Main excavation area with monumental PPN A enclosures in the Göbekli Tepe archaeological site. Photograph by Nico Becker, courtesy of the Deutsches Archälogisches Institut.

It’s been thought for some time that life emerged from the primordial soup. It now seems that humanity is the product of social soup.

Social soup is the bio-cultural-environmental complex of opinions, beliefs, desires, truths, values, myths, grudges, inventions, histories, conspiracies, rumors, plans, protocols, archetypes, dwellings, art, jokes, taboos, and other complex vectors of life woven through our mysterious emotional organic wetware. This mesh is our habitat. We don’t dwell in nature; we live amongst each other.

Social soup is a life sentence of cohabitation. The “Hobbesian Fallacy: the idea that human beings were primordially individualistic,” is invoked every time someone does a stint in solitary.¹ We don’t find ourselves in forced solitude; we lose our minds. Social soup is the necessary collective life support that we weave for each other out of each other to maintain our sense of self. For better or worse, we are our each other’s atmosphere.

Our complex, often turbulent, sometimes chaotic social soup divorces us from the more reliable, coherent, and consistent natural world. This makes life interesting, and interestingness is precisely the prerequisite for becoming human according to anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar.

our brains are time machines

Evolutionary psychology treats the brain as a living fossil. Presumably unchanged over hundreds of thousands of years, all of humanity has been built on the same neurochemical platform. Such consistency can be used as a cipher to unlock unrecorded history. For evolutionary psychologists, our brains are time machines.

Dunbar rides it back to the beginning, tracing the emergence of consciousness to a quirk in our predecessors’ neurological wiring. Stroking the hairy flesh of primates releases highly addictive opiates in the brain. Grooming is not only hygienic; it also produces a high. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours may have been the world’s first gift economy. Haptic heroin may have been the first addiction.

Scoring a regular hit would have required more cunning than gathering nuts or even hunting game. Emotional dynamics are non-linear; only the savvy survive. Motivated by addiction, the most clever would have introduced new moves and new rules, regularly upping the price of getting high in a de facto Darwinian “cognitive arms race” to symbolic thought.² These primitive hustlers are our ancestors. We are their nth generation crack babies.

If addiction drove the first economy, reputation would have been its currency. First as gesture, then as utterance, Dunbar suggests that gossip may have been the first form of market manipulation. Social soups have been governed by what polymath blogger Venkatesh Rao calls “narrative rationality” ever since.³

From horror stories to bedtime stories, narrative can both shock us and put us to sleep. Narrative is the electric current of the social soup. It gives the social soup its charge. Origin stories are the most powerful. They polarize. They align us, repelling them.

Entropy is the cosmic force constantly pulling us apart. Authority goes to whoever tells the new story that better holds us together. It is assumed, not granted. While commanding, authority cannot be or won at the tip of a spear. While persuasive, it cannot be persuaded.⁴ Its logic transcends reason.

Entropy says nothing will ever be the same. Authoritarians are the narrative entrepreneurs who find ways of saying everything will be all right. They all print fake news. From Hitler to Trump, L. Ron Hubbard to Billy Graham, the “most compelling and elegant story”⁵ is the bottled lightning that shocks the social soup into new configurations. Charisma is a prerequisite. Hillary Clinton never had a chance.

Magic is the magnetism of the social soup.

Charisma charms. It enchants. It casts a spell. It is nothing less than magic. For chaos magician and writer Gordon White, “what magic does is enhance the probability of certain outcomes over others.”⁶ It is the invisible force that aligns the human dust, rearranging the quantum playing field in the magician’s favor. Magic is the magnetism of the social soup.

Shamans were the first to put it all together. Whether through exhaustive rhythmic dance, self-harm, or psychoactive substances, humans are able to escape into a hallucinatory netherworld. Shamans claimed the right to interpret it. They translate the lessons of the spirit animals, geometric patterns, spatial archetypes, and other encounters into narratives for navigating the mundane. With a monopoly over the supernatural message, their authority was bulletproof. It came from beyond.

Shamanic sight isn’t special. While shamans make sense of such visions, they aren’t the only ones who can see them. Lab reports of subjects administered controlled amounts of LSD, DMT, ayahuasca, and psilocybin mushrooms report the same visual effects that are encoded in both ancient and latterday shamanic cultures.⁷ Under the same spell, everyone sees pretty much the same thing. Altered states of consciousness are universal modes of the human technology. Hallucinations are not bespoke experiences of individual minds gone haywire; they are consistent and reproducible visual effects that have persisted over millennia. Visions are not brain bugs; they are features. Shamans aren’t charlatans; they were the first neuroscientists.

Petroglyphs are ground zero. Dating back at least 40,000 years, the painted, engraved, and carved cave art initially found in the Mediterranean—now stretching as far afield as Indonesia—has long marked the beginning of the ‘creative explosion’ of human culture. Once we started turning caves into canvases, cultural innovation flourished. It was the starting line of the human race.

Once we started turning caves into canvases, cultural innovation flourished.

The beauty Werner Herzog lauds in the ballet of forms at Chauvet obscures the point. Paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger’s recent comprehensive survey of the geometric shapes found in the caves of the Mediterranean revealed a sum total of just thirty-two distinct forms over 30,000 years.⁸ For archaeologist David Lewis-Williams, this is no surprise: these geometric patterns, alongside the therianthropic human-beast hybrids and piercing death and resurrection scenes commonly found in the near unreachable cavernous guts of the earth, are precisely the visual tropes encountered in altered states of consciousness. Petroglyphs weren’t just decoration. They were prehistoric trip reports.⁹

Transitionalist Darwinian evolution doesn’t do well with creative explosions. Following his own ayahuasca experience in Western Amazonia as a doctoral candidate in the early 1980s, Canadian anthropologist Jeremy Narby rationalized his hallucinations into a theory that does. Snakes were his cipher. The most commonly encountered vision, snakes persist in the myths of shamanic cultures across the world as the ‘mother’ of ayahuasca itself, the tree of knowledge or the tree of life, the sky pole or twisted ladder that shamans traverse between axis mundi, the points they occupy on earth, and anchors in the sky. Regularly twinned, and often twisted, Narby recognized that they mirror not only the content but also the form of DNA.

All organic matter is drawn from DNA, a profoundly curious construct. Only a few percent of the three billion nucleotides in human DNA actually code for the genes that determine our physical makeup. The rest appears to be repetitive molecular gibberish, often repeating the same seemingly useless patterns hundreds of times over. Scientists called it ‘junk DNA.’ Yet this alphabet soup both corresponds to Zipf’s Law and passes Claude Shannon’s redundancy test, two ontological thresholds for natural language. Junkiness is also what allows these periodic stretches of DNA to receive the fantastically iridescent yet nearly invisible ‘biophotons’ emitted by the aperiodic segments that code for genes. DNA appears to be transmitter and receiver of vibrant human readable messages at the limits of visibility itself. Ayahuasca appears to be a brew that tunes our brains into the subatomic signal.

Ayahuasca is not just a psychedelic. It’s an entheogen: it reveals the divine within. What better description of DNA? And where else would Amazonian tribes have learned the recipe for ayahuasca? Of the hundred thousand or so unique plant species in the rainforest, its two ingredients are impotent on their own, only becoming active after hours of specific preparation. The shamans say they learned the recipe from tobacco, another entheogen when taken in high concentration. Taking them literally suggests, “DNA in particular and nature in general are minded.”¹⁰ If you can get to the other side of consciousness, you can download knowledge from the database of life. Through the “television of the forest,” the form of nature reveals itself.¹¹

Narby’s hypothesis brings a pre-modern flavor back to the social soup. It tosses non-humans into the mix, capturing the entire biosphere in a single cauldron. It puts animism back in the kitchen.

Narby’s musings are no more staggering to the modern scientific worldview than those of the most advanced scientists themselves. Francis Crick, the Nobel prize-winning scientist who discovered the snaking form of DNA, spent the rest of his life trying to unpack the mystery of its complexity. The fossil record shows terrestrial DNA as early as 3.85 billion years ago, only 500 million years after the surface of the earth had cooled enough for water to form. Crick ran the numbers: DNA was far too sophisticated to have arisen out of the primordial soup so quickly. He settled on another explanation: “directed panspermia.”¹² Not only was DNA out of this world, it was fired here from afar by intergalactic snipers. It appears the social soup may predate the primordial soup.

Proof of the Higgs boson continued to turn up the weird. Its discovery in 2013 demonstrated the effect by which pure energy acquires mass by traversing the Higgs field, a portal between the invisible energetic realm that co-exists with our visible material environment. Now with their own portal to the other side, scientific cosmology is no longer estranged from shamanic. A new theory of creative explosion lies in their reunion: Prometheus may have been a plant.

Shamanism was the early spark that drove increasing social complexity

This is not a new idea. “Perhaps one of the only genuinely global spiritual beliefs… is the notion that mankind was instructed in the ways of magic, culture, language, law and technology by the spirits. We invented very little. We were shown most of it.”¹³ Shamanism was the early spark that drove increasing social complexity. Historian Daniel Lord Smail expands the role of psychoactive substances into a general theory of cultural acceleration this side of consciousness. He calls it “deep history.”¹⁴

Smail stretches Dunbar’s “social intelligence hypothesis” for the emergence of symbolic thought into a perpetual evolutionary engine. If the nervous system is the feedback loop driving the escalation of complexity between mind and culture, then “culture is indeed coded in human physiology.”¹⁵ DNA does not only mutate accidentally, genes and cultures coevolve: as culture changes, cultural pressures change, forcing humans to continually adapt. The winning mutations are written into our genetic code in a system of positive feedback. Such systems naturally accelerate. Evolutionary psychology misses the punch line: our brains aren’t just fossils; they’re fuel.

Introducing new substances and events that tinker with our neurochemistry, reframe our dispositions, and alter our consciousness, boosts the coevolutionary process. Smail calls them “psychotropic mechanisms.”¹⁶ From the earliest experimental rituals to alcohol, coffee, tea, chili peppers, chocolate, sugar, opium, nitrous oxide, erotic literature, novels, newspapers, massage, terrorism, masturbation, and conspiracy theories, new psychotropic mechanisms unbalance brain-culture equilibrium, giving the coevolutionary dynamo a regular kick. Some cause mass addiction, others enlightenment. Social soups are classified by their culture of consumption. Otherworldly insight or Netflix and chill… again?

Smail’s schema presents a predicament: “Is culture just a drug?”¹⁷

Not always. Linguist and former Christian missionary Daniel Everett’s field work in the Amazon gets ahead of the problem. In the Pirahã, a tribe without shamans, he saw drug-free culture first hand.

Pirahã culture is shaped by an “immediacy of experience principle.”¹⁸ They construct huts only to let them decay; make baskets and necklaces to be quickly abandoned; marry, separate, and remarry without agonizing; eat exactly what they hunt and gather as soon as it is hunted and gathered; and take on new names and new identities following transformative experiences. “Lack of concern for the future was a cultural value.”¹⁹ This extends to spirituality. Or, perhaps, it stems from it. They are a tribe without shamans.

Each Pirahã sees spirits, but they don’t deify them. Without the pyrotechnics of psychedelics, their encounters don’t merit memorialization. “Traditional oral literature and rituals have no place.”²⁰ No narrative, no magic. They live in a cultural Faraday cage: their social soup resists the electromagnetic field. Culture is left bare. After three decades of seeing its material effects regularly being born anew, Everett distilled a definition:

“Culture is an abstract network shaping and connecting social roles, hierarchically structured knowledge domains, and ranked values. Culture is dynamic, shifting, reinterpreted moment by moment. Culture is found only in the bodies (the brain is part of the body) and behaviors of its members. Culture permeates the individual, the community, behaviors, and thinking.”²¹

Culture doesn’t dictate, it nudges. It is the weak force that pulls us into each other’s orbits. Culture is the field that forms and deforms as we move through it. It resides in and between the bodies that form the social soup, growing in strength the more they come together. If narrative and magic are the electromagnetic field of the social soup, culture is its gravity.

Gravity counters entropy. It produces the stable flows in an otherwise chaotic cosmos. Cultural gravity gives the social soup the inertia necessary to gain momentum. It makes it viscous. It gives it a lasting shape.

Culture is the interface between the deep self and deep space.

Culture is the interface between the deep self and deep space. Tools are the “congealed culture” that externalize its form into the environment.²² The internalization of culture is what Everett calls the “dark matter of the mind: knowledge and values relating to our environment, ranging across the unspoken and the ineffable, the bodily and the mental, engaging the full individual.”²³ It is the things that are such a native part of our self-image that we forget they came from others.

These cultural crusts corrode the electrodes of the social soup, insulating it from electromagnetic and environmental shocks. Not just any story can penetrate it; not just any calamity will reorganize it. They maintain social form long enough for it to be written in DNA. Culture allows the coevolutionary engine to purr precisely because it slows down the tempo

The fundamental forces of the social soup collide in mythology. “Mythology allows for the retention of meaning.”²⁴ It writes the social story into culture as a cipher for values, preserving it long enough to magnetize the human atoms themselves. It’s the way culture turns narrative into sympathetic magic.

Meme magic is as real as it is ancient. Myths are “cool” tools.²⁵ They connect directly to the dark matter of our minds. Like cartoons and hieroglyphics, stereotypes and Internet memes, the mutability of their message is a medium that invites participation. Participation tribalizes. By the laws of social thermodynamics, the heat lost by emerging order produces chaos elsewhere. The more the alt-right galvanized around the Cult of Kek and Mike Cernovich’s mytho-hashtags, the more the Clinton campaign went into meltdown.

Institutions are tools of tools. Meta-tools. They codify specific interpretations of meaning by formalizing the dark matter of the mind into explicit mental models, the “dynamic, unstable and partially coherent set of beliefs, desires and intentions held together by narratives that weave through the current realities, possible histories and possible futures of a situation,” and externalizing them by “arranging reality to conform to their structure.”²⁶ Institutions turn stories into formal platforms upon which increasingly complex institutions can be built, increasing the tempo of cultural innovation.

Political institutions are hot tools. Their goal is high resolution. Perfect politics is technocratic; it admits no participation. Think Yanis Varoufakis at the European Commission. But realpolitik is as much a mythology as the myths it attempts to deny. The political territory is governed by the mythological map. When cultural currents change, friction builds on the surface of rigid institutions that no longer align, turning up the heat. When the social soup starts to boil, culture war breaks out. Francis Fukuyama’s two-volume two-decade-long study of the origins, development, and decay of political order offers a survival strategy: “Adaptable institutions are the ones that survive, since environments always change.”²⁷ Foxes last in politics, not hedgehogs.

Chris Langton scientized McLuhan’s temperature model. Langton studied cellular automata, two-dimensional ecosystems conditioned by initial rule sets. His contribution solved the problem of how to ensure a lively environment by dialing a single parameter. He likened it to temperature in second order phase transitions of matter, wherein molecules don’t make an either-or choice between chaos and order. Rather islands of order float around in a sea of chaos, and at the transition heat, “the balance is perfect: the ordered structures fill a volume precisely equal to that of the chaotic fluid. Order and chaos intertwine in a complex, ever-changing dance of submicroscopic arms and fractal filaments.”²⁸ On either side of this thin line, systems spiral into either frozen order or chaotic heat death. Complexity emerged from getting the balance right. Langton called achieving it the “Game of Life.”

Civilizations are strategies for playing the Game of Life at scale. Agriculture, religion, politics, architecture, medicine, law, literature, education, and the like are technologies for regulating heat. The civilizational stack is the thermostat for keeping the social soup at Goldilocks temperature.

Nests do more than shelter, they turn the many into one.

Farming was long thought to have come first. Evolutionary moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt tells a different story. He situates civilization in the long chain of increasingly complex superorganisms—organisms made up of other organisms—from the first mitochondrial marriage of singled-celled bacteria to the imagined communities of countries and the deterritorialized billion-strong nation of Facebook. In the few species that have achieved “ultrasociality,” forming large enough structured groups to benefit from the division of labor, architecture was the common catalyst: “One of the key features of all the nonhuman ultrasocials to cross over appears to be the need to defend a shared nest.”²⁹

Nests do more than shelter, they turn the many into one. This “groupishness” is an evolutionary advantage.³⁰ Colonials like bees, wasps, ants, and aphids make up just two percent of known insect species, but account for more than half of those alive today by weight. Nests synchronize societies by projecting the dark matter of their collective minds into the physical institutions of their shared environments. They are self-reinforcing infrastructural feedback loops that simultaneously contain the social soup and allow it to scale.

Architecture is the human nest. The difference is that it’s sacred. Per Goethe, the sacred “links souls together.”³¹ Souls outweigh bodies in the economics of posterity. The sacred invites sacrifice. As a young Georges Bataille wrote of his hometown cathedral, “as long as it lasted, even if in ruins, we would still have a mother for whom to die.”³² Architecture cheats the Game of Life by making martyrs of its contributors. Architecture, not agriculture, is the base layer of the civilizational stack.

Adolf Loos’ ontological test for architecture was the tomb. Passing it the woods, “you turn serious.”³³ It is architecture because it affects. It transforms your state of mind. But architecture also effects. Verb, not noun. It births original ideas and entities. Architecture is as magical as it is sacred.

Caves were not the first architecture because they kept out the rain, but because they were “concrete symbols of passage into another world.”³⁴ Petroglyphs preserved shamanic souvenirs so they could feed prehistoric research programs. If entheogens were the red pill that woke the human mind, then caves were the original peer-to-peer infrastructure for downloading informational contraband. Architecture may have begun as a tomb, but its origin is the stone data center co-located with the other side of consciousness. Shamans were the first architects. Profound evidence is currently being dug up in Southeastern Turkey.

German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt invested the last two decades of his life excavating Göbekli Tepe, “potbelly hill,” the vast megalithic site he first opened up in the mid-1990s. Because radiocarbon dating depends on the decay of organic material, megalithic sites are typically impervious. Their age remains conjectural. But Göbekli Tepe was buried, leaving an unimpeachable temporal signature of its entombment. Recent dating revealed the oldest layers date back about 11,500 years, roughly twice as old as the orthodox dating of Stonehenge. This changes everything we thought we knew about the beginnings of civilization.

Göbekli Tepe is composed of a vast array of diverse T-shaped megalithic stone circles, most enclosing the two largest in the center. Some reach to twenty feet in height; many feature ornate animistic and humanoid carvings. Armies of skilled craftsman would have been required. Hunter-gatherers were not supposed to have been capable of this.

The peer-reviewed publications of Schmidt et al. have already overturned a number of conventional beliefs. While only a fraction of the site has been unearthed, ground-penetrating radar shows more of the same. There are no domiciles. Göbekli Tepe was not an early Neolithic settlement; it was a cult center. It predates the surrounding settlements and the evidence they offer of the cultivation of grains and the domestication of animals, the earliest known on earth. The ‘fertile crescent’ was not planted by seeds but architecture.

Archaeologists are the keepers of our most hallowed stories.

Göbekli Tepe’s implications are sweeping, but archaeology is a necessarily conservative discipline. Archaeologists are the keepers of our most hallowed stories. Empires and industries have been built atop them. Unlike the apocryphal John Maynard Keynes, when the facts change, archaeologists can’t always update their beliefs. It takes more than evidence to dig up the foundations of constitutional land claims, genocidal historiographies, faculty positions, and the textbook trade. The findings at Göbekli Tepe are so profound that their radicality seems to be welcomed only by the “lunatic fringe” of “alternate archaeologists.”

Self-styled Indiana Joneses, “Megalithomaniacs,” psychonauts, seekers, seers, and skeptics of academic orthodoxy, alt-archaeologists troll the hubris of orthodox historiography with models that account for out of place artifacts like the Nazca lines and underwater civilizations, the Antikythera machine and the Baghdad battery, overgrown pyramids, impossible megaliths, and the elongated skulls of ancient giants. While their conclusions are controversial, their archive contains a critical mass of potent architectural evidence far off the radar of polite architecture discourse. There is gold to be mined down the rabbit hole of conspiracy history.

Alt-archaeological history is catastrophic rather than gradual. Their earth is terraformed by cataclysmic events, population bottlenecks, and seismic shifts rather than steady, consistent, uniform processes playing out over geologic time. Catastrophe drives diffusion. It makes one social soup run into another. Proof seems to be increasingly tallying in their favor.

The Younger Dryas Boundary Impact Hypothesis was a big win. First proposed in a 2007 peer-reviewed paper by twenty-six authors,³⁵ many credentialed scientists, the ensuing decade of heated debate led to a more definitive account in 2013.³⁶ The 1,300 year long mini Ice Age that set in from 12,900 to 11,600 years ago is no longer a mystery. It was the result of extraterrestrial impact.

Breaking up over Canada into pieces that smashed into the miles-thick Laurentide Ice Sheet, the comet fragments left no discernible craters. Instead, they melted enough ice to raise global sea level by upwards of one hundred fifty meters in a flood of, literally, biblical proportions. Swallowing coastal territories larger than the area of China and dropping global average temperatures by 8ºC while raining decades of debris around the world, the comet impact not only wiped out megafaunal species and entire human cultures, it would have eviscerated and drowned surface evidence of human prehistory.

Science has identified the cause, but its own blindness was one of the effects. With little hard evidence to gather, our antediluvian memory persists almost exclusively in the soft tissue of mythology, precisely the pre-modern memory device that academic Enlightenment thinking sought to expunge. If rational incrementalism is what left us with such a gaping hole in our prehistory, then we shouldn’t be so hostile to irrational interpretations that attempt to fill it.

Science has identified the cause, but its own blindness was one of the effects.

Alt-archaeologists like Andrew Collins triangulate inter-cultural mythological overlaps with material evidence to spin spectacular backstories so unbelievable they just may encode some truth. From the intersection of mythology, genetics, and archaeology, he compiled a fantastical composite sketch of the architects of Göbekli Tepe.³⁷

Products of inter-hominid hybridization, they benefited from the mixing of bio-cultural innovations born of distinct social soups. Contemporary human DNA recalls these prehistoric affairs, while their contributions are currently being reevaluated. Neanderthals did have bigger brains than us, and Denisovans may have been giants.³⁸ The latter have been linked to a 50,000-year-old bone needle and sophisticated jewelry. Last year Neanderthals were identified as the architects of a 177,000-year-old magic circle found deep inside a Spanish cave.³⁹ No older ritual architecture is known. The base layer of our civilizational stack may have been inherited.

Star lore was their compass. They saved their mythologies to the cloud beyond the clouds, storing tens of millennia of shamanic insight in the cosmic opera of lunar cycles, eclipses, shooting stars, and constellations by animating them with memorable archetypes and storylines. By the time the comet hit, they had been stockpiling self-correcting entheogenic insights for tens of thousands of years. In its aftermath, they washed up in Anatolia. In the hunter-gatherers of the Fertile Crescent they found the ideal hosts for their bio-cultural DNA. Göbekli Tepe was their transfusion device.

Both Collins and Graham Hancock—capital-A Alt-archaeologist—believe it was an observatory. What better typology for what Hancock calls the “Magicians of the Gods” to convert locals than to demonstrate their magical ability to predict celestial patterns? Gordon White’s definition appears tailored for Göbekli Tepe:

“The practice and goal of magic is the building of metaphoric pan-dimensional sense organs that allow you to perceive and participate in a much larger world… A ‘true’ magic circle is the growing of ears to hear the stars and voices to speak the language of the dead… It is having a portable research lab and postal address in this world and the next.”⁴⁰

The practice and goal of magic is the building of metaphoric pan-dimensional sense organs that allow you to perceive and participate in a much larger world

Accepting archaeoastronomical alignment at Göbekli Tepe requires stretching the canvas of accepted prehistory at least twice over. But that is precisely the program. And Göbekli Tepe is not the only data point. Rocket scientist Thomas Brophy’s detailed analysis of Nabta Playa, a series of similarly recently discovered stone circles in the Nubian Desert, reveal precise astrological alignments that date back to the earliest dates confirmed at Göbekli Tepe.⁴¹ Its sophistication shatters all existing models. No wonder you likely haven’t heard of it.

Collins’ argument leans on a holed stone in enclosure D that would have located Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. Hancock relies on Pillar 43, the “vulture stone,” of the same stone circle.⁴² One of the most impressively ornate stones on site, he interprets the animal carvings as ancient constellations that register a specific epoch, a theory supported by a recent peer-reviewed paper from Edinburgh University.⁴³ Both discoveries point to the Great Rift, a dark disc that bifurcates the Milky Way.

Shamanic cultures around the world consider the Great Rift the location of the sky world. Sitting at its apex, Sirius is a portal that shamans use to enter it. Hancock’s interpretation of the vulture stone positions the constellations depicted on it with respect to the Great Rift. Unlocking the epoch of the configuration with precession, the slow and subtle rotation of the earth’s axis around a slight wobble that causes the stars to reliably shift along a 26,000-year period, he arrives at the present. Reading the flailing headless human at the bottom of the image as a warning, Hancock believes Göbekli Tepe is a time capsule that was found just in time.

Cosmologist Lisa Randall’s thinks the Great Rift may be caused by a dense mass of dark matter. Imperceptible beyond its gravitational effects, this invisible mass may be responsible for regularly pulling comets out of otherwise stable distant orbits, hurtling them into our path every thirty-odd million years.⁴⁴ It could explain the extinction of the dinosaurs, the Younger Dryas Boundary Impact event, and numerous other traces of regular extraterrestrial impacts baked into the earth’s crust. Studying Sirius may not have been an accidental obsession. It may have been an ancient defense early warning line for cosmic rockets.

Hancock’s paranoia aside, the idea of architecture as a conduit for connecting the dark matter of the mind to the dark matter of the cosmos is precisely the classical model of the discipline. The lesson of alt-archaeology is that it has a history. To consider the classical timeless is to have fallen under its spell.

Egyptian history is even more mired in babble than Sumerian. It is the current headquarters of alt accounts precisely because the canon is so specious. The transgressions of Egyptologists constantly prove that no one can be trusted with humanity’s most potent secrets. Disentangling conspiracy history from conspiracy theory is more art than science. The discoveries of Göbekli Tepe and Nabta Playa a few hundred kilometers on either side of the Dynastic Nile help to hem the conjecture. They make it increasingly difficult not to take Hermes Trismegistus as his word: “Egypt is an image of heaven.”⁴⁸

Hermeticism is architectural magic.

Hermeticism is architectural magic. Its principle axiom is eing: “that which is above corresponds with that which is below, in the accomplishment of the miracle of the one thing.”⁴⁹ It suggests that Egyptian monuments are a map of the night sky. This is Egyptological heresy. Under protest, Robert Bauval claimed the Giza pyramids mirror the three stars of Orion’s belt.⁵⁰ Devoid of engravings, these otherworldly wonders are mute as to their dating, construction methods, function, architects, and patrons, while the laser-guided precision of their chambers, building blocks, and due north alignment are undeniable. Given that the Egyptian Tree of Life has recently been identified as psychedelic, and that recent mummy DNA analysis traces the pharaonic lineage more to the Near East than to Africa itself, Hermeticism may indeed be a remnant of the Anatolian space program.⁵¹

Hermetic architecture is the thermal bridge keeps the social soup from boiling over. It magically dumps the excess heat of the social soup into the clockwork coolness of the night sky by formally mirroring the spiritual in the mundane. It appears to be a good strategy. Egyptian civilization lasted for three millennia. The Greeks had other ideas.

Before they even had a word for architect, Greek poets identified Daedalus, creator of the labyrinth, as their archetype. Labyrinths invert pyramidal logic. Pyramids point to the sky; labyrinths operate in plan. Pyramids balance cosmic order by galvanizing complex societies to achieve lasting monolithic simplicity; labyrinths are a technology to makes you forget where you came from. Labyrinths lobotomize. They induce amnesia. Forgetting the past allowed the Greeks to play with the future.

The democratic experiment of the 5th century BC quickly spawned sophistry and mob rule. Plato was caught in the crosshairs of both. Having seen his teacher condemned by a jury of peers unburdened by proof, he sought revenge by submitting knowledge itself to a trial of reason. Dialectic was his stone for killing two birds. It was intellectual alchemy for transmuting gnôsis, understanding gained in direct experience, into epistêmê, knowledge derived from first principles. Dialectic was the ability to leave the cave and return to tell about it. It gave logic a monopoly over truth. Rhetoric and opinion were reduced to window dressing. Dialectic was the ultimate Socratic revenge.

Plato’s cave takes on a different valence when considering the thirteen years he spent studying with priest-magicians in Egypt. Not to mention his initiation in the Eleusinian Mysteries. This once-in-a-lifetime Athenian rite of passage was played out regularly for more than a millennia in the center of a cavernous building after drinking a mysterious potion that likely contained psychedelic mushrooms.⁵² ‘Turning around’ may have been ancient slang for ‘tuning in.’ Dialectic was a tactic for turning trip reports into legitimate authority. Classic shamanism.

“Normalization” is the term Venkatesh Rao uses to describe how technologies of the future sneak into the present under the cover of dominant existing metaphors.⁵³ The scrolling files and nested folders of the desktop were elements of physical reality before they were digitized. Via Jacques Derrida, Mark Wigley called out Plato’s normalization of philosophy in the cloak of architecture: Platonic theory requires first preparing the ground, then laying foundations upon which to construct a logically consistent discursive structure to ultimately be ornamented with persuasive rhetoric. This schema is not coincidental: “The figure is employed to credit philosophy itself with the unmediated condition exhibited by a building, putting in place the supposed neutrality and authority of the structural and structuring gaze of philosophical argument.”⁵⁴ To secure philosophical authority, Plato dressed dialectic in architectural drag.

To secure philosophical authority, Plato dressed dialectic in architectural drag.

Architecture wasn’t just a mule. Plato repaid his debts. Andrea Wilson Nightengale explains how Classical philosophy was born by repurposing the “‘theoric gaze’—the gaze of (and at) alterity.”⁵⁵ The theoros was the private or state-sponsored spectator sent to cult events and oracular prognostications in order to courier their visions home. By separating oracle and theoros, the Greeks split the shaman in two, turning hallucinatory science into a game of telephone. Plato committed the same crime against the theoros.

Techné, the practical knowledge of transforming materials from one form to another, was indistinguishable from magic in archaic Greece. It charmed trees into columns, leather into shoes, wild horses into vehicles. By Classical Greece, techné had become practical: “any ability that can be described and taught.”⁵⁶ Plato took advantage of this disenchantment, severing practical knowledge, praktikê, from true understanding, gnôstikê. Tektons, craftsmen, had mere know-how. While the philosopher had a monopoly over interpreting the Forms seen in ‘contemplation,’ the architektôn had at least witnessed them. Both enjoyed knowledge-of. Having borrowed its image to normalize philosophy, Plato shared the carcass of the theoros with the architect.

Philosophy broke the chains of the Hermetic mirror only to replace them with the mimetic speculations of philosophical theory. Plato conscripted the architect to command the philosopher’s army of craftsmen in exchange for the more lax rules of the cult of harmonics. Solve for symmetry and proportion and the gods will be appeased. Solve for the outcomes envisioned by the philosopher and the architect could play with the Promethean fire of design.

The “space between consciousness and the world,”⁵⁷theoria holds the yawning gap of kaos open rather than attempting to close it. Theory replaced the Hermetic bridge with a thermal break. It isolated the social soup. Closed systems are characterized by entropy. The theorist’s contribution to Western Civilization was enduring chaos.

In Vitruvius, the discipline of architecture was formally codified by the uninitiated. Book IV of his treatise clumsily enumerates fragments of astronomical intelligence that result in little more than a sundial, or gnomon. In ruthless Imperial Rome, not much more was needed to guarantee Augustan auctoritas. Gnosis was reduced to gnomon in architecture’s official origin story.

The unholy Roman-Christian industrialized the thermal break. The ecumenical councils and the crusades were the original wars on drugs. Priests replaced philosophers as bureaucratic buffers who buzz killed direct communion with the supernatural. Eleusis was shuttered. As Europe went dark, shamanism only survived off the map.

It took postmodern humor to finally find the irony in Socratic revenge. Only once modernist rationalism had claimed the past and future with history and science could postmodernism short-circuit the two to reveal the folly of authority founded on criticism. Histories of science confused Greece and Egypt, grafting the Hermetic principle onto the figure of the labyrinth. Trapped in a hall of mirrors like the Minotaur, critique ran out of steam.⁵⁸ Authority has been a hot potato ever since. It now goes to whoever can take the most heat.

This was the insight of John Boyd. A fighter pilot-cum-engineer who discovered the dynamics of maneuverability then expanded them into a full-blown theory of combat, Boyd recognized that in the fog of war, agility is the most important metric. The side that can change direction the fastest without losing their way can increase the delta of its advantage by cranking up the tempo. Inciting chaos becomes an invincible doctrine. It appears to be the Trump card of the 21st century.

America is proving to be Rome on speed.

America is proving to be Rome on speed. The disintegration of New Deal liberalism into an elitist urban archipelago governed by neoliberal cronyism has left a sea of economic and cultural blight, the prototypical petri dish for breeding reactionary politics. “Where others see the river of time flowing as it always has, the reactionary sees the debris of paradise drifting past his eyes.”⁵⁹ As in the 1920s when apocalyptic Biblical literalism, racist nationalism, and propagandistic advertising exploded in the United States,⁶⁰ the same perfect storm of economic inequality, total war, technological revolution, mass migration, and the unintelligible abstraction of globalization is crippling a new generation of shipwrecked minds.

Architects have never had more work. But the new children of Vitruvius don’t practice by building buildings; they operate directly on the playing field of the Game of Life. They are the chief strategists, political technologists, network executives, televangelists, Internet trolls, and other wartime architects using black magic to construct heat shields for authoritarians as they inflame the rest of the social soup. While the culture war machine of Roger Ailes, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, and Steve Bannon is most visible in America, the pseudonymous science fiction of Vladimir Putin’s vizier, Vladislav Surkov, is most revealing of the architectural effects on the victims of the new “non-linear warfare” of “all against all”:

“I saw a two-dimensional world, endless in length and width, but without height. Without sky… The tail of the attack fighter crushed my consciousness into a pancake. It became flat and simple… We understood everything literally, and that meant we were absolutely unsuited for life.”⁶¹

Wartime architects don’t just promise the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” they deconstruct the psyche, leaving mindless docile bodies to get lost in the two-dimensional labyrinth of life.⁶² They scorch the earth of the rat park, leaving only a steady drip of slow release FDA-approved opioids.⁶³ They release chemtrails of conspiracy theories into the airwaves, suggesting a pantheon of demons for addicts to fight other than their own. The only pyramids they build are telemarketing schemes. The only exit they offer is rapture. They fill the vacuum of hope with hate. Oxycontin, InfoWars, survivalist go-packs, Christofascism, and shit posts are gateway drugs for numbing the pain of the everyday apocalypse in post-industrial America.

If fundamentalist accelerationism rescues shipwrecked minds, another class of magicians are building a salvage mission to Mars. The new dominant “universal metaphor” of computing has normalized a techno-pagan cult of Prometheanity by reenchanting techné.⁶⁴ An anti-architectural, bottom up, fail-fast way of “crashing into serendipity” by tinkering with the laws of reality itself, hacking is nothing less than witchcraft. First as cyberspace, now as virtual and augmented reality, the Internet of Things, the sharing economy, artificial intelligence, decentralized currencies, planetary scale computers, and every other disruption of old world physics, hackers create magical realms and mirror them onto everyday life itself. The Californian Ideology is the neo-Hermeticism of the pancomputationalist cosmos.

And now we’re hacking human DNA.⁶⁵ While we've been on the lookout for Roko's basilisk, the true singularity may have passed without a gasp.⁶⁶ If Jeremy Narby’s hypothesis carries water, then we’ve left the mirror stage. Rather than aping the other side of the cave, we've begun to architect it. Perhaps it’s fortunate that Silicon Valley is no stranger to psychedelics.⁶⁷ As the shamanic and Platonic science programs meet again on the American frontier, the temples they architect will disrupt the social soup itself.

[Footnotes in image gallery.]

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