Saponification

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Jung famously declared in 1929 that the ‘gods have become diseases’. He meant by this that the archetypal forces that govern our lives have so thoroughly been suppressed or ignored by modern reason that they have nowhere else to go but to appear in distorted form in symptoms, psychosomatic disorders and physical afflictions.


As in Jung’s day, in the early to mid 20th century, the gods are still off the official radar and most of us today do not ‘believe’ in the gods. They are as much banished from official consciousness today as they were in the time of Nietzsche, Freud or Jung. But as Jung might say, we don’t have to believe in the gods, because they have taken possession of us unconsciously. They do not require our belief to maintain their existence, because if we ignore them they simply move into our lives and take over, granting us less personal freedom than before. This is one of the big themes in media and cinema texts today. We consider ourselves to be free agents, secular persons in a free society, but this is a mere illusion or veneer which masks the fact that we are entirely conditioned by forces we do not see and over which we have no control.

Hitting bottom isn't a weekend retreat. It's not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go! LET GO!

In this regard, cinema, media and popular culture generally have served us well in recent times. These popular forms of expressions simply ignore high culture’s insistence that God is dead and the gods are no more, and they tell a very different story about our lives. Our lives are literally shot through with mythic themes, motifs, cosmologies, and archetypal patterns that suggest that, far from being dead, the gods are having a field day at our expense. The prevalence of myth in contemporary movies and media productions is too great to be ignored.


As Nietzsche said in 1872: we are starved of myth today, and we are prepared to seek it out wherever and whenever can:

And here stands modern man, stripped of myth, eternally starving, in the midst of all the past ages, digging and scrabbling for roots, even if he must dig for them in the most remote antiquities. What is indicated by the great historical need of unsatisfied modern culture, clutching about for countless other cultures, with its consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical womb?

(Nietzsche 1872: 109-10)
Nietzsche, Friedrich 1872: The Birth of Tragedy. Trans Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin, 1993.

The modern hunger for myth suggests that our instinctive nature is filling in for what our minds reject. Our minds continue to call myth crap, but we must have our regular fix of the mythic diet. We are at war with ourselves in this regard, and I would describe this as a conscious aversion for gods and myths, versus an unconscious addiction to these same realities.

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

Work cited The Gods Have Become Movies, LaTrobe University, 18 May 2010
Dr David Tacey has written extensively on religion, health and society. His most recent book in this field is Gods and Diseases: Making Sense of Our Physical and Mental Wellbeing (Sydney: Harper Collins, 2011).

David is Reader and Associate Professor at La Trobe University, Melbourne, where he teaches courses on the crisis of meaning in Western culture, Jung's cultural psychology, literature and postmodern theory. He is the author of twelve books, including Edge of the Sacred (Daimon, 2009), ReEnchantment: the new Australian Spirituality (Harper Collins, 2000), and The Spirituality Revolution (Harper Collins, 2003).