Full Frontal Magic: The Death of Modern Godforms

Full Frontal Magic: The Death of Modern Godforms January 1, 2017

2016 has ended with several famous deaths.  Many people have been personally experiencing this in a real and powerful way.  In modern times, we live in a society devoid of traditional myth making in relating to the natural world.  Our stories are often told and linked powerfully in to actors and actresses.  In a way, the glamour, fame, and acclaim our modern stars receive seems like a modern secular replacement for the myth making and stories of pre-industrial society.

a black-and-white photograph of a Christian cross in a cemetary
karigamb08 / pixabay.com

We have a huge problem with this cultural substitution,  an actor and actress dies.  We cannot know for sure how the death of actor or actress would have affected the populace in say ancient Rome or Greece, but we do know how the death of these actors and actresses are affecting us.  Many of this personally identify with our storytellers and the sense of loss is real.

More Real than Real

While we can not speak to every individual in our western culture, we can speak to a culture devoid of personal meaning and experience.  Day in and day out, many of us go to work, we sleep, and we repeat.  Although some of us do have real meaning in our lives, most of us act in way mimics sleep.

It is like living in the movie, “Brazil”.

The bureaucracy and repetition of daily lives lulls many people into a grey walking sleep.  In our capitalist industrial society, the greyness creates a unique opportunity for profit.  The repetition without meaning creates a need for strong and emotive surrogates.   Movies and stories have become the surrogates for our own imagination.

Why do people mourn so deeply the loss of stars, simply they feel like part of their own family has died and in way, inside their imagination it has.

a plastic toy frog reflected in a mirror
Alexas_Fotos / pixabay.com

The Church of the Advertising You

Celebrities obtain that modern status, and we invest in those people.  We feel with those people, we associate with those people.  We become those people and those people are much easier to deal with the real people.

In-fact, celebrities provide the on-demand, emotional support people need at the time of desire. 

This arrangement is so much easier, although less fulfilling for most people.  We of course, only receive packaged and produced emotional stimuli from the media outlets.   Without the context and only pieces of information, would not the future generations understand the Kardashians as a family of sex forces?  Would not people in the future build altars to those celebrities?  Removed from the context of the mortal coil and without the information that they will die, do not the myths live on?

Now, at the start of 2017, we can carry this down further.  Even Facebook and YouTube offer us, the reduced form of interaction between people at a much lower cost to the companies. We create and brand simulations of ourselves and become those as an escape to that normal grey and repetition.  On Facebook, if you conform to the expectation, you will get fed.  Is this not similar to the transactional relationship many people have with spirits?

hands making the American Sign Language symbol for "love"
johnhain / pixabay.com

We the gods and goddesses

This post may be for those of you ready to hear this. In 2017, what if we start to invest this energy into ourselves and stop investing in celebrity egregores?  What could we become would if we reinvested this focus and energy on ourselves in a focused way?  In a way, we are talking about a non-gothic version of the left hand path. If you listen and analyze people who are successful, you can start to hear thought leaders provide a couple models that move away from the hero worship while embracing modeling and mentoring.

What if we started from the position, that we can achieve the same results as some of these leaders and celebrities and then apply our time, focus and energy toward our lives? 

What if we sought out the day to day win of self-transformation instead of allowing surrogates to substitute for our dreams and imagination?  Reinvesting in our own dreams instead of the surrogates might be the single most powerful transformation, we can make in 2017.

It all starts with seeing the famous or the rich, and simply saying to yourself “I can do that” and then sitting down planning and acting on that.

Want more information?

Check out: Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel


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