Before Abraham…Before scriptures…Before temples.
In this 1st episode of The Mosaic Chat, we travel back nearly 300,000 years, to the earliest traces of what we might call religious consciousness.
What does it mean that some of the first signs of spirituality appear not in monuments, but in graves? Why would early humans carefully bury their dead, sometimes with red ochre, sometimes with objects meant “for later”? What does that gesture reveal about the birth of the invisible in human thought?
This opening chapter explores a long arc of spiritual development: from animistic worlds filled with presences, to the rise of shamans as mediators between visible and invisible; from cave paintings deep in darkness to the first monumental sanctuaries built before cities even existed.
As societies settled, farmed, and organized themselves, the sacred also changed form. Gods became named. Rituals became public. Kings ruled with divine legitimacy. Law began to descend from heaven rather than from rulers. And gradually, a moral dimension entered the divine sphere: justice, truth, responsibility.
By the time prophetic voices emerge speaking of one creator and of human moral choice, the world is still polytheistic — but already transformed. The ground has been prepared for a new understanding of the divine.
Why begin here?
Because when we speak today of Jews, Christians, and Muslims imagining a shared future in the Middle East and North Africa, we are standing on top of this very long beginning. The God of Abraham did not emerge in a vacuum. He appears at a threshold shaped by thousands of years of spiritual experimentation, imagination, and moral inquiry.
Understanding that journey helps us better understand ourselves.
🎙 A conversation with Pauline Berthaud and Tomer Attias
📖 Inspired by Abramundi: Manifesto for the Creation of an Abrahamic Alliance in the Middle East and North Africa
