THE NEW SUPERBEINGS

We are so used to living in a material world, ruled by pragmatism, relying solely on the individual, and leaving knowledge to science alone, that we forget that more collective psychologies may have a bearing on our lives.
Indeed, I’m convinced that ‘mechanisms’ exist throughout human experience that are just as prevalent today as in the past. It is just that our worldview is so short sighted that we do not even consider such esoteric elements.

Researchers such as Jung and Campbell knew this.

In their work on myths and archetypes, they identified specific personality traits that exist in myth. But more than this, they also appeared in our dreams.
Myths, it seems, were our dreams writ large – the first ‘media’, as it were. And the relationship between myth and us does not stop here. Indeed, it is fundamental to who we are.

Why did myths have such an effect on people?

Because those archetypal gods were actually aspects of our own psychology. In heroes such as Hercules we see an exaggerated form of the striving of the human.
Hence, myths get under our skin, because we intuitively know they are us. In some myths, such as Oedipus, we even find great human drama played out, and in this way, they become symbols of taboo.

This is the power of myth in action.

Through the storyteller, elements of our psychology and action are symbolised, and they become powerful controlling devices – moral theatre, to be exact.
But myths are even more than this. For instance, if myths out human psychology, then we can assume that the elements of myth should be eternal. After all, we seem to have been peculiarly human for a long time.

I think they actually are eternal.

And this transfers from early myth-media to the modern. Change is not fundamental, but simply culture deep. We can see this in the mythological expression of womanhood.
In the deep past she was Aphrodite, a sexual and fertile being. The sexuality was taken away in the Virgin Mary. In modern times, the archetype was reborn in the Marilyn Monroe type, and we see the image still in the supermodel.
What we see here is a continual psychological controlling model using a definite archetype, changed only by the culture expressing it at a particular time. And in each case, womanhood aspired to be as the myth-media expressed it.
Hence, there are continually created cultural gods, or superbeings, refashioned for every age, which control so many elements of our action and psychology. Yet this powerful force is ignored by academe.
As such, we have no idea of correctly gauging just how virulent their influence really is. But we do have an indication from the latest myth-media ‘superbeing’ – an archetype that seems to live in an ‘other world’ to us, constantly revered, and making us aspire to be like them.
We call them celebrities.

© Anthony North, March 2009