The Templar Cartographer - Cristian N. George

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Résumé :
The Templar Cartographer describes the experiences of a survivor of the cataclysm that decimated humanity. Alexandre Deschamps was living a normal life in Paris with his wife Daphne when an eerie light enveloped the city and reduced it to rubble. A climatic catastrophe had destroyed irremediably the planet, and post-apocalyptic tribes began to organise themselves socially once again. Floyd, one of Europe's Silicon Valley Templar missionaries, rescues Alexandre from the brink of death and, integrating him into the order of new civilising heroes, appoints him as the Temple's cartographer. The cause of the catastrophe seems to be the simulacrums, formless entities, chimaeras, and spectres that haunt human minds. Alexandre will embark on a spiritual adventure to identify the ancient energy meridians, known to ancient esoteric wisdom, through which the invisible entities have triggered a process of involution, favouring the rise to power of the Selenarian Military Junta, a regime led by Pontifex Delta, a dictator who has instituted directed discarnation in exchange for the vain promise of an immortal ideal body. At a rapid pace, other characters are integrated into the narrative with the same fervour to map the unknown. Stanislas Huchette, a historian of ideas documenting a treatise on the Enlightenment in Rome, discovers in a lost Pythagorean manuscript, used by the ancient intellectuals of Rome's antique Portico for necromantic ceremonies, strange references to an occult geostructure from the time of the flamens and sybils. After the strange death of a prelate who bequeaths him strange artefacts, the scholar embarks on a desperate expedition in search of an archetype with a magical cosmogonic function related to Rome's obelisks. London secret agent Scott Lloyd, disgusted by the misanthropy of the reformed intelligence agency which recruited him and the maverick journalist Sara Lodge, who found strange clues in a lost letter of lord Bulwer-Lytton, are also on the trail of artefacts and meridians known since time immemorial. This is a complex and detailed story in which the real and the dream intertwine, revealing the contradictions of the human condition. In a possible future where the promises of transhumanism to improve the human condition prove to be empty aspirations, the novel is an expression of rebellion against the paradoxes of identity, individual free will and the potential to transcend biological limits.