A Peer-Reviewed Journal Published the World’s First Known Mantis Petroglyph. The Entity Type It Depicts Is Documented in the Abduction Research Record

The Journal of Orthoptera Research is not a publication that typically generates alternative archaeology discussion.

It is a peer-reviewed entomology journal focused on grasshoppers, crickets, and mantises. When Soghra Abedi, Mehdi Hassani, and Gregory Holwell published their 2020 paper A Praying Mantis in Rock Art from Iran, they were reporting a finding that was anomalous even by the standards of their specialized field: the first known petroglyph of a praying mantis anywhere in the world, found at the Teymareh rock art site in Khomein County, Iran.

The petroglyph is 14 centimeters in height. It shows a figure with six limbs whose arrangement is consistent with insect morphology, a triangular head with large eyes, and grasping forearms that the researchers identified as unmistakably those of a praying mantis. The specific head morphology, including a cranial extension that helps narrow the identification to a specific genus, is consistent with the Empusa mantis genus that is native to the Iranian region where the carving was found.

The anomalous element that the entomology researchers noted is the figure’s two middle limbs, which end in circular forms rather than in the pointed terminations that a purely naturalistic mantis representation would show. The closest archaeological parallel for limb terminations of this specific form is the squatter man petroglyph motif found globally, in which a human-like figure flanked by circles appears in rock art across North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia with a distribution that has no conventional diffusion explanation.

Whether the circular limb terminations represent: the artist’s specific stylistic convention for depicting the mantis’s limb structure, a connection to the squatter man tradition’s proposed plasma discharge symbolism, or something whose meaning the available context does not allow to determine, is the question that the Teymareh petroglyph raises without resolving.

The researchers’ conclusion: the carving suggests that humans have linked mantises to the supernatural since ancient times. Their paper identifies it as the oldest known mantis image in the human artistic record within its estimated date range.

The Empusa and Its Specific Characteristics

The Empusa genus whose specific identification the researchers proposed deserves examination because its specific physical characteristics are what makes the mantis-deity connection across independent cultures less arbitrary than it might appear.

The Empusa mantis is characterized by: a large triangular head with prominent compound eyes that can appear to track an observer’s movements because each compound eye contains multiple lenses producing a moving pseudopupil; grasping forelegs held in the characteristic prayer-like position that gives the mantis family its common name; a body length in larger females of approximately 10 centimeters, making it one of the larger mantis species; and in the Empusa specifically, a distinctive crest or horn on the head that the Teymareh petroglyph’s cranial extension replicates.

The mantis’s behavioral characteristics that ancient human populations would have observed include: its ability to turn its head 180 degrees, the only insect capable of doing so, producing a visual effect of direct eye contact that no other insect produces; its motionless ambush hunting strategy that makes it appear more intentional and less reflexive than typical insect behavior; and its cannibalistic mating behavior in which the female frequently consumes the male during or after copulation, a behavior that would have been observable and memorable to any human population paying attention to the local fauna.

Whether these specific behavioral and physical characteristics, the direct gaze, the intentional-appearing behavior, the predatory competence, and the large-eye triangular head, are what produced the mantis’s sacred status across independent cultures, or whether the sacred status reflects a genuine ancient understanding of the mantis as connected to non-ordinary consciousness states, is the question that the cross-cultural distribution of mantis deity traditions raises.

The San People and Kaggen

The most extensively documented ancient mantis deity tradition is the San people of southern Africa, whose creator deity Kaggen is identified with the praying mantis and is the central figure in the San rock art tradition that has been analyzed in depth by David Lewis-Williams at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Lewis-Williams’s research, documented in his 2002 book The Mind in the Cave and in multiple peer-reviewed publications, proposes that San rock art encodes the specific visual experiences of shamanic trance states induced through the hyperventilation and concentrated rhythmic movement of the San healing dance. The specific imagery in San rock art, including therianthropic beings combining human and animal characteristics, geometric entoptic forms, and the specific phosphene patterns that the nervous system generates in altered states of consciousness, is interpreted by Lewis-Williams as documentary representation of shamanic experience rather than symbolic mythology.

Kaggen the mantis deity in this framework is not simply a cultural choice of animal symbolism. The mantis is specifically associated with the trance state and with the passage between ordinary and non-ordinary reality because the mantis’s specific visual characteristics, particularly its direct forward-facing gaze and its stillness, are what the shaman’s consciousness encounters in specific states of altered perception.

Whether the San mantis deity tradition and the Teymareh mantis petroglyph reflect independent human encounters with the same class of experience, the mantis as a gateway or symbol for specific states of consciousness, or reflect genuinely independent artistic traditions that converged on the same subject for different reasons, is the question that their geographic separation of approximately 6,000 kilometers and their temporal separation makes impossible to explain through cultural diffusion.

The Squatter Man Connection

The circular limb terminations that the Teymareh petroglyph’s middle limbs display are the most specific element connecting the carving to the broader cross-cultural petroglyph tradition.

The squatter man motif, documented in rock art across six continents, shows a humanoid figure in a specific posture with arms raised and legs bent, typically flanked by or incorporating circular forms. The motif appears in petroglyphs in Arizona, Norway, Peru, Hawaii, Australia, Kazakhstan, and multiple other sites whose geographic distribution precludes conventional diffusion as an explanation for the motif’s consistency.

Anthony Peratt at Los Alamos National Laboratory published a research program beginning in 2003 proposing that the squatter man motif represents ancient human observation of high-intensity plasma discharge events in the upper atmosphere, visible from the ground during periods of significantly elevated solar electromagnetic activity. His specific argument is that the squatter man’s characteristic form replicates the specific visual appearance of a columnar plasma discharge photographed from below in laboratory plasma physics experiments, and that the global distribution of the motif reflects a specific global observation event rather than cultural transmission.

Whether Peratt’s plasma discharge hypothesis is correct is contested in the archaeoastronomy and rock art research communities, but the specific correspondence he documents between laboratory plasma discharge photographs and the squatter man motif’s characteristic form is published in the peer-reviewed plasma physics literature rather than in the alternative archaeology circuit.

The Teymareh petroglyph’s circular limb terminations appearing in a mantis-human hybrid figure, combined with the squatter man motif’s proposed plasma discharge origin, produces a specific interpretive possibility: if the circular forms represent plasma discharge effects, and if the plasma discharge events produced visual phenomena associated with the mantis figure specifically, the petroglyph may encode an ancient observation of an atmospheric plasma event seen in proximity to or association with the mantis imagery.

Whether this interpretation is correct, or whether the circles represent a stylistic convention, ritual objects, or something else whose meaning the available context does not establish, is a question the available evidence cannot resolve.

The Abduction Literature’s Mantis Entities

The mantis-type entity is one of the most consistently reported non-gray entity types in the abduction research record documented in this library’s hybridization piece.

John Mack’s case archive, developed over more than a decade at Harvard, includes multiple accounts of mantis-type entities whose specific described characteristics, tall stature, large triangular head with prominent eyes, thin elongated limbs with grasping quality, and a specific quality of consciousness that experiencers describe as ancient and overwhelming, are consistent across independent cases from individuals with no knowledge of each other’s accounts.

The specific mantis entity’s reported hierarchical position in the abduction tradition, as a senior or directing intelligence rather than as the operational abductors who make direct contact with human subjects, is the element that the abduction research literature treats as one of its most consistent cross-case findings. If the gray entities are the operational team and the mantis entities are the directing intelligence, the structural parallel with the ancient traditions in which the mantis is the deity or senior spirit rather than the immediate agent of human contact is specific enough to deserve examination.

Whether this parallel reflects: genuine ancient memory of the same class of non-human intelligences documented in the contemporary abduction record, the abduction experience’s cultural encoding in the specific symbols that various traditions have developed for non-human consciousness, or the abduction narrative’s influence on how experiencers frame and report their encounters in cultures with access to the ancient astronaut tradition, is the methodological question that cross-cultural consistency arguments always face.

The Teymareh petroglyph predates the modern abduction research tradition by a minimum of 4,000 years and potentially by 40,000 years. Whatever it depicts, it was carved before any contemporary cultural framework for interpreting non-human intelligences existed. The specific visual correspondence between the petroglyph’s figure and the mantis-type entity descriptions in Mack and Jacobs’s documented case archives is not explained by cultural contamination in the direction from contemporary abduction narrative to ancient carving.

What the Carving Establishes

The Teymareh mantis petroglyph establishes the following without interpretive assumption: a human population in what is now Iran, at some point between 4,000 and 40,000 years ago, considered a hybrid human-mantis figure important enough to carve permanently into rock.

The specific mantis genus depicted is native to the carving’s location, establishing that the artist had direct observation of the actual animal. The figure is not a generic insect or a symbolic representation but a specific identified species with the specific head crest that distinguishes Empusa from other mantis genera.

The hybridization with human elements, producing a figure with both insect and human characteristics, follows the same compositional principle as every therianthropism in the ancient art record: a being that partakes of both human and non-human nature simultaneously.

Whether this being is: a shamanic representation of the consciousness transformation that the mantis symbolizes in the San and other traditions, a genuine non-human intelligence whose physical form combines the characteristics depicted, a deity whose nature the hybrid form encodes in visual terms, or something whose meaning the ancient context does not allow to recover, is the question that the peer-reviewed entomology paper leaves to its readers.

The journal published the finding. The petroglyph is documented. The mantis genus is identified. The circles at the limb terminations are there.

Whatever was important enough to carve into Iranian rock between four thousand and forty thousand years ago, it looked enough like what the abduction research tradition calls a mantidian that the correspondence is documented across two completely independent evidentiary traditions separated by the entire span of recorded history.