Civilizations don’t begin with kings or armies — they begin with stories.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Iliad, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings — separated by thousands of years, they’re all asking the same question:
How do you turn chaos into meaning? 🧵
The oldest epic we know is about Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, who lost his closest friend and went searching for immortality, only to learn that no man escapes death.
He learned that meaning lies in what we build and leave behind.
Across time, stories help us face death and make sense of a broken world.
That was 4,000 years ago. But the pattern never changed.
Every epic since has wrestled with the same truth: chaos comes for all of us.
Baroque art dazzles the eye.
But dazzling was never the goal.
It was built for survival.
When the Protestant Reformation emptied pews, the Catholic Church fought back, not with arguments, but with performance that made people flood back into its churches… 🧵
In 1652, Bernini unveiled The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Rome.
A marble saint in rapture, an angel poised with a golden spear.
It’ was theatre in stone, designed to make you feel divine presence.
This was the Counter-Reformation’s strategy:
If sermons couldn’t bring people back, spectacle would.
Art became persuasion.
Every detail aimed to make the viewer part of the sacred drama.