Hello fellow neanderthals.
I want to thank you as we pass 5,000 subscribers.
To help this project grow into books, translations, videos, and deeper original research, I’ve opened an optional paid tier on Substack.
All essays will remain free.
Supporters receive monthly Keys to the Library posts — annotated reading lists exploring overlooked books and the ideas behind the essays — plus project updates and polls to help shape what I research and write about next.
If the writing has brought you value and you want to see it pushed further, this is one way to do it.
Neanderthal Paganism is a niche within a niche. While the narrative around Neanderthals has softened, our fundamental conception of them remains largely intact. They’ve been granted the capacity to feel, empathize, and ritualize, but still only within the comfortable bounds of a gradualist evolutionary story.
Human origins is a relatively recent field of inquiry, barely 150 years old, and its current form still bears traces of its founding prejudices. We’ve allowed archaic humans to straighten their posture, wear jewelry, and exist for something more than the taste of mammoth flesh — but that “something” still has to fit comfortably inside our own modern halls of perception.
Still, the attraction to the symbolic, the sacred, and the inexplicable has never left us. Traditions separated by vast distances in time and space keep returning to the same motifs with remarkable persistence. A common source seems to flow through them like blood in our veins: capacious, vital, and so deeply inherited that we take it for granted, as a fish might water.
In 2010, ancient DNA confirmed that Neanderthals are part of our ancestry. Neanderthal Paganism is about the anthropological implications of that fact, and about laying a stronger foundation for the alternative narratives that have existed since their discovery.
There is a lot more work to do: a book (already underway), translations and republications of overlooked literature, and deeper research into the biological and anthropological roots of myth. Videos and visual materials will help bring the work to a wider audience.
Mythological subjects need a school of original research that overflows the boundary between science and religion. We are here to do it.
If you want to help build that, the paid tier is open.
Either way, I’m glad you’re here.
Onward, cave people.
M
P.S. Keys to the Library begins Friday, October 16, and continues every third Friday of the month. The first installment will be open to everyone as an introduction to the series. Future installments will be for paid supporters.
