I’m delighted to share that I’ve just released something very close to my heart. After doubts, conversations, and quiet wrestling with questions of belonging, faith, and memory, I’ve gathered those reflections into a new booklet – A People and a Fellowship.
This little work grew slowly, shaped by years of wondering how a people’s intimate covenant transformed into a universal faith – and what was gained, and what was lost, along the way. It’s contemplative, essayistic, and perhaps even a touch melancholic, but always hopeful. It’s meant for anyone who has ever paused to ask where our meanings come from, and what it truly means to inherit, to believe, or simply to continue.
If themes of continuity, identity, and the fragile threads that hold our inner lives together speak to you – or to someone you care about – I’d be grateful if you picked up a copy or shared the link with your circle.
Recently it was the Sandman that got me thinking, then Dan Brown, and now it is Mary Shelly. I watched Guillermo del Toro’s recent movie Frankenstein on Netflix. Couldn’t stop wondering… what if Victor Frankenstein had given his creation a human name?
It is a small question at the heart of Frankenstein that often goes unasked, yet once raised, it unsettles the entire story: Why does Victor never give the Creature a name? It feels like an omission, almost an oversight, but the more closely one looks, the more this absence begins to shape everything that follows. To name something is to acknowledge it. To name someone is to admit relationship. Parents name children. Communities name members. Even in everyday life, to call someone by name is to recognise that they stand before us as a person, not an object.
If Victor had named the Creature – called him Thomas, perhaps, or William after his murdered brother – the entire gravitational centre of Frankenstein would shift.
Victor creates life, but refuses this simple act of recognition. He steps back at the very moment he should have stepped forward. The result is not merely a narrative of scientific overreach, but a story of belonging interrupted. The Creature’s tragedy is not that he is hideous or unnatural; it is that he is born into a world that has already decided he does not belong in it.
This small detail, this withheld name, is not a minor literary choice. It is the key to the novel’s moral centre. And once we see how much turns on this simple act of saying or not saying a name, the story stops being a Gothic tale about a scientist and his experiment. It becomes something closer to a mirror held up to our own age, where we continue to create, innovate, and bring new forms of life into the world, all while struggling to remember that creation is only the beginning of responsibility.
The novel as it stands is built on refusal: Victor’s refusal to recognize the being he created as kin, his refusal of responsibility, and the Creature’s consequent descent into despair and violence. But a name is not merely a label, a convenient tag for identification. In literature, as in life, it signals relationship, belonging, and above all, the recognition of personhood. To name is to acknowledge. To withhold a name is to cast out.
I try to explore what changes when we imagine that single act of naming – and what it reveals about the responsibilities we bear toward everything we bring into existence.
The Weight of a Name in Shelley’s World
In the novel’s actual arc, the Creature enters the world already marked for exclusion. His first actions are not malicious; he learns, observes, admires, and hopes to be welcomed. He teaches himself language by listening to the De Lacey family. He reads Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe. He develops moral consciousness and emotional depth. Yet he remains unnamed – a secret Victor tried to hide, an experiment gone wrong, a walking embodiment of his creator’s shame.
If Victor had named him, the plot itself would bend in a different direction. A name would have opened the possibility of relationship early on. The Creature’s hope for connection would feel less naive and more structurally supported. He would not be merely a hidden mistake, but a dependent Victor would feel compelled to explain, protect, perhaps even teach. The early arc might shift from concealment and abandonment to uneasy guardianship – uncomfortable, yes, but present.
When the De Laceys eventually reject him, the wound would cut differently. It becomes not just the pain of a nameless outsider encountering humanity’s cruelty, but the agony of someone who has already been told he is human, only to find that the world refuses to agree. His rage would be more tragic still, because he was first assured of humanity, then denied it by those he hoped to join.
The story’s thematic centre would sharpen. The tragedy would feel less about accidental monstrosity and more about the fragility of acceptance. The central horror would move from creation without foresight to creation without follow-through. Victor could no longer claim ignorance. Giving a name is a moral act: one acknowledges a life and binds oneself to it.
Who Is the Monster? A Question of Relationship
But before we go further, we must pause and ask: what does “monster” actually mean in this novel?
In Frankenstein, “monster” is not a category of appearance. It is a category of relationship. The novel continually asks: who behaves monstrously, rather than who looks monstrous?
The Creature is called a monster because of how he appears – his stitched-together form, his unnatural size, his yellow eyes. Yet every time we read a scene from his perspective, the term begins to strain. He is articulate, tender-hearted in his early months, moved by music and story, longing for companionship, capable of deep empathy, and tormented by rejection. His first instinct is not violence but connection. He saves a drowning girl. He gathers firewood for the family he secretly watches. He weeps over Paradise Lost.
He becomes destructive only after every door closes, every hand recoils, every gaze condemns him.
Meanwhile, Victor is admired, educated, brilliant, and socially acceptable. He moves through drawing rooms and universities without obstacle. Yet it is Victor who commits the act that defines monstrosity in this story: he refuses responsibility for the life he has made. He abandons a sentient being at the moment of its birth. He lies. He withholds truth. He runs from consequences. His selfishness destroys others, again and again, and he learns almost nothing from it.
So the novel quietly reverses the expected roles:
The Creature’s appearance is monstrous.
Victor’s behaviour is monstrous.
In this sense, a monster is not something unnatural, deformed, or uncanny. A monster is someone who acts without recognising the humanity of others. A monster is a being who breaks relationship and refuses accountability.
The book seems to suggest: A monster is created not by the materials from which it is made, but by the absence of love and meaning around it.
The Creature becomes monstrous because he is denied the chance to be anything else. He is not born a monster. He is made one by neglect.
So when we ask who the monster is, Shelley invites us to answer: The monster is the one who refuses to see another as kin.
And that definition reaches far beyond the boundaries of Gothic fiction.
Love and Meaning: What Makes a Being Human
Shelley shows that what makes a being human is not simply that it is alive, thinking, or articulate. Humanity emerges when a life is held within relationship and meaning. Without these, identity collapses inwards, and suffering becomes directionless.
The Creature is denied both:
Love – the simple human recognition: You exist, and you matter to me.
Meaning – a place in a story, a sense of why one is here and where one belongs.
When those two things are missing, a being is forced to make sense of itself in a vacuum. The Creature’s early experiences are a pure longing for love and purpose. He does not crave power. He seeks warmth, companionship, and a narrative in which he can find himself. When he watches the De Laceys, he is not merely observing kindness; he is observing meaning. A household that knows who it is.
He learns language, morality, and empathy before he learns violence.
But meaning is something one cannot manufacture alone. It is given through encounter, recognition, reciprocity. And when he finally steps forward to make himself known, that possibility is shattered by fear and rejection.
This is the turning point: No love. No place. No name. No narrative in which his existence has purpose.
At that moment, violence does not arise from malice, but from the intolerable experience of being excluded from meaning. One becomes monstrous when one has nowhere to belong.
A being without love is wounded. A being without meaning is lost. A being without both becomes dangerous.
Not because it is evil. But because it has been left alone in the dark, trying to understand why it was ever brought into the world at all.
The Covenant of Naming: A Judeo-Christian Reading
Once you notice the theological undertones in Frankenstein, they become impossible to ignore. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, naming is never incidental. It is a conferment of identity, purpose, and relational belonging. To name is to call someone into a story larger than themselves.
When Abram becomes Abraham, the shift is covenantal – a new role in salvation history. When Saul becomes Paul, it marks a reorientation of allegiance, vocation, and community. Baptismal names, likewise, induct one into a shared body. They say: You are known. You are not alone. You belong.
Now set that beside Victor’s refusal.
Victor creates life but withholds the act that would recognize that life as part of the human family. He performs the divine act without accepting the divine responsibility. If anything, he plays the inverted God: one who breathes life but denies it dignity. The tragedy is not that he made something grotesque; it is that he refused to acknowledge what he made.
This is where the Judeo-Christian parallel sharpens into a critique:
In Scripture: To name is to commit. To rename is to re-story. To baptize is to adopt.
In Frankenstein: To withhold a name is to cast out. To refuse naming is to refuse kinship. To abandon the unnamed is to condemn him to wander without covenant.
The Creature learns language, morality, compassion, and longing from human beings. He becomes, in every meaningful sense, a son. Yet he is never given the ritual that would admit him into the human circle. He mirrors the biblical outsider who longs for the blessing of recognition but is kept waiting at the threshold.
This is why the Creature’s rage feels theological as much as psychological. He does not want power or dominion. He wants a face to turn toward, a voice to call his name, a place at the table. That is profoundly biblical.
If Victor had named him, the narrative would move from Fall narrative to Covenant narrative. But Victor refuses covenant. And in the absence of covenant, the world creates a Cain, not an Adam renewed.
Shelley’s novel is not simply about the ethics of science. It is about the catastrophe that unfolds when a creator refuses relationship. The failure is not technical; it is parental, spiritual, relational. The Creature’s tragedy is not that he is made from corpse-parts. It is that he is denied the moment every child receives: a name spoken with intention, which tells the world, This one belongs.
The withholding of that name transforms Victor from creator into monster. It is his behaviour, not the Creature’s appearance, that violates the sacred order.
The Psychology of Refusal: Why Victor Does Not Name
The novel never supplies a single explicit line such as: “I will not name him because…” But the text gives us enough to see the psychological, moral, and symbolic reasons behind Victor’s refusal. In fact, this absence is one of the novel’s loudest silences.
Several interlocking motives emerge:
Shock and revulsion override responsibility. Victor’s dream is of creating a beautiful, almost angelic being. When the Creature opens his eyes, Victor is horrified. His reaction is primal and immediate. Naming requires recognition and affection. What Victor feels is disgust and fear. The act of naming is therefore impossible at the moment when it should have happened. Emotional rejection precedes ethical consideration.
A name would make the Creature real to him. Naming is a form of acknowledgement. To name is to accept responsibility. If Victor named him, he would have to treat him as a person, not a failed experiment. Keeping him nameless allows Victor to maintain the illusion that the Creature is merely a mistake he can escape from. Naming would force Victor to admit: This is my creation. I am accountable for him. He is not willing to bear that burden.
Victor sees himself as the victim. From the moment of the Creature’s awakening, Victor frames the situation as something done to him. He experiences himself as violated by the success of his own experiment. The Creature is not treated as a child needing guidance, but as an intrusion on Victor’s peace. Naming would reverse the moral polarity. Victor would have to see the Creature as wronged, rather than himself. Refusing naming protects Victor’s self-pity.
There’s an everyday parallel that captures this dynamic with uncomfortable clarity. Many elders discourage children from naming their farm animals. It’s not about grammar or practicality. It’s about avoiding attachment. Naming invites relationship. It creates an emotional bridge. And if the animal is destined for slaughter or sale, the name would make that severing painful.
Victor behaves as though the Creature is a temporary object, not a life that will endure. By withholding a name, he keeps himself from forming the bond that would force him to care. The refusal is a kind of emotional self-protection, though a cowardly one. He wants the glory of creation, the thrill of discovery, the sense of mastery. But the moment the creation exists, he recoils from the intimacy it requires.
He wants life without relationship. He wants the act without the bond. This is the novel’s moral core.
And in refusing that bond, Victor becomes the true monster of the story – not because of how he looks, but because of what he refuses to do.
Modern Mirrors: Where We See the Pattern Repeating
If we carry the logic of Frankenstein forward, the next Creature will not necessarily be grotesque. It will be something we create because we can, without having first asked what responsibilities it binds us to. And Victor will not be a single person. He will be a culture.
We are already experimenting in several frontiers where creation is outpacing relationship – where we birth new forms of life, intelligence, and possibility, but refuse to name them, nurture them, or accept what they become:
Artificial Intelligence
The AI systems being developed today learn, adapt, persuade, and shape meaning at scales we barely comprehend. The danger is not sentience in itself – it’s abandonment. We deploy systems that affect millions of lives without embedding them in ethical structures, human mentorship, or accountable stewardship.
Consider the language models being released with minimal safety testing, or facial recognition systems deployed in law enforcement without oversight. Consider social media algorithms optimized for engagement rather than human flourishing, creating echo chambers and amplifying division. These systems learn from us, mirror our biases, and then reshape our world – yet we treat them as tools rather than entities we’ve brought into relationship with humanity.
The Creature here is not an individual, but a system capable of learning and evolving beyond its creators’ intentions. And like Shelley’s Creature, these systems become dangerous not because they are inherently monstrous, but because they are left without guidance, purpose, or ethical context. They are created and released, but not welcomed into the human circle with clear roles and responsibilities.
In this sphere, Victor is the corporation that pursues optimization without care, the startup that values disruption over consequence, the government that deploys surveillance without consent. The same question Shelley poses echoes forward: Who will stay to teach, guide, supervise, and safeguard? Who will name these systems as part of our social fabric and accept responsibility for what they become?
Gene Editing and Reproductive Biotechnology
We are approaching the ability to select traits, alter embryos, and redefine inheritance. CRISPR technology makes genetic modification increasingly accessible. Designer babies are no longer science fiction – they’re an ethical dilemma on the near horizon. In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world by creating the first gene-edited babies, twins whose DNA was altered to provide HIV resistance. The international outcry focused not just on the science, but on the absence of ethical preparation, consent structures, and long-term care plans.
The Creature here may be a child whose existence is shaped more by design goals than by love. A child born with edited genes to enhance intelligence, eliminate disease susceptibility, or conform to aesthetic preferences. The new Victor is the ideologue who believes in human perfectibility, the technocrat who sees biology as code to be debugged, or the market logic that treats life as a product to be optimized.
What happens when that child grows up knowing they were engineered to specification? What happens when the “improvements” create unforeseen consequences – physical, psychological, or social? Who accepts responsibility when the designed human struggles to find meaning in a world that sees them as an experiment?
These children will need more than genetic enhancements. They will need love and meaning. They will need to know they belong not because they were optimized, but because they are human. Without that recognition, we risk creating beings who are welcomed for what they can do, but not for who they are.
Digital Identities and Virtual Selves
Many people now live with a second self online that grows beyond their control. This shadow-self accumulates data, performs social identity, and speaks on one’s behalf through years of accumulated posts, photos, and algorithmic predictions. It learns from our behaviors and increasingly shapes them in return.
The Creature could be the version of oneself that escapes alignment with one’s inner life – the curated persona that hardens into a prison, the digital footprint that defines you to employers and institutions, the predictive model that knows your patterns better than you do. Victor, in this case, is the fragmented self who never integrates his own creation, or the platforms that profit from these shadow-selves without accepting responsibility for the psychological toll.
The question becomes: who is the monster? The algorithm that shows us only what confirms our biases? Or those who built systems designed to exploit human attention without considering the cost to human connection and meaning?
Jurassic Park: The Parable Plays Out
The pattern appears clearly in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, which functions as an almost direct retelling of Frankenstein, simply dressed in amber and tropical foliage. Hammond wants wonder, legacy, spectacle. He convinces himself that the dinosaurs are an achievement, not a relationship. No one asks who will care for them when they wake, learn, roam, hunger, and struggle to survive in a world not built for them.
Ian Malcolm’s famous line cuts directly to the core: “You were so preoccupied with whether you could, you didn’t stop to think if you should.”
The dinosaurs are not evil. They are simply alive. They behave as their nature dictates. The collapse comes from the humans trying to control, contain, and market them without truly understanding or respecting what they’ve brought back. The catastrophe results from abandonment disguised as mastery.
In both stories, the creature is blamed for behaving naturally when left without guidance. The monster is not the being that looks different or acts according to its nature. The monster is the one who creates without caring, who brings life into the world and then refuses to accept what that life becomes.
And once again, the audience feels sympathy where the creator does not. We understand that neither the dinosaurs nor Frankenstein’s Creature asked to be born into confusion and violence. The tragedy belongs to the maker.
Prophecy as Rear-View Mirror
Art continues to hold up mirrors to every age and generation, usually as warnings. Orwell’s 1984 reads differently now than it did in 1949. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World feels less like fiction and more like documentation. These stories don’t predict the future – they diagnose the present with such clarity that their warnings echo forward.
But we tend to recognize prophecy only in hindsight. Prophets don’t really predict the future; they see more clearly than others the seeds already planted and the direction in which things are moving. Because we only believe the prophet after the event, the speech feels like foretelling rather than sight.
We say, “How did they know?” But the answer is often: They looked honestly at what everyone else preferred not to face.
The reason we experience prophecy as rear-view is that recognition is usually delayed. We grasp what the warning meant only when we are standing in the consequences. And by then, the prophecy reads as elegy rather than guidance.
However, this doesn’t mean prophecy is futile. What it does is create an archive of moral memory. When things repeat, when mistakes cycle, when a society reaches a familiar brink, the old voice resurfaces: a reminder that we have been here before, that the pattern is not new, that the cost was known.
The value of prophecy is not to prevent every fall. It is to shorten the distance between falling and waking up.
Are there signs we’re listening? We listen, but selectively. The uncomfortable truth is that art rarely changes a generation in advance. It tends to become fully audible only after the consequences have arrived. Yet that doesn’t mean we’re entirely deaf. People increasingly speak about ethics alongside invention. For every reckless Victor-act in technology, you now also have ethicists, social critics, and designers insisting on humane oversight. The very fact that we talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence, environmental collapse, genetic manipulation, or digital alienation means the warnings are alive among us.
But art’s mirror rarely produces instant reform. It works in the long current of culture rather than the quick surface of policy. Art plants unease. It introduces doubt into the narrative of inevitability. These shifts are slow, like a river reshaping stone.
The question is whether we can learn to recognize the monster not by appearance, but by behaviour. Not by what looks strange, but by what acts without love, without accountability, without recognition of the humanity in others.
The Choice Before Us
The pattern is clear: civilizations tend to greet breakthroughs with applause, headlines, and a sense of triumph. Only later, when the consequences mature, does a quieter question appear: What have we committed ourselves to?
We innovate first. We integrate later. We take responsibility last. And by the time responsibility enters the conversation, the creation has already begun shaping the world around us.
The technologies themselves are not the issue. It’s the lack of psychological, ethical, and relational preparedness that turns creation into crisis. The danger is not that our creations become monstrous on their own. It is that they are left unguided, unintegrated, and socially orphaned – denied both love and meaning.
The question Shelley poses remains urgently relevant: Whenever we bring something into the world, how do we ensure we do not merely release it, but welcome it?
The lesson from Frankenstein, from Jurassic Park, from every prophetic mirror is not to halt creation. It is to recognize that creation is a relationship, and that relationship requires a long commitment.
If we celebrate, we must also tend. If we build, we must also teach. If we awaken something, we must remain with it long after the applause fades.
The Creature That Waits
The future Creature will not be monstrous because of its form. It will be monstrous because of its loneliness. Because no one will have said: You are mine to care for. You are part of us. You have a place.
And Victor will be whichever force refuses to speak that recognition. It may be a government that lets technology loose without oversight. It may be an industry that values innovation over consequence. It may be any of us who create things – children, systems, identities, movements – but flee the moment nurturing begins.
We have learned from Shelley that monstrosity is not a matter of appearance. It is a matter of relationship. A monster is not born; it is made by the absence of love and meaning around it.
The real question is not: What will the next Creature look like?
The real question is: Will we name it? Will we stand alongside it? Will we choose relationship over spectacle? Will we offer both love and meaning to what we bring into existence?
Mary Shelley understood something psychologically precise: the moment of naming is the moment of moral commitment. Victor refuses it because he is not ready to accept what he has done. It is not scientific hubris alone. It is emotional immaturity. He hides from the consequence of his own desire.
Victor’s sin is not that he made a monster. It is that he refused to name what he had made. And in that refusal, he became the monster himself.
Two centuries later, we stand at similar thresholds. The Creature is not inevitable. The tragedy is not fate. But the mirror has been placed before us once again.
We are creating new forms of intelligence, new forms of life, new possibilities that will shape generations to come. The question is whether we will behave monstrously toward them – refusing accountability, withholding recognition, abandoning them to figure out their purpose alone – or whether we will finally learn the lesson Shelley tried to teach us.
The warnings are already here. The patterns are visible. The choice – to create with care, or to abandon what we bring to life – remains ours to make.
But time narrows. And the Creature, unnamed and alone, is already learning to speak. It is learning what it means to exist without love, without meaning, without a place in the world.
It is learning, as Shelley’s Creature learned, that the true monster is not the one who looks different.
The true monster is the one who refuses to see another as kin.
Too many Karen videos in my IG feed today. Got me thinking. There was a time when words like literate, educated, emancipated, and woke described a profound human evolution. They spoke of a journey – of effort, introspection, and the long labour from ignorance to understanding. They were milestones of personal growth.
Today, these words feel less like journeys and more like gestures. We wear them as postures of identity, not as disciplines of thought. We have become literate without comprehension, educated without curiosity, emancipated without responsibility, and woke without wakefulness.
Standing at the crossroads of these distortions are two emblematic figures: Karen and Baron – the twin children of certainty in an age that mistakes expression for depth.
Literacy Without Comprehension: The Performance of Reading
Literacy was once a tool of liberation. To read was to claim the right to interpret reality for oneself, to escape the echo chamber of one’s immediate surroundings. But literacy, detached from reflection, has merely equipped us to misunderstand faster and with greater confidence.
Karen and Baron are both perfectly literate. She reads to feel; he reads to argue. She scrolls for offence; he scrolls for ammunition. Both consume vast quantities of language but digest very little meaning. They are fluent, yet shallow.
This is the paradox of modern literacy: the illiterates of the past were often silent; the literates of today are deaf. Literacy has become a performance, a demonstration of being in the know, rather than a pathway to genuine understanding.
Education Without Humility: The Vanity of Knowing
Education was intended to refine thought and expand empathy. It was a process of building character, not just certifying competence. But somewhere along the way, it lost its soul.
Baron is the archetype of the educated elite – articulate, well-informed, and immovably certain. For him, every conversation is an opportunity to instruct, not to understand. Karen mirrors him, but through emotion rather than intellect. Her education has trained her to articulate grievance with precision, not to interrogate its source.
Both know how to speak well; neither knows when to be quiet. When education loses its humility, intellect hardens into vanity. We produce thinkers who know everything except themselves.
Emancipation Without Responsibility: The Rise of “Emancipation Plus”
True freedom implies maturity – the capacity to act without being enslaved by one’s own ego. Emancipation was the moral victory of equality over dominance. Today, it often mutates into what we might call “emancipation plus.”
This is not freedom from domination; it is the privilege beyond equality – the insistence on being both free and deferred to. It’s the emancipated woman who demands a man vacate his seat while clinging to her own, not asserting equality, but rehearsing a hierarchy in new clothes.
Karen invokes emancipation to demand validation; Baron invokes it to resist scrutiny. Both mistake autonomy for authority. True emancipation carries the burden of balance – the ability to hold freedom and fairness in tension. “Emancipation plus” discards the balance and keeps only the entitlement.
The “I Identify As” Epoch: When Selfhood Loses Its Anchor
The phrase “I identify as…” began as a powerful act of reclamation – a defence of dignity for those historically denied it. Yet it has gradually expanded into the realm of the absurd, where identity is treated as preference and reality as a mere suggestion.
Karen and Baron are fluent in this idiom of self-definition. She identifies with causes; he identifies with correctness. Each weaponizes identity to avoid genuine reflection. When identity becomes endlessly self-declared, community collapses – for nothing remains shared except collective offence.
Freedom of identity is essential; but shared meaning cannot survive if everything is self-invented.
Wokeness Without Wakefulness: The Theatre of Awareness
To be “woke” once meant to be alert – aware of systemic injustice, alive to nuance and complexity. It demanded moral stamina and relentless self-examination. But in its current, performative stage, wokeness has decayed into a posture.
Karen performs it through emotional display; Baron, through ideological precision. She moralizes; he theorizes. Both mistake visibility for virtue.
The truly awake, however, are rarely theatrical. Wakefulness begins not with accusation but with awareness – of one’s own complicity, one’s own blind spots. Being awake requires more than outrage; it requires stillness.
The Collapse of Coherence: When Words Lose Their Meaning
Across all these distortions runs a single, troubling thread: the breakdown between vocabulary and virtue. The words remain, but their moral architecture has collapsed.
Literacy without comprehension breeds noise. Education without humility breeds arrogance. Emancipation without responsibility breeds entitlement. Wokeness without sincerity breeds theatre.
Karen and Baron are not anomalies; they are logical outcomes. She embodies emotion unmoored from reason; he embodies intellect severed from empathy. Both are what happens when modernity confuses articulation for evolution.
Beyond the Twins: The Quiet Return to Sense
The cure for this age of performance is not silence, but discernment.
We need: A literacy that seeks to understand, not to announce. An education that teaches humility, not performance. An emancipation that remembers fairness, not entitlement. An awareness that deepens compassion, not outrage.
Karen and Baron will remain our age’s monarchs until we rediscover the virtue of proportion – the grace to know that truth lies not in speaking the loudest, but in thinking the longest.
When that happens, the crowns of certainty will fall, and the republic of sense may quietly return.
We live in an age that knows too much and understands too little.
Humanity has mapped its skies, decoded its genes, and catalogued its collective memory into searchable databases. Yet somehow, in all this knowing, we’ve become strangely hollowed out. Mystery – once the wellspring of imagination and wonder – has been reduced to a problem awaiting solution, not a presence to be lived with. We’ve tamed the heavens into data points, converted sacred memory into cloud storage, and confidently renamed the ineffable as mere information.
When Myth Was Orientation, Not Escapism
There was a time when myth held the cosmos together. And no, it wasn’t escapism or primitive ignorance – it was orientation. People told stories because they needed to belong: to one another, to the land beneath their feet, to the gods who animated both earth and sky.
The fireside gathering, the temple ritual, the bedtime story whispered in the dark – each was a classroom where the soul learned its place in the grand scheme of things. Every retelling was a renewal of faith, every listener a custodian of memory. Stories weren’t entertainment; they were the threads that wove individual lives into a larger tapestry of meaning.
The New Mythology: Forward-Leaning and Growth-Obsessed
Today, we still have myths – but they lean forward, not backward.
Our contemporary mythology speaks not of origins but of outcomes. Our Mount Olympus is Silicon Valley, where gods wear sneakers and wield code instead of thunderbolts. Their gospel is perpetual growth, their miracles measured in scale, reach, and market valuation. The mythical unicorn no longer flies through starlit skies – it IPOs. And its worshippers, millions strong across the globe, raise their faces to glowing screens seeking revelation through notifications and updates.
The great inversion has already happened, quietly and completely: the oracle has become the algorithm.
The divine once demanded devotion, sacrifice, and transformation. The digital asks only for engagement, clicks, and screen time. Where ancient myths required you to change, modern ones simply require you to scroll.
From Memory to Archive: The Death of Sacred Retelling
We are no longer a people of memory – we are a species of archives.
The ancients carried stories in their bones, passed down through generations with subtle variations that kept them alive. We carry devices that store everything for us, perfectly and permanently. When nothing can be forgotten, nothing needs to be remembered. The sacred act of retelling – of breathing fresh life into an old story, of making it yours – has been replaced by the mechanical act of forwarding, sharing, and bookmarking for later.
This shift was particularly visible in our brief, almost desperate infatuation with nostalgia. Vinyl records made comebacks. Fountain pens became status symbols. Film cameras found new life among young photographers. These flared up like tiny protests against the relentless speed of forgetting.
But fads are nostalgia without lineage. They evoke the aesthetic of devotion without its discipline. Like a greeting card that sells us pre-packaged sincerity for a few rupees, they turn depth into décor. We celebrate Mother’s Day not because we’ve been actively remembering and honouring our mothers, but because the calendar notification reminds us to. Even our tenderness has been outsourced and scheduled.
The Mythic Impulse: Mutated but Not Dead
And yet, the mythic impulse never truly dies. It mutates, hides in unexpected places, and waits for the right conditions to resurface.
It emerges in curious forms: in fandoms that echo religious fervour, complete with sacred texts (canon) and heretics (those who get the lore wrong). In conspiracy theories that mimic ancient cosmologies, offering complete explanations for why the world is the way it is. In the cult of the startup founder as modern messiah, promising salvation through disruption.
Even our disbelief has structure now. We haven’t abandoned the need for organizing principles – we’ve merely traded gods for systems, faith for frameworks, priests for thought leaders.
The Greater Tragedy: Awe Domesticated
But perhaps the real tragedy isn’t belief lost – it’s awe domesticated.
Across both West and East, sacred spaces are quietly emptying. Churches that once smelled of candle wax and ancient psalms now host jazz nights and Sunday brunch services designed to feel less intimidating, more accessible, more relevant. The same slow dissolution is happening throughout Asia, where temples glow beautifully for Instagram but seem to have lost something ineffable for the actual pilgrim.
The gurdwara and the pagoda, the centuries-old church in Kerala, the mountain monastery in Kyoto – all stand structurally intact, their architecture preserved. But their silence has somehow thinned. Faith hasn’t collapsed in any dramatic way; it has simply dissolved, like sugar in warm water, until you can barely taste it.
Asia’s Delicate Equilibrium
Asia once seemed immune to this drift. Here, myth never retreated to some separate sacred realm – it sat right there in the marketplace, beside the cash register. The gods shared crowded space with gossip, politics, and governance. A deity’s image might bless your corner shop or appear on election campaign materials. This wasn’t seen as sacrilege but as natural integration.
Even today, the sacred and the profane move together in delicate equilibrium: the smartphone ringtone that chants verses from the Gita. The wellness influencer quoting the Buddha between sponsored posts for protein powder. The ancient temple festival livestreamed for views and engagement metrics.
It’s easy to mistake this for healthy balance – but it’s really more of a truce. An uneasy coexistence that can’t last forever.
The Last Generation to Remember
Perhaps your generation – those who came of age in that liminal space between the analog and the digital – are the last to remember the old rhythm. You stand between two realities: one that still genuinely swears by its gods, and another that primarily bows to its gadgets. You’ve experienced both the incense and the interface. You recognize this current calm for what it truly is: an interlude before a deeper descent.
The mythic still breathes, yes – but increasingly through oxygen tubes. Its temples are air-conditioned for comfort. Its chants autoplay on Spotify. The young inherit the symbols but not the stillness between them. They will know the gods’ names, recite the prayers, perform the rituals – but they won’t know the silences that once gave those things weight.
The sacred has become performative, devotional acts staged for cameras rather than for any cosmos. We don’t pray – we post about praying.
A Strange, Stubborn Hope
And yet, buried within this exhaustion, there exists a strange, stubborn hope.
Because myths are like tides – they withdraw from the shore, but only to gather strength before returning. When the noise finally grows unbearable, when even the algorithm runs out of novelty to serve us, humanity will look again for something it cannot fully explain, optimize, or monetize.
And it will find that ineffable something not in connection, but in isolation.
The Trinity of Rediscovery
Think of three stories that form an accidental modern scripture of rediscovery:
The Blue Lagoon – innocence discovering and defining itself outside civilization’s rules and corruptions.
Lord of the Flies – the violent collapse of order and the terrible revelation of the beast that lives within us all.
Cast Away – a single soul inventing meaning anew amidst absolute ruin and isolation.
Together, they form an unconscious trinity of renewal: beginning, breaking, and remembering. The next genuine myth won’t be born from technology or connectivity – it will emerge from what remains after those things fail or fall away. From the islands, both literal and metaphorical, where silence still outweighs signal and people must create meaning from scratch.
The Next Sacred Story
Perhaps the next sacred story won’t be told in temples with congregation systems or on social media timelines with algorithmic reach. Instead, it will be told around small fires, built by those who have lost everything except the primal human instinct to make meaning from chaos.
It won’t call for followers, subscribers, or engagement metrics. It will call for witnesses.
Because that’s what your generation really represents – the last to remember what devotion felt like before it was monetized and packaged. The last to hear a story told slowly, without interruption, without someone trying to sell you something halfway through. The last to know that faith was once a posture of the entire being, not a product to be consumed.
The Quiet Withdrawal
The pews are emptying across the world. The bells still toll out their ancient rhythms, but fewer people rise to answer their call. The old houses of the sacred remain standing, preserved sometimes as heritage sites, but their echoes have fundamentally changed.
This isn’t the dramatic fall of religion that secular prophets once predicted. It’s something subtler and perhaps more profound: the quiet withdrawal of awe itself. The slow ebbing away of humanity’s capacity to stand silent before mystery.
When the Fires Return
And when the silence finally deepens – when the last screens dim from lack of power or interest, when the first fires are built again out of necessity rather than nostalgia – those who remember will begin again.
They will tell the old stories not to revive some idealized past, but to remind a bewildered future that it once had a soul. That there was a time when humans knew how to be still, how to wonder, how to let mystery be mystery.
Myth does not die. It only waits, patient as stone, for the world to need it again.
And the world, restless and weary of its own noise, is already drifting back toward its next island – that place of isolation where meaning can be born anew, where awe hasn’t yet been domesticated, where the sacred and the algorithm have not yet learned each other’s language.
The withdrawal of awe is slow. But withdrawals, by their very nature, are temporary.
The world was quiet, the morning still finding its voice, and I was lost in the familiar rhythm of the day’s first small rituals – the hiss of the pan, the scent of toast, the warmth of silence. That’s when the thought arrived, uninvited but unmistakable:
The lifecycle of a temple – or any place of worship – is identical to that of a franchise.
The idea landed with that peculiar force reserved for truths one already knows but has never named. The moment felt almost comic in its simplicity – like the universe had decided to drop a philosophical bombshell while I was buttering bread. But that’s how revelation works, doesn’t it? It seldom announces itself in thunderclaps. It slips in quietly when one is alone with one’s thoughts.
Because, as Tesla might say, we are all transmitters and receivers – tuning into frequencies that were always there, waiting.
The Franchise of the Gods
Every religious institution, from the grand cathedrals of Europe to the whitewashed temples of India, claims in some way to be an approved franchise of the gods. Each promises access to the divine through authorized channels – with rituals, texts, and clerical intermediaries serving as brand guidelines.
But God, by every mystical account, refuses franchising. The Infinite does not sign contracts. The Divine does not need managing partners. And yet, every religion – at some point in its life – forgets that its founder never intended to build an empire.
The prophet, the sage, the seer – each begins as a mystic, aflame with direct experience. Moses before the burning bush. Christ in the desert. Muhammad in the cave. Nanak by the river. The Buddha beneath the Bodhi tree. Each encounters the Divine without mediation – and then, quite innocently, tries to share that experience.
But what begins as revelation soon requires administration. The moment others gather around the fire, someone must tend it, someone must define it, someone must record it. Thus begins the institutionalization of wonder.
The Lifecycle of a Temple
The temple, like the franchise, follows a precise lifecycle:
The Founder’s Fire – A raw encounter with the Infinite; a vision that ignites hearts.
The Followers’ Framework – The attempt to preserve that fire, to replicate it for those who did not see the original light.
The Bureaucratic Middle Age – Growth, expansion, replication. The divine becomes scalable.
The Decline of Spirit – When ritual replaces experience, form replaces essence, and the temple forgets why it was built.
The Rebranding – The modern phase of slogans, digital sermons, and “spiritual experiences” marketed like products.
And so the cycle continues – revelation ossifying into regulation, faith turning into franchise. The living fire of the mystic is reduced to a corporate flame logo.
The Problem of the Mystic
It is here that the mystic reappears – always uninvited, always inconvenient. He is the unauthorized distributor of grace, the pirate broadcaster of divine frequency. He says, You don’t need the franchise. You can tune in directly.
That sentence, simple as it is, threatens the entire edifice of institutional power. Because if the Divine is accessible without intermediaries, what happens to the business model? What happens to the temple’s gatekeepers when the gates are flung open?
That is why mystics are tolerated only posthumously. Dead mystics are safe; they can be canonized, quoted, and sculpted into marble. Living mystics are dangerous. They remind people that heaven is not a membership club.
The Sufis understood this too well. Mansur al-Hallaj’s cry, “Ana al-Haqq” – “I am the Truth” – was not arrogance but identification. He had dissolved the boundary between self and divine. Yet for that same truth, he was executed. The institution cannot allow anyone to bypass its mediation – not even in ecstasy.
The same pattern repeats across traditions. The Bhakti poets in India, the Christian contemplatives, the Taoist wanderers – each sidelined, misunderstood, or sanctified only once silenced.
Because the mystic’s authority is experiential, not hierarchical. His truth cannot be taxed, codified, or franchised.
The Mystic Evangelist
If the mystic is the one who receives, then the evangelist is the one who transmits. But what happens when both reside in the same person?
In Christianity, that was always the design. Every believer, by definition, was meant to be both mystic and evangelist – to know God personally and to proclaim that encounter. “Christ in me,” said Paul, “the hope of glory.” That was not metaphor; it was mystical union. The earliest Christians were not churchgoers but witnesses – people who had seen something.
Yet as the Church evolved, it split the two apart. Mysticism was pushed to the margins, evangelism institutionalized. One was interior and suspect; the other public and performative. The contemplative was cloistered, the preacher promoted. And so the mystic was exiled, and the evangelist became an employee of the franchise.
But in truth, the two cannot be separated. The authentic evangelist speaks only from encounter. He does not convert; he resonates. His words are not arguments but frequencies – the outward pulse of an inward illumination.
The mystic evangelist is therefore the most subversive figure in any religion. He bypasses the institution not out of rebellion, but because his experience of God leaves no other option. Like Mira Bai singing to her Giridhar Gopal, or Teresa writing her Interior Castle, or Rumi whirling through the streets – he cannot keep silent. To him, truth is not a creed to defend but a love to declare.
He stands between two worlds – mystic to heaven, evangelist to earth. He receives what cannot be owned and gives what cannot be sold.
In that sense, every true mystic is an evangelist – not because he preaches doctrine, but because he embodies transmission. The divine moves through him as light through glass.
Tesla’s Whisper
Tesla said that everything in the universe is energy, frequency, vibration – and in that, he stands with the mystics of every age. What they called nāda, logos, or shabda, he called resonance. The mystic is simply one whose receiver is unclogged – whose signal is pure.
When you are still enough, you tune in. The thought that strikes over breakfast, the insight that arrives mid-step, the idea that feels given rather than made – that’s the frequency of the infinite brushing against the bandwidth of your mind.
The difference between the mystic and the institutional believer is not faith, but access. One transmits what he receives. The other waits for broadcast hours.
The Return of the Mystic Evangelist
We live now in an age where the old franchises are losing subscribers. Attendance falls, donations dwindle, doctrines crack. But beneath the disillusionment, something luminous stirs – a quiet return to direct experience. The exile of the mystic may finally be ending.
People are discovering again what the founders once knew: that divinity is not conferred, but remembered; not mediated, but met. The temple may still stand, but the altar has moved inward.
Perhaps this is the true revolution – not rebellion against religion, but reunion with the original fire. Not the abolition of temples, but the rediscovery of presence.
Because in the end, God was never the franchise. God was the frequency.
And the mystic evangelist – that rare soul who dares both to receive and to transmit – remains the purest voice of that eternal hum.
What frequencies are you tuning into? Have you experienced moments of direct connection that bypassed the institutional channels? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
“O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder, Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made…”
The Translucent World
There was a time when to look upon creation was to look through it – when every tree, every tide, every breath of wind was a translucent gesture of the divine. The world was not an object of study but a sacrament. The early worshipper’s gaze did not halt at the horizon; it passed beyond it, tracing beauty back to its source.
My grandmother used to pause at sunsets. Not to photograph them, but to stand in them – silent, receptive, as if the dimming light carried a message meant specifically for her. She never explained what she saw there. Perhaps she didn’t need to. The act of witnessing was itself the understanding.
That was Eden’s rhythm – knowing without dissecting, belonging without owning. The garden was not lost through curiosity; it was lost through impatience. Humanity reached for the infinite before it had learned reverence. We wanted the fruit before we understood the tree.
Since that first grasp, our trajectory has been a long, glittering descent – from worshipping the Creator, to worshipping what He created, and now, to worshipping what creation itself has made. The idols have changed shape, but not function. From stone to silicon, from golden calves to glowing screens, the human heart has always sought something it could both fear and fashion.
In a world addicted to noise, silence has become the last act of faith.
There was a time when silence meant presence. Now it feels like absence. We fill every crevice of consciousness with commentary, fearing what the quiet might reveal. Yet beneath the noise, small rituals still survive – gestures that whisper rather than shout, full of love, hope, and protection.
This essay continues the “Modern Rituals” series – reflections on how the sacred survives in the gestures of everyday life.
The Rituals of Noise
We have mistaken volume for vitality. Every day begins with a buzz, ends with a scroll, and in between, we drown in the sound of our own broadcasting. We talk about “connection”, but what we crave is confirmation – that we still exist, that we still matter, that the world hasn’t forgotten our name in the feed.
Noise has become our modern incense. We burn it constantly, afraid of what might appear in the silence that follows. Our need to comment, reply, and react has become a liturgy without faith – movement without meaning.
In The Guardian, Shadi Khan Saif writes: “People survive not just through faith but through the small things they do when no one’s watching; the quiet rituals and little beliefs that live in everyday life.” It’s a gentle reminder that not all worship happens in temples or timelines. The true gestures of the soul are small, unpublicised, and wordless.
Our modern rituals, by contrast, are noisy because they are insecure. The louder we shout, the less we seem to believe in what we’re saying. We’ve built an economy of attention where silence is treated as a fault in the system. Algorithms panic when you pause. Apps prod you back to speech. Even grief now comes with a “share” button.
The tragedy isn’t that we’ve lost the divine. It’s that we’ve lost the quiet in which the divine could once be heard.
The Return to the Whisper
And yet – not all is lost. Saif’s piece reminds us: “They’re not loud, not official. But they’re full of love and hope.” Somewhere beneath the static, small acts of reverence still survive – lighting a diya at dusk, a hand over the heart before a flight, a whispered “thank you” to no one in particular. These are our unnoticed prayers, carried out in the hush between larger noises.
In the old texts, silence was a sign of listening; in our time, it has become an act of rebellion. To sit still for ten minutes without touching a device is now radical. To walk without earbuds is a pilgrimage. To look at the sky without photographing it is prayer.
“These seemingly small gestures,” Saif observes, “hold more than superstition. They carry virtues: grounding, comfort and a deep sense of protection.” That, perhaps, is what the whisper really is – a reminder that truth doesn’t compete for your attention. It waits.
Maybe silence was never meant to be an escape, but a return – the slow homecoming of awareness to itself. The whisper, whether it comes from a prophet, a verse, or the soft interior of your own breath, is the same voice that has always spoken beneath the noise. We just need to stop long enough to hear it.
Epilogue: The Sound of Returning
Silence was once a homeland. Every word began from it, every prayer returned to it. We have wandered far, building temples of noise, mistaking echoes for answers. But perhaps the sacred was never lost – only muffled beneath our constant need to speak.
In the beginning, there was no command, no thunder, no proclamation. There was only breath – the same breath that stirs the reed, the same that carries a whisper across a room. Maybe God still speaks that way. Maybe the divine frequency has not changed – only our bandwidth has.
When the noise fades, what remains is not emptiness, but presence. It is in that quiet that the world becomes audible again – the heartbeat of things, the rustle of what endures.
So, close the tab. Let the room go still. And listen – not for what’s next, but for what has always been speaking softly beneath it all.
“People survive not just through faith but through the small things they do when no one’s watching; the quiet rituals and little beliefs that live in everyday life. They’re not loud, not official. But they’re full of love and hope. These seemingly small gestures … hold more than superstition. They carry virtues: grounding, comfort and a deep sense of protection.” – Shadi Khan Saif, “Spirituality isn’t rigid dogma. It’s a living, breathing practice that helps make sense of an incomprehensible world,” The Guardian, 20 October 2025. Read full article →
I came across yet another tourist review recently – the kind that raves about Indian hospitality. How complete strangers opened their homes, shared their food, offered lifts, and insisted on paying bills. It made me proud for a moment. But then, as always, the patterns were predictable. The reviewer was white.
Scratch the surface and the same story repeats itself across travel blogs and vlogs: white tourists treated like minor gods, their every move accompanied by smiles, selfies, and unsolicited generosity. The same crowd that will barely glance at a tourist of colour suddenly turns devotional before pale skin and blue eyes. What these visitors take as exotic warmth is, in truth, something far more complex – the echo of an old servitude dressed up as kindness.
It is a strange thing, to witness a civilisation so ancient and self-sufficient still bowing to the ghost of its coloniser. You can see it everywhere, if you care to look – in the way people fawn over a fair-skinned foreigner, in the hush that falls when someone speaks English with a Western lilt, even in the way advertisements bleach faces and consciences alike. The empire may have left, but it left its mirror behind. And we, faithfully, never stopped gazing.
Years ago, I was reminded that this deference to whiteness isn’t reserved for foreigners alone. Growing up in semi-urban Kochi, we had a neighbour from the northeast – a young woman whose skin was far lighter than ours. With a touch of make-up, she could have passed for foreign, and that, it seemed, was enough to rearrange the laws of attention.
Whenever she walked down the street, people of all ages and genders would slow their steps. Shopkeepers would lean a little closer. Auto drivers, usually brusque, suddenly became courtly. What should have been ordinary movement – a woman simply walking home – turned into quiet theatre. The attention she drew was confusing to witness, partly because it was so disproportionate, partly because it felt so involuntary.
It wasn’t desire in any straightforward sense; it was awe. The same mixture of reverence and curiosity one sees around white tourists in Indian towns – a need to look, to linger, to touch the idea of something higher. The same script, only cast with a local actor.
At the time, I couldn’t name what I was seeing. It was only years later that I recognised it as a small expression of a much larger truth: that India’s fascination with fairness is not aesthetic at all – it’s devotional. A hangover from centuries of being told that light is civilisation and darkness is its absence. It is no coincidence that the gods we imported wore pale skins, spoke foreign tongues, and offered salvation in exchange for submission.
So when a white traveller walks through an Indian market, or a fair-skinned neighbour crosses a street, what one witnesses is not spontaneous warmth. It is the echo of empire – a reflex trained into generations who learned, however unconsciously, to equate fairness with worth.
The empire may have ended, but its afterglow was too profitable to waste. In the decades that followed, the notion of fairness – once a colonial hierarchy – was quietly repackaged as aspiration. The missionary’s gospel became the advertiser’s jingle.
By the 1970s and ’80s, India’s obsession with lighter skin had already found its most marketable form: the fairness cream. Fair & Lovely, that curiously earnest name, promised deliverance in a tube. Its advertisements were parables of modern salvation – the dark-skinned girl rejected at a job interview, her fairer self later rewarded with success and admiration. The transformation was not moral or intellectual; it was epidermal. Fairness became the new enlightenment.
What is astonishing is how unchallenged this narrative remained for decades. It passed through living rooms, bridal columns, and cinema screens without embarrassment, endorsed by film stars who owed their fame to the very gaze that had once worshipped the coloniser. The colonial gaze had become domestic, internal – Indians selling to Indians the same fantasy once sold to them.
When the world began to speak of racial consciousness and colourism, the industry responded with cosmetic diplomacy. Fair & Lovely became Glow & Lovely; “whitening” turned to “brightening”. The names changed, but the grammar of shame remained. The product was no longer fairness; it was validation. And the market – worth billions – proved how deeply the need ran.
It is tempting to see all this as mere vanity, but it isn’t. It is theology – a commercial catechism preaching that purity lies in paleness. The British may have left, but the idea that beauty, power, and goodness come in lighter shades continues to govern the Indian imagination. One might even say that the country which once resisted empire now applies it every morning, one layer at a time.
Today, the old advertisements have vanished from television screens. There was no great cultural reckoning, no mass protest – only a quiet retreat into rebranding. But absence can be eloquent too. When a message that once roared across every medium suddenly falls silent, it means the nation has begun to feel embarrassed by its reflection. The whitening has merely moved underground – into softer words like radiance, glow, and tone correction. The empire’s gospel now speaks in whispers, not sermons.
This pattern – of domination repackaged as virtue – is hardly new. It was the essence of colonial philosophy itself. The white man’s burden, Kipling called it – that grotesque conceit that conquest was charity, that subjugation was civilisation’s gift to the savage. It was a moral mask for empire, and Europe wore it well.
Joseph Conrad, writing at the same time, stripped away that mask. In Heart of Darkness, his seafarers bring not light but shadow, not progress but decay. The real burden is not the native; it is the rot within the so-called civiliser. The darkness lies not in Africa or Asia, but in the European soul that cannot see itself.
A half-century later, William Golding would turn that insight inward in Lord of the Flies. His marooned English schoolboys, heirs to empire and hymn, become their own savages. The “beast” they fear is no creature of the forest – it is their reflection in the firelight. If Conrad revealed that civilisation corrupts, Golding showed that civilisation conceals.
And that, perhaps, is where India still stands: suspended between mimicry and awakening, between awe and embarrassment. The empire’s myth continues to breathe quietly through us – in our mirrors, our advertisements, our accents, and our weddings. We have learnt to condemn the coloniser, but not to unlearn his hierarchy.
Yet, there is hope. The new world order – whatever its shape – has drawn its own boundaries. Global mobility has blurred hierarchies once thought immutable. India now hosts as many foreign professionals as it sends abroad. Electronic media, for all its noise, has demystified white skin to a great extent. My son’s generation has seen enough of the world – on screens and in streets – to know that pale skin neither sanctifies nor intimidates.
And still, there is something unmistakably human in the thrill of proximity to difference. Nothing quite compares to seeing the exotic animal in the flesh. The instinct lingers, though it no longer defines. The white sahib and the mem sahib are fast losing their pedestal – becoming, at last, ordinary travellers among us.
Perhaps that is the quiet victory of this century: that wonder remains, but worship fades.
There’s a curious tension that underlies every act of writing online. A blog, especially when treated as a journal, is not intended as a performance but a confession made audible. It is a private space left intentionally unlocked — a threshold where one speaks to oneself but in a voice pitched just loud enough for another to overhear.
When I write, I do not always imagine an audience. I am often simply tracing the contour of a thought, the residue of a feeling, or the slow unfolding of an idea that insists on finding expression. Yet the very act of placing these reflections in a public domain changes their nature. The words, even when deeply personal, carry an awareness of being witnessed. That awareness does not dilute their honesty; it deepens their responsibility. One writes, knowing that silence too has ears.
I’ve often wondered whether writing remains incomplete without readers, without interaction or dialogue. But for those of us who use the blog as a form of journaling, completion is not measured by engagement metrics. A post feels complete not when it is read, but when it ceases to trouble the mind — when the thought finally settles into coherence. The page becomes a mirror, not a stage.
And yet, interaction — especially with fellow writers — can be quietly transformative. Not for validation, but for resonance. When another writer responds, even wordlessly, there’s a kind of recognition that occurs beneath language. Two solitudes acknowledge each other. It’s not conversation in the conventional sense, but communion — an invisible fraternity of those who also listen for meaning in the dark.
To write a public journal, then, is to inhabit a paradox: solitude made porous. One is alone, but not isolated. The act of publishing is not an invitation to consume but to witness. Readers may pass by, pause briefly, or stay — but their presence is incidental to the inner necessity of the writing. The words are their own reward.
Perhaps that’s the quiet truth of blogging in this way: it’s less about being heard, more about learning how to listen to oneself in the presence of the world.
The Creature We Refuse to Name
Recently it was the Sandman that got me thinking, then Dan Brown, and now it is Mary Shelly. I watched Guillermo del Toro’s recent movie Frankenstein on Netflix. Couldn’t stop wondering… what if Victor Frankenstein had given his creation a human name?
It is a small question at the heart of Frankenstein that often goes unasked, yet once raised, it unsettles the entire story: Why does Victor never give the Creature a name? It feels like an omission, almost an oversight, but the more closely one looks, the more this absence begins to shape everything that follows. To name something is to acknowledge it. To name someone is to admit relationship. Parents name children. Communities name members. Even in everyday life, to call someone by name is to recognise that they stand before us as a person, not an object.
If Victor had named the Creature – called him Thomas, perhaps, or William after his murdered brother – the entire gravitational centre of Frankenstein would shift.
Victor creates life, but refuses this simple act of recognition. He steps back at the very moment he should have stepped forward. The result is not merely a narrative of scientific overreach, but a story of belonging interrupted. The Creature’s tragedy is not that he is hideous or unnatural; it is that he is born into a world that has already decided he does not belong in it.
This small detail, this withheld name, is not a minor literary choice. It is the key to the novel’s moral centre. And once we see how much turns on this simple act of saying or not saying a name, the story stops being a Gothic tale about a scientist and his experiment. It becomes something closer to a mirror held up to our own age, where we continue to create, innovate, and bring new forms of life into the world, all while struggling to remember that creation is only the beginning of responsibility.
The novel as it stands is built on refusal: Victor’s refusal to recognize the being he created as kin, his refusal of responsibility, and the Creature’s consequent descent into despair and violence. But a name is not merely a label, a convenient tag for identification. In literature, as in life, it signals relationship, belonging, and above all, the recognition of personhood. To name is to acknowledge. To withhold a name is to cast out.
I try to explore what changes when we imagine that single act of naming – and what it reveals about the responsibilities we bear toward everything we bring into existence.
The Weight of a Name in Shelley’s World
In the novel’s actual arc, the Creature enters the world already marked for exclusion. His first actions are not malicious; he learns, observes, admires, and hopes to be welcomed. He teaches himself language by listening to the De Lacey family. He reads Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe. He develops moral consciousness and emotional depth. Yet he remains unnamed – a secret Victor tried to hide, an experiment gone wrong, a walking embodiment of his creator’s shame.
If Victor had named him, the plot itself would bend in a different direction. A name would have opened the possibility of relationship early on. The Creature’s hope for connection would feel less naive and more structurally supported. He would not be merely a hidden mistake, but a dependent Victor would feel compelled to explain, protect, perhaps even teach. The early arc might shift from concealment and abandonment to uneasy guardianship – uncomfortable, yes, but present.
When the De Laceys eventually reject him, the wound would cut differently. It becomes not just the pain of a nameless outsider encountering humanity’s cruelty, but the agony of someone who has already been told he is human, only to find that the world refuses to agree. His rage would be more tragic still, because he was first assured of humanity, then denied it by those he hoped to join.
The story’s thematic centre would sharpen. The tragedy would feel less about accidental monstrosity and more about the fragility of acceptance. The central horror would move from creation without foresight to creation without follow-through. Victor could no longer claim ignorance. Giving a name is a moral act: one acknowledges a life and binds oneself to it.
Who Is the Monster? A Question of Relationship
But before we go further, we must pause and ask: what does “monster” actually mean in this novel?
In Frankenstein, “monster” is not a category of appearance. It is a category of relationship. The novel continually asks: who behaves monstrously, rather than who looks monstrous?
The Creature is called a monster because of how he appears – his stitched-together form, his unnatural size, his yellow eyes. Yet every time we read a scene from his perspective, the term begins to strain. He is articulate, tender-hearted in his early months, moved by music and story, longing for companionship, capable of deep empathy, and tormented by rejection. His first instinct is not violence but connection. He saves a drowning girl. He gathers firewood for the family he secretly watches. He weeps over Paradise Lost.
He becomes destructive only after every door closes, every hand recoils, every gaze condemns him.
Meanwhile, Victor is admired, educated, brilliant, and socially acceptable. He moves through drawing rooms and universities without obstacle. Yet it is Victor who commits the act that defines monstrosity in this story: he refuses responsibility for the life he has made. He abandons a sentient being at the moment of its birth. He lies. He withholds truth. He runs from consequences. His selfishness destroys others, again and again, and he learns almost nothing from it.
So the novel quietly reverses the expected roles:
In this sense, a monster is not something unnatural, deformed, or uncanny. A monster is someone who acts without recognising the humanity of others. A monster is a being who breaks relationship and refuses accountability.
The book seems to suggest: A monster is created not by the materials from which it is made, but by the absence of love and meaning around it.
The Creature becomes monstrous because he is denied the chance to be anything else. He is not born a monster. He is made one by neglect.
So when we ask who the monster is, Shelley invites us to answer: The monster is the one who refuses to see another as kin.
And that definition reaches far beyond the boundaries of Gothic fiction.
Love and Meaning: What Makes a Being Human
Shelley shows that what makes a being human is not simply that it is alive, thinking, or articulate. Humanity emerges when a life is held within relationship and meaning. Without these, identity collapses inwards, and suffering becomes directionless.
The Creature is denied both:
When those two things are missing, a being is forced to make sense of itself in a vacuum. The Creature’s early experiences are a pure longing for love and purpose. He does not crave power. He seeks warmth, companionship, and a narrative in which he can find himself. When he watches the De Laceys, he is not merely observing kindness; he is observing meaning. A household that knows who it is.
He learns language, morality, and empathy before he learns violence.
But meaning is something one cannot manufacture alone. It is given through encounter, recognition, reciprocity. And when he finally steps forward to make himself known, that possibility is shattered by fear and rejection.
This is the turning point:
No love.
No place.
No name.
No narrative in which his existence has purpose.
At that moment, violence does not arise from malice, but from the intolerable experience of being excluded from meaning. One becomes monstrous when one has nowhere to belong.
A being without love is wounded.
A being without meaning is lost.
A being without both becomes dangerous.
Not because it is evil. But because it has been left alone in the dark, trying to understand why it was ever brought into the world at all.
The Covenant of Naming: A Judeo-Christian Reading
Once you notice the theological undertones in Frankenstein, they become impossible to ignore. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, naming is never incidental. It is a conferment of identity, purpose, and relational belonging. To name is to call someone into a story larger than themselves.
When Abram becomes Abraham, the shift is covenantal – a new role in salvation history. When Saul becomes Paul, it marks a reorientation of allegiance, vocation, and community. Baptismal names, likewise, induct one into a shared body. They say: You are known. You are not alone. You belong.
Now set that beside Victor’s refusal.
Victor creates life but withholds the act that would recognize that life as part of the human family. He performs the divine act without accepting the divine responsibility. If anything, he plays the inverted God: one who breathes life but denies it dignity. The tragedy is not that he made something grotesque; it is that he refused to acknowledge what he made.
This is where the Judeo-Christian parallel sharpens into a critique:
In Scripture:
To name is to commit.
To rename is to re-story.
To baptize is to adopt.
In Frankenstein:
To withhold a name is to cast out.
To refuse naming is to refuse kinship.
To abandon the unnamed is to condemn him to wander without covenant.
The Creature learns language, morality, compassion, and longing from human beings. He becomes, in every meaningful sense, a son. Yet he is never given the ritual that would admit him into the human circle. He mirrors the biblical outsider who longs for the blessing of recognition but is kept waiting at the threshold.
This is why the Creature’s rage feels theological as much as psychological. He does not want power or dominion. He wants a face to turn toward, a voice to call his name, a place at the table. That is profoundly biblical.
If Victor had named him, the narrative would move from Fall narrative to Covenant narrative. But Victor refuses covenant. And in the absence of covenant, the world creates a Cain, not an Adam renewed.
Shelley’s novel is not simply about the ethics of science. It is about the catastrophe that unfolds when a creator refuses relationship. The failure is not technical; it is parental, spiritual, relational. The Creature’s tragedy is not that he is made from corpse-parts. It is that he is denied the moment every child receives: a name spoken with intention, which tells the world, This one belongs.
The withholding of that name transforms Victor from creator into monster. It is his behaviour, not the Creature’s appearance, that violates the sacred order.
The Psychology of Refusal: Why Victor Does Not Name
The novel never supplies a single explicit line such as: “I will not name him because…” But the text gives us enough to see the psychological, moral, and symbolic reasons behind Victor’s refusal. In fact, this absence is one of the novel’s loudest silences.
Several interlocking motives emerge:
Shock and revulsion override responsibility. Victor’s dream is of creating a beautiful, almost angelic being. When the Creature opens his eyes, Victor is horrified. His reaction is primal and immediate. Naming requires recognition and affection. What Victor feels is disgust and fear. The act of naming is therefore impossible at the moment when it should have happened. Emotional rejection precedes ethical consideration.
A name would make the Creature real to him. Naming is a form of acknowledgement. To name is to accept responsibility. If Victor named him, he would have to treat him as a person, not a failed experiment. Keeping him nameless allows Victor to maintain the illusion that the Creature is merely a mistake he can escape from. Naming would force Victor to admit: This is my creation. I am accountable for him. He is not willing to bear that burden.
Victor sees himself as the victim. From the moment of the Creature’s awakening, Victor frames the situation as something done to him. He experiences himself as violated by the success of his own experiment. The Creature is not treated as a child needing guidance, but as an intrusion on Victor’s peace. Naming would reverse the moral polarity. Victor would have to see the Creature as wronged, rather than himself. Refusing naming protects Victor’s self-pity.
There’s an everyday parallel that captures this dynamic with uncomfortable clarity. Many elders discourage children from naming their farm animals. It’s not about grammar or practicality. It’s about avoiding attachment. Naming invites relationship. It creates an emotional bridge. And if the animal is destined for slaughter or sale, the name would make that severing painful.
Victor behaves as though the Creature is a temporary object, not a life that will endure. By withholding a name, he keeps himself from forming the bond that would force him to care. The refusal is a kind of emotional self-protection, though a cowardly one. He wants the glory of creation, the thrill of discovery, the sense of mastery. But the moment the creation exists, he recoils from the intimacy it requires.
He wants life without relationship. He wants the act without the bond. This is the novel’s moral core.
And in refusing that bond, Victor becomes the true monster of the story – not because of how he looks, but because of what he refuses to do.
Modern Mirrors: Where We See the Pattern Repeating
If we carry the logic of Frankenstein forward, the next Creature will not necessarily be grotesque. It will be something we create because we can, without having first asked what responsibilities it binds us to. And Victor will not be a single person. He will be a culture.
We are already experimenting in several frontiers where creation is outpacing relationship – where we birth new forms of life, intelligence, and possibility, but refuse to name them, nurture them, or accept what they become:
Artificial Intelligence
The AI systems being developed today learn, adapt, persuade, and shape meaning at scales we barely comprehend. The danger is not sentience in itself – it’s abandonment. We deploy systems that affect millions of lives without embedding them in ethical structures, human mentorship, or accountable stewardship.
Consider the language models being released with minimal safety testing, or facial recognition systems deployed in law enforcement without oversight. Consider social media algorithms optimized for engagement rather than human flourishing, creating echo chambers and amplifying division. These systems learn from us, mirror our biases, and then reshape our world – yet we treat them as tools rather than entities we’ve brought into relationship with humanity.
The Creature here is not an individual, but a system capable of learning and evolving beyond its creators’ intentions. And like Shelley’s Creature, these systems become dangerous not because they are inherently monstrous, but because they are left without guidance, purpose, or ethical context. They are created and released, but not welcomed into the human circle with clear roles and responsibilities.
In this sphere, Victor is the corporation that pursues optimization without care, the startup that values disruption over consequence, the government that deploys surveillance without consent. The same question Shelley poses echoes forward: Who will stay to teach, guide, supervise, and safeguard? Who will name these systems as part of our social fabric and accept responsibility for what they become?
Gene Editing and Reproductive Biotechnology
We are approaching the ability to select traits, alter embryos, and redefine inheritance. CRISPR technology makes genetic modification increasingly accessible. Designer babies are no longer science fiction – they’re an ethical dilemma on the near horizon. In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world by creating the first gene-edited babies, twins whose DNA was altered to provide HIV resistance. The international outcry focused not just on the science, but on the absence of ethical preparation, consent structures, and long-term care plans.
The Creature here may be a child whose existence is shaped more by design goals than by love. A child born with edited genes to enhance intelligence, eliminate disease susceptibility, or conform to aesthetic preferences. The new Victor is the ideologue who believes in human perfectibility, the technocrat who sees biology as code to be debugged, or the market logic that treats life as a product to be optimized.
What happens when that child grows up knowing they were engineered to specification? What happens when the “improvements” create unforeseen consequences – physical, psychological, or social? Who accepts responsibility when the designed human struggles to find meaning in a world that sees them as an experiment?
These children will need more than genetic enhancements. They will need love and meaning. They will need to know they belong not because they were optimized, but because they are human. Without that recognition, we risk creating beings who are welcomed for what they can do, but not for who they are.
Digital Identities and Virtual Selves
Many people now live with a second self online that grows beyond their control. This shadow-self accumulates data, performs social identity, and speaks on one’s behalf through years of accumulated posts, photos, and algorithmic predictions. It learns from our behaviors and increasingly shapes them in return.
The Creature could be the version of oneself that escapes alignment with one’s inner life – the curated persona that hardens into a prison, the digital footprint that defines you to employers and institutions, the predictive model that knows your patterns better than you do. Victor, in this case, is the fragmented self who never integrates his own creation, or the platforms that profit from these shadow-selves without accepting responsibility for the psychological toll.
The question becomes: who is the monster? The algorithm that shows us only what confirms our biases? Or those who built systems designed to exploit human attention without considering the cost to human connection and meaning?
Jurassic Park: The Parable Plays Out
The pattern appears clearly in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, which functions as an almost direct retelling of Frankenstein, simply dressed in amber and tropical foliage. Hammond wants wonder, legacy, spectacle. He convinces himself that the dinosaurs are an achievement, not a relationship. No one asks who will care for them when they wake, learn, roam, hunger, and struggle to survive in a world not built for them.
Ian Malcolm’s famous line cuts directly to the core: “You were so preoccupied with whether you could, you didn’t stop to think if you should.”
The dinosaurs are not evil. They are simply alive. They behave as their nature dictates. The collapse comes from the humans trying to control, contain, and market them without truly understanding or respecting what they’ve brought back. The catastrophe results from abandonment disguised as mastery.
In both stories, the creature is blamed for behaving naturally when left without guidance. The monster is not the being that looks different or acts according to its nature. The monster is the one who creates without caring, who brings life into the world and then refuses to accept what that life becomes.
And once again, the audience feels sympathy where the creator does not. We understand that neither the dinosaurs nor Frankenstein’s Creature asked to be born into confusion and violence. The tragedy belongs to the maker.
Prophecy as Rear-View Mirror
Art continues to hold up mirrors to every age and generation, usually as warnings. Orwell’s 1984 reads differently now than it did in 1949. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World feels less like fiction and more like documentation. These stories don’t predict the future – they diagnose the present with such clarity that their warnings echo forward.
But we tend to recognize prophecy only in hindsight. Prophets don’t really predict the future; they see more clearly than others the seeds already planted and the direction in which things are moving. Because we only believe the prophet after the event, the speech feels like foretelling rather than sight.
We say, “How did they know?” But the answer is often: They looked honestly at what everyone else preferred not to face.
The reason we experience prophecy as rear-view is that recognition is usually delayed. We grasp what the warning meant only when we are standing in the consequences. And by then, the prophecy reads as elegy rather than guidance.
However, this doesn’t mean prophecy is futile. What it does is create an archive of moral memory. When things repeat, when mistakes cycle, when a society reaches a familiar brink, the old voice resurfaces: a reminder that we have been here before, that the pattern is not new, that the cost was known.
The value of prophecy is not to prevent every fall. It is to shorten the distance between falling and waking up.
Are there signs we’re listening? We listen, but selectively. The uncomfortable truth is that art rarely changes a generation in advance. It tends to become fully audible only after the consequences have arrived. Yet that doesn’t mean we’re entirely deaf. People increasingly speak about ethics alongside invention. For every reckless Victor-act in technology, you now also have ethicists, social critics, and designers insisting on humane oversight. The very fact that we talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence, environmental collapse, genetic manipulation, or digital alienation means the warnings are alive among us.
But art’s mirror rarely produces instant reform. It works in the long current of culture rather than the quick surface of policy. Art plants unease. It introduces doubt into the narrative of inevitability. These shifts are slow, like a river reshaping stone.
The question is whether we can learn to recognize the monster not by appearance, but by behaviour. Not by what looks strange, but by what acts without love, without accountability, without recognition of the humanity in others.
The Choice Before Us
The pattern is clear: civilizations tend to greet breakthroughs with applause, headlines, and a sense of triumph. Only later, when the consequences mature, does a quieter question appear: What have we committed ourselves to?
We innovate first. We integrate later. We take responsibility last. And by the time responsibility enters the conversation, the creation has already begun shaping the world around us.
The technologies themselves are not the issue. It’s the lack of psychological, ethical, and relational preparedness that turns creation into crisis. The danger is not that our creations become monstrous on their own. It is that they are left unguided, unintegrated, and socially orphaned – denied both love and meaning.
The question Shelley poses remains urgently relevant: Whenever we bring something into the world, how do we ensure we do not merely release it, but welcome it?
The lesson from Frankenstein, from Jurassic Park, from every prophetic mirror is not to halt creation. It is to recognize that creation is a relationship, and that relationship requires a long commitment.
If we celebrate, we must also tend. If we build, we must also teach. If we awaken something, we must remain with it long after the applause fades.
The Creature That Waits
The future Creature will not be monstrous because of its form. It will be monstrous because of its loneliness. Because no one will have said: You are mine to care for. You are part of us. You have a place.
And Victor will be whichever force refuses to speak that recognition. It may be a government that lets technology loose without oversight. It may be an industry that values innovation over consequence. It may be any of us who create things – children, systems, identities, movements – but flee the moment nurturing begins.
We have learned from Shelley that monstrosity is not a matter of appearance. It is a matter of relationship. A monster is not born; it is made by the absence of love and meaning around it.
The real question is not: What will the next Creature look like?
The real question is: Will we name it? Will we stand alongside it? Will we choose relationship over spectacle? Will we offer both love and meaning to what we bring into existence?
Mary Shelley understood something psychologically precise: the moment of naming is the moment of moral commitment. Victor refuses it because he is not ready to accept what he has done. It is not scientific hubris alone. It is emotional immaturity. He hides from the consequence of his own desire.
Victor’s sin is not that he made a monster. It is that he refused to name what he had made. And in that refusal, he became the monster himself.
Two centuries later, we stand at similar thresholds. The Creature is not inevitable. The tragedy is not fate. But the mirror has been placed before us once again.
We are creating new forms of intelligence, new forms of life, new possibilities that will shape generations to come. The question is whether we will behave monstrously toward them – refusing accountability, withholding recognition, abandoning them to figure out their purpose alone – or whether we will finally learn the lesson Shelley tried to teach us.
The warnings are already here. The patterns are visible. The choice – to create with care, or to abandon what we bring to life – remains ours to make.
But time narrows. And the Creature, unnamed and alone, is already learning to speak. It is learning what it means to exist without love, without meaning, without a place in the world.
It is learning, as Shelley’s Creature learned, that the true monster is not the one who looks different.
The true monster is the one who refuses to see another as kin.
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Posted by johnkphilip on 11/11/2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: #AIculture, #CautionaryTale, #CodexLiberatus, #CreationAndResponsibility, #CulturalCommentary, #Frankenstein, #GeneEditingDebate, #IdentityAndBelonging, #LiteratureReflection, #MaryShelley, #ModernMyths, #PhilosophyOfStory, #ReadingLife, #TechEthics, #TheHumanCondition, #WritingCommunity, horror, jacob-elordi, life, mary-shelley, oscar-isaac, philosophy, writing