Chapter 2: The One

This chapter—and indeed none in this book—will defend a teleological or linear approach to the history of religions that retroactively interprets it as if it necessarily had to explain the future birth of God.

I reject any determinism of history. For the sacred is a plasticity that humans stubbornly turn into dogma.

I interpret monotheism as a decisive mutation in which the divine accidentally acquires the capacity to detach itself from the soil and to contaminate consciousness. Just as natural selection favors efficiency, spiritual selection produces the One—not by design but by contingencies; not by continuity but by evolutionary leap. Monotheism thus appears as an adaptive mutation of forgetting that the One will carry to the firmament: he is the master of effacement.

To understand the alchemy that drives humans toward monotheism, we must probe the cracks where polytheism collapses and where the One takes root. These fissures are not those of the gods; they are human. They translate the growing inability of people to organize societies that have become complex and unpredictable, where a multitude of gods no longer suffices to give coherence to the real.

We are in the Fertile Crescent, where the great Mesopotamian and Egyptian deities—born from the soil alongside barley and wheat—now reign over the world, over minds, and over the beyond. The divine, like a river in flood, relentlessly redraws the contours of civilizations and city-states. Ever more numerous, the gods clash, unite, beget, and die in myths where their roles reverse and their power falters under the weight of human anguish. Humans feed their gods but also corrupt them, dragging them along into the political, social, and climatic instability that kingdoms undergo. The Epic of Gilgamesh expresses this paradox: a king, sure of his strength, defies gods that 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 others. In fourteenth-century BCE Egypt, Akhenaten sought to impose Aten—not by creating a god but by drastically reducing the roles of the others to counter and weaken the Theban priesthood. His fleeting reform demonstrates the difficulty of great religions to evolve on their own. Akhenaten touched too early upon a truth the Hebrews would later embrace: one does not reduce the gods—one sweeps them away, erases them, kills them.

It is no accident that monotheism is born at the confluence of empires and exiles. Seven centuries later, around 622 BCE, in the hills of Judah, King Josiah proclaimed he had 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 saw a political opportunity: to unify Judah and annex the memory of its vanished sister kingdom to the north, Israel. He launched a reform that appears as the first historiographic coup d’état: the invention of tradition as a political weapon. Josiah had rival sanctuaries destroyed, Asherah stelae (Yahweh’s consort) erased, and local priests reduced to silence. Under his direction, scribes recomposed history and fixed part of the oral tradition. The veneration of patriarchs across the tribes became that of a single lineage. Israel had never been polytheist. It had never worshiped Baal, El, or the heavenly bodies. It had been but one people, under one God, from the beginning. What had been multiple and bushy was thrown into the fire, and that fire became a burning bush: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”

Seeking to extinguish the spark of hope of the Hebrews by reducing the Temple of Jerusalem to ashes in 586 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar would, without knowing it, set ablaze the history of the world for millennia to come. Deported to Babylon, torn from their land, deprived of temple and sacrifices, the Judean elites refounded their relation to 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 extract itself from the Temple, describing him as unfathomable, transcendent, invisible. The distancing from Jerusalem made Yahweh the first portable God, detached from any place, capable of absorbing the entire universe.

Monotheism is born of the uprooting of a people who refuse effacement. When humans have no more soil, threatened by their fellows, by wars, hatred, despair, they conceive an empty sky to inhabit: the sky is other people. God is the name of social cohesion projected onto the firmament. Divine abstraction is a response to exile: a God without earthly attachment haunts all borders, probes all souls, 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, and finally a forest of gods towering over the kingdoms: Yahweh is the tipping point where the divine mutates into a metaphysical virus. From a tribal god carved into the stone of a Temple, he becomes an abstract specter capable of touching consciousness beyond borders. In a sense, he engendered the first Great Disconnection in History: the necessary wrenching that frees God from his stony casing and his origins to hurl him into the interstellar void of pure ideas.

This spiritual revolution without equal must not make us forget that the One is, doubtless, the greatest falsifier of History. The resistance of the Hebrews—their heroic refusal to fade before regional powers—made the Almighty a master of effacement in his own right: a God able single-handedly to face down and crush all the primordial divinities of the Middle East. For Yahweh did not only erase the history of the world and of the religions before him—his own polytheist origins, his wife (Asherah), up to his own representations—he imposed and confiscated for the future the very definition of God: a unique creator, a pre-existing, eternal, transcendent being—a vision so blinding that it occludes humanity’s role in the birth of the divine and the cosmic cycle of life within which it is inscribed. Yahweh is the greatest stroke of genius in a magnificent lie, and the pinnacle of oblivion: having made us forget that we ourselves are the product of oblivion. He is the victim turned executioner; he wielded oblivion so masterfully that he forbids humanity from ever forgetting again.

The One embodies the ruthless revenge of Cronos: not only did He silence His peers, but He forbids even the very idea that another god might still be born. By staying Abraham’s knife, the One does not save Isaac; He preserves the human soil and the cycle of generations that brings Him into being.

Walk among the ruins of Karnak, Delphi, Babylon, Rome. Everywhere, in the cracks of temples, whisper the murdered gods. Monotheism thought it had triumphed by reducing them to silence, 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 humans’ fear in the face of the infinite, of the risk of forgetting’s black hole. And what if the true sacred lay not in oneness but in the art of letting gods die… so that they may be reborn, under other names, in other forms, in another cradle?