Deification — From Ōkami to Jibril, a narrative for Gabriel

A documentary essay by Gavriel Wayenberg / Namasthay / Lurch Productions

VIDEO COVERAGE:

Credits: The Metro Classic Japanese - 1030's Authors - Akro - d'Artagnan - Dr Toon/Universal

Opening sequence — Brussels ↔ Tokyo ↔ Casablanca

After being invited to a TV-Show called "Parce qu'on est Jeunes" - by RTL, our subject meets André Couchard, director of the first cybercafé in French speaking Belgium - Invited there because he travelled to the university on his motor-skateboard, and noticed by one of the TV-Show producers...

An Apple laptop flickers to life in a Brussels café in the mid-1990s. Through a tiny golf-ball camera called CU-SeeMe - a practice famed Man Eats Dog main actor Benoit Poelvoorde incited him to pursue, a young student demonstrates the first live internet-phone link on Belgian television. It is a modest gesture that will later be remembered as his first visible act of connection — between continents, between generations, and, symbolically, between Israel’s new tech and Europe’s early web. In fact, presenting the first widely known Israeli app, the Internet Phone (a Skype/Teams ancestor) on TV, he had been on a path of sponsoring with large IT brands (IBM, Toshiba, Bull, Epson,...) promoting portable computing. There, he becomes the on-air demonstrator of that Israeli video-call app, bridging cultures before “startup nation” was a term.

Chapter 1 — University and the cyber-awakening

At the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the economics student François Wayenberg watches the old order of finance crash into the newborn Internet. First he researches as the second-in-the-world student to work on the Swap-Options with famed Pr. André Farber (z"l) his family lets him down for the additional classes' financial support he needed, and force him to swith to another subject - he chooses the internet revolution. His professors consider the web a by-service; he calls it deliberately a revolution. Rejected once, he rewrites his dissertation overnight from Harvard’s Net Gain and passes—without honors but with foresight. The humiliation becomes fuel: proof that vision often begins as disobedience.

Soon after, he joined André Couchard’s CyberCafé, the first French-speaking hub of the online world. There he connects with Christian Perrot, ex--art director at Liberation, and Marie-France Perez, founders of Nirvanet, who finally invite him at a secret interview for the then famed but also much feared CyberTheatre.

Chapter 2 — CyberTheatre and the Japanese door

The Internet’s stage quickly expands. Through Philippe Brawerman (Pinned by Time Magazine the most influencial person in IT in Europe) and Eric Vauthier’s La Rétine du Plateau, he is hired, after refusing the CEO position, as a pre-sales engineer, and helps develop the CyberTheatre, twice honored by UNESCO. Among its satellite projects is his poetic Miyazaki’s Eggs, a fan-curated portal introducing Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli to Western audiences. At Annecy 1996, his site wins a prize; the young Belgian’s HTML becomes a bridge between Japan’s most spiritual animation studio and the online West. In Japan’s collective imagination, foreigners who protect sacred art are called Ōkami — wolves of the gods. Without knowing it, he steps into that archetype, at a time when Miyzazki's and Ghibli's work wasn't translated - his poetic take on explaining the storylines caught the attention; he learned Japanese. Not knowing there could be positive consequences later.

Chapter 3 — Mitsui and the moral contract

Hired by Mitsui Bussan a large sogo-shosha originating in the 1620AD, he learns the discipline of kaizen, the ethics of silence, and the elegance of restraint. Colleagues take newcomers to neon nights; he is kept for morning meetings . Respect replaces excess. Earlier, novelist Amélie Nothomb’s Stupeur et Tremblements had made that corporate world famous - as being a non-contemporary colleague; he has lived its quieter counterpart. This chapter becomes the moral foundation of what he will later call Covenant Coding: precision as devotion. He learns swift soft skills which later will get him on to advise NASA and get thanked by the then agency director.

Chapter 4 — EPFL to Kundalini

Switzerland follows—EPFL, Lausanne—then collapse: a car accident, family distance, the convincing of a brother out of addiction - he gets let down a second time by family. The fall opens a vertical well: meditation, breathwork, Kundalini practice. What had been technological ascension turns inward. Indian-related teachers recognize his discipline; the Sanskrit greeting Namaste fuses with his Belgian nickname.Namasthay is born: a hybrid persona, half engineer, half monk, through collaborative work with Mirja, a Finnish visagist and gifted artist - he engages with DeviantArt art portal and opens his gallery.

Chapter 5 — Film school and the street mirror

For his father’s seventy-fifth birthday, he directs Ocean 75—a private documentary so moving that the tailor of kings (i.e. his father) gifts him film school at SAE Brussels. There he enters the visual underground: cameo roles in Saïd Jdida & A6000’s “1030”, Akro’s “Bitches of Brussels” (Universal), and Thierry Renson’s “Tell.” He plays the stern policeman, the silent watcher, the man who holds the line. To Muslim audiences he becomes Jibril—the just messenger who enforces moral gravity inside chaos. From Ōkami to Jibril, the same archetype evolves: guardian, bridge, disciplinarian of light.

Chapter 6 — Ajinomatrix and the scientific turn

The archetype meets data. From his meeting at Mitsui where he had convinced and met Joel Lloyd Bellenson, then fame king of the iSmell smell sinthetizer (throning on the Wired Magazine cover), he founds Ajinomatrix, a sensory-AI company first prototyped for Mitsui, digitizing taste and smell to improve how humans design food. Joel joins. Here spirituality and computation meet: flavor becomes information; harmony becomes measurable. The scientist and the mystic finally speak the same code.

Epilogue — From deification to practice

In Japan, those who render invisible service to the harmony of others are sometimes “enshrined” as kami—not gods, but remembered presences. In Islam, Jibril (جبريل) is the messenger who transmits the Word with precision and without ego. Between these poles stretches one continuous path: to serve accuracy as a form of devotion.

“Deification,” in this context, is not about worship. It is about function: when a person becomes a conduit of coherence. From Brussels’ cyber cafés to Tokyo’s torii, from Kundalini mats to AI labs, that function has stayed the same—to open doors, hold boundaries, and translate awe into action. Namasthay is also pursuing music in addition to being a productive poet, he lines up 45 music albums between Christmas Eve 2023 and the end of November 2025.