Know that I was made to divinize
Ego sum nihil, ego sum lux mundi
The only way to save us is by divine intervention
The personally irreligious (last I checked) economist Tyler Cowen has long been fond of suggesting that the most important thinkers of the future will be religious thinkers—counter to everything we heard growing up in the age of the New Atheists, and yet, the evidence seems to keep amassing. After the recent release of LUX, the Spanish polymath Rosalía’s fourth studio album, I want to propose a corollary: the most important pop stars of the future may indeed be religious pop stars.
Critics and listeners already seem to agree that LUX represents a titanic accomplishment by the classically-trained, genre-bending singer. Urbane reviewers and YouTube-savvy opera conductors alike have spent the last two weeks obsessively unpacking Rosalía’s 4-movement, 18-track opus, whose symphonic trilingual cathedral piece and Mexican-inflected post-breakup diss track have already charted worldwide. Closer to home, it’s a striking accomplishment to get me to pay serious attention to Top 40 (it helps, of course, to make a hyperpolyglot album with Iberian duende at its core).
The white habit helps too. To my delight, it’s not a gimmick. Carrying the weight of pop stardom, relationship gore, and a crazy-making, warpspeed world on her heart, Rosalía returns to the cathedral a bruised and earnest seeker—but not one about to amputate her past for the sake of cheap absolution. What emerges is a priestly masterpiece of feminine spirituality, playful and deadly serious, contemporary and rooted, ethereal and with a liberal dose of body horror.
We’re told that the process of conceiving LUX required Rosalía to read the biographies of 15 woman saints, mostly but not exclusively Catholic. I’ve read, for example, that the tender Italian lyric “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti” is a paean to Francis of Assisi, from the perspective of his companion, Clare. But I’ll hold back my etiological impulse and focus on the impeccable, moment-making vibes.
“Sexo, Violencia, Y Llantas” (sex, violence, and tires!) opens the disc on a gentle, melismatic, perhaps a bit quizzical note (translated from the Spanish):
Who could live between the two?
First love the world, and then love God
Who could live between the two?
First love the world, and then love God
And then the drop:
Who could come from this earth
And enter heaven and return to earth?
That between earth, earth and heaven
There would never be ground
In the first, sex, violence, and tires
Bloodshed, coins in throats
In the second, flashes, doves, and saints
Gracе, the fruit, and the weight of thе scales
Starting the album off on this foot, she lays out the premise in no uncertain terms: the stakes of this inquiry are high, and I’m going to be working through it using everything I’ve got. The following tracks plunge us in the slipstream of her dizzying, but never disembodied, pursuit.
She becomes a relic (or rather, the source of many bodily relics) in the process of giving away her heart to the world. She’s transfigured into a porcelain chaos-icon, who promises to bewitch and poison, uplift and humiliate, all the while intoning in Latin, Ego sum nihil, ego sum lux mundi (a formulation that echoes the old Hasidic tale of the two pockets, one with a slip of paper reading “For my sake the world was created”, the other, “I am dust and ashes”.) She blends erotic desperation with Christology, setting the image of herself as sugar melting into coffee against pleas for divine intervention and sexual surrender. She brings in half a dozen vernacular styles from across Iberia and Latin America to revisit the full-spectrum human mess of a past relationship; she rehearses her own funeral.
In the intimate, luminous “Divinize”, I’m reminded of Purity Ring’s “Fineshrine”—a haunting sprite of a song about ritual self-dismemberment. My friend first played it for me on an acid comedown in Seattle; I’d later encounter it as a girlfriend’s bedroom anthem. “Get a little closer, let fold / Cut open my sternum and pull.” Spooky! But where Purity Ring walks you to the ledge of the numinous, stopping just short of naming it, Rosalía’s body-offering, whispered through tears, soars with London Symphony strings to meet it undisguised: Know that I was made to divinize / Outside me, inside me. Her spine, a rosary for the conjuring. Dropping bodily relics (“Reliquia”) of her quarreling, blunt-smoking self at the various stations of her tour, she sanctifies the map.
This is not Madonna ironizing or subverting Catholic themes, and it’s not Hozier borrowing the language of church to “worship like a dog at the shrine of your life”. This is the real deal: a complete religious stance grounded in embodiment—it’s gestural, rather than propositional—and metamodern sincerity.
And sue me, I’ve always found irony to be a bit overrated (it’s done its good part, don’t get me wrong—but by the time I came of age in the new millennium, it had already jumped the shark). A friend who’s perhaps both more religious and snarkier than me took a listen and ballyhooed the whole production as “too Disney”. Listening through again, I can’t pretend I don’t see where he’s coming from—and yet, I can’t say I mind a touch of it, considering where the alternatives have landed us.
And besides: whatever the Disney here, it hangs in fine balance with the duende, Rosalía’s transmutation of the haunted, depraved, and despairing through her classical flamenco training. The effect, as the listener moves from “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti” to “Berghain”, from “Mundo Nuevo” to “De Madrugá”, from “Memória” to “Magnolias”, is an integration of light and shadow into the spiritual realism of chiaroscuro.
Despite hushed references to the apple, the fall, and God the King, plus some Christological ornamentation here and there, I have no idea what Rosalía actually “believes”. Regarding the ultimate nature of reality, I have hardly any idea what I believe—and not for lack of trying. But I’m willing to argue that propositional belief is less than half the point of religion—and that grading an ecology of gestures, practices, and moral-aesthetic stances on the curve of “how true are the beliefs” is a recipe for anomie, and possibly even civilizational catastrophe.
Hard-edged atheism seems to have lost its cool both on the left and in the “save the West” camp; and anyone with a finger on the pulse can tell you that watered-down “spiritual but not religious” is losing its purchase just the same. But we can’t revive what is even deader—contra the hopes of First Things for Rosalía, sincerity needn’t lead to cartoonish atavism (and for thinking people, it won’t). The move these days, for those with the impulse to “make meaning”, is sincere, full-bodied religious grappling, through and not around all the shadow and muck.
LUX expresses a refreshingly metamodern stance toward religion—one that takes lived religious traditions seriously but not literally, insists on trying them on for size (a somatic gesture), and charts a course between the failed projects of what David Chapman would call eternalism and nihilism.
In Fr. Richard Rohr’s terms, after the dissolution of the stultified “order” of organized religion into the thin, unsatisfying, choose-your-own-adventure “disorder” of postmodern secularism, Rosalía’s sincere, bloody grappling is an act of reorder. That is to say, of excavating what’s still alive (this ghost is still alive) in the extended system of high-stakes metaphors she inherited from her Spanish Catholic forebears, and seeing if it can be revived along more honest, human-compatible lines.
In the age of the New Atheists, who would’ve imagined Ayaan Hirsi Ali converting to Christianity? In the 90s, who would’ve predicted Björk crash-landing in a sonic cathedral named for a Berlin nightclub to proclaim, “The only way to save us is by divine intervention”? But in 2025, who isn’t defaulting to this formulation? Call it hysteria, call it Disney. At the dawn of AGI, at the nadir of the demographic transition, the ascendant impulse is to divinize.
At the beginning of the decade, metamodern types (myself included, in my interview for a PhD position at the Spirituality and Psychology Lab) were given to asking the question: “What can we do to reenchant the world?”
The great stagnation is over. In the age of spiritual machines, enchantment may soon become too cheap to meter. What’s left to ask is: “How are we to make sense of it?” We’ll need artists who can hold the tension—between the earthly and the divine, the ironic and the sincere, the rational and the numinous. Rosalía, to her credit and our great benefit, is already living the question with her full body.
Josh Lipson, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality.