The Mantis Older Than Religion

✦The being people meet

Across the largest report sets, insectoid and specifically mantis-like beings recur as a distinct class: investigative, telepathic, emotionally cool, often encountered in a clinical or technological setting. Michael and colleagues coded grey- or mantis-like forms in roughly 6% of encounters; the insectoid category appears throughout the Johns Hopkins and Lawrence corpora. What marks the mantis is less its frequency than its consistency — strangers converge on the same triangular head, the same appraising stance. The Atlas documents that convergence as phenomenology; it makes no claim about what, if anything, is on the other side.

✦The oldest trickster

Among the |Xam San (Bushmen) of southern Africa, |Kaggen — the Mantis — is the trickster-creator: shape-shifter, maker and unmaker, dying and reviving. He is recorded first-hand in the nineteenth-century Bleek-Lloyd archive, one of the deepest primary records of any hunter-gatherer cosmology. An honest caveat belongs here up front: |Kaggen is a mythic narrative figure — he has a wife and family, he acts in stories — not a being someone reports meeting in trance. The link to DMT does not run through the myth directly. It runs through what the San did with altered states, and through what those states did to the oldest human art.

✦The bridge — entoptic imagery and the first art

This is the load-bearing connection. In the neuropsychological model of rock art (Lewis-Williams & Dowson's The Signs of All Times, 1988; Lewis-Williams's The Mind in the Cave, 2002), the geometric and figurative content of humanity's earliest images derives substantially from altered states of consciousness — the same class of visionary experience the San entered in the trance dance, now argued to underlie Upper Palaeolithic cave art. The model is influential and genuinely contested. But it supplies the one thing the DMT literature lacks: a mechanism for why altered states might generate shared content that then settles into a culture's sacred imagery. If trance reliably produces certain figures, those figures can become gods — and a mantis is one of them, in two places, without contact between them.

✦What the sources say

Coded grey- or mantis-like forms in roughly 6% of DMT entity encounters.

Large survey establishing insectoid/'alien' beings as a recurring encounter class.

Primary |Xam San testimony recording |Kaggen, the Mantis trickster-creator.

The entoptic model: altered-state percepts recur cross-culturally in rock art.

Argues the oldest human art derives substantially from altered states of consciousness.