origins//research
iteration 5/10 Experience build 5/10 · implementing whisper-chain (oral-transmission chasm) + ritual-walkthroughs (Shang divination) 95/95 criteria · 100%
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type · ideastatus · proposal
On this pageConceptWhy it takes you back in timeExperience walkthroughData from the vaultImplementation sketchImages neededEffort

Descent Tree Explorer — walk the family tree of the gods

Concept

An interactive family tree of religious lineages rendered as a living tree you can walk. The roots sit in the deep past at the bottom of the screen; the canopy is the present at the top. Three great trunks grow side by side in one orchard:

Branch forks are dated divergences. Fruit hanging on each branch are earliest dated attestations — each fruit carries its date, evidence class (1-archaeology / 2-text / 3-reconstruction), and links straight to the vault note that backs it. Hovering a deity name (Zeus) makes its cognates light up across branches simultaneously (Dyauṣ Pitā, Iūpiter, Týr, Dievas, Tiwaz) with the sound-law chain shown on the connecting glow. Edge semantics follow vault law: descent = solid living wood, contact = a graft/vine crossing between trunks (Anu borrowed into Hittite religion; Atrahasis flood → Gilgamesh XI → Genesis), convergence = deliberately no connection — two fruits pulse in sympathy with a "looks alike, isn't kin" label. Common origins stay a hypothesis, not a premise: the orchard has three trees, not one.

Why it takes you back in time

Time is not a label on this visualization — it is the vertical axis you physically travel. You land in the canopy at 2026 CE and scroll down, descending through strata: past the Quran's first manuscripts, past Eddic Iceland, past Homer, past the Knossos tablet that wrote Zeus's name in 1400 BCE, down into the dark unattested root-zone below ~3000 BCE where everything is rendered as translucent ghost-wood (evidence class 3 — reconstruction, honestly marked). The background ages with you: parchment → papyrus → clay → ochre-stained rock, and the ambient light dims from daylight to firelight. The emotional payload is the moment the cognate glow fires: you hover Zeus high in the Greek branch and watch a thread of light run down the branch, through the Mycenaean fruit, into the trunk, and back up into India, Rome, and Scandinavia — five thousand years and five thousand kilometres of separated peoples saying the same two words, Sky Father, because their great-great-…-grandparents once said it together. That is the comparative method made physical, and it lands like vertigo.

Experience walkthrough

1. Arrival. Full-viewport SVG orchard, camera at canopy level (present day). A thin time-rail on the left edge shows your current depth: 2026 CE. Three crowns are labeled with living traditions; leaf-count subtly encodes adherent scale.

2. Descent. Scroll/drag descends the tree. The time-rail spins backwards; era strata bands (CE / classical / Bronze Age / unattested) slide past. Branches converge as you go down — Christianity and Islam merge back into Second-Temple Judaism, which merges into Israelite religion, which fuses (at the El-Yahweh node) into the Canaanite trunk.

3. Fruit. Each attestation is a small amber (archaeology) or blue (text) fruit. Click → side panel with the note's frontmatter card (date, evidence class, confidence, counter-evidence) and a link to the rendered vault note. The Knossos di-we fruit at 1400 BCE is the oldest written "Zeus"; the Kuntillet Ajrud fruit (~800 BCE) shows "Yahweh and his Asherah."

4. Cognate glow. Hover any deity name → all cognates across all branches ignite; the connecting path is annotated with the reconstruction (Dyḗus ph₂tḗr) drawn in the ghost-wood root zone. The Anatolian branch glows differently* — root reflex only (šiu-, Tiwaz), no father formula — visually preserving the vault's central steelman.

5. Grafts. Contact edges arc between trunks as vines with a direction arrow and a date window: Mesopotamian flood → Genesis; Anu → Hittite pantheon; Zoroastrian eschatology → Second-Temple Judaism (marked unresolved/dashed where the vault verdict says so).

6. The root zone. Below the earliest attestation everything is translucent and explicitly labeled "reconstruction — no text exists." Reaching the PIE root plays no fanfare; it shows the honest void, with the three anchor cognate branches faintly converging into it. Date-or-label, rendered.

Data from the vault

All of it already exists at tier 1–2; the explorer is a view, not new research:

Implementation sketch

Stack: bun only, zero npm deps, vanilla JS + inline SVG, served from the existing tools/server.ts (Bun.serve if-chain — two new branches before the catch-all file handler).

Images needed

Numbered GPT-5.5 (codex CLI) photorealistic prompts — no text in images, no devotional framing, no recognizable living people:

1. Hero / page banner — "Photorealistic ancient gnarled oak at dawn on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, immense root system partially exposed in eroded earth, three massive trunks growing from one buried root mass, golden hour mist, shot on medium-format film, archaeological-documentary mood, no text."

2. Era stratum: Bronze Age band — "Macro photograph of a sun-dried clay tablet surface with faint cuneiform impressions, warm raking light, shallow depth of field, texture fills frame edge to edge, suitable as a dim background band, no legible text."

3. Era stratum: classical band — "Macro photograph of aged papyrus fibre texture with faded iron-gall ink stains, soft museum lighting, fills frame, background-texture use, no legible writing."

4. Era stratum: medieval-to-modern band — "Macro photograph of stretched vellum parchment with wax-seal residue and candle-soot edge darkening, raking light, full-frame texture, no legible writing."

5. Root zone (reconstruction stratum) — "Photorealistic underground cross-section of deep tree roots in dark loess soil fading into black, single shaft of light from above, ochre hand-print faintly on a buried stone, archaeological excavation lighting, mysterious but not mystical, no text."

6. PIE fork vignette — "Photorealistic Bronze Age steppe scene at dusk: wheeled wagons and horses beside a river, distant figures around a fire under an enormous clear darkening sky, c. 3300 BCE material culture, cinematic wide shot, no faces in close-up, no text."

7. Canaanite fork vignette — "Photorealistic Late Bronze Age Levantine coastal city at sunset, mudbrick temple platform above a harbor, storm clouds over the Mediterranean, Ugarit-inspired architecture, archaeological reconstruction realism, no text."

8. Śramaṇa fork vignette — "Photorealistic dawn on the middle Ganges plain c. 500 BCE, mist over the river, a solitary ascetic figure seated far from a walled early-historic city on the horizon, muted naturalistic palette, documentary framing, no text."

9. Cognate-glow social card — "Photorealistic night sky over a dark treeline, a single bright star with thin light refractions reaching toward five points on the horizon, long-exposure astrophotography feel, restrained and precise, no text."

Effort

M overall.