Cultural Atavism?

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Its been very interesting to tune in on anthropology and history in respect to where we're currently at. There's been something of an emerging trend in cultural thought that we're in the process of taking baby-steps toward Greek/Roman pantheism.

It makes a lot of sense to me from the standpoint that the Greek/Roman gods/godesses themselves were self-coagulating traits in the human condition that tend to become increasingly eccentric and stereotyped as a culture gets increasingly hedonistic and nihilistic. Probably the most in-your-face arena of Greek/Roman paganism is the pop industry - ie. Kardashians, Gaga and Nicki, the Hollywood rehab club, cultural tabloids, etc. etc. and even there we're still semi-virgin in comparison to the 'good ol days'.

All the same, what's your take? Do you think we'll get there? Do you think we'll find enough bulwark against that sort of erosion as not land right in the lap of the likes of Mars, Apollo, Aphrodite, Demeter, Dionysus, etc.?

What is wrong with hedonism and nihilism? I think the world would be better off if we had more nihilists.

I think you're selling the ancients short by describing them as hedonists and nihilists. They had formidable philosophers and statesmen, invented cement, aquaducts, built road networks across Europe, discovered the earth was a sphere and so on.

And we're not doing too bad either. When my father was young the milkman had a horse-drawn cart and very few people had tv or phones. Today just about everybody has a smartphone. "We" just discovered the Higgs boson by building the 8th world wonder, CERN. I'm a nihilist, and I'm extremely optimistic about the future of humans. I really don't get the doomsday people.

And about the reality tv and "celebrity" crap on tv, there will probably always be demand for easily digestable entertainment. Shakespeare in his day was aimed at the masses as well, so who knows?

The pantheons of Greece and Rome included Athena/Minerva. People seemed to throw themselves full force at whatever was dominant in them.

Also, don't read what I'm saying quite that one-dimensionally. There are seeming pros and cons - when you look at Athena vs. Dionysus you have people like Pythagoras and Plato on one side and you have gangs of omophages running around who would tare apart and eat alive anything that would fight their desire to make love to all ports of (human or animal). We haven't known the likes of either in our time, the first we'd love where the later we'd clearly prefer to be without.


This isn't a doomsday prediction, it is however a claim that paganism is an amplification, even hyper-amplification, of human traits to cartoon-like hyperbole. We'd get a bit of everything if that should happen. The thing I don't know, which I'm interested in philosophically knocking around, is what would still hold against that. For example clearly today we greatly like being able to live our lives in autonomy without being overrun or having our rights impinged on by others, question is how much we're willing to fight for that, what kinds of things would render us submissive to such a system - I ask because I honestly don't know. There's a lot to consider.

Well right, and similarly people could argue that even all through the Christian era Mars was very much alive and well in the Crusades, European kingdom vs kingdom, etc. etc..

It seems like we have though, by certain help as well, been taking the binders/governors off. The thing that gets a little scary is that we do have more technology than any time in our presently recorded history and with that one or two people can do more damage to the world than ever before. If there's any doomsday feeling perhaps it might be that particular powder-keg.

First off- you're miss using the word "Pantheonism".

I think that you mean "Paganism" -maybe.

The word Pantheonism means "all is god"- that there is a universal spirit in all of nature.
More Hinduism, and american indian beliefs, than western thought (pagan, or abrahamic religions). Though there were Pantheonistic philosophers in late Hellenistic and Roman times.

That building in Rome called "the Pantheon" was so called because it housed statues of "all of the gods" known to the romans (their own, and those of subject peoples). Nothing to do with "Pantheonism"

At any rate - we cant "return to the Pantheonism of the Greco Romans" because they didnt have Pantheonism(except in the fringes of philosophy) in the first place.

So you're either talking nonsense, or you are talking sense about something other than "Pantheonism" than you are miss labeling as "pantheonism".

Maybe you mean "paganism". But what the Khardashians and Lady Gaga have to do with reviving anything in Greco Roman culture is not clear.

Good point - it was actually a mix (ie. people like Pythagoras and Plato believed in 'the one', similarly the stoics were supposedly pantheists), some people held pantheistic beliefs about the gods of Greece and Rome while perhaps others didn't.

Also, for whatever reason, even at the age of 33, I've been hearing 'pantheism' and multiple gods being used so interchangeably for my entire life that I had to look that one up.

Stranger things have happened, do what you will with that.


Replace every instance of 'pantheist' with pagan and my OP might make more sense to you. As for Gaga, Kardashian, and everything else I just explained - I'm just expressing that its a self-assembling phenomena of which our pop-culture is a quick and intuitive example.

Or "polytheism"- the belief in a bunch of Gods - as opposed to "monotheism"-having one God. That might be what you mean.

But be that as it may- what the Kardashians have to do with reviving either polytheism, or Paganism, is not obvious to me.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 13 Apr 2013, 8:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There's no 'reviving', ie. its not a deliberate act. That's the point of calling it cultural atavism. Paganism is showing itself to be a fundamental/instinctive fall-back. Its not a matter of people deliberately trying to set up churches and temples to Greek or Roman gods, its not even them realizing they worship anything at all and very well they may not be worshiping anything at all in the way we think of the term 'worship' today. Rather its a cultural facsimile of Greek/Roman paganism that's starting to bud by the natural proclivities of instinct.

Also the Kardashians, Gaga, etc. are one example of one aspect of many - ie. its just an example, not an entire argument.

If that's still way too floral for you to follow let me know.

Yes,

You still have alot of explaning to do.

wwhhh......

(cracks his knuckles and searches the deepest recesses...)

The Greek and Roman gods are symbols of certain 'chunks' of human existence and behavior.

As religion erodes people are looking to their instincts as ways to explore their identity and even find adventure in what they might consider a really dull/boring material world. As they look to their instincts for identity their instincts are being amplified. The gods were symbols of instincts in extract.

The Greeks and Romans took that chase to the logical ends that we haven't had the guts to go to yet, I mean really threw themselves at it. We may not go all the way, just that where we're starting to drift is not brand new territory.

Did the above help any or do I need to give up?

So the Greeks had mythic role models.

So did, and does, every culture.

Are you saying that we used to not have them, and we are only now evolving them?

Or what?

No.

Rather than write you a book I'll just wait till someone who isn't wired 180 degrees opposite to me wants to jump in on this thread.

I'm pretty skeptical about this. Unfortunately, schools impose theories that we can't refute - I had myself an argument with a teacher because of it, she allegedly told me "You shouldn't deny the wisest Men in history." So, if their theories are non-sense I have to swallow it because that's "food for thought" and my refutation is pretty asinine.
So, after this you get to a conclusion: Hedonism is imperious. If the way MOST think doesn't change dramatically, there will be this "Cultural Atavism".

Of course, there's always exceptions and we should be glad about progress - but will we be like our imponent ancesters like Socrates? What can we do to reverse the situation?

To that I think what we have in the human condition is our own aches and pains chasing us around, we each have our own push to find purpose, to find usefulness, to find gratification, and hence whatever the dominant system is tends to govern how that manifests itself. The polytheistic paganisms, often though essentially both polytheistic and pantheistic, tend toward splitting of the one or initial essence into personality attributes, and when one really thinks about it the pagan narrative is in a lot of ways the human narrative - what a lot of monotheists would call a mirror held up to the psyche of the human condition or, particularly if one wants to go Abrahamic, a mirror held up to the flesh where it sees itself magnified (one might argue that implied the twist 'as below so above').

I have read this sort of hypothesis before. It's been so long that I can't remember exactly who brought this up so can't give links. It might have been Camille Paglia. Ever since pop culture became such a huge force this has been brewing.




When I first encountered this line of thought those stars were little children or not even born. The people who first hypothesized this were talking about Marilyn Monroe (as Aphrodite, naturally) and Elvis Presley (as Apollo) and Jim Morrison as Dionysius. They took it pretty literally and would match a celebrity exactly to a god. Camille Paglia did say (in one of her many books) that we encourage rock stars to kill themselves as a form of religious sacrifice. Not consciously, but as a culture.




I don't think it will go much past where it is now (I could be wrong). Meaning, I don't think it will become so literally religious. The bulwark against that is the celebrities themselves.They are human after all. And modern interactive media is making them even less demigodlike than they used to be since they now have twitter accounts and blogs which makes them more "one of us" and less like inhabitants of Olympus as they used to seem in Marilyn Monroe's day.

I get what you mean about the larger-than-life human characteristics that pagan gods and also celebrities embody. The celebrities themselves get it and sometimes rail against the public that wants them to be always horny/angry/beautiful/wise/whatever attribute they've been assigned. I think that modern celebrities can fight back against that more successfully than past celebrities because twitter/internet/behind the scenes interviews etc give them more of a platform to show how utterly ordinary they are. Anyone who thinks Gwyneth Paltrow is like Athena and there were some who thought that) just needs to read her Goop blog.

I'd have to disagree though with the assertion that anyone needs to be seen as god-like or be subject to hero worship.

I think what it ultimately is - these are currents in society. Stars and celebrities might represent a particular height of manifestation but for instance Aphrodite might be manifest in many pop icons, many models, women's fashion industry when it comes to the erotic, ie. its a much broader thing than one person. Similarly Mars wouldn't just be the hawkish leader of a country or its military - you can find Mars in pro sports, you can find Mars in MMA, you can find Mars at the gun club.

I think there's a line where those cultural traits get caricatured and taffy-pulled far enough to where you literally end up with - as in the pagan days - a cult of Athena, a cult of Demeter, a cult of Dionysus, a cult of Mars, etc. where people start deliberately throwing themselves at philosophical and physical/active exploration of those specific concepts.


Lol, I blush on her behalf any time I hear her talk. Sometimes I'm so embarrassed for her that I need to flip the channel. If there's anything Athena-like about her she must have even more Hermes in her in terms of being able to completely and utterly hide it from the public.

Mythic figures that embody traits are invented by every culture.

The ancients created gods. We turn frail mortals into gods- and then the mythic images of the mortal take on seperate life of their own seperate from that of the mortal model. The ancients atleast had the decency to mythologizes beings who were imaginary to begin with rather than real celebs.

But that tendency to embody qualities in human form a constant in human culture. Not a sign the we are moving back in time to some earlier stage.