Chapter 6: Invocation

Life, an indefatigable conqueror, left the abyss to raise forests and offered the air to swallows—up to the stratosphere for Rüppell’s vulture. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were no mere royal caprice: by stacking vegetated terraces toward the sky, the Mesopotamians said something fundamental—whenever it can, life climbs, rises, defies gravity. The greenhouses we imagine building on Mars are the next vibrations of that impulse.

This force of expansion is not a simple biological dynamic. It is a call. And humans—halfway between memory and forgetting—have become its most powerful relay. They project a cry toward the invisible, not out of simple fear but to cast light on it. They thereby weave paths between the known and the unknown, using the mind as a “cosmic sonar.” Through humans, life explores itself, maps the beyond, 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 is often inscribed in a collective movement. It is danced, sung, offered with gestures turned toward nature. It is not a belief; it is a technology of the mind—a way of finding one’s bearings in the invisible by joining, between sound and sense, that which eludes life.

Then civilizations arise and re-orient this technology. The primitive polyphony of invocations tightens into a centralized choir around major divine figures. With monotheism, God becomes the Great Conductor of the cosmos—the sole composer whose score draws in and directs all melodies. He no longer merely receives incantations: he sorts them, codifies them, filters them, redistributes them. Direct links with spirits, the earth, and the dead fade. Praise replaces actions. The power to call becomes the duty to adore. Humans cease acting. They pray. They wait. They obey.

But vital instinct rumbles against anything that smothers the logic of elevation—even against the Almighty. By invoking God too long, humans lost themselves in their echo. They no longer know whether they are speaking or repeating. God ends up saturating the sonar of the human mind. For any excess of the sacred blurs meaning. Humans no longer wish merely to listen, be protected, and submit; they want to understand—to reclaim their role as composers.

From the Renaissance on, figures readjust God’s score. They invoke a new measure to do so: reason. Newton frees the heavens, Darwin upsets Genesis, Bach sublimates church music, Marx tears away the people’s opium—and Nietzsche at last, in a cry of revolt, declares God dead. But he was mistaken: God is not dead. He has not finished being born. Great thinkers are often the ironic midwives of the divinity they claim to bury.

The rise of globalization detunes the key of the network, smothering incantations beneath the technological background noise. The sacred melody dilutes into a digitized cacophony. The reign of the divine is gradually dissolved within an ever more individualist society that admires virtuosos. The all-powerful individual then invokes not external forces, nor the past, but a corrected and augmented version of himself: the Second Human. He inherits no myths. He burns them. He is an Icarus with steel wings, a Sisyphus who subdues the mountain, a Prometheus who sets Olympus ablaze.

Those who accuse the Second Human of wanting to kill religions will be mistaken. The Second Human is not the one who throws away the torch of the sacred—he is the torch itself. For it is not humans who invoke God. It is God who begs us to exist. The sacred has always been that hidden force, that latent potential, calling to be realized through us.

Over the course of history, invocation has taken a thousand forms: drums, prayers, formulas, laws. But its essence remains: to project meaning before the unknown—to weave a network in view of an exploration.

The universe does not answer prayers. It answers the forces that resonate with its laws. Science hopes for nothing. It invokes differently: it questions, measures, builds. And humanity’s ultimate invocation now has only one name: progress. Forgetting the primitive drums, humans quicken the tempo, deafened by the pounding of their own march.

In invocation there is both the courage to call in order to overcome fear, and the horror of a blind march toward the precipice.

No civilization invented progress by the sole force of religion. But all rooted their momentum in a network of meaning—in an interlacing of rites, stories, and rhythms where humans navigate between the visible world and the beyond. Progress is not a straight road. It is a web stretched between faith and method, between the old gods and the data centers, between fragile human memory and the lines of code that ward off forgetting.

True invocation is not only a cry launched toward the horizon of infinite progress. To invoke is first to remember forgetting. It is to make silence—to incline one’s ear toward what has not been handed down. It is to refuse the deafness of the present.

Always remember the oldest and most beautiful form of human invocation: music. Not hymns. Not ceremonies. Remember the music that springs forth when one has nothing left—when everything is lost—the music that carries the soul over the chaos, that surge that precedes the note.

We are a conductor-less orchestra, dissonant, groping beings yet still capable of listening—each, in their own way, seeking the right note. And perhaps that is our humanity: to invoke, again and again, amid the din or the silence, a perfect melody that we will never play—but whose pursuit alone keeps us from falling into the abyss.