Of Gods, Men And Overmen, Part 2-the Gods

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 â€Every time I try to talk to someone it's ‘sorry this’ and ‘forgive me that’ and ‘I'm not worthy...’ funniest. God quote. Ever.

Of Gods, Men & Overmen, part 2-The Gods

We all know of gods and pantheons; of celestial bureaucracies and heavenly courts. We also know that every culture (no matter how primitive or advanced) has come up with deities or has associated divine patrons to almost every aspect of life.

The question is, why do that? Why choose to personify and name lightning, or the sun, or even darkness? Why bother with giving disasters or random occurrences human characteristics and agendas of their own? I've already mentioned how mankind cannot exist in a spiritual vacuum but that alone is not enough to explain why gods were invented in the first place.

In order to approach this matter rationally, we need to consider this not from the perspective brought to us by theologians, but by atheist scientists. You see, there is a theory, presented by Richard Dawkins, called God’s Utility Function.

This theory; presented in his book, the River Out of Eden; states that God (or gods, pick anyone you like), does not appear to have a utility function. That means that any and all existing divine intelligences that have created/are running the world don’t appear to have built the world in a manner that everything has a distinct and clearly defined purpose. Dawkins claims that there is too much mindless violence and an uneven distribution of resources (food, water, bitches, whathaveyou) in every ecosystem to prove any clearly defined purpose or function.

Ancient civilizations were as aware of this fact as we are (albeit in a much more limited fashion) and were experiencing this kind of cosmic injustice and lack of purpose in their daily lives as well. They could not quite comprehend how or why anything was happening. In their short, horrible and harsh lives, they did not possibly have the time or the means to work their way of thinking around these events. They refused to comprehend that the world was (and in some ways still is) cruel, so they chose their next best option.

The asshole in the sky.

They chose to personify the world around them so they could have someone to blame for their misfortunes or thank for the daily bounty. They chose to give names to the creator of the heavens so they could praise him for keeping the world afloat and they made up a whole genealogy for the elements that tormented their daily live, just so they could condemn them at their choosing.

Because gods were the first spiritual tools ever invented, they were used as sponges to soak  any blame and as beacons to lead us through the darkness.

Naturally, as humankind evolved further mentally and built its civilizations, gods grew in complexity; and so did their tools. With each new spiritual and mental aspect presented, mankind attributed another face, name and genealogy to a new god whose sole purpose was to fill that specific function. That is why the Greek Pantheon had Hermes, the trickster god and why the Aztecs had Ixtab, the goddess of suicide among their midst. 

Sometimes, gods were plainly integrated from various cultures into a belief system ( as was the case in the Roman Empire) just so they could update their spiritual arsenal with even more stuff they thought they needed. Was this a case of rampant spiritual consumerism? Did our ancestors (as we, in our day and age), pray to and collect gods they did not need simply for the fun of it?

Or had  human society reached a critical mass of societal stasis? Had we collectively come to a point where its spiritual extension had grown so damn convoluted it was almost collapsing under its own weight?

If the advent of Christianity is any indication, then the answer to both the above questions is “yes”. We had reached a point where our gods had become so many and unwieldy and served no purpose whatsoever, while in the actual world, our society had reached a point of collapse. This led to people slowly being drawn away from the old gods, feeling that they were wasting their hopes and their faith in this form of religion and sought an alternative. 

They sought someplace else to invest their faith. And gods without faith aren’t really gods now, are they? Like us, they cannot exist in a spiritual vacuum. This brings us to the matter of belief, or faith.

What is faith? There are myriads of definitions, one for each existing religion (and even more), so for simplicity’s sake, let’s define faith as: “The mental tenacity of adhering to a way of thinking despite any and all indications to the opposite”.

In many ways, this makes faith synonymous to hope, which is considered by many philosophers to be a viable substitute for it. But enough philosophizing! Let’s get down to rationalizing faith via geeking:

It is a common trope in fantasy fiction and fantasy RPGs

And in some cases, in ridiculous and unnecessary D&D handbooks

that gods are not in and of themselves omnipotent beings. That despite their power and glory, they are directly dependent on their worshippers and that it is their faith that keeps them alive (if you want to read more on the matter, go read Small Gods right the fuck now). If no tribute is paid to a god, if no prayers and sacrifices are made in his/her/its name, then the god ceases to be. We have seen this happen in the course of our history. In fact this would support the idea that gods are spiritual tools.

But faith doesn’t consist entirely of prayers, sacrifices and burning incense. It’s also supported by a much larger infrastructure of priests, temples and worshippers that collectively make it work. Because, you see, faith is not only the force that sets the gods into motion and keeps them alive. It is also the foundation of the very society that supports them. 

I mean, don’t get me wrong, Athena is an okay gal, but you don’t honestly think this was built just for her sake now do you?

Make no mistake:  gods don’t just serve as a handy means for us to rationalize the universe. They are also a tool for societal reference. In the same way that the growing complexity of gods reflects the complexity of the way of thinking and the culture they were spawned in, the adherence to their tenets serves to keep that society in order.

Sure, nowadays human society has evolved beyond the idea of requiring a religious doctrine to keep us from killing each other, but it wasn’t so back then. The gods served as a means to set up taboos and behavioral norms, as well as ways of thinking that allowed the continued survival of this society.

In the Greek Dodecatheon, for example, gods took it as a personal insult when sacrifices were not regularly performed in their name and rained fire (or some other equally horrible misfortune) on those that went against that doctrine. A specific example: Achilles, after finally killing Hector, chose to drag his corpse around Troy. This was a direct violation of the burial customs and so the gods intervened to destroy Achilles for his hubris.

The most powerful man of his time, brought down for not adhering to proper burial standards. Sure, when presented like that, it sounds downright ridiculous, but it’s really not: it’s an example of a fable enforcing a cultural law by presenting the repercussions of breaking a  taboo.

Speaking of fables, let’s move on to the meat of the matter:  mythology. What is the purpose of mythology, besides making boring stuff (like adherence to the laws and keeping society from tearing itself apart) look cool?

And/or inspiring awe in the hearts of the faithful?

If faith is the lifeblood of the gods, then mythology is their bones, organs, cartilage and the very skin that holds them together. It is the thing that gives them a distinct, coherent form and also breathes life into them.

It was mythology that made Brachma lord and master of the universe and it was mythology that made Odin the All Father. It’s mythology that set Hephaestus as the eternal underdog and killed and resurrected Osiris. It is the work of storytellers, seeking to entertain an audience by giving them glimpses of the lives of the immortals, each providing his own perspective and adding new twists to the original narrative.

Does this remind you of anything?

Serialized retellings of a story with new details and acts of heroism or villainy added to the narrative? Nope, doesn’t ring a bell.

Mythology also allows us to look into the interaction between men and gods and the role they played in their lives at the time. Case in point: Homer’s Iliad.

The Iliad serves to present two points about the culture that spawned them. Firstly, that the gods were seen by the Greeks at that time as meddling, selfish creatures; an entire pantheon of super-powered tricksters, meddlers and all-around vengeful pricks. Their actions affected the 10-year war for Troy, giving rise to heroes and then tearing them down.

On the other hand, however, the gods are not blamed for their meddling, not even once. With few exceptions, none of the characters in the Iliad ever curses or spits at the gods. They hardly ever antagonize them. This is because mortals knew that there was no point in blaming the gods for their follies, because deep down, they considered themselves responsible for their own mess.

After all, none of the gods ever actively played a role in dragging this war into a decade-long elimination round.

This acknowledgement of lack of divine fault was a common trope in the old way of thinking. After all, gods are just there and we pray to them just to make sure, because the world is, all things considered, an overall shitty place. Despite their immortality and considerable powers, gods remain a bunch of wreckless bastards and we can’t really hold them accountable for every horrible thing.

When omnipotence came into the fray, however, this idea could no longer stand. The gods, who were once sets of tools and free of blame, now became one multi-purpose, ever present machine that ran the universe. Suddenly, man was living under the scrutiny of a single intelligence that, despite its considerable power, chose not to interfere.

This was an expression of a radical shift in tone. Once again, our spiritual expression became one of distant admiration and object terrible repercussions, like the natural forces that plagued our ancient ancestors. The advent of monotheism meant that we, as a culture, wished to start over again and begin our climb across the treacherous landscape of spirituality anew.

And we did it, even if it took us about 20 centuries, by researching ancient civilizations and gleaning their secrets, adapting our findings to our old way of thinking. The 19^th century saw a rise in spirituality (which was, in essence, a remixing of old world religions and tenets, sprinkled with current conspiracy theories). Slowly but surely, we once again began to bridge the gap with our gods and tried to turn them into more manageable, quantifiable repositories of faith.

This was not the result of a return to the old ways. None of us were willing to go back to dancing naked in the forests, sacrificing sheep and dying of the common cold. What we wanted, instead, was far more ambitious. 

We wanted to bring our gods to a level where we could begin to emulate them.

This change took place mostly in the 20^th century, through fiction. The integration of old world mythologies into our TV shows, our literature, our videogames even, suddenly turned the ancient masters of the universe into household names. Xena would punch the living crap out of Ares every Saturday evening and Shiva fought Visnu with laser guns in the Lord of Light, we smashed Zeus’ face against a rock in God of War.

As always, there were some…unfortunate byproducts along the way.

Some people consider this to be a perversion of ancient literature. I call this integration. You need to be able to make fun of something, to turn it into an everyday symbol, before you can begin to emulate it.

We have come a long way since we feared the lightning enough to think of it as intelligent. We have crossed millennia thinking that everyday occurrences are the direct result of meddling higher powers. But right here, right now, we know deep down that we only have ourselves and the seemingly random procession of cosmic and everyday events to blame. And given enough time, we’ll even get over that.

So what is the purpose and the function of gods in our day and age? Why do we even need them, in this time of overall rationality and scientific advancement? Why do we even keep them alive in our minds, in our popular culture, in our everyday language?

Because we haven’t become them yet. But trust us, we’re getting there.

I got your immortality man, I swear! I just need a couple centuries to get it all up and running!

What I Think About Stuff-of Gods, Men & Overmen, Part 1

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The Fruit of Knowledge by Deep Hurting

Of Gods, Men & Overmen, Part 1

DISCLAIMER: This is the beginning of a series of articles intended to present the mythology of today’s popular culture, i.e. superheroes and comic book characters in general. It is not intended as a pro-religion anti-science piece. It’s simply the collected thoughts and observations of a comic book nerd. Enjoy.

Let me go on record by stating that I am religious.

Most of my friends are not aware of this and in fact consider me to be an atheist, or at the very least, apathetic toward the subject of religion. This is because, despite believing, I have chosen early in life to celebrate my faith by myself, instead of shoving my beliefs down other people’s throats and trying to convince them that my own adherence to a certain way of thinking is the one true way.

In the words of renowned atheist comedian George Carlin, you can believe into anything you damn well like, as long as you keep it to your own damn self.

I have found that this disposition has allowed me to enjoy great works by both religious and non-religious artists and it has also allowed me to laugh along with everyone else when a well-said blasphemous joke is thrown around the table. 

To this day, Wormwood’s Pope makes me laugh my ass off.

But most importantly, it has allowed me to approach the subject of mythology, religion and its interpretation in the modern mediums (mostly through comic books) as objectively as I could possibly muster. 

I don’t think it will come as a shock to anyone to find out that comic books and the superhero genre in general is an adaptation to older mythologies and in some cases, a straight-out reproduction of old belief systems. Each and every superhero has always had his roots set inside the rich soil of religious tradition and has used this basis as a means to build his or her own mythology.

But as I mentioned in my Molecule Man VS Dr. Manhattan article, this is not just about using the old gods as a means to fuel our spandex-clad gods. It’s a matter of devotion, of faith if you will.

For a complete analysis on the evolution of mythology and mysticism all the way to the modern superhero, this book makes for an excellent primer.

We live in an age that has incorrectly been dubbed as a time of spiritual indifference and general religious apathy. That is not the case. The fact that a lot of the people in the world choose not to blindly adhere to the established system of beliefs does not mean that they remain idle. If anything, with the advent of the Internet, every single one of us that has even rudimentary access to a computer can immediately share his opinions and seek out a new religion, simple as that.

Hell, in some cases you can just get baptized and ordained by filling out a simple entry form!

The fact that we are currently going through hard times only serves to increase our desire for a spiritual anchor, to find some way of thinking or a belief system that can comfort us, gods that we can pray to and pay tribute to.

Superheroes are part of this solution, albeit in a more…fetishized manner.

You have 5 seconds to identify this character.

Think about it: we pay tribute to them by sacrificing our income on issues, trade paperbacks, action figures and collectibles. Some of us (mostly the most attractive among the masses), honor them by donning  their spandex. We spend huge sums in order to bring them to life on the silver screen. We buy the games where they are featured and we quote or reminisce upon their works or their failings on a daily basis. We even fight over them, spending hours upon hours of arguing each hero’s superiority over the others.

In other words, we deal with the superhero as an alternative to the old world gods. Why?

Because we need something to aspire to. Or, at the very least, to become a symbol of hope or disaster, something that can sum up our way of thinking into one coherent symbol.

21^st century’s symbol for “everything’s gonna be alright”.

For better or worse, mankind cannot exist in a spiritual vacuum. Even atheists, people who choose not to believe in an external, omnipotent force, place their faith in humanity or scientific advancement. This is mostly attributed to the fact that we, as a species, know that there is so much about our universe that we cannot explain or comprehend…yet.

We know, deep down, that we need something to pass the time until the great gap between the sum of our knowledge and the great Unknown has been bridged and we can finally have the answers to Life, the Universe and Everything at hand.

It’s probably something just as simple yet much more marvelous than 42.

The existence of the superhero has also proven something else: that our understanding of religion (and the way gods and men have coexisted for millennia) is experiencing an unparalleled shift. 

Gone are the days when gods served either as anthropomorphized functions in Nature, or as distanced agents of higher powers. Gone are the times of blind devotion and unquestionable faith. This is the age when gods coexist with man in his mind and are shaped and molded according to his whims. The age where the collective will of men serves to change gods into whatever they want at the time; to turn them from forces of good to forces of evil, to change them from the side of the angels to the side of the devils, or let them linger in the grey areas of ambiguous morality for a brief period of time.

We have seen a number of cases where the faithful have caused their gods to experience a severe transmogrification. Want an example?

The multitudes cried for simplicity and by God, they got it!

Our perception of faith and our relationship with our gods has turned symbiotic. It has also allowed us to bring them down to our level. Marvel has done it for decades, by piling problem after problem on its pantheon, forcing them to deal with their erring human side, even as they soak in our adoration.

This is the first sign that man has, for the first time in his history, actively sought to bring himself to the same level as his gods, in an attempt to emulate them. 

Because let’s face it: you can’t emulate faceless beings and you can’t simulate omnipotence or omniscience. But what you can do, is seek to slowly and carefully integrate the idea of becoming something greater by slowly giving yourself cool new powers.

Omnipotence? Pfft. Regrowing a severed limb in 6 seconds or less? Seems legit.

Which brings us to our next topic: morality; specifically, the responsibility of our overmen toward their readers and creators. 

Once again, mythology and ancient stories can be used as a point of reference to this: each god and each man, in his or her turn, shares a certain burden of responsibility. Even in the case of the Greek Pantheon (which was mostly consisting of super-powered assholes), a certain set of rules was followed. In other words, the gods, despite their powers and abilities, had to pay a price for abusing said privileges.

Bitch got pregnant, so I got her half a continent. Bitches love continents.

In the case of superheroes, these rules and responsibilities are presented in the form of ‘codes of honor’, of strict rules that heroes cannot break, first and foremost being their adherence to never taking a human life.

Even the more ruthless of their number (like the Punisher or the Authority), face great repercussions when they kill the wrong person, or when they overextend their reach. Why?

The first reason is hubris. The second is duality.

Hubris is part of our mindset seeking to equalize gods and men. It’s our way of bringing the Overmen to our level, of presenting repercussions for morally ambiguous acts. It’s our way of bringing them down, when they perform an act that we consider to endanger our understanding of societal order.

Why? Well, mostly because we expect our invented gods to be just as vulnerable and worthy of reprisal as we are. Because we want them to be larger-than-life versions of us, the readers (the faithful), but at the same time we want them to share certain characteristics of ours.

It’s why we chose to argue the morality of a prison existing for superhumans in the civil war, instead of the plausibility of it somehow keeping a bunch of god-like beings locked up inside it.

Duality, on the other hand, is the need that we have to understand the fundamental workings of the universe. 

In the words of Heraclitus: “War is the father of all things”. And the meat and bones of each and every superhero story, origin and in the ancient mythology from which these ideas originated, there is war. 

Not so much in the form of an actual, full-scale battle, but more in the shape of opposing forces.

In most cases, it is the war of good versus evil. Of societal norms versus the injustices that we face in our everyday lives. The gods of old fought against demons, malevolent entities and even other gods. 

In the case of superheroes, we have archetypal benevolence clashing with archetypal malevolence.

The evolution of the superhero genre has, of course, served to expand on this idea and create characters that aren’t as goody two-shoes or as one-dimensionally evil as they used to be back in the 50’s. But the core idea remains:

Good will clash with evil every month. Good will triumph.

The stories that could be called more cerebral (or better presented) are stories where the two sides are obscured by increasingly complex layers of character, but the main idea remains the same:

Good triumphs. Good deeds are rewarded. Evil is defeated. Evil deeds are punished.

It may sound simplistic, but it really isn’t. It’s simply a reflection of our expectations from our fiction. We live in a world where we are casually exposed to numerous examples of injustice and we regularly find ourselves exposed to acts that we consider unfair or that we condemn morally. We find ourselves wondering whether crime does pay or not. We see corrupt, obviously immoral individuals rise to power. There is absolutely no way we will put up with this in our fiction.

So there you have it: from our old gods, to us, to the Overmen we seek to become. It’s a matter of faith, of wanting to believe that we can be more than we can be, that things will get better. And things will get better, as long as we are tenacious enough to achieve it. 

Stay tuned for part 2.

Of Gods, Men And Overmen, Part 3-the Tales Of Men

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“Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved. ”

— Anaïs Nin

Of Gods, Men & Overmen, part 3-The Tales of Men

We’ve come a long way, haven’t we? Through the millennia, since our first proto-ancestor walk-crawled his way from the oceans to check out that ‘cool new thing they call land, you gotta try it dude, it’s really awesome and not full of proto-sharks and shit trying to eat you every goddamn second; I’m thinking about taking the whole family there, you know?’

Sure, we’re gonna have to grow a new set of lungs just to live here along with a lot of really disgusting bits in order to cope and the living conditions might be kinda shitty at first glance, but the kids are gonna love it!

All the way up to our glorious monkey predecessors, to our epic war with the Neanderthals and through the Ice Age 

I tol’ you man: SAPIENS DON’T SHARE FOOD!

We’ve clawed, invented, eaten, farmed and fucked our way across the eons, all the way to…well…today. We made up gods, set up societies, introduced and adjusted our gods to societies and kept on going, on and on and on, until we turned into an ecological disaster to rival the Ice Age ourselves.

Now there are seven billion of us and we’re shaping our environment according to our whims and things look on the up and up, don’t they? I mean, barring complete and utter societal disaster or the self-extermination of our own species. 

We came real close to that more than a couple times

Our only limit is the sky and the quickly depleting resources of our home planet. And even then we might find a way around that, even if that means driving our population all the way back to the astonishingly low number of 10,000 that were left IN TOTAL by the end of the Ice Age.

But this is not an article that aims to give you an abridged version of human history in its entirety. This article is instead about mankind’s stories. In Part Two, I talked about the gods of man and their necessity, as well as the role of mythology. But to understand fiction, you need to go a step further.

Because if gods are the mortar keeping a society together (at least in its early stages), then stories, in general, are the foundation that is set at its base, allowing for the bricks to be set upon. 

There are two functions to every story: The first one is to uphold societal norms and perpetuate the current society’s paradigms. This is pretty much the hard core of every religion ever.

Yes, it is overly simplified but then again, this is the Internet. And no one comes to the Internet expecting overwrought religious arguments on some guy’s blog now do they?

The second one is to supercondense the knowledge and wisdom of every previous generation in a form that will allow future generations to more easily absorb it. Every story (every good one that is) is a product of its time. It represents the fears, ideas, hopes and aspirations of the age it was spawned from. 

Every great story does the exact same thing but without actually adhering to the specific traits of the age that spawned it.

Stories are, in a way, a sort of indirect telling of history. The tone, the style of presentation, the morals, they all point to the ways of thinking of the peoples that were there at the point of its inception. Take for example, Red Riding Hood.

AHAHAHAHAHAHA! No, not this one; definitely not this one.

The original story (considered to have been put to paper sometime during the 17^th century), was the tale of a young girl who ventures out into the wilderness, where she gets tricked by a beast, thus giving him both the information he requires to devour her grandmother, as well as to set up a trap and get her too.

In some versions, bestiality is also implied.

There is no crafty lumberjack to serve as a rough and rugged deus ex machina. The girl has gotten herself and her grandmother killed. End of story. 

Red Riding Hood was a story that pretty much told children exactly how horrible and dangerous the woods are and how you should not fall victim to your own naiveté, or you will be exploited by strangers.  It was a tale that taught children to fear the unknown and to be always wary.

But as the world got better and our perceptions changed, suddenly so did Red Riding Hood. The Brothers Grimm (despite otherwise being insufferable, childhood-crushing cunts with the magical power to shape minds through their stories) changed the tale so as to not only include the savior-lumberjack, but also to present Red Hood and Grandma as the forest’s proto-Batmen, setting up traps and keeping the woods safe for everyone since.

Suddenly, the tale changed. The world wasn’t so horrible. Forests (despite the fact that they were still scary) weren’t as depopulated. You could count on the kindness of others. The world was more forgiving-though not by much-which meant that you had to stay vigilant. You got out of trouble for free once, and then you were on your own, kiddo.

This iteration of Red Riding Hood has remained the same for almost five centuries now because, despite its time of origin, it teaches a lesson everyone should heed: be wary, be careful, don’t talk to strangers but also count on the unexpected bravery and goodness of others.

It’s a story of conflicting points. On one hand, it tells you the world is shit and you are to blame. On the other it says: sometimes, good things happen to good people.

This fable’s purpose is to inject those messages subconsciously into a child’s brain, allowing it to slowly come to terms with this seemingly nonsensical set of rules that make up society. But there’s more to it than that. Every fable, parable and mythology serves to present a very basic concept of ethics as well. It uses archetypal characters that represent certain concepts, set in certain roles which they must play out.

Joseph Campbell presented those roles on his works in great detail, presenting the two main archetypes as:

The Hero:

The Hero is, for all intents and purposes, a symbol that represents good. Heroes, whether anti or reluctant ones, are creatures that are defined via their adventures, the mark they leave upon the world, but above all they are defined by their sacrifice.

The Hero has a goal. But to reach that goal, the Hero must give up his life, his identity and sometimes even more than that to achieve. He faces impossible odds but he succeeds, despite the cost, as long as he does not stray away from the path his morality has set for him.

But for the Hero to be a Hero, he requires someone to be his direct and exact opposite. Therefore he is in desperate need of…

The Antagonist:

The Antagonist exists as a counterpart and a complete and utter antithesis of the Hero. He represents Evil, or at the very least the antithesis of Good that the Hero represents. He exists so he can cause the grief required to push the Hero forward and in the end becomes the Hero’s final and absolute sacrifice.

Because you see, a Hero is not a Hero if he has no one to antagonize. To lose his Antagonist, to destroy him in battle or to thwart him once and for all, means that the Hero must lose his purpose, signifying the end of his tale.

The Antagonist also stands for everything that is opposed to societal norms. Be he a megalomaniac, a mad scientist, an evil wizard, he is always the thing that must be destroyed in order for the Hero’s society to keep on existing.

These archetypes have remained the same throughout the ages and have not been changed in any way, because they are the absolute definition of the conflict that takes place in the human mind. Stories just serve to give them a flare and to turn the anguish that is the direct byproduct of this conflict into a flashy fanfare, allowing us to come to terms with it much more easily.

For this great service, we have come to love our fiction. We have worked with it and changed it and transmuted it into all sorts and forms. We use it as a means to escape the crushing routine of our everyday lives and we find ourselves constantly wishing to escape into our fiction.

But do we, really? I found myself wondering that as I was having my mind blown to bits while reading through Warren Ellis’ Planetary series. I stumbled upon a quote, spoken by a mad scientist to a creature brought from a fictional universe he and a team of experts had designed and conceived so they could explore it:

You sure do make me feel like an unispired idiot sometimes, Mr. Ellis.

Meta-fiction references aside, this quote had me wondering: why are we so afraid of our fiction? What makes it so endearing and on the other hand, so damn dangerous? Why do we bother inventing it, remixing it and narrating it, if it makes us feel so uneasy?

Well, that’s probably because in its own way, it is way more real than your current life, am I right? I thought and realized that the little asshole that resides in my head was right.

There’s a certain flair and impossibility in the archetypes and in the mechanics of a story. There’s a clearly defined purpose, a goal that must be reached, a damsel that is distressed, an Antagonist to overthrow, a very specific burden to carry. Unlike the chaotic, jumbled mess of grey morality and bullshit limitations that is our life, there is order in the structure of a story. 

To be in a story, means to have a clearly defined purpose. That is the gist of it. That is the glaring difference our life has to our fiction. We find ourselves thinking that we lack purpose or meaning, which is why we invent creatures that we can live out their roles, if only for a little while. We feel powerless against an uncaring universe, which is why we seek to escape.

But to provide the physical means to escape, you first need to cultivate the minds that will invent them. And how did we do that? By gradually turning our fiction into something common, popular and easily digestible, allowing us to come to terms with it and go from absolute terror into awe and then into gradual understanding.

And thus, Man did invent Overman. And it was good.

Stay tuned for Part 4.

Of Gods, Men & Overmen, Part4-the Cult Of The Overman

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Little thing, little thing, you’ve such a long way to go…

Of Gods, Men & OverMen, part4- The Cult of the Superhuman

I didn’t believe in superheroes when I was a kid. 

Oh sure, I enjoyed their colorful suits and their flashy superpowers and I always dragged my ass out of my comfy bed every weekend so I could watch the Batman cartoon.

Pictured: childhood prescription cocaine.

But I always listened to my friends argue about superheroes about who would beat who in a fight and we’d pretend to play in the schoolyard and I could never really invest myself into it, you know? I always considered superheroes to be things of fantasy, man-shaped black holes that sucked in time and enthusiasm and left you feeling empty.

The shitty 10-year old cynic in me was making sure I was rooted to this mundane, simple Earth we live in.

Little did that cynical tyrant know that his reign was coming to an end.

The day of revolution came on the eve of my 12^th birthday, when I stumbled upon the SINGLE MOST AWESOME AND IMPOSSIBLE THING EVER:

Like finding your lost car keys by that winning lottery ticket on the coffee table right next to every hot girl you ever met and wanted to bone, as they’re all about to tell you how much they want to have sex and that they don’t mind sharing, really.

The tyrant did not feel the immediate repercussions of this revelation. In fact, he held on with admirable tenacity upon his throne and resisted the surges and the quaking of the sleeping nerd that was stirring in the depths of my brain.

The final blow came after I read War of the Worlds, which pretty much served to set a wonderful transmogrification in motion: the gentle and gradual transformation of an ordinary boy into an aspiring pop culture enthusiast.

Because there’s only so many ways you can call yourself a nerd before you start taking offense.

I was not a zealot (and never will be) but I studied the Scriptures of the OverMen thoroughly, I looked into the literature that spawned them, followed the cultural currents that foretold of their coming as best as I could and now I stand here, calling myself an adherent to the Cult of the OverMan.

But to know the cult of the OverMan, you must first examine its origins and its function. The idea of the thing that is above human, of the anthropomorphized force of nature has existed throughout our mythologies and our stories, even our religions. It has been retold, recast, remade into a million iterations.

In the dawn of the 19^th century, it was the pagan gods of old. By the middle of it, the Vril-ya. Then came the Secret Masters, who dwelt in Tibet and possessed the sum of human knowledge. Then along came old Nietzche who remade the OverMan into a creature that does not only possess considerable fortitude, but is also unchained by morality and human limitation.

Then came the psychics, beings that were human but could manipulate matter with their minds. Afterwards, they communicated with unworldly beings. Then they were unworldly beings themselves, some of them either direct descendants of deities or deities themselves. 

By the middle of the 20^th century, the OverMan was a human who had reached the stars and was well on his way to claiming absolute mastery on the universe. But then space was deprived of faith and it became just a cold, everlasting void as the OverMan became a creature that sat upon a golden throne in the Earth and chose instead to look into the fundamental trappings of the universe, to analyze and probe the workings of Everything Everywhere and learn how to manipulate them without ever once having to leave the house.

With each iteration, OverMan became less and less wondrous. With every single retelling of the archetype, the OverMan became more ordinary, more flawed, more…regular. He turned from the creature of marvels, the absolute pinnacle of our species into Joe Quantum and Jane M-Brane. 

By the beginning of the 21^st century, the OverMan was a pastime, a spectacle, a thing that we trapped in 2-dimensional, silver screen cages and made him dance and hurt and scream and fight for our amusement.

After centuries of collective effort, we had finally subdued him. We were now ready and able to begin worshipping the OverMan on our own terms.

So: no more fire and brimstone, we’re not gonna have any of that, thank you. And could you do something about this whole End of Days business? It’s awfully depressing.

But this is not a religious article, nor is it a biographical one. I don’t write all this so I can project my beliefs and ideas into an audience that doesn’t want to hear them. What this is, instead, is a bare-bones approach to the modern iteration of the OverMan… 

If you guessed anything other than Superhuman, then thank you for playing and I’ll see you next week.

Superhumans have been around since the beginning of the 20^th century, though the term became widely popular after the well-known abuse it received at the hands of some black-haired asshole who wanted to kill everyone because they weren’t blonde and blue-eyed.

Who could I possibly be talking about? Also, watch Downfall, you bastards!

The first Superhumans, examples of men who possessed uncanny abilities beyond those of mortal men first appeared in the 1920s, in pulp magazines. They were crimefighters, adventurers, explorers and all-around badasses that possessed an innate cynicism and brutality you’d be hard pressed to find even in today’s gore-happiest Superhumans.

From top to bottom: super-powered junkie genius, machine-gun totting psychic serial killer

They were heroes of a harsh age and they catered to their tiny and shunned audience, an audience consisting of proto-geeks who lived their lives in a world that seemed to be tumbling into madness. In many ways, Doc Savage, the Shadow and Captain Occult were like the great prehistoric gods of pop culture. They were sluggish, rough things that were made for the purpose of appeasing their worshippers and providing them with monthly escapades that allowed them glimpses of an impossible world full of wonder and danger.

Also, gratuitous spaceship battles, laser pistols and tits.

Then the world went through a case of ‘turning into shit for a while’ (as it’s often wont to do) in the 40’s and the new generation of audiences (and the faithful among them) found that the stone-faced gods in the pulps could not appease them. We did not need bloodthirsty barbarian lords to worship and lead us among the rubble from where our new pop culture would spring, no sir! What we needed were gods with ideals. We needed OverMen that would lead us on into pastures new and show us new worlds so we could build more hopeful wonders around them.

The necessity for the invention of such tools arose in the age of M.A.D., of constant threat of another global war, of all-around International Confusion. The real world had suddenly become madder than the one detailed in our fiction. We needed solace. We needed guidance.

More than ever, we needed heroes.

Heroes that could stand against the growing tide of shapeshifting rat-lobsters that aimed to destroy our heavy machinery.

The advent of the Superhumans in fiction was inevitable. They were the product of the time that spawned them. They burrowed themselves in our collective conscience and have lingered to this day because first and foremost, they are symbols.

Oh sure, they’re oversimplified and downright ridiculous upon closer examination and they perform insane, endlessly looping rituals that seem to serve no clearly defined purpose whatsoever at first glance, but that’s the fault of the audience, not theirs.

To not take a life, to protect the innocent, to transcend the barriers of the known universe and to save the world every month is the sole duty of the Superhuman. Nothing less, nothing more. Their only function is to offer hope and a chance to escape our routine and pessimistic fixations. Such wondrous creatures could not exist beyond the pages that they inhabit, after all.

But what are the roles of these fictional OverMen? What do they represent and what do they stand for? Here’s a quick rundown:

Superman-Everything’s going to be okay.

Of all the representations of the OverMan idea, Superman is by far the most straightforward and simplistic of them all. He’s strong, he’s fast, he shoots lasers, he’s very nearly omniscient and his sole purpose is to protect us from the horrors that seek to destroy us from beyond our world, but remains neutral toward humanity’s internal struggles. In many ways, Superman is like God.

In many respects, Superman should not have lingered after all these decades. He should have slipped into obscurity along with his pulp predecessors, being the safe and non-challenging character that he is. And yet, here he is. Why?

Because Superman is Hope. He is the force that makes everything okay. He is a being that saves our ass every month only so we can keep being who we are, even as we pull ourselves inexorably toward Armageddon.

Batman-Adapt and Overcome

A mortal man that has reached the absolute peak of human achievement. A frail creature that is the companion and antithesis of the God figure of Superman. In many ways, Batman should have taken Superman’s place in pop culture and even replaced him, yet he hasn’t.

Frank Miller put it best, in Dark Knight Returns. That iteration of Batman presented his old, tired and quite frankly pathetic Bruce Wayne as an empty vessel that was there to channel tenacity, anger and an insane adherence to survival. He is a creature that has been stamped on, beaten and broken in every possible way, yet he keeps on his crusade.

Batman is a symbol of perseverance. Of holding on to your morality and struggling not to lose yourself, even in the face of ultimate evil.

Wonder Woman-The might of the gods in the service of man

Wonder Woman is in many ways, Superman’s counterpart. There’s the widespread belief that she’s also a symbol for justice. In my opinion, this is not so.

Wonder Woman exists as a construct that has gone through a dramatic change: from oversexualized soft porn symbol, she has become a creature of wrath. Despite the writers’ best efforts, she has not managed to establish herself as a symbol for justice or as a champion of order.

 Her best stories always present her as a powerful ally and a terrifying foe, but also as an instrument of fury that puts both her friends and her enemies in mortal peril. Out of all the Superhumans, Wonder Woman is the one creature that is more like her pagan ancestors than her contemporaries.

Spiderman-What Would Peter Parker Do?

I have openly stated that I dislike Spiderman and will stick to my opinion. But he serves a very useful purpose, either way. When he was conceived, the slogan Stan Lee used was “the hero that could be YOU!”

It took me nearly a decade before I finally realized the hidden meaning behind that quote. 

Spiderman’s charm doesn’t lie just in the fact that he’s a creature that the audience can sympathize with. He’s a creature that is constantly questioning the reader, trudging on through his everyday dramas, bearing the entire world on his spindly shoulders, as if he’s asking the reader:

“What the hell else would you have done, if you were me?”

Captain America-Justice For All

An old fashioned slogan for a man who’s found that the world has passed him by. For a Greek, Captain America is a very hard sell. Pop culture has presented him as an ultimate American symbol and to be fair, that was his original purpose.

But the Captain isn’t just about America. He’s a romantic creature, a thing that has sprung up from a mad time, preaching mad ideas, trying to cope in a world which, to be perfectly honest, can’t quite find a place for him.

The Captain is a creature that represents an endless struggle for the greater good, in a world that refuses to understand or acknowledge morality.

Hulk-The Pariah Eternal

Hulk is one of those symbols that at first seem to serve no other purpose except to look cool and fill a spot in the pantheon. His true purpose eludes everyone but the most frustrated nerds who have chosen to believe in him.

Because the Hulk is the Perpetual Geek, stuck with the Cool Kids in the same school yard, pushed and picked around for his dorky glasses. He was made by Jack Kirby, a man who went through similar phases in his life and he is essentially the very personification of nerd rage.

He is a creature that seeks to tear at the Universe, wanting to vent the frustration of his audience. No wonder he didn’t work in his movies: the Hulk is a fantastic creature, like the perfect lover we conjure up in our dreams. He is impossible to exist and he speaks out only to a very select few. He’s not movie material. He’s actualized fantasy.

But what will the OverMan truly be? He can’t possibly be a thing as symbolic and simplified as our fictional Superhumans. After all, they only exist within the confines of their fictional universe and even then, they are relieved of repercussions and responsibility, existing in a world of their own.

If history has taught us anything, it’s that the collective masses of humanity exist in a duality of both conquest and responsibility. As our knowledge and capability of manipulating our environment grows, so does our understanding and responsibility toward it.

The OverMan, no matter how fantastic he may be, no matter how ideal his existence, will be burdened with duties of titanic proportions and perform follies and experience ills of unimaginable magnitude.

The OverMan will be just like us. He may be able to fly unaided, but we’ll be no less human for it. 

It’s funny how this train of thought reminds me of the ideas of 17^th century philosophers, who speculated on the chance of stumbling into a Heaven upon Earth. They too considered that when we inhabit Heaven, we will be free of our ills, of our terrors and our responsibilities. They called this earthly paradise Arcadia and they claimed it would be the future abode of men, who would become as gods.

 Giovanni Barbieri gave them the best possible answer: 

Even in the green pastures of Arcadia, you will find death, o man.