MAY 17, 2011. There are many myths written by humans that describe the gods. Whether these stories contain grains and pieces of history is up for debate.
What is central, however, is the characterization of the gods as powerful, and the humans as less powerful. This is so obvious it hardly seems mentioning.
The Prometheus tale is one of the more interesting accounts, because this Titan stole fire from Zeus and gave it to humans. With it, humans were able to fashion weapons, tools, coins…which led to the establishing of civilizations, the arts, etc.
What were humans missing, that they needed this gift from above?
Indeed, in all god myths, there is a sharp division between what the gods can do and humans can do.
Depending on which myths you read, humans were missing intelligence, ethics, freedom…
But there is a simpler and more profound way of looking at this situation. In all god stories, humans decided to answer the question: how was the world brought into being? The answer? The gods or god), of course.
This power was expanded to mean: the gulf between gods and humans was all about CREATIVE POWER.
Humans decided that they were weak and deficient in this respect. The gods had a monopoly.
Strange that, in modern times, a school of psychology was never founded on that split—using it as the basis for describing humans’ negative state of mind.
Because it’s right there. In all human stories about the relationship between gods and themselves, you find it. The gods have all the creative power, humans have none.
That wasn’t a red flag?
That wasn’t a reason for investigating this curious attitude?
That wasn’t a perfect starting point for a new psychology?
Well, it wasn’t. Mainly because it was too real, too obvious, too important. It was, potentially, too liberating. And societies weren’t about liberation. They were about control. What better way to distance humans from their own creative power than to cede it all to invisible gods, whose minions on Earth were an elite priest class?
Remember, Prometheus was punished for giving fire to the human race. He was chained to a rock, where a bird would gnaw on his ever-regenerating liver every day.
And Lucifer, another related mythical invention, which, in Latin, means light-bearer, or carrier of light, went through a similar exercise. Except, Church fathers decided to make him into a hideous countenance—all because he (if you adjust the details) tried to bring creative power back to humans…
It’s absurd—it’s a human rendering of ceding all creative power to gods and calling the reclaiming of that power a crime.
Talk about self-imposed mind control. This one is the gem of gems.
If god myths described gods as the only beings who had hands, and humans as hand-less, well, the absurdity would have been clear…when humans looked at what was at the ends of their own arms.
But actually, it’s the same with creative power. Humans tell stories about gods having all the creative power? Are you kidding?
This should tell you something about the degree of effort it took for humans to deny their own creative fire.
It’s really the ultimate cover-up and cover story.
And until science took over and brought its own curious forms of arrogance and control, the antithesis to “the gods have all the creative power” was magic.
That was the one place where a few humans tried to assert their inherent power.
Magic and art.
The Roman Church employed artists for two reasons. To flesh out, in visual form, their bizarre cosmology, and to capture the creative spirit of art, bottle it, and dominate the people who practiced it.
The true “neurosis” of the human race centers around the creative impulse and creative power. It’s all there for anyone who wants to see it.
But people still have a problem with it. They persist in inventing new and ever-more bizarre stories about beings and gods who have the ultimate creative force.
They think their stories are more permissive and gentle than the old Church versions. But it’s still self-imposed mind control.
The circus goes on. Scientists are, of course, getting into the act, with their maybe-could-be-possible speculations dressed up as “potential genetic breakthroughs.”
A 2003 Sunday Times piece began: “A creativity gene that evolved about 50,000 years ago was the spark that kindled the development of the modern mind…”
In 2009, the New Scientist weighed in with this headline: “Artistic tendencies linked to ‘Schizophrenic gene’…”
The modern myths employ genes as gods. It’s still out of our hands. It’s all in the DNA.
Sure it is.
Anything to distance ourselves from the obvious: we create the gods in our own image.
And it keeps working, along as we forget that our own image is really one of unlimited creative power.
Chew on that one for a while.
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