When the Dead Built Gods: The Mechanical Messiah and Humanity's Ancient Obsession with Creating Life

Imagine receiving construction blueprints from beyond the grave, detailed instructions whispered by the spirits of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and other founding fathers, guiding your hands to build nothing less than a technological god. Sound like the plot of a Gothic horror novel? This actually happened in 1854, when spiritualist John Murray Spear claimed to birth a “Mechanical Messiah” under the guidance of deceased luminaries who called themselves the ‘Association of Electrizers.’

But Spear’s bizarre creation was merely the latest chapter in humanity’s millennia-old obsession with breathing life into the lifeless. From the bronze guardian Talos patrolling ancient Crete, to Hephaestus’s self-moving tripods serving the Greek gods, to a terrifying devil-faced automaton that spat at visitors in 17th-century Milan, the dream of artificial intelligence is far older than our silicon age suggests.

What drove these ancient engineers, mythmakers, and mystics to pursue the impossible? And what dark secrets lie hidden in the lost blueprints of history’s first “robots”? The answers reveal that our modern AI revolution may be less revolutionary than we think and far more dangerous than our ancestors dared imagine…