it.

VI) The Buddha’s engineering: defeat Death, retire the Self#

• Māra (literally “Death”) tempts the Bodhisattva; enlightenment = victory over death’s compulsions (SN 4; Dhp 46–51).
• Mucalinda, the naga king, shelters the Buddha during a storm in week six after awakening—serpent as converted protector of the new tech Udāna 2.1.
• Ordination (pabbajjā, upasampadā) is social death: leave the householder’s name, status, and lineage to join the Sangha (the living dead who walk).
• Meditation: jhāna absorption and insight (vipassanā) reduce DMN‑style selfing; modern imaging shows trait/state DMN quieting in experienced meditators Brewer et al. 2011; population effects on stress/depression are measurable Goyal et al. 2014.
• Doctrine: anattā (no-self) + paṭiccasamuppāda (dependent arising) formalize the technical deconstruction of the snake‑cult’s old product (the reified “I”) Wynne 2007; Gombrich 2009.

SCC made the I; Buddhism shows you how to take it off, like a shed skin, while staying alive.

VII) What Buddhism keeps—and what it discards#

Keeps:

• Initiation by death (symbolic).
• Serpent grammar (nagas, coils, guardians; later kundalinī in Śaiva‑Tantric milieus cross‑pollinates with Buddhist tantra).
• Communal ritual cycles (uposatha, rains retreat).
• Embodied tech: posture, breath, gaze, diet.

Discards / sublates:

• Egoic rebirth as telos → replaces with cessation (nibbāna).
• Blood sacrifice → pure intention; gift economy (dāna).
• Esoteric secrecy → remarkably open soteriology (with later tantric exceptions).

Table 1 — Snake‑Cult Features Mapped to Early Buddhism#

VIII) Why serpent? (A cognitive aside)#

Snakes are the perfect teacher: ancient salience, fast detection, and visceral fear prime systems for ritual arousal Isbell 2009 (snake detection hypothesis). Serpents shed skin (renewal) and coil (recursion/attention), mapping cleanly onto predictive processing metaphors: the self as a controlled hallucination you can uncoil. Buddhism exploits this: confront fear (Māra), abide through storm (Mucalinda), discharge the predictive “I”.

IX) Objections & how they land#

• “Steppe/ANE in India ≠ Buddhism.” True; Buddhism is a late Ganges innovation. The claim is a chain, not a straight line: symbol tech and some ancestry move west/south over millennia, mixing with Indus and Gangetic lifeways before the śramaṇa bloom Narasimhan 2019; Parpola 2015.
• “Nagas predate Buddhism; kundalinī is later.” Yes. That’s the point: Buddhism blooms within a pan‑Indic serpent ecology; later tantrism re-serpentinizes praxis across Buddhist/Hindu lines White 1996.
• “Göbekli isn’t proof of SCC.” Correct; it’s a convergent case that ritual can precede and drive domestication. The SCC story says consciousness tech enabled agriculture, not vice versa Banning 2011; Laland 2016.

FAQ#

Q1. Where’s the earliest explicit Buddhist snake?
A. Udāna 2.1 recounts the naga Mucalinda shielding the Buddha during a storm in the sixth week after awakening—canonical and programmatic for serpent domestication by dharma.

Q2. Is there archaeological evidence of serpent worship in the Indus?
A. Yes: multiple seals/terracottas show snakes; interpretations vary, but serpent motifs are widespread and persist into historic naga cults Kenoyer 1998; Parpola 2015.

Q3. How does meditation enact “ritual death”?
A. By suppressing self‑referential processing (DMN), saturating attention (jhāna), and exposing aggregates as contingent; subject–object collapses without physiological death Brewer 2011.

Q4. If SCC made agriculture possible, why did Buddhism critique society?
A. Because once the I stabilizes and surplus emerges, the tech can invert: the highest good becomes release from I‑driven craving within agrarian samsara—hence monastic renunciation.

Footnotes#

Sources#

• Banning, E. B. “So Fair a House: Göbekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre‑Pottery Neolithic of the Near East.” Current Anthropology 52.5 (2011): 619–660.
• Birch, Jonathan. “Dimensions of Animal Consciousness.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 24.10 (2020): 789–801.
• Brewer, Judson A., et al. “Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity.” PNAS 108.50 (2011): 20254–59.
• Bronkhorst, Johannes. Greater Magadha: Studies in the Culture of Early India. Brill, 2007.
• Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (2012). “Declaration.”.
• Gangal, Kalyan, et al. “A dissimilarity measure for archaeological chronologies and its application to the spread of agriculture in India.” Proc. Royal Soc. A 470 (2014): 20130367.
• Gombrich, Richard. What the Buddha Thought. Equinox, 2009.
• Goyal, Madhav, et al. “Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well‑being.” JAMA Internal Medicine 174.3 (2014): 357–368.
• Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark. Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization. University of California Press, 1998.
• Laland, Kevin N., et al. “The extended evolutionary synthesis: its structure, assumptions and predictions.” Nature 540 (2016): 1–9.
• Lbova, Liudmila V. “The Siberian Paleolithic site of Mal’ta… iconography and childhood.” Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 49.1 (2021): 77–89.
• McDermott, LeRoy. “Self‑Representation in Upper Paleolithic Female Figurines.” Current Anthropology 37.2 (1996): 227–275.
• Narasimhan, Vagheesh, et al. “The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia.” Science 365 (2019): eaat7487.
• Parpola, Asko. The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization. Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Pāli Canon. Udāna 2.1 “Mucalinda.” Access to Insight.
• Quiles, A., et al. “A high‑precision chronological model for Chauvet–Pont d’Arc Cave.” PNAS 113.17 (2016): 4670–4675.
• Raghavan, Maanasa, et al. “Upper Palaeolithic Siberian genome reveals dual ancestry of Native Americans.” Nature 505 (2014): 87–91.
• White, David Gordon. The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India. Princeton University Press, 1996.
• Wynne, Alexander. The Origin of Buddhist Meditation. Routledge, 2007.