False Ascent: When Memory Became Monument

This preprint explores the motif of false ascent—the attempt to raise monuments as substitutes for covenantal memory. From Babel to ziggurats, pyramids, and sacred mountains, civilizations preserved the form of sacred ascent while severing it from covenant. Reading these traditions through the framework of Sacred Anthropology and its theological constants, the study argues that memory became monument, and monument became myth—a distortion that still echoes in cultural architectures of power. Part of the ongoing research for the monograph Those Who Carried the Heavens.