"Is humanism our salvation or a complicit ideology that casts a shadow over the atrocities of the West? In this essay, written in an engaging and accessible prose, Adrián Ruiz invites us to journey to the origins of Renaissance humanism in search of the light that will allow us to go beyond the clichés and distorted images that make up what he calls the myth of humanism. Humanism is not a homogeneous and continuous tradition in the West, as some assume. Nor is there be an anthropocentric movement. Nor can we take its supposed modernity for granted. The author explores humanism with a focus on the contradictions and discontinuities revealed to the historian of ideas. Thus, he places a question mark over the connection of this movement with the Modern Era, with anthropocentrism, and with later forms of humanism, such as the Enlightenment and existentialist humanism, devoting a few pages to the current phenomenon of transhumanism. In this essay, the reader will find an approach to Renaissance humanism that explores the context in which it emerged and its ideas about the universe, nature, the human being, the body, reason, freedom, and God. But above all, the author seeks to open up a space for doubt, something evident from the very first pages: "I will be satisfied if, throughout these pages, I manage to bring before your eyes--just as the astronaut who returns home with a piece of the moon--a sample of the complexity of reality. The Thracian girl belongs to us. That is why we must always formulate theories with a little picture of her nearby."