The thread of the divine

For each tradition in chronological order: its nearest semantic neighbor among only the texts that came before it. Computed blind, from embeddings alone, this recovers documented lineages with uncanny accuracy: the New Testament's ancestor is the Old (0.991), the Zohar's is the Apocrypha, the Dark Night's is the Philokalia, the Bardo's is the Lotus Sutra, Gibran's Prophet descends from Rumi, and the Avesta's ancestor is the Rig Veda, the Indo-Iranian kinship philologists established from language alone. Where the thread surprises, it is either noise (shared translation register) or a question worth asking.

Dates are approximate composition starts from the corpus metadata. Semantic affinity can reflect inheritance, shared genre, or shared translation register; the thread is a map of resemblance, not proof of transmission.