The history of religion is inseparable from the history of curation, translation, and the evolution of our media

The history of religion is inseparable from the history of curation, translation, and the evolution of our media. One of the oldest sacred texts is Sumer’s Kesh Temple Hymn, cut into clay some 4600 years ago. Whether scholars call it a “religious text” might be beside the point; Enlil’s preamble claims that The Kesh Temple Hymn was written by the goddess Nisaba, the deity of writing, literature, numbers, and intelligence. There’s no evidence from archaeology that we can isolate what theologian Paul Tillich calls “ultimate concern” — matters of our faith and meaning-making — from our record-keeping, systems of abstraction, and politicized attempts to ground our claims in some profound authority transcending hearsay and opinion. What we decide to set aside for reverence or worship, we commit to record and the methods of recording are instruments through which divinity by any measure warps the manifold of shared attention and behavior, instantiating itself in the human world.

What new ecologies of sacred text production will emerge when we have language models that can synthesize and translate anything we feed them?