the emotional synchronization of the public life of the city. As with the culture of the Ancient Greeks, the theopoetical founding documents of all religions invoke more or less consciously elaborated literary practices, even when the accompanying dogma serves to obscure these facts. Religions, in Sloterdijk's view, are literary products with whose help authors compete for clients in the narrow market of attention of the educated. This highly original study of the poetic devices on which religious narratives draw offers a new interpretation of religion and a new critique of theological documents through history, as well as a fresh perspective on our contemporary age in which narratives, facts and alternative facts compete with one another.