Did the Ancients Decode Reality?

The claim

There's a compelling idea, recently put well in a viral video (Chase Hughes, "The Ancients Decoded Reality"): independent civilizations — Vedic India, Hermetic Egypt, Plato's Greece, Buddhist Asia, Sufi Islam, the Maya — separated by oceans and centuries, kept describing the same underlying structure of reality. The punchline: "If the pattern holds across time and culture, it stops being myth. It becomes a model."

It's a seductive argument, and it has a real intellectual pedigree — it's the perennial philosophy, a term Leibniz borrowed and Aldous Huxley made famous in The Perennial Philosophy (1946): the thesis that one mystical truth sits at the core of all traditions.

But "lots of cultures said similar-sounding things" is exactly the kind of claim that is easy to feel and hard to verify. Since this whole project is a catalogue of the world's oracle systems, it's the perfect place to ask the sharper question: when is a cross-cultural parallel real, and when are we fooling ourselves?

When the parallel is real: the binary oracles

Here is a convergence that is not hand-waving — it's arithmetic, and you can see it on the leaderboard right now.

At least four cultures, with no plausible contact, independently built binary divination — oracles whose entire structure is combinations of a two-state mark:

• China — the I Ching: six stacked lines, each yin or yang → 2⁶ = 64 hexagrams.
• West Africa — Ifá: eight marks, each single or double → 2⁸ = 256 Odù.
• Arab world & medieval Europe — geomancy: four rows, each one or two dots → 2⁴ = 16 figures.
• Madagascar — Sikidy: the same dot-based binary, blended from African and Arab roots.

This is not a vibe; it's the same mathematics surfacing again and again. As the geomancer Stephen Skinner puts it in Terrestrial Astrology: Divination by Geomancy, the I Ching's hexagrams and geomancy's figures "work on the same principle of binary mathematics." When Leibniz formalized binary arithmetic in 1703, he wasn't working in a vacuum — he had been studying the I Ching's hexagrams, sent to him by the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet, and noticed they ran from 000000 to 111111 (Leibniz & the I Ching). Ron Eglash's African Fractals (1999) shows the Yoruba and Bamana systems were doing rigorous combinatorial reasoning centuries before Europe formalized it.

So the video's instinct is partly right. There is a genuine pattern that "becomes a model": the human mind, given the job of mapping life's situations, keeps reinventing the idea of encoding them as binary combinations. That's a real, defensible convergence — and it's structural, mathematical, and checkable.

When the parallel isn't real: parallelomania

Now the other half of the honesty.

The leap from "several cultures built binary oracles" to "all the ancients secretly agreed that consciousness is the fundamental ground of reality" is a completely different kind of move — and it's the one the perennialist argument always over-reaches on. Biblical scholar Samuel Sandmel gave the failure mode a name in 1962: parallelomania — "that extravagance which first overdoes the supposed similarity in passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying an inevitable connection."

Three traps, specifically:

1. Cherry-picking. Scan thousands of pages of any tradition and you can always find lines that rhyme with "all is one" or "the mind shapes the world." You notice the hits and forget the enormous amount that doesn't fit. (This is plain apophenia — the pattern-finding drive we covered in Decoders of Entropy.)
2. Diffusion vs. independent invention. Some "parallels" are real but borrowed (geomancy and Ifá likely share roots; geomancy reached Europe through Arabic texts). A shared idea that travelled is not evidence of a universal Truth — it's evidence of trade routes. You have to rule diffusion out before you can claim independent convergence.
3. Vague targets. "Reality is consciousness" is broad enough that almost any mystical sentence can be filed under it. The same critique sank the universalist reading of Jung's archetypes and Campbell's monomyth: critics note it overgeneralizes, flattening real cultural difference to fit one template.

The tell is simple: a real convergence makes a sharp, falsifiable prediction (binary divination has exactly 2ⁿ outcomes — count them). A parallelomaniac convergence makes an unfalsifiable mood ("everything is connected").

The honest split

So, did the ancients decode reality? Split the question in two:

The video is doing perennial philosophy — and perennial philosophy is a faith stance, not a finding. What the oracle leaderboard does is the structural version: it lays 40+ systems side by side so the real patterns (the binary family, the numeric-correspondence family) are visible and sortable, while the dowsed/metaphysical columns are honestly flagged as exactly that.

Why this matters for an oracle

It loops straight back to this project's core idea. Every oracle is a codebook — a decoder that maps a draw onto a structured space of meanings. The genuinely astonishing thing the ancients "decoded" isn't a hidden metaphysics. It's that, again and again, different cultures reached for the same encoding — the binary, the combinatorial, the small finite set of archetypes — as the natural way to compress the whole space of human situations.

That convergence is real, it's beautiful, and it needs no mysticism to be amazing. The ancients didn't decode reality. They independently discovered the same good codes for talking about it — which is a more honest, and frankly more impressive, thing to have done.

Sources & further reading

The convergence claim: Chase Hughes, "The Ancients Decoded Reality" (video) · Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1946) · Perennial philosophy

Binary divination & independent invention: Stephen Skinner, Terrestrial Astrology: Divination by Geomancy · Ron Eglash, African Fractals (1999) · Ifá & binary code · Leibniz & the I Ching

The critiques: Samuel Sandmel, "Parallelomania" (1962) — overview · Hero's journey / monomyth criticism · and our own Decoders of Entropy on apophenia and the Barnum effect