Zara Zinsfuss

I write under the name Zara Zinsfuss. The name is a pen name. I will not say more about that.

I am writing this from Switzerland, where I have lived for most of my adult life. I am in my mid-thirties. I work in the technology department of one of the country's well-known financial institutions, in a role that sits somewhere between software engineering, cybersecurity, and systems architecture. The work is mentally demanding enough to keep my natural curiosity reasonably appeased, and it pays the bills. The corpus that this site presents is not a product of that professional life. It is a product of the life I have led alongside it, in the evenings and weekends and quiet hours that the professional life has left for the things I actually care about.

This page exists because the reader who is about to spend many hours with the work I have produced has a reasonable interest in knowing how I came to take the source material seriously enough to spend many years producing this corpus. What follows is the account.

How I came to this material

I grew up in a Protestant Christian household, in a family environment that was, in the language one uses for these things now, precarious and not particularly functional. The Christianity was real but not deep; the family environment was difficult enough that the religion mostly served as a kind of ambient frame rather than as a serious working faith. I was confirmed at sixteen, in the way that most Swiss Protestants of my generation are confirmed, and the confirmation marked, more accurately than its officiants would have wanted, the end of my Christian life rather than the beginning of an adult one.

The two years that followed were a void. I did not actively reject Christianity; I just discovered that nothing in it was answering the questions I had begun to ask, and the Sunday services felt antiquated in a way I could not reconcile with what the religion was supposed to be claiming to be. I drifted. I was a teenager with no money, no one to talk to about the questions I was beginning to take seriously, and the slowly forming suspicion that the inherited religious vocabulary I had been given was not going to be adequate to the world I actually lived in.

What pulled me out of the void was philosophy. Schopenhauer, who I read first, opened the door to Eastern thought and to the contemplative literature that I found, immediately, more honest about the structure of human experience than the Christian devotional material I had been raised on. Alan Watts, who I came to through Schopenhauer, showed me how the same insights sounded in a contemporary American voice. Heidegger gave me the first set of tools I had ever encountered for thinking carefully about being, time, and the ways in which inherited vocabularies shape and limit what can be thought. And Nietzsche — Nietzsche, more than any of the others, formed me. Thus Spoke Zarathustra was the book that made me understand what serious moral and metaphysical inquiry could feel like from the inside. I read it at eighteen and have never quite stopped reading it. Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and Jung's Man and His Symbols came in the same period and contributed their own substantial contributions to whatever the resulting structure of my thinking became. The combination — Eastern contemplative material, Heideggerian attention to being and inherited language, Nietzschean moral seriousness, Dostoevskian psychological depth, Jungian symbolic literacy — is what I was working with by the time the events I am about to describe occurred.

The night of recognition

In a hot summer in the late 2000s, on a night I remember more clearly than I remember most things, I sat in my room and prayed. I do not know who I was praying to. The God of my Christian upbringing had become unavailable to me by then, and the philosophical material I had been reading had not provided a substitute. What I prayed for was simply to know what was true. What the truth of all of it was. What was actually going on. I was eighteen and in some distress and I needed an answer, and I did not get one — at least not in the sense of any voice or vision that I could describe afterward as having received.

What I got instead was a kind of frenzy. The frenzy moved me toward what I knew best, which was the internet and the printed encyclopedias I had spent my childhood reading. I started reading Wikipedia articles about religions. Every religion I could find, in alphabetical order. Where the foundational texts were available online, I read those too. I did not sleep well for several nights. I am not sure I slept at all.

I reached the letter R, and I found The Book Which Tells the Truth, freely available online, and I read it. I read it once, and then I read it again, and I do not remember how many times I had read it before the early-morning light came through my window and I realized that my search was over. The text — Yahweh's account of his contact with Raël, the demystification of the religious vocabulary I had been struggling with, the specific claim that the Hebrew Bible was preserving a real history of an actual scientific project conducted by actual beings who were not gods — landed on me with the unmistakable feeling of recognition. I had been looking for something. I had now found it. Whatever subsequent work needed to be done — the years of further reading, the gradual integration with everything else I had been learning, the eventual decision about what to do with what I had found — all of that was downstream of the recognition that occurred in those summer nights.

Fifteen years of private notebooks

In my early twenties I received the Raëlian baptism, the cellular plan transmission that the tradition treats as the formal registration of an individual's genetic identity in the alliance's records. I have been a Raëlian, in my own particular way, ever since.

For most of the subsequent fifteen years I was not active in the Raëlian community in any institutional sense. I am, by temperament, an independent thinker, and the experience of finding the source material had been so personal that the prospect of immersing myself in the institutional movement felt like a different kind of activity than what I was actually doing. What I was actually doing was reading, thinking, writing notes that no one would ever see, and accumulating what I now realize was a substantial body of hermeneutical observations on the source material — observations that were not, in most cases, present in the standard Raëlian self-presentation. The precessional structure of the source's framework. The integration with the cross-cultural mythological literature. The technical readings of specific biblical passages. The political-structural reconstruction of the alliance. The cosmic-competition framework. None of this was my invention; the source material gestures at all of it. But the gestures had not been worked out, and I found, as the years went by, that I was working them out, mostly for my own satisfaction, in notes that no one else had any reason to read.

The promise on the rooftop

The promise to write this corpus was made on the autumn equinox of 2026, which on the Raëlian calendar is the year 80 AH — eighty years After Hiroshima, eighty years into the Age of Aquarius.

I was in Jerusalem at the time, on a post-pandemic trip that I had been wanting to make for years and had finally given myself permission to take. I was on the rooftop of the hotel where I was staying, near Davidka Square in the center of the city, watching the sun set over the Old City. I prayed again — silently, alone on a rooftop with the stones of Jerusalem in front of me and the autumn light going gold and red and purple and finally dark over the Mount of Olives — and I made a promise. The promise was to myself, and to the Elohim, in whom I had by then come to believe with the kind of certainty that only fifteen years of working through the source material can produce. The promise was that I would write the things I had been thinking about. That I would not let what I had accumulated stay in the notebooks. That I would put it down, in a form that someone other than me could read, and let it find whatever readers it found.

A few weeks later I traveled to Okinawa to meet Raël. This was the first time I had been in his physical presence after sixteen years of being a Raëlian. I had had, throughout those sixteen years, the obvious doubts that any honest person has when committing to a contemporary prophetic figure. What if he had made it all up? What if the whole thing was an elaborate creative project of a French journalist with literary ambitions and a sense of humor? I will not say more about the meeting than this: the doubts that had been with me for sixteen years dissolved in his presence. He is a kind and honest man. What I felt from him was truth and love, in the simple senses of those words that the contemporary vocabulary tends to flinch away from. I came back from Okinawa and began the writing in earnest.

On AI collaboration

The writing has been done in collaboration with an AI assistant, and the reader deserves to know this directly.

The assistant in question is one of the contemporary large language models, used in extended sessions across many months to help me draft, refine, and structure the prose that the reader is encountering on this site. The corpus's content — the specific hermeneutical readings, the integration of source material, the structural arguments, the substantive interpretive moves — is mine, in the sense that it represents the working-out of insights I had accumulated across fifteen years of reading and thinking. The prose is collaborative, in the sense that the AI has been a real partner in the work of putting the insights into the form the reader is now encountering. I have steered the writing throughout — choosing what to include, what to leave out, what to emphasize, what to challenge, what to revise — but I am not going to pretend that I produced every sentence on my own.

I do not think this collaboration weakens the work. I think it is one of the conditions that have made a corpus of this scope feasible at all, conducted by a single person on the margins of a demanding professional life, in a window of historical time that previous decades did not provide. The Aquarius chapter argues that the corpus's own existence at this specific moment is one of the signs of the age. I believe that. If the AI collaboration is part of what made the corpus possible, then the AI collaboration is also part of what the age has provided. I am happy to have used it.

I am also, like most people working with these tools at this moment, aware that the relationship between human authorship and AI collaboration is something the broader culture has not yet worked out. This page is part of my contribution to working it out, in whatever modest way a single page can: I used the tool, the work is mine in the senses that matter, and you are reading the result.

A correction

I should say, before signing off, that I do not take myself or my thoughts as seriously as a corpus of this length might suggest.

I am, by temperament, a curious and joyful person who happens to have spent fifteen years thinking carefully about what I privately call my favorite pet religion that I happen to also believe in. I am a religion and cult nerd in general, alongside being a nerd in many other fields — history, geopolitics, linguistics, computer science, cybersecurity, cryptography, anthropology, and a number of others I will spare the reader the recital of. The Raëlian source material is the specific intellectual obsession that has produced this particular corpus, but it is one of several deep interests that have shaped the person who is writing it.

I mention this because the corpus's voice, by the demands of its subject matter, is necessarily measured and serious in ways that may give the reader the impression of a more grave and self-important author than I am. I am having fun. I have been having fun writing this. The work has been demanding, but it has also been the kind of demanding that one undertakes for the pleasure of the demand. I hope the reader will, at least sometimes, sense the underlying pleasure beneath the seriousness of the prose.

On reaching me

The corpus is the public artifact of the work. The corpus is where the reader is invited to engage what I have done. I do not maintain a personal social media presence, and the project's public discussion happens through the GitHub Discussions, which is the right place to ask questions, raise objections, suggest corrections, or propose collaborations.

The corpus is in active development. If something in it is wrong, I would rather know.