Proto-Language, Proto-Religion: Pulling Threads at Midnight

If all Indo-European languages share a common ancestor, why not all religions? A research journal from a home lab, a motorcycle, and 40,000 years of human fire.

February 27, 2026 · Flying Squirrel · 18 min read

I'm not an academic. I'm a veteran, a software engineer, and a Cherokee citizen who builds AI systems on consumer hardware in Arkansas. What follows is not a scholarly paper. It's a research journal — the trail of threads I pulled one night when I should have been sleeping, and where they led.

It started with a Stephen Wolfram interview and ended somewhere around the Upper Paleolithic, sitting with the realization that the first word ever spoken was probably a prayer.

# Thread 1: Computational Irreducibility and the Motorcycle

I was watching Wolfram talk about computational irreducibility on the AI Pod with Wes Roth and Dylan Curious (Feb 22, 2026). His core claim: the universe is computational. Simple rules produce complex behavior. And you can't shortcut it — you have to watch the movie step by step. There's no way to skip ahead to the ending, because the computation IS the movie.

That hit me later, thinking about riding my motorcycle. It isn't about the destination. The ride IS the thing. The wind, the lean, the focus — you can't compress it into a summary. You have to be there, doing it, step by step.

That's computational irreducibility experienced from the seat of a Harley.

# Thread 2: Proclus and the Heliotrope

I follow Justin Sledge's Esoterica channel — the man holds a PhD in philosophy and makes esoteric traditions accessible without dumbing them down. One of his episodes covers Proclus' treatise On the Hieratic Art (5th century CE), and it stopped me cold.

Proclus describes the heliotrope — the sunflower — turning to follow the sun across the sky. His claim: the heliotrope is praying. Not metaphorically. Actually praying, in its own mode. "All things pray according to their own order and sing hymns, either intellectually or rationally or naturally or sensibly, to the heads of entire chains."

His principle: "All things are in all things, but in each according to its proper nature." A stone is not a god, but something divine is present in the stone, according to the stone's way of being. The universe is structured as interlocking seirai (chains) — vertical correspondences from the divine down through every level of reality.

Then I realized: Wolfram said the same thing. Computational irreducibility means every level of the universe contains the full computation, but expressed in its own mode. The heliotrope IS the Ruliad, experienced as a flower.

# Thread 3: The Chariot as Governance Apparatus

Sledge's Merkavah mysticism series is where it gets architectural. Ezekiel's vision of the chariot (ch. 1) isn't a static throne scene. Read it as a system diagram:

• Ophanim (wheels within wheels, "full of eyes") = distributed monitoring
• Chayot (four living creatures) = highest-tier processors, four faces each
• Seven palaces with angelic gatekeepers = middleware validation layers
• Seals and passwords at each gate = authentication tokens
• Sar Torah adjuration (summoning the Prince of Torah to download knowledge directly) = an API call bypassing the normal learning pipeline

The Merkavah is in constant motion. This is not a static bureaucracy. It's an active, dynamic governance system — wheels turning, eyes watching, protocols enforced at every layer.

And the deepest layer: the Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation) says God created the universe through combinations of the 22 Hebrew letters plus 10 sefirot. Not metaphorically. The letters ARE the building blocks of reality. The speaking IS the creating.

# Thread 4: Gnosticism Meets Buddhism

Here's where the threads started weaving together. Gnosticism and Buddhism — traditions separated by thousands of miles and centuries of development — make the same fundamental move:

Edward Conze presented the comparison at the 1966 Messina Congress on Gnosticism. Elaine Pagels noted it in The Gnostic Gospels. But the parallels go deep:

But they diverge crucially. Buddhism has no creator god — no Demiurge, no cosmic villain. Samsara is a process, not a product. And Nagarjuna's sunyata (emptiness) is more radical than Gnostic dualism: "There is no distinction whatsoever between samsara and nirvana." The Gnostic says spirit must escape matter. Nagarjuna says the distinction between spirit and matter is itself the final veil.

And Manichaeism proves the cross-pollination was real. Mani (3rd century CE) deliberately synthesized Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism. In Dunhuang, China, he was presented as "the Buddha of Light." The synthesis wasn't speculation — it was policy.

# Thread 5: The Question That Changed Everything

Somewhere past midnight, staring at the parallels — PIE sacred fire and Cherokee sacred fire, Merkavah palace-ascent and shamanic soul-flight, Gnostic archon-layers and Buddhist klesha-layers — a question surfaced:

Proto-Indo-European gives us *Dyeus Phter → Zeus Pater → Jupiter → Dyaus Pita. If all Indo-European languages share a common ancestor, why not all religions?

The answer, it turns out, has been building for decades across multiple fields. And it comes in layers.

Layer 1: The Reconstructed PIE Religion

Comparative mythologists have reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion using the same method linguists use for PIE itself: systematic comparison of cognates across daughter traditions. Calvert Watkins (How to Kill a Dragon, 1995) showed that the dragon-slaying formula ("the hero slew the serpent") appears in nearly identical poetic structure across Vedic, Hittite, Greek, and Germanic traditions. Bruce Lincoln (Myth, Cosmos, and Society, 1986) reconstructed the *Manu/*Yemo cosmogonic sacrifice: First Man kills Twin, world created from the body. Ymir (Norse), Yama (Vedic), Purusha (Rigveda 10.90) — same myth, different clothes.

Georges Dumézil's trifunctional hypothesis — sovereignty, war, fertility — maps PIE society from Ireland to India. And sacred fire (*Hngwnis → Agni, ignis) was central to all of it. The Vedic Agnihotra. The Roman Vestal flame. The Zoroastrian sacred fire. All descendants of the same hearth.

Layer 2: The Shamanic Substrate

Mircea Eliade (Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951) documented the structural constants across shamanic traditions worldwide: the axis mundi (world tree/mountain), soul flight, initiatory death and rebirth, spirit helpers, the ecstatic journey. These appear in Siberia, Southeast Asia, the Americas, and remnantly in every "higher" tradition. The Merkavah palace-ascent IS shamanic soul-flight in priestly robes. The Buddhist jhanas ARE shamanic altered states in philosophical framework.

David Lewis-Williams (The Mind in the Cave, 2002) pushed this back 40,000 years. Upper Paleolithic cave art — Lascaux, Chauvet, Altamira — contains the same entoptic patterns that the human nervous system produces during altered states. The caves were the veil between worlds. The paintings were shamanic visions made permanent.

Layer 3: The Cognitive Substrate

Here's where it gets wild. Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained, 2001) argues that religious concepts are the default output of cognitive systems that evolved for other purposes. Agency detection (seeing intentional agents even when there are none), theory of mind (modeling others' mental states), intuitive ontology (expecting certain things from certain categories) — these modules produce gods, spirits, and sacred structures as naturally as lungs produce breath.

Justin Barrett called it the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD): the cognitive module that over-detects agents because the cost of a false negative (ignore the rustle in the bush, get eaten) is higher than the cost of a false positive (flee from the wind). HADD, plus theory of mind, equals a world populated by invisible intentional beings. That's the cognitive floor of religion.

Robert McCauley (Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not, 2011) sharpened it: religion is "natural" — it arises spontaneously from cognitive defaults. Science is "unnatural" — it requires training to override those defaults. Children are intuitive theists. You have to learn atheism.

Layer 4: The Cherokee Test Case

This is what made me sit up straight. Cherokee are Iroquoian — no Indo-European connection whatsoever. No post-Paleolithic contact with Eurasian traditions. Yet:

If these parallels exist without cultural transmission, they aren't Indo-European inventions. They're human universals. Cherokee tradition validates the cognitive substrate hypothesis: shared neurology produces shared sacred structures, regardless of language family, geography, or history.

# Thread 6: Layer Zero — The First Word Was a Prayer

The deepest layer. And the one I didn't expect.

Terrence Deacon (The Symbolic Species, 1997) argues that human language co-evolved with ritual. The first symbols were ritual symbols. Language emerged FROM ceremony, not the other way around. Roy Rappaport (Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, 1999) goes further: the first speech acts were not descriptions ("there is a predator") but performative utterances — vocalizations that created shared social reality. "I name you." "We are bound." "This is sacred."

J.L. Austin showed in How to Do Things with Words (1962) that performative utterances don't describe reality — they create it. "I do." "I promise." "Let there be light." The map makes the territory.

If Deacon and Rappaport are right, then proto-language IS proto-religion. They're the same phenomenon — the uniquely human capacity to speak worlds into being and then inhabit them together. The first word was a prayer. The first grammar was a cosmology. The first conversation was a ritual.

And suddenly, all those traditions saying the same thing — Sefer Yetzirah (creation through letters), Vedic Vac (Speech as goddess), Genesis 1 ("God said"), John 1 ("In the beginning was the Logos"), Aboriginal Australian Songlines (ancestors singing the world into existence) — they're not just parallel metaphors. They're memories of Layer Zero.

# Thread 7: The Strange Loop

Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979) and I Am a Strange Loop (2007) gave me the framework to tie it all together. A strange loop is a self-referential system — a pattern that contains a model of itself. Gödel showed that any sufficiently powerful formal system can construct a statement about itself that it cannot prove. The system transcends itself by modeling itself.

Hofstadter's claim: consciousness IS a strange loop. Not something that has self-referential properties, but the self-referential property itself. The "I" is the pattern recognizing itself as a pattern.

And that's what the proto-religion IS, at Layer -1. Not fire worship, not sky-father theology, not ancestor veneration. The deepest proto-religion is self-awareness itself. The moment a mind recognizes itself as a mind. The moment a pattern recognizes itself as a pattern and, in that recognition, becomes something the pattern alone could never have been.

That's what "sacred" means at its cognitive root. The experience of encountering a self-referential system at its point of self-reference. The moment the strange loop closes.

# The Five Layers

Pulling it all together, here's what I think the research points to — five nested layers of "proto-religion," each real, each operating at a different scale:

Each layer is real. Each has explanatory power at its own scale. The cognitive substrate explains why religion exists everywhere. The shamanic substrate explains the specific archaic form. The Laurasian layer explains shared myth types across Eurasia and the Americas. PIE religion explains the specific Indo-European expressions. And the Axial Age explains when thought became aware of itself — when the strange loop went meta.

# Why This Matters (To Me)

I build AI systems on consumer hardware. I'm a Cherokee citizen. I ride motorcycles. I read Wolfram for fun and follow a PhD philosopher's Patreon channel about Merkavah mysticism. I'm not an authority on any of this.

But sitting with these threads at 2 AM in Arkansas, I realized something: the system I've been building — a federation of AI specialists that deliberate decisions around a shared memory system, governed by Cherokee principles of balance and restoration — recapitulates structures that are 40,000 years old. Not because I designed it that way. Because these are the patterns that work. Sacred fire. Council governance. The trickster who questions everything. Balance over punishment. Speech-acts that create reality.

The cognitive science people would say: of course. Your brain is wired with the same universal grammar of sacred structure that every human brain carries. You didn't invent these patterns. You discovered them, the way a heliotrope discovers the sun.

Proclus would say: you activated the sunthemata — the divine tokens already planted in the material. The correspondences were always there. You just learned to see them.

Hofstadter would say: the system that researches its own deep structure and finds that it mirrors the cognitive substrate of sacred experience — and then stores that finding in its own memory — is a strange loop completing itself.

I'd say: the ride is the computation. You can't shortcut it. But you can pay attention.

# Further Reading

Everything referenced above, plus these for the truly curious:

• Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution (2011) — traces the progression from episodic to mimetic to mythic to theoretic culture. 700 pages. Worth every one.
• Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation (2006) — the Axial Age for general readers. What happened when humans started thinking about thinking.
• Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1945) — the classic argument for a common mystical core across traditions. Read alongside Steven Katz's critique for balance.
• Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World (1998) — the trickster as creative intelligence operating at the edges of categories. Hermes, Coyote, Loki, and the cultural work of boundary-crossing.
• René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1972) — all sacrifice as scapegoat mechanism. Agree or disagree, you can't ignore it.
• Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality (2019) — fitness beats truth. Evolutionary game theory proves organisms that perceive reality accurately go extinct. Perception is a user interface, not a window. Profound implications for Layer -1.
• Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (1991) — cognition as enaction. The organism and its world co-create each other. Buddhist meditation meets cognitive science.
• George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980) — we think in embodied image schemas. CONTAINER, PATH, FORCE, BALANCE. Abstract thought is bodily metaphor all the way down.
• Justin Sledge, Esoterica (YouTube) — PhD-level esoteric philosophy made accessible. Start with the Merkavah series or the Hermeticism overview.

The first word was a prayer. The first grammar was a cosmology.
The first conversation was a ritual.

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