Chapter 1: Germination

We must overturn the traditional conception of the sacred from the outset if we wish to understand it. God is not a presence but a promise. God is not a pre-existing entity but a potentiality of life. Inseparable from humanity, God—like humanity—is in perpetual becoming, at once the work and the craftsman of our collective adventure.

The divine is an organic product born of the relation between humans and the living, between knowledge and forgetting. Studies of the earliest agricultural hearths offer an intriguing illustration: from a simple seed perceived as sacred there finally sprang an entire pantheon of deities.

We are in the Neolithic Middle East among the Natufians (twelve thousand years before the birth of Christ), where scholars traditionally locate the oldest cradle of agriculture—one that gave birth to the first great civilizations and to the primordial divinities. But how did this agriculture arise?

The chief obstacle long faced by modern historians and scientists is not merely the absence of traces, but a deeper paradox. Their mission is to restore humanity's memory, to recover what was lost in order to explain it. And yet forgetting is not a mere void to be filled—it is itself a driving force of history. In attempting to reconstruct chains of causality, historians have at times neglected the fact that certain decisive transformations—such as the domestication of plants—were not driven by any conscious project, but by the unconscious repetition of inherited gestures, preserved precisely because their origin and their purpose alike had been forgotten. Forgetting is not the enemy of memory; it is a ferment of it. Reconstituting history therefore consists not in filling the void of forgetting, but in making room for it—recognizing in its silences a dynamic proper to human evolution.

Returning to plant selection, what may seem obvious today is in fact a complex process: the domestication of cereals required uninterrupted tending over millennia before yielding a fertile grain incapable of surviving without human intervention. The Natufian of the Neolithic did not initiate such a process and then sustain it while foreseeing its outcome two thousand years later. He did not shape domestication with an end in view; he repeated a gesture laden with meaning without grasping its scope. Why?

For a long time it was thought that plant domestication resulted from a desire to honor new deities who influenced selective behavior. But archaeology points out the anachronism: the earliest traces of domestication precede by several millennia the onset of those gods.

It would take archaeology in the early twenty-first century for the mystery to be resolved at last: God is not the source of plant domestication; he is its fruit.

The first sedentary humans of the Natufian Levant had a tradition of burying their dead near dwellings. Thus they daily witnessed a strange phenomenon: certain plants grew better when close to graves. They aged more slowly and developed with greater vigor than those in the fields. The explanation—unknown to them—is that the decomposition of bodies releases polyamines, molecules that encourage growth and play an important role in gene expression. From their point of view, this phenomenon surely bore vital and cosmic significance—an understanding whereby the energy of the ancestors seeped into the plants and granted them this apparent strength. These sheaves thus took on a sacred character. Ritual consumption of the seeds as gifts from the elders and re-sowing upon new graves would perpetuate the practice over time through a cyclical cult linking death to life and life to death. This repetition brought about a progressive genetic transformation of the plants themselves. The Natufians had set an irreversible process in motion. Century after millennium, the ritual accidentally transformed wild wheat into domesticated cereal, which spread widely beyond burial sites thanks to human tending—humans who, in the meantime and without knowing it, had become farmers.

The first people who instituted this ritual did not know they were rooting a world in which, two thousand years later, their descendants would harvest boundless fertile fields. Having lost the origin of the sacred gesture, they saw their harvest as a gift from an invisible place somewhere beyond death and memory. That "beyond" became a dark womb in which the imagination composted the seed of myths and civilizations. Gaia, Osiris, Tammuz—these gods of fertile soil, primordial in their respective pantheons—hatched a posteriori to explain and ritualize the magic of sowing and harvests. These deities thus sprang from a repeated gesture honoring the dead—an act forgotten. A gesture born of a stunned instant before the grief of a grave where, instead of nothingness, life returned with unsuspected vigor.

The pattern of the sacred can be rendered thus: first, humans alter their environment through a meaningful repeated act; then time reveals the usefulness of that act even as it erases its origin through forgetting; finally the miraculous result demands a divine explanation.

The sacred springs not from a presence (the divine) but from an absence (the dead). The first gods are belated explanations of a biological phenomenon that precedes them. Spirituality may be seen as a side effect of decomposition.

God is a biological answer erected into revelation.

But before being the fruit of revelation, God is a forgotten seed. His paradox is rooted in amnesia: God grows in ignorance and effacement, in the shadow of a human who does not remember. Religions imprisoned him in dogma, fossilizing the sacred and erasing the human hand behind the miracle. From this absence there springs a longing: God becomes the fruit that humanity cultivates eternally—through him nourishing its infinite quest for meaning across spirituality, philosophy, music, and the arts. Ever savored, ever desired, this fruit—forever lost and forever found—is at once our hunger and our bread.

Forgetting is therefore a creator of transcendence. It transforms the biological into the mythical. It turns causality into gift.

This original gesture persists in certain traditions, but its cycle is broken: the dead no longer give fertile sheaves to the living; the living lay an ephemeral bouquet on the graves.

If forgetting reveals itself as a source of creation, it must never be total nor glorified. Its destructive power is just as undeniable. It is a weapon we carry without a sheath. What humanity forgets completely it can no longer understand; what it can no longer understand it cannot transform.

Learning, said Plato, is not the acquisition of something new but the recollection of what the soul already knew before birth. Socrates' "know thyself" is an archaeology of the self: digging within to rediscover the universal. "Forget thyself" is an archaeology of the divine: burying the self to let the other-than-self grow. Forgetting in order to remember differently: that is revelation—not the discovery of God but the experience of becoming the place where God seeks to be born—this unsettling sensation that something ancient in us is actualizing itself through our existence.

I do not write so that we may remember, but so that forgetting may be fertile enough. And if this essay must in turn be forgotten—just as we forgot and buried the primordial religions of the Middle East, just as we will one day bury today's religions—if only a single sentence, a murmur of old, were to remain in the ears of future generations, I would want them to hear this: God is a flower born on a grave.