The previous post highlighted the tension between archeologists and what I call ancient aliens researchers. The latter camp argues similarities between far-flung cultures imply a lost global civilizat…

I’m no credientialist, but still, most of my research on human origins draws from official sources: linguists, comparative mythologists, geneticists, and archeologists. (And, of course, the ultimate a…

The FAQ page on Tepe Telegrams, the official blog of Gobekli Tepe (GT), includes this gem:

I will host the Astral Codex Ten meetup in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, on September 25th. Now, 33% of my readers already subscribe to ACX. The other two-thirds should carve out an hour, go to the park, …

In this episode, I answer a few questions from a reader. Enjoy the show notes, which are helpful when discussing particular works of art.

Welcome everyone who came from’s recommendation. He has a lot of good ideas, but I particularly like his articulation of Luxury Beliefs, such as when someone in a gated community says, “Defund the pol…

The above is what “Snake Cult of Consciousness” yields when run through an AI slop meme generator. Not entirely bad. But alas, I have been beaten to the punch:

I am in awe at how dense myths can be. The Fall of Adam and Eve occupies just a few pages in Genesis, and yet it richly captures what it would be like to wake up to one’s role as an agent—the Knowledg…

Brian Kulis is a professor of Machine Learning at Boston University (and my former adviser). He has also worked in industry on the crack team responsible for Amazon’s “wake” word. We discuss the histo…

Mungo Manic is a pseudo-anonymous researcher and commentator on X who fell down the rabbit hole of Australian prehistory. His posts have drawn attention to how identity politics and cultural sensitivi…

Within the decade, millions will solicit life advice from personal chatbots that know them better than they know themselves. Current technology is changing many parts of therapy, from onboarding asses…

A language model can learn a lot about language from the streets, so to speak. It is trained on terabytes of PubMed articles, YouTube transcripts, and reddit comments. But it doesn’t know how to behav…

Most of the feedback I got on the Snake Cult of Consciousness was on the pharmacology of venom. The first was from someone who ostensibly works with snake venom:

I’d like to add a third postulate to Galton’s Lexical Hypothesis:

“The key to the interpretation of so many still hermetic motifs […] is available to us, immediately accessible, in myths and tales still alive.” Levi-Strauss

In today’s episode, I’m joined by David Stillwell, a professor of computational social science at the University of Cambridge, who uses big data to understand psychology.

It has been a good year here on Vectors of Mind. The Eve Theory of Consciousness has always been aspirational. Pedantically, it’s more of a hypothesis—particularly versions 1 and 2. However, with the …

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” -Carl Jung

Depicted above are several libation cups made in the image of the Ancient Egyptian god Bes. The burgeoning field of archeo-botany allows us to investigate what was consumed from such ritual jugs by an…

Note: I wrote this piece in 2023 for a now-defunct Substack specializing in embryo selection. It appears below unedited.

To my knowledge, no one has argued that women evolved recursion before men. This seems like low-hanging fruit, given it’s the oldest story in the book. Indigenous cultures worldwide have myths of a pr…

“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was wi…

In this post, I’d like to show that societies like Australian Aboriginals and the Navajo are similar in ways that require cultural diffusion. That is, central elements of their culture hail back to th…

It’s been a while since the last subscriber post, figure it’s time to check in. I’m sitting on a couple of longer posts, including EToC v3; keep an eye out for them. In the meantime, there will be mor…

IQ has a reputation for being the hard-nosed psychometric option. Those who are willing to accept facts over feelings will admit its supremacy. But this is stolen valor! Emotional intelligence is fund…

In 1921, Leo Frobenius reported the creation myth of a Bassari tribe in Northern Togo:

This post steps back from grand claims and asks readers to make a few of their own. One of the most addicting parts of personality research is trying to understand the unifying theme of a factor when …

Homo Sapiens have been around for about 200,000 years but didn’t do much for the first 185,000 or so. At the end of the Ice Age, there was a “revolution of symbols,” as archeologist Jacques Cauvin cal…

My work has become dangerously close to a Prompt Engineer1. This is fine by me, as it combines my love of writing, psychometrics, and NLP. Here are some of the most overpowered prompting techniques:

“Language may well have arisen as a mysterious power possessed largely by women—women who spent much more of their waking time together—and, usually, talking—than did men, women who in all societies a…

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Psychology, and the Word was Psychology” ~New Vector Translation

is a researcher and writer blogging about the science and politics of mental health at . In this episode, he joins me in dissecting the psychological and religious frameworks of Jordan Peterson, a fig…

Chicks still wet from hatching, covered in bits of shell that have been their only home, will run for cover at the sight of a hawk but not a gull, heron, or pigeon. Humans are not foreigners to animal…

The blog now has over 100,000 words of content which I want to make easier for newcomers to navigate. Part of that is producing a FAQ answering questions about the timeline, the extent to which a sing…

Dear readers, this is a check-in to get a sense of what you’d like to see more of, as well as an update about my plans for this blog. So please comment to let me know what you find compelling and woul…

Kathleen Lowrey is a professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, where she researches gender and shamanism. We came into contact here while discussing the primordial matriarchy on the Note…

Christ is described as the “Word made flesh,” an avatar of Logos—the divine rationality and organizing principle from which all existence emanates. When John riffs on Genesis, proclaiming, “In the beg…

Captain Thomas Herbert Lewin wrote in 1869:

and Michael Smith riff off the Snake Cult of Consciousness. Michael has been super helpful in reading over EToC versions 2 and 3 before I sent those out (keep an eye out for v3). Malcolm has been thin…

Not one but two readers have asked me about the Turkish myth of Shahmaran, a mythic snake-woman who lives in a cave. Among other things, she teaches a young man the history of Mankind. She ends up bei…

I also appeared on the DemystifySci podcast:

Commenting on Archeologists vs. Ancient Aliens, writes:

If you haven’t taken it, please check out the Moments of Awakening survey. I’ll post it on Reddit and X shortly to get a larger sample (please share with friends), but for now it doubles as a way to l…

Richard Dawkins said there were two great evolutionary moments. The first was the emergence of DNA, which marked the beginning of biological evolution. The second was the emergence of memes. Just as g…

In this episode I speak with , an Australian psychologist and writer of the Mind & Mythos Substack. Dan’s work explores the intersection of psychology, mythology, and narrative, initially focusing on …

I’m running a quick survey on people’s earliest memories. If you’ve got a moment, I’d love your input:

and join me to discuss More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth, and Belief by Bernardo Kastrup. We dive into Kastrup’s challenging philosophy of analytical idealism, which posits that reality is…

Stepping back from grand theories, this post revisits the mystery lexical factors. From word loadings, can you describe the general principle that holds a factor together? This exercise gets at the ul…

Using Google’s NotebookLM has been a game-changer for searching through mid-sized text databases. In my recent research on creation myths similar to Genesis, I uploaded the thirteen-part anthology The…

Vectors of Mind has been around for two years now, and there’s quite a bit of content that builds on itself. Enjoy this 90 minute monologue where I describe each article chronologically, and give some…

Okay, let’s take a little reprieve from the sapience stuff. I actually had a bunch of psychometrics queued up before being pulled in by the clarion call of consciousness. It’s just so hard to look awa…

Anthropologist Paul Schebesta’s 1936 work, Revisiting My Pygmy Hosts, offers a window into the creation myths and belief systems of the Efe pygmies of the Congo. Their explanation of the original sin …

Polls are an under-used Substack tool, particularly when a post makes a specific argument. Less than 1% of people who read an article will comment, and those who do usually have strong opinions. Polls…

Books about human evolution often follow the format:

Think of this post as a study group on Crecganford’s recent mythological analysis. I encourage you to watch the 39-minute video and comment. I’ve mentioned Crecganford a couple of times on the blog. H…

This article is a change of pace. Instead of endless footnotes and statistical arguments, I’ll let Anatolian folklore do the talking. The most obvious rejoinder to the snake-venom-as-entheogen hypothe…

If I follow this trajectory, by next year my titles will be full paragraphs. For those who missed the chatbot piece, I’ve been hanging out on the SenpAI Discord server to discuss the latest in LLM the…

I recently attended LessOnline, a rationalist/blogger conference where I presented on the Snake Cult. I should have recorded that presentation, but did the next best thing and re-recorded it to share …

Dr. Thacker returns to Vectors of Mind for a deep discussion about human evolution and consciousness. Stetson, who holds a PhD in genetics with expertise in cancer and neurodevelopmental disorders, w…

It’s been long enough since the last post that some readers have reached out. I’ve been enjoying the holiday season and have a backlog of content for the blog. That includes a long piece (EToC v3.0), …

The Eve Theory of Consciousness proposes that self-awareness was discovered by women and spread memetically. To make this case I draw on linguistics, archeology, pharmacology, genetics, anthropology, …

Lexical studies in psychology and Latent Semantic Analysis in computer science were introduced a half century apart to solve different problems and yet are mathematically equivalent. This isn’t a meta…

“No ethnomusicologist, I think, would stand for plurigenesis as regards the bull-roarers, which even in decorative detail are often alike and are used for the same purpose wherever and whenever found….

One of the topics with the worst signal-to-noise ratio is the prospect of AI doom. It requires reasoning under uncertainty about intelligence, linear algebra, politics, consciousness, and morality—mos…

Note: a more recent version of this theory appears here.

The role of women and serpents in creation myths is the perfect test case for OpenAI’s deep research. Readers are likely familiar with the ground, so they can spot-check claims. Further, no such speci…

Brian Muraresku’s Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name makes a good case that Jesus is a reincarnation of Dionysus, and early Christianity was a continuation of the millenn…

Data scientist Matthew Fisher and I met at the Less Online conference at Lighthaven in Berkeley, where I gave a presentation on the Snake Cult of Consciousness. Between sessions, we discovered we had …

Dr. Tom Froese is a researcher in enactive artificial intelligence investigating the systematic organization of life and mind. He received his PhD in cognitive science from the University of Sussex, d…

“If we want to understand the phylogeny of language or any human production, we have to keep in mind the following timeline. What is most important is that an essential divide occurred around 15,000 B…

In the beginning, God created three beings: Man, Antelope, and Snake. There was only one tree, bearing red fruit. Every seven days, God would come down from the sky to pluck the fruit. One day, Snake …

If self-awareness emerged recently, this should show up in comparative linguistics. The ability to introspect is a big deal, and it would require the invention of new words to communicate new experien…

After millennia of debate on the origins of consciousness, experts still put forth start dates spanning five orders of magnitude. This post will highlight some of those attempts, relate them to recurs…

This is part of a series on the evolution of recursion. The first post explained why so many psychologists, philosophers, and linguists believe recursive thinking is the ability that makes us human. T…

Humans are unique among animals for their capacity for symbolic thought and their reliance on complex, grammatical language. About 70,000 years ago, our species began producing art and then took over …

When God Was a Woman presents an ancient world radically different from our own: one where women were the first prophets, serpents granted wisdom rather than sin, and the foundations of civilization—w…

There’s a tradeoff between writing posts of general interest and those that develop ideas related to Eve and the Snake Cult. The post on cultural diffusion was more of the former and was even tweeted …

A provocative new paper claims our ancestors’ long walk out of Africa pruned not just their genes but their imaginations. The data, however, tell a different story.

You may have noticed that men and women think differently. Don’t worry, it’s not a sin. In fact, female preference for people vs things is a well-studied phenomenon in psychology. If the self was disc…

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.

Comprehensive deep dive into the global incidence, prevalence, disparities, and trends of schizophrenia.

Ancient DNA and quantitative-genetic models reveal ongoing selection on human cognitive traits throughout the Holocene.

From Egyptian Coffin-Texts to Greek philosophy, why serpents swallow chaos and why Eros is the duct-tape of the universe.

How the Mother of the Gods, her roaring rhombos, and a dying youth became the soundtrack and syllabus of Greek, Phrygian, and Roman civilization.

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.

How Kunapipi and other Dreamtime beings swallowed novices, digested their boy-souls, and spat out initiated adults—plus parallel spirit-child myths.

The best-available numbers on how schizophrenia strikes men vs women and different ethnic groups, with full tables and primary citations.

From Greek shepherd‑seers to Kurdish snake‑queens, cultures worldwide claim a serpent’s bite, lick, or brew lets humans talk to animals.

Sweep through Yoruba clay-people, Dogon fish-twins, Egyptian ka-snakes, and Lebe’s bullroarer to see how Africa narrates human beginnings.

An exhaustive survey of global bullroarer initiation cults and their teachings about creation and civilization.

A turbo-charged rundown of the 15 most influential Christian writers ever—complete with shock upsets, savage hot-takes, and receipts.

How water-serpents and founding women co-star in Navajo, Zuni, Taíno, K’iche’, and Inka origin stories and what that pairing reveals about birth, chaos, and order.

A long-form comparative study of dismemberment-cosmogonies, snake-ash anthropogenies, esoteric water-mirrors, and the solar Herakles of the Orphic hymns.

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.

A source-heavy world survey of tales where a crone decides that humans must die.

A source-checked world survey of tales in which a woman’s act unleashes mortality. Includes a brief note on the (thin) quantitative literature.

A phylogenetic exploration of myths where women introduce clothing and weaving, symbolizing humanity’s separation from nature.

Across the Americas, Indigenous traditions recall ant-folk, giants, and shadow-people who occupied the land before humans arrived.

Joseph Campbell’s own words show that he traced mythic parallels to trade-routes and sea-lanes, not Jungian Wi-Fi.

Weighing archaeological, genetic, and historical evidence for whether chickens reached the Americas before Columbus.

A source-by-source catalogue of every passage where Joseph Campbell attributes mythic parallels to real-world cultural diffusion rather than Jungian psychic unity.

Why colonial tales of giants, 20th-c. positivism, and new genome data all matter for the debate over pre-Columbian Polynesian–American contact.

Continent-by-continent survey of archaeological, textual, and biochemical evidence for ancient entheogenic practices.

An expanded survey of every known Christian-Gnostic current that equated Jesus with the Edenic serpent, complete with extended primary-source excerpts.

Close reading of Manichaean, Ophite and Naassene passages that speak of Christ-as-Serpent in pharmacological terms.

Do Gnostic writers ever speak of Christ’s serpent as literally poisonous—or as an antidote? A source-by-source audit.

How a prehistoric serpent-goddess cult may have jump-started self-aware thought and spread its rites across the globe.

Exploring the evolution of self awareness through Genesis, John’s Logos, Gnosticism, and sacrificial myths, linking the Edenic serpent to Christ and the birth of the conscious self.

How pronouns, rituals, myths, and fluted spear points reveal a single Ice-Age culture behind all pre-Columbian peoples.

How recent sweeps, dosage compensation, and X-linked disorders reveal the chromosome’s outsized role in human brain evolution and sex-biased cognition.

How X-linked gene dosage, inactivation escape, and imprinting sculpt human brain development, intelligence, and social behavior.

Overview of key theorists (Klein, Chomsky, Bickerton, Tattersall, Mithen, Coolidge & Wynn) and their theories on the Upper Paleolithic Cognitive Revolution.

Darwin’s views on the rapid pace of human evolution, driven by gene-culture interaction, reputation, language, and social institutions.

Survey of the swastika’s ancient global presence and theories (diffusion vs. independent invention) explaining its origins and spread.

A comprehensive historical analysis of claims that Phoenician sailors reached the Americas before Columbus, examining evidence and scholarly debate from classical antiquity to modern times.

Comparative analysis of Eurasian ‘fall from grace’ myths suggesting a common proto-myth originating in the Paleolithic or early Holocene.

A review synthesizing evidence on how the Y chromosome influences human cognition, focusing on neurodevelopmental disorders, specific genes, brain structure, and evolutionary context.

Examines the surprising stability of mythic motifs over millennia, suggesting myths like the Cosmic Hunt or Serpent symbolism could encode memories of real cognitive shifts, supporting the Eve Theory’s timeframe.

Examines the historical and anthropological debate surrounding the concept of primordial matriarchy, from Bachofen’s theories to modern critiques and evidence.

A comprehensive, evidence-driven defence of the Eve Theory as the only evolutionary route to recursive self-awareness and language (i.e. the Wallace Problem).

Deep synthesis of Tom Froese’s Ritualised-Mind Hypothesis and Andrew Cutler’s Eve/Snake-Cult Theory, resolving the Sapient Paradox through ritual-mediated recursion, female agency, and gene–culture sweeps.

How a late Upper-Pleistocene spark of self awareness spread memetically, rewired our genome, and solved the Sapient Paradox.

Examining the archaeological record of Australia (Sahul) – early colonization, persistent simple technologies, late emergence of complex art – as a key case study supporting the Sapient Paradox and the late development of behavioral modernity.

Examines the evolutionary hypothesis that female-led selection pressures for social intelligence and self-domestication placed women at the vanguard of human evolution.

Comparison of the early Holocene emergence of the Aboriginal Dreamtime symbolic system with the Near East’s Neolithic ‘revolution of symbols,’ examining Australian rock art, technology, exchange networks, language diffusion, and cognitive impacts.

An anthropological examination of the bullroarer, arguing its global distribution and consistent ritual functions point to cultural diffusion from a common prehistoric origin.

A comprehensive analysis of the Sapient Paradox, synthesizing archaeological findings (tools, art, burials) with paleogenetics (brain-related gene sweeps, population bottlenecks) to evaluate theories for the delayed emergence of behavioral modernity.

An exploration of two theories on the origins of human consciousness: the Snake Cult/Eve Theory (snake venom) versus the Stoned Ape Theory (psilocybin mushrooms).

From Göbekli Tepe initiation lore to Orphic world-egg cosmology, tracing Herakles’ twin careers as Adamic hero and winged time-serpent.

A detailed exploration of the complementary roles of Cosmic Herakles (Chronos) and Dionysus Zagreus in Orphic theogony, myth, ritual praxis, and Neoplatonic interpretation.

How Cosmic-Herakles sets the wheel of time while Dionysus turns it toward liberation in Orphic-Bacchic cults.

Why the blank-slate claim that cognition hasn’t evolved since the Upper Palaeolithic fails basic population genetics—and what ancient DNA now shows.

Snake-shaped Zeus in chthonic cults, Orphic theogony, and Stoic ekpyrosis, mapped onto the Herakles–Dionysus macro-/micro-myth.

An exploration of the serpentine creator deities Nüwa and Fuxi in Chinese mythology and their parallels in world mythologies.

A comprehensive review exploring the concept of the ’narrative self’ across philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and literary theory.

A comprehensive analysis of evidence and scholarly debate surrounding pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact between the Americas and Old World civilizations.