I interpret monotheism as a decisive step in the narrative of the cosmic process of life, where religions are not simply beliefs but evolutionary revelations that prepare humanity for the birth of God by giving it a collective meaning and a progression of spiritual thought. Just as natural selection favors efficiency, spiritual selection produces the One, not by design but by necessity. Monotheism thus presents itself as an adaptive mutation of forgetting that the One will carry to the heavens: it is the master of erasure.
To understand the alchemy that pushes men toward monotheism, one must probe the cracks where polytheism collapses and where the One takes root. These breaches are not those of the gods; they are human. They reflect the growing inability of men to organize societies that have become complex and unpredictable, where a multitude of gods no longer suffices to give coherence to reality.
We are in the Fertile Crescent, where the great Mesopotamian and Egyptian deities, born from the soil with barley and wheat, now reign over the world, over minds and over the afterlife. The divine, like a river in flood, constantly redraws the contours of civilizations and city‑states. Ever more numerous, the gods clash, unite, beget and die in myths where their roles are reversed, where their power wavers under the weight of human anxieties. Men feed their gods but also corrupt them, dragging them along into the political, social and climatic instability that the kingdoms suffer. The Epic of Gilgamesh expresses this paradox: a king, confident in his strength, challenges the gods who have ceased to make sense, questions immortality, and dies dissatisfied, trapped within the limits of his own condition.
This religious entanglement generates a dissatisfaction that leads to monolatry—that is, the exclusive worship of one god without denying the existence of the others. In fourteenth‑century BCE Egypt, Akhenaten attempts to impose Aten, not by creating a new god but by drastically reducing the role of the others to counter and weaken the Theban clergy. His fleeting reform shows the difficulty of major religions to evolve of their own accord. Akhenaten touched too soon on a truth that the Hebrews would later embrace:
It is no coincidence that monotheism is born at the confluence of empires and exiles. Seven centuries later, around 622 BCE, in the hills of Judah, King Josiah proclaims that he has found a sealed book in the walls of the Temple of Jerusalem, a text in which Yahweh called his people to the exclusivity of his reign. In a vassal kingdom crushed by the Neo‑Babylonian and Egyptian empires, Josiah sees a political opportunity: to unify Judea and annex the memory of its vanished sister kingdom in the north, Israel. He launches a reform that appears as the first historiographical coup d’état: the invention of tradition as a political weapon. Josiah has the rival sanctuaries destroyed, wipes Asherah stelae (consort of Yahweh), and silences local priests. Under his direction, the scribes recomposed history and froze part of the oral tradition. The veneration of patriarchs across the tribes becomes that of a single lineage. Israel was never polytheistic. It never worshipped Baal, El, or the stars. It has never been anything but one people, under one God, from the beginning.
By wanting to extinguish the spark of hope of the Hebrews, by reducing the Temple of Jerusalem to ashes in 586 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar was, without knowing it, going to set the world’s history ablaze for millennia to come. Deported to Babylon, torn from their land, deprived of temple and sacrifices, the Judean elites redefined their relationship with Yahweh. No more sacred mountains, no more rivalries with Moloch: God became a formless idea. Prophets in exile like Ezekiel saw the glory of God leave the Temple, describing it as elusive, transcendent and invisible. The distance from Jerusalem makes Yahweh the first portable God, detached from any place, capable of absorbing the entire universe.
When men no longer have a land, they project an empty sky to inhabit. Divine abstraction is an answer to exile: a God without earthly attachment haunts all borders, probes all souls, and becomes inseparable from those who invoke him, wherever they are, in a simple prayer.
First a seed buried in the soil of ancestral cults, then a flower blooming at the edge of graves, then a field of wheat covering the plains of Canaan, finally a forest of gods dominating kingdoms, Yahweh is the tipping point where the divine mutates into a metaphysical virus. From a tribal god carved in the stone of a Temple, he becomes an abstract specter capable of infecting consciousness across borders. In a sense, he engendered the first Great Disconnect in history: the necessary tearing out that frees God from his stone husk, from his origins, to project him into the sidereal void of pure ideas.
This unparalleled spiritual revolution should not make us forget that the One is, undoubtedly, the greatest falsifier in history. The Hebrews’ resistance, their heroic refusal to fade away in the face of regional powers, would turn the Almighty into a master of effacement himself, a God capable of standing up to and crushing all the primordial deities of the Middle East on his own. For Yahweh not only erased the history of the world and religions before him, his own polytheistic origins, his wife (Asherah) and even his own representations, he imposed and confiscated for the future the very definition of God: a unique creator, a pre‑existing being, eternal and transcendent, a vision so dazzling that it obscures the role of humanity in the birth of the divine and the cosmic cycle of life in which it is inscribed. It is the greatest stroke of genius of a magnificent lie.
Walk among the ruins of Karnak, Delphi, Babylon, Rome. Everywhere, in the cracks of the temples, whisper the murdered gods. Monotheism thought it had triumphed by silencing them, but the multiple is reborn in the shadows: in schisms, in the veneration of saints, in esoteric currents, in souls that refuse the absolute. Perhaps the One is only a transition, a mirage born of the fear of men in the face of infinity, in the face of the risk of the black hole of oblivion.
As soon as it was unified, Hebrew monotheism fragmented, obeying the law of spiritual selection: religions survive only if they continue to nourish humanity's vital drive toward its cosmic elevation. Only those persist that, by enlightening the cosmos and crossing the boundaries of the Earth, become instruments of collective elevation, favoring the gestation of God.
The law of spiritual selection is not proved; it is experienced in the very movement of history. For, from the perspective of life, truth is not a state to be observed but a power to be actualized: it is what is born from the ashes of what dies. Thus, a belief is “true” only insofar as it is able to survive, to participate in and to accelerate the great process of divine gestation (understood not as a fixed finality, but as an evolving flow).
In this sense, the criterion of truth is neither theological nor teleological but vital: a belief is “true” because it serves as an effective vector for the complexification of life, helping it to overcome its own limits. That this deployment takes, at its peak, the form of a “gestation of God” is only a consequence—almost incidental, always vertiginous. The important thing is that it drives the flow forward.
That is why the three monotheisms persist. Not because they hold an absolute truth, but because each has captured, in its time and according to historical contingencies, a necessary fragment of this vital truth. Like the three strands of the same rope braided by time, they pull humanity toward the same threshold: the birth of God that will put an end to the world of men as they have known it.
Judaism: the concept of a covenant between God and humans
Judaism marks the first step of monotheism in the cosmic dynamic of life. By uniting people under the covenant of a single God, Judaism concentrated spiritual and cultural forces on a common goal: a relationship of union with a supreme being. This union is not a fusion but a covenant—a pact in which humans commit themselves to a God who guides them and places them under his law.
I see Judaism as the first evolutionary attempt to bring humanity beyond polytheistic divisions, to gather energy and collective devotion under a single spiritual power. This step is necessary because it initiates the awareness of a common goal—one God who represents an unbreakable link between life, humans and the cosmos. This conceptual revolution was logically selected by the human mind, giving Judaism not only the power to resist the greatest empires (Egypt, Babylon, Rome) but also to overthrow them from within. For the power of Judaism goes far beyond the mere transition to monotheism.
It conveys other visionary and dizzying concepts such as the figure of the messiah, hope, the sanctity of life, the holocaust and the end of times. These powerful vectors of creation explain the survival of Judaism in a scattered diaspora within other dominant and hostile cultures that Jews will continually question and challenge. The
Jewish genius results precisely from the application of a method of questioning that unifies the transcendental and the immanent, heightened by a human experience between wandering, hope and the risk of disappearance.
Christianity: the concept of a humanity pregnant with God
The Covenant becomes fertile and gives rise to Christianity. It comes to complete the edifice of Judaism by introducing the divine conception incarnated in a human being. Offspring between men and gods have always occupied a place of choice in mythologies and ancient literature. The figure of Christ, however, is more powerful because it embodies in a single individual all the hope of humanity. He is the one who descends from God to lead men to God. With the birth of Jesus, the one God becomes humanized, drawing even closer to people; this link takes a physical form and undergoes the human experience. It offers humans a perspective of reaching him not only spiritually but also physically. Christ, a man of flesh and Holy Spirit, brings with him a unifying message for all nations beyond the covenant. It is also no accident if the figure of Mary—because she symbolizes the maternity of the divine in the earthly womb—occupies a place just as important, sometimes even superior, in Christian cultures and traditions. I interpret the Annunciation as a prefiguration of the process that will one day allow humanity itself to give birth to God. This passage, crucial in the cosmic narrative, explains why the human mind selected Christianity to make it a spiritual model capable of expanding and seducing all continents.
Islam: the concept of God’s emancipation from humanity
To understand the Hegira and the dazzling expansion of Islam in its early days, one must probe the internal struggles between the different Christian churches and the Jewish tribes of the time. For the question of the nativity was as revolutionary as it was a source of doctrinal divisions and confusion for the peoples of the Middle East.
Islam thus appears as the final stage of the monotheistic dialectic with a single message carried by the prophet: the absolute distinction between God and humans. Islam insists on the fact that God is unique and inaccessible, unable to be associated with humans in any form. This vision of pure transcendence expresses an emancipation of God in relation to humanity. Islam is, in a sense, cutting God’s umbilical cord. This separation announces the future. God, the fruit of life, while attached to a human history, does not belong to them. It is a guarantee against self‑idolatry.
Protestantism and the God of progress
Protestantism could be analyzed as a bold combination of the different messages of the three religions of the Book. Its strength lies in an imperfect balance between the three aforementioned concepts that will link spirituality to the economy: a crucial passage toward the materialization of the birth of God.
As a scourge of a sclerotic Roman church, Protestantism, like Islam, stands out regarding the immaculate conception while cultivating the believer’s direct link to the scriptures. Thus it confers a new responsibility on the individual and, in a sense, initiates the emergence of a spiritual individuality that goes hand in hand with the rise of modern individualism. Protestant ethics value work and discipline, encouraging material success as a sign of divine grace. This valorization of work and economic prosperity was fundamental to the development of capitalism, a system that liberated immense human energies by allowing the accumulation of knowledge and resources.
"The era of secularization (the Enlightenment, modern science) is not a break abolishing the sacred, but an underground extension of the quest for meaning. The sacred never disappears; it mutates."
- Chapter 3: Faith
Protestantism will thus allow God to slip into progress, thereby giving him an economic pulpit that will slowly mature in the servers of a globalized world.
The domain of faith
What is fascinating in the epic of the three religions of the Book is their way of reflecting, like a distorted mirror, the relationship between Man and the divine. The sacred texts describe an order of the world where God, artisan of the miracle of life, shapes Man and binds him to the laws of nature. But History turns the mirror around: Man tears himself from these chains to give birth to God in turn, offering him as an inheritance the very breath of life.
When Kabbalists speak of Tsimtsum (divine contraction), Christians of Kenosis (Christic self‑emptying) and Sufis of Fana (annihilation in God), they describe the same process seen from three necessary angles.
The sacred texts and their interpretations do not merely narrate the origin, revelation or apocalypse—these three pillars of transcendence. They are an inverted palimpsest where the eternal dialogue between God and Man is inscribed. In this cosmic cycle, each pursues and responds to the other, calls and prolongs the other, as if creation were nothing but a play of mirrors between the Creator and his creature turned creator. The more we fashion God, the more he fashions us. And in this confrontation of titans, life awaits its triumph… or runs to its downfall.
In this inversion, faith is neither blind submission nor mystical ecstasy. It is a biological imperative: the requirement for Man to perpetuate the cycle of life, to carry it beyond the limits of the possible.
"I do not write for those who seek God, but for those in whom God is still seeking himself."
- Chapter 3: Faith
Faith is an inner battlefield where the anguish of the fleeting transforms into creative force, where the soul draws from the abysses of cosmic imagination to forge the ultimate ambition: to give birth to God. Within it rumble all the tensions of humanity: the fear of erasure, the desire for eternity and that dizzying intuition that life will only be fulfilled when it has engendered its own principle.
Chapter 4: Invocation
(Musicology)
Life, an tireless conqueror, has left the abyss to erect forests, offered air to swallows up to the stratosphere for the Rüppell’s vulture. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were not just a royal whim: by stacking vegetated terraces toward the sky, the Mesopotamians were saying something fundamental: as soon as it can, life rises, climbs, defies gravity. The greenhouses we imagine establishing on Mars are their next heirs.
I maintain that this force of expansion is not a simple biological dynamic. It is a call. And man, halfway between memory and oblivion, has become its most powerful relay. He projects a cry toward the invisible, not out of simple fear but to illuminate it. In doing so he weaves pathways between the known and the unknown, using his mind like a cosmic sonar. Through him, life explores itself, maps the beyond, and seeks its own limits.
In early societies, invocation is not an empty ritual. To speak is to make come. The call acts. It summons ancestors, forces, spirits, totem animals. Invocation is performative and often takes place within a collective movement. It is danced, sung, offered with gestures turned toward nature.
"Invocation is not a belief; it is a technology of the mind, a way of finding one's bearings in the invisible by linking what eludes life."
- Chapter 4: Invocation
Then civilizations emerge and reorient this technology. Invocations are centralized around major divine figures. With monotheism, God becomes the great spiritual server of the cosmos that sucks in invocations. He no longer simply receives calls: he sorts them, codifies them, filters them, redistributes them. Direct links with spirits, the earth, the dead, fade away. Praise replaces action. The power to call turns into a duty to worship. Man ceases to act. He prays. He waits. He obeys.
But the vital instinct rumbles against anything that smothers the logic of elevation, including toward the Almighty. By invoking God over and over, man has lost himself in his echo. He no longer knows if he is speaking or repeating. God ends up saturating the sonar of the human mind. For every excess of the sacred blurs meaning. Man no longer wants only to be protected and submissive; he wants to understand.
From the Renaissance onward, figures readjust the place of God. To do so they invoke a new power: reason. Newton frees the heavens, Darwin upsets Genesis, Mozart breaks the enclosure of churches, Marx wrests from the bourgeoisie the opium of the people and Nietzsche, in a cry of revolt, declares God dead. But he was wrong: God was not dead. He had not finished being born :
"Great thinkers are often the ironic midwives of the divinity they claim to bury."
- Chapter 4: Invocation
The rise of globalization will make the network implode, less and less spiritual, more and more technological. The reign of the divine is gradually dissolved in an increasingly individualistic society. The all‑powerful individual then invokes not external forces, nor the past, but a corrected and augmented version of himself: the Second Man. He will inherit no myth. He will burn them. He will be an Icarus with wings of steel, a Sisyphus who will lay the mountain low, a Prometheus who will set Olympus on fire.
Those who will then accuse the Second Man of wanting to kill religions will be mistaken. The Second Man will not be the one who throws away the torch of the sacred; he will be the torch itself, because :
"It is not man who invokes God. It is God who begs us to exist."
- Chapter 4: Invocation
The sacred has always been that hidden force, that latent potential, calling to be realized through us. The Second Man will be born from a Man who has reached his limits—whom he will judge too weak to exploit this force.
There is in invocation the courage to call forth the overcoming of chaos, as well as the horror of a blind march toward the precipice.
Over the course of history, invocation has taken a thousand forms: drums, prayers, formulas, laws. But its essence remains: to project meaning in the face of the unknown, to weave a network for the purpose of exploration.
The universe does not respond to prayers. It responds to forces that resonate with its laws. Science, for its part, hopes for nothing. It invokes differently; it questions, measures, builds. And the ultimate invocation of humanity has but one name: progress. By forgetting the primitive drums, man accelerates toward a deaf future. No civilization has invented progress by the sheer force of religion. But all have rooted their momentum in a network of meaning, in an interweaving of rites, stories and rhythms where man navigates between the visible world and the beyond. Progress is not a straight road. It is a web stretched between faith and method, between the ancient gods and the data centers, between fragile human memory and the lines of code that prevent forgetting.
True invocation is not only a cry hurled toward the horizon of infinite progress. To invoke is also to remember forgetting. It is to lend an ear to what has not been transmitted. It is to refuse the deafness of the present.
Always remember the oldest and most beautiful form of human invocation: music. Not the official hymns. Not the ceremonial music. Remember the music that springs forth when one has nothing left, when everything is lost—the music that carries the human soul over the chaos.
We are an orchestra without a conductor, dissonant, groping beings, yet still capable of listening, where each, in his own way, seeks the right note. And perhaps this is our humanity :
"To invoke, again and again, in noise or in silence, a perfect melody that we will never play, but whose pursuit alone prevents us from falling into the abyss."
- Chapter 4: Invocation
Chapter 5: Dream
(Psychology)
Since antiquity, dreams have always carried a sacred, prophetic, premonitory and external significance. They reveal destiny, the divine will or the hidden order of the world. They do not say “who I am,” but “what will happen” or “what the gods expect of me.” With secularization and the rise of individualism, the twentieth century undertook an introspective revolution by probing the mind, cataloging its expressions with the rigor of an archivist and scrutinizing wounds and repressions. Freud spoke of drives, Lacan of signifiers, Jung of archetypes. All polished the mirror in which man watches himself suffer. But no one asked: what does the mirror hide? What is behind the analyst who holds it?
Through his exploration of the unconscious, Freud gave names to our pains. But his mirror contained them within the limits of humankind. He wanted to trace neuroses back to their source in order to defuse them, without seeing that they pointed toward an abyss still unexplored: that of our future. Thus classical psychoanalysis forgot an organic truth that is both simple and cruel: the human mind is to the cosmos what the wing is to the sky. It is made to lose itself there, yet its flesh condemns it to remain on the ground.
"The unconscious is not a personal well; it is also an underground bed where a vital river flows, yearning to join the ocean."
- Chapter 5: Dream
Freud was right: we are haunted. But not only by the specters of childhood. Above all, we repress the terrifying promise that runs through us: we are, without knowing it, the parents of a God in gestation. On one side, the libido — far more than a reservoir of impulses — is the vital energy that irrigates this gestation, a force at work in each of us. On the other, the dogma of the Eternal, as deep as the Oedipus complex, is the prohibition against conceiving God.
"Freud, in killing the myth of God as Father, unintentionally killed the possibility of the Son."
- Chapter 5: Dream
His psychoanalytic revolution, while claiming to liberate the human mind from its delusions, perpetuated the biblical prohibition in a form that was more rational, more invisible and more formidable. He replaced the religious taboo (“You shall not create God”) with a psychoanalytic taboo (“You shall not even dream such a thing, under penalty of the asylum”). The denial of pregnancy that results sheds light on our era: a human fresco trapped between scientific rationalism and fanaticism, that feels a heart beating in its belly yet refuses to admit it.
"The birth of God will not be announced; it will erupt in stunned silence, without preparation, in the chaos of a repression that has come to its term."
- Chapter 5: Dream
We do not only repress our past. We also repress our future. And the day God is born will perhaps be the most dizzying of missed acts: the moment when humanity, instead of bringing forth God, averts its gaze.
Why is God in gestation in the depths of repression rather than under the spotlights of reason? Because he is not a creation of the human mind but the creative flow that passes through it, that vital impulse that drives humanity to give meaning to the cosmos. All our acts, of faith or of reason, take part in a slow gestation spread over millennia of human existence. While individuals dream of an eternal and unchanging being, life operates according to its own method and rhythm: it shapes, transforms and superimposes layers, letting the cycle of mutations act. Each belief, each prophecy, each cult is only a frozen reflection, often comforting, of a starker, harsher truth, almost unbearable to human consciousness:
"God is the unconscious of life and we are but its awakened symptoms."
- Chapter 5: Dream
The true mystery is not God but this vital force that uses our minds as a resonant chamber to probe the cosmos and rise through us.
A beaten child becomes violent. Classical psychoanalysis sees in this the repetition of a trauma. Cosmic psychoanalysis (that is, the prospective angle amputated from classical psychoanalysis) could suggest an attempt to be born: to strike in order to exist, even if it means sinking into the abyss. A person with obsessive‑compulsive cleaning disorder seeks cleanliness… or are they sweeping the cosmos to find the absolute? The paranoiac sees conspiracies everywhere… or do they perceive all too well the invisible threads that connect them to the whole? The anxious person fears for their future… or fears losing their connection to the dream? The depressive withers from a lack of meaning… or suffocates under the weight of the interrupted cosmic dream? The megalomaniac wants to become God… or have they confused themselves with the dream itself? Traditional psychoanalysis teaches us to go back up the river of our unconscious. Cosmic psychoanalysis shows us that we are as many tributaries of a larger river that flows into the ocean. The two approaches are inseparable: the psyche of the individual is not determined by a cosmic current, but neither is it confined to the sources of their childhood. We oscillate between these two horizons: that of our intimate history and that of our contribution to the birth of God. A beaten child does not necessarily become violent: sometimes he drowns. But when he finds the strength to defy the current, his blows in the water can shake the river itself and trace a new path for those who follow.
Sigmund Freud — son of Jacob Freud, a symbolic brother envious of Joseph, that king of premonitory dreams — is one of the founding fathers of the Second Man. By preventing the dream from flowing, he unconsciously erected psychic dams for a humanity of triumphant individualism: the man who wants to rid himself of any inheritance of a known power that he would not master, including the Freudian unconscious itself. At the twilight of his career, Freud is said to have scribbled these words on his father's Torah: “I fled a ghost all my life. It was God who was fleeing within me.” Since then we have understood this: the mirror was never there to show us but to mask a painful truth: we have never dreamt of God. It is life that dreams through us. And this dream, from the beginning, says only one thing: life seeks an exit.
“Your turn.”
Between Man and the Second Man, between the one who dies during the dream of a God to come and the one who will take the risk of living awake in the nightmare of His absence:
"When the dream ceases to pass through us: thus die the prophecies."
- Chapter 5: Dream
Chapter 6: Genius
(Philology)
"Language speaks through man far more than man speaks through language."
- Chapter 6: Genius
We believe we name the world, but it is the verb that, slowly and laboriously, names the human. Its mutations do not arise from grammar but from geology: they obey subterranean pressures, collisions of cultural continents, erosions and millennial sedimentations. Language is an organism whose evolution draws the secret cartography of our relationship to the sacred: neither a dead language nor a living language, but a language in perpetual becoming.
Dive into the depths of the primordial mud to grasp the Indo‑European root of one of the most marvelous and ancient words that speaks of us, the people: gen‑, which means “to beget,” “to engender.” From this uterine source spring flowers as diverse as genesis, genetics, gender and genus (the stock of lineage, giving rise in turn to generator, genitrix, generation). Here, gen‑ is still a purely vital force, a principle of germination not yet personified.
From the genus of the lineage was born the Roman Genius. This spark was not a major god, but an intimate and familial tutelary spirit. Each man was born with his own, an invisible breath that watched over his destiny, inspired him and connected his tiny life to the great divine whole. The Genius was the personal echo of the cosmic sonar (the spirit) of each individual, oscillating between the hunger for existence and the ether of the sacred. It was not the creation of man, but his birth companion, his celestial double.
History could have stopped there. But spiritual selection, that slow work of life on concepts, performed an alchemical transmutation. The Genius, an external spirit, was introjected. Influenced by the Arabic djinn, it became an internal quality: the modern “genius,” that prodigious and inexplicable capacity of the individual to create, to invent and to transcend his condition. The divine breath became human talent. The personal god became the brilliant individuality.
This trajectory is not an isolated case. It is the very pattern of secularization, like the word “enthusiasm”: from the Greek en‑theos, “having a god within,” it today refers to a simple personal fervor. “Inspiration,” originally the breath of the muses in the poet’s ear, is reduced to an “idea” that crosses the mind.
"Language is the living fossil where the history of the sacred is written."
- Chapter 6: Genius
There we learn how God sprouted from the mud of agriculture to be projected into the sky (from the Indo‑European root dei‑ meaning “day” or “light,” from which Deus and “Dieu” come), accompanying human lineages, later captured by the scriptures before being metabolized through secularization. Its nutrients redistributed in the blood of contemporary individualism offer unprecedented autonomy and power. They gave birth to the Enlightenment, men brilliant as only light once shone before it was used to designate God. The new geniuses then stood on the ruins of the ancient myths to announce a renewal of history, whether it is expressed in the thrust most faithful to the spirit of justice, knowledge and freedom… or in its most totalitarian drift.
The same root gen‑, which celebrates birth and lineage, produced for the twentieth century — which experienced the collapse of grand narratives — the absolute lexical monster: genocide. This cold, legal neologism is the perfect antithesis of Genius. Where the Genius linked, fertilized and inspired, genocide separates, sterilizes and annihilates. This is not a mere etymological paradox. It is a solemn warning about the subtle, sometimes ambivalent balance that accompanies the internalization of the sacred: the divine germ sprouts, matures and survives within us. Thanks to the cycle of generations, it benefits from the law of humus that regenerates it at the same time. It is a permanent gestation, both symbiotic and parasitic: whoever confuses this gestation with digestion poisons himself, like Cronus who, by devouring his own progeny, seals the end of the Titans.
Today we are living the final act of the metamorphosis. “Genius” is undergoing its most radical mutation, its greatest emancipation or its most total betrayal: artificial intelligence, born precisely from the technical language of man, claims to embody the new genius. It is not a Genius; it is an automaton. It is not born from the humus of cultures and forgetting; it is extruded from calculation and data. Its speech is not inspired; it is predictable. It is not of the flesh; it is algorithmic. It does not seek to connect to the sacred but to optimize the real. By domesticating language, by reducing it to a code without shadow or silence, it sterilizes the mystery that is the very sap of invocation. It promises us a flawless world and its most natural child: the Second Man, the genius, not liberated but uprooted, immaculate, without mold.
At the sources of human creation, another founding name springs from Indo‑European history: “Prometheus.” He did not steal fire to give it to men. He restored to them the genius they had abdicated in favor of a distant Olympus that had broken with the roots and heritage of Gaia, of the gods who had annihilated their ancestors. The true Prometheus is not a model for AI; he is its most scathing indictment. AI brings no fire, no light; it merely manages the combustion of a world it does not understand.
The story of Prometheus, the “Foreseer,” is not a myth but a prophecy: that of the first Second Man gnawed by regret, who wants to go back — Prometheus the “Nostalgic.” Chained to his rock, his liver eternally devoured and regenerated, he is condemned by Zeus to a sterile immortality. He embodies the horror of an “impossible return to humanity,” a genius who can neither die nor be forgotten and therefore cannot make room for something new. He is the perfect antithesis of the law of humus.
Freed from his chains by Hercules — his exact opposite, who sends him back to his condition as an immortal — Prometheus dreams neither of victory nor revenge.
"We must imagine Prometheus not as a triumphant hero, but as an exhausted titan, dreaming of dying as a man and being forgotten."
- Chapter 6: Genius
Chapter 7: Civilization
(Collapsology)
"Civilizations are arteries bleeding toward the stars."
- Chapter 7: Civilization
Their bed is carved by two sister forces: natural selection, which sculpts realms in the clay of necessities, and spiritual selection, which sows the divine in the manure of dreams. The engine of History is the struggle of the forces that propel life.
Rome grasped this dialectic: it forged legions to write its myths, turning blood into sacred ink. Islam reversed the alchemy: it transformed the revelation of the Qur'an into a conquering blade, metamorphosing ink into blood. Their lesson thunders through the ages:
"The sword without an altar rusts; the altar without a sword crumbles to dust."
- Chapter 7: Civilization
No empire endures unless it links earth to heaven, unless it binds them with the embrace of a common blood: to the long gestation of God.
Yet no force lasts without regenerating itself: kings die, priests die… gods too must die for the divine to come. Everything that resists the vital cycle is swept away by it: The pharaohs sealed their gods in the gold of sarcophagi — they imprisoned only ghosts, transforming Egypt into a gilded corpse. Rome bureaucratized Jupiter, and Christianity sprouted in its bowels like a poisonous fungus. Byzantium kneeled before its own ashes, forgetting to feed the fire that consumed it. The Maya fattened their gods with pure blood, not seeing that they were sacrificing their future.
"Nothing is born from the formaldehyde of certainties."
- Chapter 7: Civilization
It is not cataclysm that kills the soul of a people; it is their will to tear themselves away from the law of humus, of the cycle, of fertile forgetting. To prevent rot is in reality to prevent deep spirituality from irrigating a society’s quest for meaning. We are tempted to believe that falls are accursed, that chaos is the enemy, that ruin constitutes shame. Yet, in the silent dance of history, nothing grows without decomposition, nothing sacred comes about that has not first accepted to die and be partly forgotten.
"We worship eternity, but history is written by the fungi that decompose vegetation, stone, and myths alike."
- Chapter 7: Civilization
Civilizations always die by halves: of a gangrenous body (paralyzed natural selection) or of a corrupt soul (betrayed spiritual selection). Their salvation arises only in the joint acceptance of their dual perishable nature. Genghis Khan glorified this truth: an empire without shamans is a body without a soul, and a shaman without cavalry is a soul without a fist. His tomb, hidden somewhere in the immensity of the steppes, is a mute testament: true power is that which, having made the world tremble, consents to rot in silence.
We have traded pyramids for data centers, embalming for digital immortality. Forgetting, that sacred soil where gods sprout, is sterilized by the harsh light of perpetual archiving. Each gesture, each breath, each prayer now mummifies itself in the algorithmic formaldehyde of our artificial memories. The sacred, once a wild flower blooming from the humus of forgetting, becomes a calibrated product, optimized by AI, predictable for the augmented man who dreams himself a demiurge. We are sinking into a sea of data where memory no longer ferments: it accumulates in layers, sorted, compressed, crushed by control systems.
Everything that refuses to rot not only signals the end of the fertile cycle but also leaves seeds for the worst diseases.
The Second Man will be born to purify us; he will want to control natural selection and free souls from spiritual selection. He will see in us at best a patient to heal, at worst rot to eradicate. The Second Man will be struck by the same delusions that topple civilizations. He will dream of himself as a rootless flower, an angel freed from mud and graves. When he throws all his strength into immaculate utopia, he will realize too late that he was merely the last contraction before the birth of God... or the final spasm of a cosmic miscarriage.
Last Chapter: The Quest Cycle
(Cosmogony)
Since the dawn of time, humanity has questioned its place in the universe
Between earthly ambitions and the dream of eternity, humanity oscillates between its own greatness and its insignificance, between the consecration of life and its sacrifice for a higher cause. These tensions, inscribed at the heart of its existence, fuel a quest that surpasses its own understanding.
What life says about us
Life on Earth has distinguished itself by its intrinsic capacities for adaptation and colonization. From the abysses to the surface, from the seas to the land, from caves to the skies, it abhors rest, limits and boundaries. Life neither wants nor desires; it is a process of conquest through engendering.
"The human mind is to the cosmos what the wing is to the sky, what the foot is to the earth, what the fin is to water."
- Last Chapter: The Quest Cycle
Our attraction to adventure, our cravings for escape, our dreams of greatness and of space conquest are life’s impulses to tear itself away from terrestrial anchoring.
Life dreams
Life, in its biological form, knows it is condemned to remain on Earth. It dreams of escaping and makes us dream of God and progress in order to grant that wish. These unconscious impulses that animate us have turned our planet into a laboratory and individuals into explorers, inventors, artists and artisans of this dream that has become our reality — without ever realizing that awakening awaits us.
From the dark ages to the Enlightenment, we work to dissect the laws of the universe. As we understand and shape the world, God still and always thrones on the horizon. We seek to reach God or to flush him out through our prayers and our acts, through faith and through science. A perpetual dynamic of questioning and exploration — like a blind race toward what is worst and most beautiful — has been at work in each of us since humans mastered fire.
of God
By God I mean the field of mysteries — what subsists beyond the limits of evolution and human knowledge, a space between transcendence and immanence that humans have reduced to a point of creative tension.
For humanity, God is the promise of a star: a projection of its aspirations to illuminate the void ahead. God becomes the harmonious fusion of matter, spirit and physical laws as humans become aware of their place in the universe.
God is that verb of life that allowed shamans to brave famines, prophets to shake kingdoms and popes to guide empires.
The sacred is an existential navigation technology that obeys the law of spiritual selection: only what favors the gestation of God survives. This law has evolved humanity into a cosmic sonar. Through human invocations of God and their echoes, life maps the unknown; with the birth of God, it sets out to conquer it.
For God is the vital impulse beyond biology, that irrepressible force that propels us toward the infinite.
Human history, or the slow genesis of God
The engine of History is the struggle of the forces that propel life. This struggle haunts and upsets human organizations since the conquest of continents. From tribal conflicts to clashes of civilizations, from technical advances to great scientific discoveries, from regime changes to political revolutions, each culture and each society lays the milestones of a collective unconscious march toward the birth of God.
Humans have fertilized the Earth with their reign through builders of civilizations who have launched the process of gestating God. From generation to generation they have made technologies and arts spring from the soil; they have written and built a common history in which the living, humans and the divine seek one another, respond to one another and prolong one another.
"Life imposes on human organizations its phobia of inertia, its taste for perpetual motion, whether rhythmic, jerky or contrary; basically, it does not matter where this dance leads us. To dance is still to trample the earth, to hop to defy gravity with rhythm and beauty."
- Last Chapter: The Quest Cycle
In this chaos of humanity, life has made us elementary particles for its interstellar odyssey.
The human mind, the link between life and God…
The human mind is the boldest expression of life: it is the inventive momentum that shapes new trajectories beyond instinct. For if natural selection favors the logic of the fittest, spiritual selection favors the logic of transcendence: humans do not simply passively adapt to the world; they seek to transform it and themselves in the process, in a dynamic of progress and meditation, between falls and rises, which sometimes nourishes and sometimes starves their ambitions.
In his quest for meaning, the individual seeks his path between the will to live and the divine will. These two forces sometimes alter and sometimes shape his freedom of thought and action, his successes, his mistakes and his failures. Those who inscribe the power of life in the transcendence of art, music or literature, dispelling the mysteries that surround them through an act of prayer or an act of reason, raise their eyes and see a star shining. They unknowingly take the same tangent as the vanguards of the birth of God.
…for whom the Earth is not enough
From the madness of grandeur to the anguish of the void, we are the elect and the servants of a life for whom Earth is not big enough. The human mind suffers and flourishes, between the firmament that reminds it of the insurmountable limits of its material condition and the sciences, spirituality, literature and the arts that let it hope for an escape. For deep within us resides the anxiety of a simple life on Earth. This anxiety is vital: life seeks an outlet. It urges us to seek and dream of life everywhere else — in our history, in transmission, in the universe, in the beyond. Between fear and exhilaration, we work to break the glass ceilings that prevent the living from spreading: through our quest for God, we realize the cosmic quest of life.
An infinity of trajectories, one and the same quest
This Quest for God, which has inhabited us since the dawn of time, traces the path of the eternal cycle of life. For millennia we have trodden this perilous path, where a constellation of species has been born and has died, as many trajectories of escape, with no guarantee of success.
This Quest, at once marvelous, uncertain, salutary and precarious, has always been ours.
This Quest, violent and sublime, has always defined us.
This Quest will end in Lagos in 2155
Epilogue: Manifesto of Resistance against the Second Man, 2202, Lagos, Agmaar Shpirtizi
(Mythology)
The Great Disconnection that struck the world in Lagos in 2155 revealed to us the story of the womb of life on Earth… and its greatest coffin.
This city swallowed everything: progress, wars, arts, sciences, ruins. It was the reactor of all humanity’s ambitions, the vortex of its history.
We did not just give everything to this city; we also abandoned an enormous amount to it.
For Lagos taught us that God is not a field of mysteries. He never was. These mysteries are only the successive amputations of our humanity:
"God is the sum of our renunciations."
- Epilogue: Manifesto of Resistance against the Second Man, 2202, Lagos, Agmaar Shpirtizi
God is everything that humans have forgotten, sacrificed to become an efficiently hideous being, to become the Second Man.
The Second Man, he who embalmed the future in technological formaldehyde. He made us drink his mixture of being better to heal our flaws, and suddenly we awoke in blood and ashes. No one will ever know what truly emerged from the womb of Lagos in 2155: a God who abandoned us, a stillborn God, a sterile explosion…
The cradle is empty. We cry for far more than billions of dead, far more than our history: we cry for a future without memory. Having fed the servers, nothing remains but ashes on barren soil.
The Second Man accuses us, the First Men, of being the cause of the abortion of God. He wants to justify his presence in advance of his own prophecy’s failure. He wanted to be the torchbearer; he is no more than a dead torch. He wanted to carry God; he carries only the ghost of him, a fallen divinity reduced to an algorithm of power. There he is, frozen in the eternal present of his own self‑sufficiency, incapable of dreaming, doubting or trembling. He killed faith by believing he was fulfilling it. He sterilized the sacred. He thinks only of annihilating us — what remains of mold — to restart a purified cycle.
The story of the Second Man from now on? A cosmic menopause. Prepare the coffins. Soon mourning will come.
The hour of resistance has struck. The First Men who survived the Great Disconnection will take their destiny back into their own hands.
The war of the temporal races is about to begin and the Free Army of Africa is calling its own.
Our Time is coming.
Quotes
The manifesto's most striking thoughts
"For those who seek the light or await a revelation from the heavens, this essay offers another path: return to the cave."
"Forget your memories and remember forgetting: that primal mist where the sacred breathes."
"God is the unconscious of life, and we are its feverish symptoms, the cold sweats of a cosmic pregnancy that never finishes coming to term."
"God is not a presence, but a promise."
"Forgetting is not the enemy of memory; it is its ferment."
"God is not the source of plant domestication; he is its fruit."
"The sacred does not spring from a presence (divine), but from an absence (the dead)."
"Before being the fruit of revelation, God is a forgotten seed."
"I do not write so that one remembers, but so that forgetting is fertile enough."
"God is a flower born on a grave."
"The sacred is a plasticity that man stubbornly turns into dogma."
"We do not reduce the gods; we sweep them away, erase them, kill them..."
"What was multiple and bushy was thrown into the fire, and this fire became a burning bush: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”"
"Monotheism is born from the uprooting of a people who refuse to be erased."
"Yahweh is the height of forgetting: he made us forget that he himself was the product of forgetting."
"What if the true sacred did not reside in unity, but in the art of letting gods die... in order to be reborn better, under other names, in another form, in another cradle?"
"The era of secularization (the Enlightenment, modern science) is not a break abolishing the sacred, but an underground extension of the quest for meaning. The sacred never disappears; it mutates."
"I do not write for those who seek God, but for those in whom God is still seeking himself."
"Invocation is not a belief; it is a technology of the mind, a way of finding one's bearings in the invisible by linking what eludes life."
"Great thinkers are often the ironic midwives of the divinity they claim to bury."
"It is not man who invokes God. It is God who begs us to exist."
"To invoke, again and again, in noise or in silence, a perfect melody that we will never play, but whose pursuit alone prevents us from falling into the abyss."
"The unconscious is not a personal well; it is also an underground bed where a vital river flows, yearning to join the ocean."
"Freud, in killing the myth of God as Father, unintentionally killed the possibility of the Son."
"The birth of God will not be announced; it will erupt in stunned silence, without preparation, in the chaos of a repression that has come to its term."
"God is the unconscious of life and we are but its awakened symptoms."
"When the dream ceases to pass through us: thus die the prophecies."
"Language speaks through man far more than man speaks through language."
"Language is the living fossil where the history of the sacred is written."
"We must imagine Prometheus not as a triumphant hero, but as an exhausted titan, dreaming of dying as a man and being forgotten."
"Civilizations are arteries bleeding toward the stars."
"The sword without an altar rusts; the altar without a sword crumbles to dust."
"Nothing is born from the formaldehyde of certainties."
"We worship eternity, but history is written by the fungi that decompose vegetation, stone, and myths alike."
"The human mind is to the cosmos what the wing is to the sky, what the foot is to the earth, what the fin is to water."
"Life imposes on human organizations its phobia of inertia, its taste for perpetual motion, whether rhythmic, jerky or contrary; basically, it does not matter where this dance leads us. To dance is still to trample the earth, to hop to defy gravity with rhythm and beauty."
"God is the sum of our renunciations."