The Serpent Was Probably Not Quantum Physics

2026-10-23publishedessay

subtitle
Why similar gods might tell us more about minds than matter.

I got into this by asking Google why an Orphic god of primordial Time and a Mesoamerican Feathered Serpent could both end up, from sufficient distance, looking like cosmic flying snakes. This is the sort of question that rewards poor epistemic hygiene immediately. Within minutes I had been informed that the Aztecs discovered quantum field theory, ollin was basically a phase-space diagram, Quetzalcoatl represented matter ascending into spirit, Orphic priests were manipulating the same hidden field, and psychedelics allowed ancient philosophers to inspect the source code of reality. It was an excellent theory for roughly twenty minutes.

The annoying part is that the historical material underneath the bad theory is genuinely interesting. A late Orphic cosmogony preserved by Damascius describes primordial Chronos as a winged serpent with leonine and bovine heads and a divine face between them; he is joined to Ananke, Necessity, and in this tradition is also called Heracles. The testimony is late and the tradition fragmentary, but the creature itself is not an occult-internet fabrication. Across the Atlantic, Feathered Serpent imagery appears in Mesoamerica centuries before the Mexica empire, and scholars have connected the iconography at Teotihuacan with calendrical succession, cosmic order and the origin of time. That does not make Teotihuacan “Aztec,” and it certainly does not make Quetzalcoatl equivalent to Orphic Chronos, but it leaves us with a real resemblance after the quantum nonsense has been removed.

There are several ordinary explanations available before anybody reaches for Atlantis. Symbols diffuse. Similar environments reward similar metaphors. Humans are fascinated by snakes for obvious reasons. Coincidences accumulate quickly once thousands of civilizations have spent thousands of years making composite animals. Yet there is another possibility between boring coincidence and secret transoceanic theology: similar nervous systems repeatedly confronting similar human problems may converge on some of the same symbolic and experiential structures. That possibility is still speculative, but unlike “Quetzalcoatl discovered QFT,” it has the useful property of connecting to things we can actually measure.

I. A good analogy is not an ancient scientific discovery

The first thing the rabbit hole taught me was how easily we flatter an ancient philosophy by translating it into whichever modern vocabulary currently carries the most prestige. In a serious, if debated, reconstruction of Nahua thought, the philosopher James Maffie describes teotl as a sacred, dynamic reality whose transformations constitute the world rather than simply as another supernatural person in a crowded pantheon. His reading emphasizes motion, becoming, complementary opposition and the precarious achievement of order. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy presents these ideas as an interpretation of Nahua sources, not as a set of physical predictions awaiting rediscovery by European scientists.

You can see how this becomes “the Aztecs knew quantum field theory” after a sufficiently enthusiastic screenshot. Modern physics also refuses to treat ordinary solid objects as the final furniture of reality, and field theories describe physical events in terms of structures that are not obvious to the senses. At that altitude, both accounts can be described as saying “everything is process,” just as a pigeon and a Boeing 747 can both be described as things that fly. Nothing important follows until the resemblance produces a prediction, and there is a large difference between an ancient metaphysical interpretation and a mathematically specified theory that earns its keep in experiments.

The important part of Maffie's reconstruction is not its accidental compatibility with our favorite modern nouns. The Nahua had their own intellectual concerns, among them how one lives in an unstable world, and ideas about neltiliztli concern rootedness and groundedness rather than simply claiming that matter is a hologram. Calling this a primitive version of our science erases both the limits and the sophistication of the actual philosophy. There is an honest similarity between traditions that take becoming seriously; it just does not establish that either predicted the other.

Yet the observation/explanation distinction cuts the other way, too. Ancient people did not need mechanics to recognize celestial cycles or a theory of metabolism to notice that fasting changes the mind. They could be wrong about why a repeatable experience happened while remaining perfectly capable of discovering that it happened at all. Consciousness is an especially interesting case because every civilization had direct access to the phenomenon, even if none could put a neuron under a microscope.

II. There is geometry hiding in the observer

People have been varying breathing, posture, sleep, diet, rhythm, attention, social synchrony and sometimes psychoactive substances for as long as people have had bodies and reasons to do strange things to them. The methods do not produce one universal mystical state, but they can produce systematic changes in perception, temporal experience, emotion and the boundary between self and world. Religious interpretations of these changes are another matter entirely. What interests me first is that some features of the experience recur whether or not two participants share a doctrine.

The unusually concrete example is geometric hallucination. Heinrich Klüver catalogued recurring form constants in mescaline experiences, including spirals, lattices, tunnels and cobwebs. Decades later, researchers developed mathematical models showing how some of those recurring patterns can arise from the layout of the retinocortical map and the symmetries of connections in primary visual cortex. The relevant paper actually produces families of recognizable hallucinatory geometry from assumptions about cortical organization. A similar experience can therefore recur across otherwise unrelated individuals because their visual systems are built along similar lines.

This is a much better result than simply announcing that the vision was not supernatural. The architecture of the observer can generate stable forms that the observer experiences as qualities of the world, which means a symbol might become culturally important even when its immediate generator is internal. It also puts a firm ceiling on our enthusiasm: a model of spirals in visual cortex tells us nothing by itself about whether an ancient depiction of a serpent originated in a trance. The artifact may have had political meaning, been borrowed from a neighbor, represented an actual animal, or emerged from several causes at once.

Still, the design space is not uniform. Snakes move without limbs, vanish underground, return from places humans cannot follow, shed their skins, carry venom, and resemble rivers and lightning. Birds do the one thing terrestrial humans most obviously cannot. Joining a snake to wings creates a symbol with a nearly absurd density of available associations, and some cultures may independently favor it simply because it is a powerful piece of visual compression. Cross-cultural recurrence need not imply identical belief, shared origin or communication across an ocean to be worth investigating.

III. I accidentally built a very boring strange attractor

There is an embarrassing example of this argument already sitting on my website. In 2023 I tried putting a strange attractor on the homepage, went through a series of changes that seemed reasonable at the time, and eventually ended up with a Thomas cyclically symmetric system that stubbornly refused to become chaotic. The old code and the 2026 reconstruction preserve the explanation. I had initialized all three coordinates to the same value, (0.1, 0.1, 0.1), which placed the trajectory on the invariant line x = y = z. Because that equality remains preserved under the equations, the trajectory could not leave the line; with the parameters I had used, it headed toward a fixed point. I had gone looking for an intricate evolving structure and selected initial conditions that prevented the exploration I wanted.

This is not evidence that dreams are governed by Thomas's equations, and changing that seed alone does not guarantee chaos under every parameter choice. It is an unusually memorable way to learn that a dynamical system is not merely the equations written on the page. Starting conditions, constraints and accessible trajectories determine what an observer will actually see. I like it for this essay because it forces an abstract metaphor to touch something I built badly rather than allowing me to nod knowingly at a diagram of the Lorenz attractor.

In dynamical-systems language, an attractor is a set toward which a system's states tend to evolve. Neuroscience employs attractor models for persistent activity, memory, spatial representation and the integration of noisy evidence, though none of this demonstrates that consciousness as a whole is one giant strange attractor. The legitimate models concern specific circuits and computations, not a universal spiritual vortex. My proposal is weaker and in some ways more interesting: recurring symbols may sometimes behave analogously to attractors because different minds move toward similar representational solutions when confronted with similar constraints.

A death is a departure, so death narratives repeatedly acquire roads, thresholds and crossings. Cyclical time invites wheels, coils and repeated journeys. Transcendence invites altitude. These choices are not arbitrary, but neither are they theorems. They are what happens when bodies, perceptual systems and inherited stories constrain the enormous range of images a person could otherwise invent.

Culture then changes the starting conditions for the next person. A child learns sacred images, ritual gestures and emotional associations long before encountering whatever experiences those symbols will later interpret. Expectations alter attention; attention changes the experience; the experience reinforces or changes the symbol; the revised tradition trains another child. In this way cultural recurrence can arise from a coupled system of bodies and histories rather than from finished mythological images stored in the genome or a hidden collective cloud. Historical borrowing still matters, and often explains how a symbol arrived; the feedback process might help explain why a borrowed symbol survives.

IV. Ritual changes the observer, which is not the same thing as manufacturing revelation

The next step is easy to state badly. Ritual changes nervous systems, therefore ancient religion was state-space engineering, therefore mystics were deliberately hacking consciousness. There is a useful observation buried inside that sequence, but each “therefore” claims more than we know. What we can say comfortably is that rituals are not merely beliefs wearing costumes. They contain procedures that alter physiology, attention, expectation and social coordination whether or not their participants possess a theory of those mechanisms.

Chanting changes respiration and temporal attention. Group singing coordinates timing. Fasting changes metabolism. Vigil changes cognition. Incense changes sensory context. Pilgrimage adds exhaustion, place and expectation to an existing narrative. Kneeling changes posture and social meaning. Repeated liturgical action narrows the field of possible behavior while thickening associations around a smaller number of objects, words and gestures. A skeptic can explain every one of those effects naturalistically without making the effects disappear, because mechanisms do not negate phenomena.

Psychedelic research makes the general principle unusually visible because the perturbation is large enough to model. A 2022 network-control study using fMRI data from LSD and psilocybin found that both compounds lowered the modeled control energy required to move among recurrent brain states, corresponding to more flexible and entropic state transitions. The authors explicitly describe this as a flattening of the brain’s control-energy landscape. Another direct comparison of psychedelic, hypnotic and meditative states found that they do not collapse onto one common neural signature, which is important because “altered state” is not a single destination with several doors. Different practices can alter consciousness while doing so through measurably different patterns.

This gives us a better vocabulary for an old fact: methods change which experiences are easy to enter. The mistake would be treating the vocabulary as the mechanism known to the ancients or assuming that every state made accessible by a practice is epistemically superior to ordinary consciousness. A flattened landscape can expose neglected possibilities and also make bad possibilities easier to reach. Reduced constraint can generate insight, apophenia, terror, beauty, false certainty or several of them during the same hour.

That last point matters more than the romantic version admits. An altered state is not self-authenticating. Feeling that one has encountered ultimate reality does not by itself establish what reality was encountered, whether anything external was encountered, or whether the interpretation applied afterward is true. Ancient traditions knew some version of this problem because mystical and visionary claims have always required systems of discernment. Modern neuroscience merely gives us additional reasons to be suspicious of intensity as a truth detector.

V. A myth can outlive the experience that gave it meaning

Suppose you have an experience that changes the apparent structure of time, makes ordinary objects unbearably significant, weakens the boundary between self and world, and leaves behind an impression of having understood something enormous. Describing it afterward is an information problem. The state includes attention, spatial and bodily sensations, memory, affect and a configuration of salience that ordinary prose serializes rather poorly. Saying “everything was one” might summarize one aspect, but it transmits about as much of the experience as the phrase “C major” transmits of a symphony.

Myth may serve partly as a lossy compression format for such states. A cosmic egg breaking, a serpent coiling around the world, a dying god returning to life, or a journey into and out of the underworld can preserve a bundle of relations without specifying every part of the experience in words. A ritual can then provide a setting in which some of those relations acquire emotional or perceptual force again. This does not establish that a particular myth originated in an altered state; most myths have multiple jobs, including legitimizing rulers, preserving ancestry, coordinating festivals and entertaining people who are presumably bored of listening to the priest.

There is also an important asymmetry between survival and continuity. A language can survive the empire that once carried it without proving that the empire remains vigorous; similarly a serpent motif can remain popular for centuries after the practice, experience or theology that first animated it has changed beyond recognition. A successful symbol may survive precisely because it becomes useful for new purposes. Its longevity establishes cultural transmissibility, not fidelity to an original revelation, a particular neural state, or an intact civilizational worldview.

That suggests two different archaeological questions that are usually collapsed into one. How did a motif travel and survive, and what kind of experience might have made it compelling to the people who first used it? The first belongs primarily to history; the second may invite cognitive science and phenomenology, though the evidence is often permanently incomplete. The same object can be explained at both levels, but it is a mistake to expect a diagram of the brain to substitute for an archive of the civilization.

VI. QRI is interesting because it asks whether the compressed thing has mathematics

The Qualia Research Institute enters here because it takes an unfashionable possibility seriously: subjective experience may have formal structure worth modeling on its own terms rather than merely being treated as a colorful byproduct correlated with neural measurements. QRI’s broader program, sometimes called Qualia Formalism, tries to identify mathematical invariants of experience; its more controversial Symmetry Theory of Valence proposes that some forms of phenomenal symmetry may correspond to positive valence. These are hypotheses, not settled consciousness science, and the gap between the ambition of the program and the available evidence remains large.

I like the wager more than I currently trust any particular equation. If a visual hallucination has geometry, if pain has dimensions, if experiences can differ in symmetry, boundary, temporal grain, salience and self-location, then a mature science of consciousness probably needs a vocabulary richer than “subject reported feeling weird.” The history of science is full of domains that became tractable only after somebody stopped treating qualitative structure as noise and found the right representation.

QRI’s work on the hyperbolic geometry of DMT experiences is a good example of the distinction this essay keeps needing. The interesting claim is not that DMT proves physical spacetime is secretly hyperbolic, but that subjects report phenomenal spaces whose transformations may be described more naturally with non-Euclidean geometry than with ordinary Euclidean intuition. That can be wrong while remaining a coherent scientific proposal. “The trip changed the geometry of the universe” is a physics claim; “the trip changed the geometry of experience” is a phenomenology claim.

Their psychedelic-cryptography experiments make the point in an almost comically literal way. Visual information was embedded in stimuli designed so that altered tracers, afterimages or learned attentional strategies could make patterns easier to recover. The demonstration is not peer-reviewed evidence of a new channel to hidden dimensions, but it shows how the same external signal can disclose different information under different perceptual regimes. The pixels remain where they were; the observer’s processing changes; a feature that was effectively unavailable becomes salient.

That is about as far as I want to push the analogy. Mystical traditions may indeed contain observations that ordinary consciousness underweights, but altered states also increase the hypothesis space available to a pattern-hungry brain. The same loosening that permits a useful association can produce ten counterfeit ones. QRI is valuable here less because it vindicates mysticism than because it suggests a way to convert some phenomenological claims into models that can eventually fail.

VII. Catholicism is the place where this framework has to stop pretending everything is equivalent

At this point it would be very easy to produce the standard perennialist ending: Orphic initiation, Nahua ritual, Buddhist meditation, Catholic contemplation and psychedelic states are all technologies for entering the same underlying consciousness field, the gods are culturally specific user interfaces, and religion is ancient neuroscience with incense. That conclusion is tidy, flattering and incompatible with taking Catholicism on its own terms.

The Catholic tradition makes distinctions that are actually useful for this problem. Natural reason and empirical inquiry can discover truths about creation, including truths about the human nervous system, while revelation belongs to a different order because its source is God’s gratuitous self-disclosure rather than human exploration. John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio is unusually explicit about the difference: reason and revelation are not competing descriptions of the same epistemic procedure, and faith does not become more sophisticated by being reduced to philosophy or science. The Catholic claim is that nature and grace are distinct without being enemies, because both truth and the created order ultimately come from God.

This matters most for the sacraments. A Mass obviously has natural psychological effects: architecture directs attention, chant affects breathing and emotion, repetition builds memory, kneeling changes bodily orientation, and a lifetime of catechesis changes what the communicant expects when approaching the altar. None of that is controversial, and the Catechism itself says that the Church takes up created things and human signs into the liturgy. Catholicism has never required pretending bodies stop being bodies in church.

But those natural effects are not, in Catholic theology, what makes a sacrament a sacrament. The Church calls the sacraments efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church; their efficacy rests on Christ’s action rather than on the emotional intensity, suggestibility or neurological state of the recipient. The recipient’s disposition affects the fruit, but not because the nervous system manufactures the grace being signified. In the Eucharist specifically, transubstantiation is the claim that the whole substance of bread and wine becomes Christ’s Body and Blood while the sensible species remain. Reducing this to changed perception would not be an alternative explanation of Catholic doctrine; it would simply deny the doctrine and replace it with psychology.

The same firewall appears in Catholic teaching on contemplation. The Church absolutely recognizes methods, disciplines and bodily conditions that dispose a person toward prayer, yet it refuses to identify mystical union with a reproducible technique. The Catechism calls contemplative prayer a gift and a grace, while the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 1989 letter Orationis formas warns explicitly that Christian mystical union is not something a method can mechanically produce. A technique can alter attention; it cannot compel God.

This gives Catholic thought a surprisingly good response to the entire altered-state problem. Subjective intensity is neither dismissed nor treated as self-validating. Visions, consolations and unusual experiences are subordinate to revelation, truth, charity and discernment. Christianity does not need to deny that brains have state spaces, because grace does not compete with nature as though God were one more causal variable wedged between serotonin and the anterior cingulate. At the same time, Catholicism gives me no permission to equate an ecstatic state with sanctity or to treat whatever feels numinous as revelation. The tradition is more conservative than the psychonaut and more hospitable to interior experience than the crude materialist.

VIII. A beautiful experience is not a verdict

There is a particularly strong Catholic objection to treating altered states as sources of privileged knowledge: even an experience of overwhelming bliss or certainty cannot certify its own spiritual significance. The Catechism is unusually plain on this point in paragraph 2005, explaining that grace belongs to the supernatural order and escapes direct experience, so we cannot infer that we are justified or saved merely from our feelings or works. It also points toward the fruits of a life as a more trustworthy place to exercise discernment. This is a much sharper constraint than the generic instruction not to trust visions too much.

Imagine two people undergoing phenomenologically similar experiences of unity, tenderness and radiant significance. One returns with more humility, patience and concern for others; the other returns convinced that he has personally transcended every moral obligation ordinary humans must endure. A neuroscientific account could find substantial overlap in their experienced geometry and affect without being able to conclude that the encounters were spiritually equivalent. For Catholic theology, charity and fidelity to Christ matter in ways that neither psychedelic intensity nor a symmetry metric can replace.

This also supplies a check against the perennialist temptation to use resemblance as identity. The Church understands Christ as the fullness of public Revelation and treats even recognized private revelations as subordinate rather than as additions to the deposit of faith. A striking experience may deserve investigation, but it cannot quietly rewrite the Gospel because it felt more real than ordinary life. In a world where a person can become unreasonably certain of a pattern after twenty minutes with a search engine, the distinction between vividness and truth has considerable practical appeal.

IX. A hypothesis has to encounter something capable of disappointing it

The danger now is that the whole proposal becomes an elaborate excuse to interpret every serpent, circle and ritual as confirmation. Once a theory claims to explain whatever symbol happens to be in the next photograph, it has stopped risking anything. I have become increasingly suspicious of accounts of reality that cannot surprise their authors except by being confirmed yet again. The point of a model is to meet a system that may refuse to behave as expected, as my attractor already did in a less distinguished setting.

We could make some narrow predictions. Shared visual architecture should yield similar geometric motifs under comparable perturbations more reliably than arbitrary narrative details, a claim already partly supported by the form-constant literature. Ritual variables such as synchronized movement, breath, sleep deprivation, expectation and music should affect different dimensions of phenomenology in distinguishable ways, rather than leading to one universal state called mysticism. Prior symbolic instruction should sometimes alter which features participants notice and remember even when a physical induction procedure is held constant.

The harder and more interesting experiment would test the mythology claim directly. Assemble a pre-registered comparative corpus that separately codes documented ritual procedures, first-person experiential reports, visual motifs, linguistic histories and evidence of contact between cultures. Test whether a specific class of experiential structure predicts a specific class of symbol better than ecology, borrowing and chance, using traditions not involved in developing the classification as the holdout set. If the predictions fail after controlling for transmission and translation, then “myth as phenomenological compression” may be a useful literary metaphor rather than a historical explanation.

QRI deserves the same standard, although its proposals operate at a different level. A mathematical account of valence should ultimately predict something that a flexible retrospective interpretation cannot. A proposed geometry of consciousness should organize reports with fewer degrees of freedom than ordinary descriptive prose. If the mathematics never produces constraints strong enough to be wrong, then the project will have repeated the ancient-quantum internet mistake with prettier illustrations and more advanced notation. I would rather have a theory that fails informatively than a worldview that wins every argument by changing what its symbols mean.

X. The map and the person holding it

The comparison that first caught my attention remains unresolved. Orphic Chronos and the Mesoamerican Feathered Serpent have real historical contexts, and the resemblance between them could result from a combination of ordinary symbolism, cultural transmission and genuine convergence. I do not have enough evidence to reconstruct their creators' subjective experiences, much less to proclaim that those creators independently discovered one cosmic mechanism. The most I can say is that human experience has repeatable structures, cultural symbols can preserve some of their relations, and later cultures can train new participants to experience old symbols as meaningful.

That is already a different theory of tradition from the one that treats myth as a collection of primitive guesses about physical objects. It also explains why resemblance alone is cheap. The recurrence of a picture can establish that the picture was easy to make, easy to remember, useful to transmit, or genuinely connected to a recurrent experience; distinguishing those possibilities requires history, measurement and uncomfortable tests rather than another collage of sacred geometry. The old material deserves neither automatic credulity nor the automatic contempt we reserve for explanations using unfamiliar vocabulary.

I keep coming back to the thought that symbols may sometimes function like coordinate charts over regions of possible human experience, allowing one generation to point another toward relationships that ordinary descriptive language handles badly. This is an analogy about what people do with symbols, not an assertion that every deity is a projection of consciousness. Catholicism makes that last distinction unavoidable: its central claim is not that humanity eventually explored a sufficiently exotic mental state and named it Christ, but that God acted in history and revealed Himself in the Incarnation. Human faculties and cultures participate in receiving and transmitting that revelation, but they do not generate its source.

The Thomas-attractor mistake on my old site has become a useful warning here. I could stare at an uninteresting trajectory and blame the equations, unaware that the starting point prevented the system from showing me anything else. The inverse mistake would be just as bad: seeing an unexpectedly beautiful trajectory and immediately declaring that I had discovered the complete nature of the system. We need careful ways to explore both the observer and the observed, and enough humility to admit what a particular experience cannot establish.

The serpent was probably not quantum physics, which is unfortunate because that would have made a great rabbit hole. What survives the debunking is a harder and more durable question: how much of mythology records structures that minds reliably encounter, how much comes from historical inheritance, and how might we learn to separate them? The Catholic answer contributes one final limit to the project. No matter how skillfully we map the possible states of the receiver, a complete map of the receiver would not, by itself, tell us everything about the message or the one who sent it.