Before it became common to worship but a single God, it was common for humans all across the globe to set their allegiance to a pantheon of Gods. Presented with so much choice over worship, the common people would inevitably gravitate towards their own arbitrary favourite God or Gods. You would find farmer who preferred Ptah over Bast, priests whose piety was directed unobstructed to Osiris, and the occasional edgelord who worshiped Anubis despite having no business doing so.
The old pantheons were interesting in that the common person had a choice to worship a certain figure for any personal reason. There were those who took inspiration from the dastardly underhandedness of Perseus, and others who saw Heracles’ survival of a deep trauma as hallmark to the spirit of manhood. An artist may choose to hang a painting of Aphrodite on his wall, or say a prayer to Dionysus in hopes of inspiration. The ability to project your ideal self onto the image of the Gods, and through them see a reflection of who you are was in retrospect not only a major factor in the mental health of the individual citizen, giving them due space to find identity and meaning, but also a dashingly potent means of inspiration to the artist.
Indeed, when we look back on renaissance art, what do we see? Scenes from the bible, the Greek myths, depictions of Egyptian Gods. We have entire epics based on legendary heroes and journeys in and out of Christian Hell. John Milton’s Paradise Lost even gives character to the devil, not unlike a modern serial television production may.
To take a step back, and look at the past through the lens of the modern, we can see an interesting, but often missed aspect of past art. Something so obvious, that it seems silly to think that we can not easily see it. That something is perhaps the defining quality of mankind’s art history, the fact that so much of our species art is actually no more than glorified fan fiction.
Look at This Picture of Sailor Moon I drew! What? No, I’m Not Sexually Attracted to Children.
The days of the renaissance are interesting because the artists of the era were thought to not be particularly religious. It is from this era that we gained a re-ignition of the Greek stories and myths, through artistic depictions thereof. We saw supposed Christians painting fan art of Greek legends, perhaps drawing an affectionate parallel to a future modern-day English schoolboy drawing a picture of Goku in his textbook.
Although we may believe that we no longer live in an age of Myth, in actuality Myth is all around us. The films we watch, the books we read, the video games we play. The passion of creation is all around us, and this creative juice creates shock waves and ripples. We live in a world of fan art, fan fiction. Even this blog is covered in depictions of fictional women! Although we think we may have lost God without replacement, the truth is we have our own deities, our own perfect species to look up to and seek wisdom from. However, our worship is of yet young and unfocused. We do not know that which we worship.
Interestingly, we can see the phenomena I am about to describe in depth more in young people than in older ones, as they have not yet begun to conceptualize their behaviours, and at the time upon which they do form concepts, they will be left confused, as the rest of society has not yet created the organizational structures required to understand such deep emotions. This article aims to shine a light on what those concepts could potentially be.
Suckering Ourselves by Worshiping Humans
One of the greatest psychological problems of our age is that of Men worshiping Women. What I am trying to say is that the phenomenon of the “nice guy”, (an interesting phrase in that it describes a positive whilst being shorthand for a negative – a negative which many understand at surface but not at depth), is actually rooted in a culture-wide misunderstanding of what it means to be inspired.
You see, there seems to be some innate need in humans to have Gods. That is not to say that Gods are real or the belief in them justified, but to say that humans have historically used Gods as a tool. This tool at times has been political conquest, such as the Roman Empires conquest of Europe and Constantine’s reign over Turkey, but at other times it has been a tool for getting in touch with the deeply personal. Ask any born-again Christian or Jehovah’s witness what God means to them and you will see what I mean. The difference between the modern human and the ancient one in this context then, is that we do not feel the same reverence or personal connection to our one God that the ancients felt towards their many. And in a way this is quite justified – the Judean god does not represent us. He is everything at once, and thus has no particular quality which can speak directly to the individual. Instead of God, some would-be worshipers seek out fictional characters and real-life celebrities (a word derived from “celebrate”) in order to fill their void.
The Gods were made to be celebrated, and thus ones personal connection to them had significance. But Gods also had a structure to them. In ancient Egypt as well as Greece and even Japan, Gods had defined purposes, there was a God for a particular thing. If you, a man, felt weak after a poor hunt, you could turn to Artemis, a woman, to see that there is some celestial and sexual image for you to take solace in. Artemis is both a comforter of men, being a woman, and also a huntress superior to humans. She offers a male hunter an ideal whose image can always be strives towards, but also a comforting presence that men can relax in. But we wary, for if you relax too much, or overstep your hospitality, she will kill you. As the story goes, she murdered a creature who accidentally saw her bathing. As an image and an icon, she fulfills several roles for men. She demands privacy and presents a boundary which is to be respected, she offers courage and inspiration by way of her superior hunting ability, and she provides a sexual image for a lustful man to take and keep as his own. Artemis is a Goddess, not a real woman, and her existence makes distinct the difference in such. Do note that none of the Greek Pantheon are mortal, at best they are God, at worst Half-God. Implicit in the structure of Greek religion is an appreciation that man can not be as great as God, and so humans are inevitably flawed, and not to be worshiped in the same way.
In this Era, we have no pantheon, and no Jesus to point out the differences between man and God, and thus we get the erroneous yet implicit belief that there is no distinct separation between the two. It is in this way that a young man can idolize a woman, can believe she is perfect and put her on a pedestal, and vice versa woman to man. An ancient knew that there was no Zeus, no Aphrodite, and knowing this, as it does for us, brings a great deal of pain. If only mankind were Godlike, perhaps there would be no suffering and betrayal. However, the key difference between the civilizations of old and our own, is that despite the fact that we both know that mankind if not God, the ancients could take solace in the fact that there were Gods, perfect humans to which they could project their fantasies and desires.
Batman: The Waifu Rises
It is here that I say that there are still Gods, we just have not yet recognized them as such. Fabled, legendary stories borne with the intent to bring us flurries of emotion and inspiration, filled to the brim with heroes, villains and role models in which we can see a part of ourselves, from which we can be inspired to grow into mature adults.
Among these Gods is the ever-elusive Goddess, an interesting figure in our time in that the worship of the Goddess is actively looked down upon under the argument of objectifying women and creating unrealistic expectations, but this argument can only survive under the pretext of there being no specification which separates the fictional woman and the living one. If we are to believe that fictional worlds can logically exist in tandem with the real one, (which seems to be a trend in storytelling at the moment, the example of Superhero films comes to mind, which have gone from colorful and fictitious to gritty and “realistic”), then we are also to believe that the men and women depicted in these fictional worlds have the potential to exist in our own. Ancient civilizations never had this problem, their Gods were clearly Gods, their heroes half-Gods. Never was there an expectation that the common man or woman could ever match the majesty of these divine creatures. Indeed, there is no Batman in our world.
It is here that I want to bring the readers attention to the concept of “Waifu”. Namely, a fictional representation of a woman who has become endeared on a unique and personal level by an individual, to the point in which they represent something transcendental for that individual. The imagined relationship is in many ways a projection of the persons sexual desires, but combined with the kind of perfection only seen in Goddess fiction, to the point where that fictitious woman also becomes a source of comfort and inspiration. The personal relationship formed between the human and the character is named “Waifu” in a satirical sense, as their psychic relationship mirrors the mutual engagement of marriage.
Interestingly, the satirical naming of the term Waifu implies that it is something not to be taken seriously, and perhaps even looked down upon, which is shocking when the emotional benefits of having such an image are so clear. Take the example from the above section, Artemis is clearly top-tier waifu material for the budding Greek hunter, in the same way that your favourite video game woman might be a source of inspiration and comfort during the dark hours of life for yourself.
Outside of the emotional benefits that having a secure and comforting mental figure to fall back on in hard times provides, (for more information on this, see a similar concept pertaining to mental health: The Garden), the God and Goddess are made distinct from the aforementioned Garden in one crucial way – they create a vital distinction between humanity and perfection, which can only be conceptualized as long as one recognizes, rightfully, the status of “Divine” that their mental projections of role models have. Take a step back and think about this. You may be obsessively in love, even lovesick, towards the girl sitting a couple of rows ahead of you in class, but you lack the capacity to realise that she is not divine. In fact, I would go so far as to say that you mistakenly believe that she is divine, if only because there is a deep part inside of you that yearns for perfection, for the divine, and this deep part is empty and leaves a hole, and so you see her, the girl in class, or the girl next door, or whoever, and you fill the hole with your daydreams of this person. Lacking a cultural structure for deification, and faced with a culture that openly mocks the deification of fictional characters, instead of creating a healthy dedication to a Goddess, you seek fulfillment from the outside world, you create a Goddess out of your peers.
But man can not convene with Goddess, she is too much beyond our grasp.
And so we worship.
And so, a new “Nice Guy” is born.
A New Pantheon
I use the example of the nice guy in this article because it is abhorrent, abundant and relatable. Almost everyone either has been or has encountered a nice guy in their life. The whole truth however, is that men being too attracted to women to the point of self-defeat is not the only downside that our fundamental misunderstanding of our relationship to fiction has caused. Indeed, those who inadvertently end up worshiping fictional characters and giving their love to them are often laughed at, bullied and metaphorically spat upon, their efforts to create a safer and more fulfilling life by way of fortifying their mental health are battered down and beaten, leaving them worse off than they began. And imagine, those who take solace in imaginings of fictional characters must have been somewhere pretty dark to form that kind of behavior in the first place, and yet the rest of us rip them down.
Furthermore, having a firm grip on your identity and creating mental havens to which you can escape the dread of life is not only beneficial to your mental health, creating fortitude and endurance, but also allows one to have more fulfilling and satisfying relationships, as the old adage goes, you have to be whole to be together.
The world we live in today provides us more than the ancient world did, it allows us to choose our Gods from an almost infinite pantheon, and we never need share our Gods with anyone else, should we choose so. I myself have taken inspiration from the strangest of places during my darkest days, and have become stronger for it. Having read this article, it may strike you as weird that so much emphasis could be put on stories people made up, but humans are inherently weird creatures, and we are living in times of massive change and flux, where we need, more than ever, to understand the fundamentals of human behavior so that we might safeguard ourselves from the inevitable misunderstandings and bad decision making that comes from such unstable times. I hope this article has shed some light on your own behavior, or the behavior of your peers and loved ones, so that you may be better equipped in the long run.
I would like to end this article with a phrase which I find a little humorous, especially since this blog is so focused on Zen concepts and the apparent reality that everything is change and constant is never a possibility. And that is: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
This century has so far seen a revival of many ideas, a regression to archaic ways of thinking, and a depth of wisdom uncovered from ancient knowledge; knowledge gained from stories, legends and myths. Ironically, this era is also the most contrasting from the rest of human history. the way modern humans live is so far removed from how they have lived for all of history. Perhaps that is the reason that these gems of ancient knowledge need to be revived en masse – our stark change in lifestyle has left them forgotten.
