Young Writers Society

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? —The Madman, Friedrich Nietzsche

History is the graveyard of the gods. Marduk, Enlil, and Ishtar of ancient Sumer; Dagda, Danu, and the Morrigan of the Celts; and even big names like Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades of the Greeks; Mars, Venus, and Mercury of the Romans; Thor, Odin, and Loki of the Norse. A touch of Egyptian with Ra, Anubis, and Neith. Pantheon after pantheon has died beneath the sands of time, and exist as relics of the past or have been resurrected, reborn into modern society as interesting stories and marketable characters. But those aren’t the gods Nietzsche meant when his Madman boldly proclaimed God had died. God, in the traditional, Western, Christian sense, had died, and not in the Christian sense of Jesus’ sacrificial atonement on the cross. But he did not mean this as a literal death of God, or even that God had ceased to be worshipped. Rather, the progression of philosophy and ideology in Western society had led to the demise of society needing God, an implication Nietzsche identified. He also understood the unwillingness and unpreparedness of his era for this revelation, so he made his observations more palatable by packaging them in parable and analogy.

While he may have veiled his more damning commentary, he made no attempt to mask his thoughts on the philosophic succession from his own doctrine. Humans, having done away with Deity, would have to transcend themselves, to realize their own spark of divinity and ascend into the heights of heaven. The death of God created a power vacuum that couldn’t help but be filled, and only god killers could even hope to fill that absence. There must always be a Power That Is, and with all the old candidates out of the running, humanity was the only source capable of filling the candidacy. This is what Nietzsche meant by his Übermensch, his “Over-human”—a race of humans who had transcended simple humanity to assume the throne of the gods. What he did not account for, however, was that the gods would not relinquish their Olympus so easily.

The gods of old were imperfect, fickle, lecherous, abject embarrassments of morale uprightness who amounted to little more than glorified, deified humans. Even the less offensive deities were still restricted, stuck in a power pyramid of major and minor entities that made questionable their ability to answer their worshippers’ supplications. The most devout and pure request could be overridden by the whims of more potent deities. Little wonder the secularization of their respective societies led to the rejection of these finite overlords. The Caesars of humanity had a claim to divinity to rival the gods…and yet, the gods remained. But they did not remain unchanged. For a foundational shift had occurred that had not yet been realized. Humanity had finally made itself like unto the gods, and slowly came to realize it no longer needed them. Now, while claiming the gods are gone, humanity has rather dragged its gods down to the plane of humanity.

As humanity adapted to a world without gods, the gods adapted to a world that no longer acknowledged its belief in them. Yet the gods remain today, or rather new pantheons have arisen to take the place of the old. These pantheons exist in many arenas and under different auspices, but the essence of the form remains the same. A collection of entities form the nucleus of the pantheon, a system of priests devotes themselves to the furtherance of their deity’s worship, and loyal, devoted adherents fill the coffers, monetarily displaying their fidelity to the one who commands their affections. Oh, the names have changed, the venues of worship have metamorphized in the climate of modern intellectualism, the priesthoods aren’t formally organized as such and heaven forbid the gods go by such a sacrilegious name. But they do live on, despite such a toxic environment. These pantheons are a field, such as business or science, or a sport, or even a subset of an industry, such as popular movie- and novel-franchises. The celebrities, the characters, the heroes, are the gods; their marketing team, their devout priesthood; their fans and fandoms their pious congregations. And wherever their icons, accessories, and paraphernalia are sold, their unadorned and oft faithless temples. The sanctuaries of the modern gods are in the business of selling worship, not garnering faithfulness, and the gods must clamor for their share of gifts and sacrifices.

Thus unmasked, the gods are exposed in their Nietzschean manifestations. And spotting the pantheons in the fandoms becomes a simpler task once the veil has been parted. Marvel and DC serve a sort of Greco-Roman equivalence, only a taut rivalry of contemporaries, with their plethora of recolored minor deities filling their encyclopedia of under-loved demigods. Marvel’s Olympians are the Avengers, DC’s the Justice League. And truly, these superheroes put the power of the gods within reach of mortals, most having been mere mortals themselves before receiving their gifts. These perhaps most closely realize the essence of the Übermensch.

But superheroes don’t hold a monopoly on fictional pantheons. Titans of the fiction industry like Harry Potter and Tolkien’s Middle Earth have their own pantheons, separate from the mythologies of their worlds. They may have “gods” within their stories, but their characters are the true members of their Valhalla. And not just novels, but games as well. Magic: the Gathering calls them Planeswalkers, their Olympians the Gatewatch. Microsoft’s Halo series has soldiers of mythic proportion in their aptly-named Spartans. And the Legend of Zelda franchise has one of the deepest, richest mythologies to be found in modern gaming, with a protagonist who truly transcends time. And then there are the cults of the fandom world, subsets of overarching domains like anime, the Nightcore and Vocaloids of the music industry. Some of the dominant shrines of the Shinto-esque anime realm are shows like Attack on Titan, One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach, with their demigods being the true cult classics like Mobile Suit Gundam, Serial Experiments Lain, and Cowboy Bebop.

And let those who say they have no gods beware. Just as those who claim the meaninglessness of life find meaning therein, the absence of absolutes state so absolutely, and fail in tolerance by not tolerating intoleration, so too the godless find gods among them. Even Science, bastion of atheism, has its deities. Beyond the naturalized pantheists, Science has pedestalled its greatest thinkers, Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Einstein, Edison, Tesla, and its modern celebrities with such giants as Richard Dawkins, Bill Nye, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. And those who refrain from revering these Titans have replaced God with their deified rejection of Him. Humanity cannot escape divinity, even if it must come from within themselves. And the gods have not given up.

Having failed to depose Nietzsche’s proclamation of their doom, the gods embraced the blessing in the curse to live on in forms the humans could fulfill their craving to worship something in. Sadly, the Achille’s heel of the gift was that they’d already admitted humanity among their ranks, and with the admittance of mortals among the divine, they took in an element of the human amongst themselves as well: death. Caesar was perhaps the last prominent human to walk among the gods, and he did not walk unscathed. Having brought divinity to earth, he brought his own Promethean legacy, that gods could die, and humans could kill them. And the higher humanity walked, the lower they brought the gods. While Science frets about the next great Singularity, when humanity becomes indistinguishable from its machines, they’ve missed the one that happened within the previous century: gods and humans have become indistinguishable from each other. The rise of artificial intelligence, the coming Age of Machines, the dawn of the technological Singularity, all is simply the pursuit of another pantheon, a monument to our own journey to transcendence. We have brought the gods down to our level, we have made ourselves gods, and all that is left is for us to make the gods in our own image, as they had done us.