The Gods Of The Underworld, Umberto Eco
Contents
The Gods Of The Underworld
The Sacred Is Not Just a Fashion
The Suicides of the Temple Whose Side Are the Orixà On?
Striking at the Heart of the State Why Are They Laughing in Those Cages?
On the Crisis of the Crisis of Reason
The Sacred Is Not Just a Fashion
In 1938, coming from the pleasant town of Smallville, there arrived in the city of Metropolis Clark Kent, alias Superman; and by now everybody knows everything about him. But even in those far-off days of neotechnological capitalism, when in Chicago they were compiling the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science and considered the propositions of the metaphysical philosophers meaningless, there was nothing mysterious about Superman. The boy’s ability to fly like a plane and lift ocean liners as if they were twigs could be scientifically explained. He came from Krypton, where, as is well known, gravity is different, and so it was normal for him to have superpowers. Even his extraordinary memory derived from the fact that, again thanks to gravity, he developed better than other boys his age a talent for speed reading, which for that matter was already being taught in the universities.
There was nothing mystical about the Superman of history.
As we enter the 1980’s, the movie Superman is quite a different matter. First of all, it is no accident that he should have an onerous father like Marlon Brando, whose story takes up almost half the film, or that his father should impart to the child about to leave for Earth a Knowledge of which we know nothing, concretized in stalagmites of diamond, a material about as symbolic as anything imaginable. Or that he should give his son a highly trinitarian viaticum, put him in a spacecraft in the form of a cradle, which navigates through space like the comet of the Magi. Or that the adult Superman, possessed by ill-tempered voices like a Joan of Arc in skirts, should have problems worthy of the Mount of Olives and Tabor-like visions. He is the Son of Man.
So Clark Kent would arrive on Earth to fulfill the hopes of a generation that enjoys Tolkien’s Silmarillion and deciphers a theogony that obliges them to memorize the children of Ilúvatar and the Quendi and the Atani and the flowery meadows of Valinor and the wounds of Melkor: all things that, if they had had to be studied in school, would have driven the same generation to occupy the university or high school in protest against notionism.
So the reincarnation of Superman would seem to be the pop version of a series of more complex and profound phenomena that apparently reveal a trend: the return to religious thought. All Islamic countries are returning to a theocratic view of social and political life, masses of American lemmings rush towards suicide in the name of an unearthly happiness, neomillenarian and glossolalic movements invade the Italian provinces, Catholic Action is on the rise, the prestige of the papal throne is renewed.
And along with these manifestations of “positive” religiosity there is the new religiosity of the ex-atheists, disappointed revolutionaries who fall on the traditional classics, astrologers, mystics, macrobioticians, visionary poets, the neo-fantastic (sociological science fiction no more, but new Arthurian cycles), and finally not the texts of Marx and Lenin but dark works by the unfashionable great, dejected Mitteleuropeans perhaps, suicides unquestionably, who never published anything in their lifetime, who managed to concoct only one manuscript and that not complete, long misunderstood because they wrote in the language of some minority, all a hand-to-hand struggle with the mystery of death and of evil, writers who felt only profound contempt for human efforts and the modern world.
On the basis of these elements, these undeniable trends, the mass media, however, seem to confect a scenario that repeats the pattern suggested by Feuerbach to explain the birth of religion. Man somehow feels he is infinite, or rather that he is capable of desiring in an unlimited fashion; he desires everything, we might say. But he realizes that he is incapable of achieving what he desires, and therefore he must prefigure an Other (who possesses to an optimum degree what he most desires), to whom he delegates the job of bridging the gap between what is desired and what can be done.
In other words, the mass media indicate the symptoms of a crisis in the optimistic ideologies of progress: both the positivistictechnological, which wanted to build a better world with the help of science, and the materialistic-historical, which wanted to build a perfect society through revolution. On the other hand, the media tend to mythicize the fact that these two crises (which in many ways are the same) are translated into politico-social, economic terms, such as reassertion of law and order, or in other words, conservative restraint (compare Fellini’s parable of the orchestra conductor). The mass media expound the same problem through other allegories and underline the phenomena of the return to religiosity. In this sense, while they seem to act as thermometer, reporting a rise in temperature, they are actually part of the fuel that keeps the furnace going.
In fact, it is a bit ingenuous to speak of a return of institutional religious forms. They had never disappeared. Take certain young Catholics’ associations: In a climate of public opinion where everyone was talking about the complete Marxification of the young, it was most difficult for non Marxists to assert themselves as an organized force with a certain appeal. Similarly the success of the new Pope’s paternal image looks more like the spontaneous process of reinforcement of images of authority at a time of institutional crisis than like a new religious phenomenon. After all, believers continue to believe, and nonbelievers adapt and become Christian Democrats if the Christian Democrats offer a steady job in Town Hall, but flirt with the “historic compromise” if it looks like the Communist Party can get them a job in the regional government.
But in discussing these phenomena it is important to distinguish between institutional religion and the sense of the sacred. A recent book edited by Franco Ferrarrotti, Forme del sacro in un’epoca di crisi (Forms of the Sacred in a Period of Crisis), again brings up this important distinction: the fact that frequenting the sacraments was becoming less popular never meant that the sense of the sacred was threatened. The forms of personal religiosity, which became concrete in the post-Vatican II movements, marked the very decade in which the newspapers were making people believe that society had become entirely secular.
And the neomillenarian movements have grown steadily in both Americas and develop strikingly today in Italy for reasons involving the clash between advanced industrial society and disadvantaged proletariat. Finally, a role is played in this story of the sacred also by atheist neomillenarianism, that is to say terrorism, which repeats in violent forms a mystical scenario, requiring suffering testimony, martyrdom, purifying bloodbath. In a word, all these phenomena are real, but they are not part of the script, now fashionable, of the new post-68’ traditionalism. At most they cover, when they are made picturesquely evident, the truly new facts that concern instead conservative political action.
The theme of the recourse to the sacred becomes interesting, in my view, when it refers to a certain atheist sacrality not presented as the answer of traditional religious thought (to the disappointment of the left), but rather as the autonomous product of a crisis in secular thinking. This phenomenon also, however, is not something recent, and its roots must be sought in the past. The interesting thing is that it follows, in atheistic forms, the modes that typified religious thought.
The fact is that the ideas of God that have peopled human history belong to two types. On the one hand there is a personal God who is the fullness of being (“I am he who is”) and therefore sums up in himself all the virtues mankind does not have, and he is the God of omnipotence and victory, the Lord of Hosts. But this same God is often shown in an opposite way: as he who is not. Not because he cannot be named, not because he cannot be described with any of the categories we use to designate the things that are. This God who is not passes through the very history of Christianity: He hides himself, is ineffable, can be drawn upon only through negative theology, is the sum of what cannot be said of him; in speaking of him we celebrate our ignorance and he is named at most as vortex, abyss, desert, solitude, silence, absence.
This is the God that the sense of the sacred feeds upon, ignoring the institutionalized churches, as Rudolf Otto described it more than fifty years ago in his famous Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy). The sacred appears to us as “numen,” as “tremendum,” it is the sense that there is something not produced by man and towards which the human being feels at once attraction and repulsion. It produces a sense of terror, an irresistible fascination, a feeling of inferiority and a desire for expiation and suffering. In the historical religions this confused sentiment has taken the form, in turn, of divinities more or less terrifying. But in the secular universe it has assumed, for at least a hundred years, other forms. The awesome and the fascinating no longer wear the anthropomorphic guise of the most perfect being but take on that of a Void in whose regard our aspirations are doomed to defeat.
A religiosity of the Unconscious, of the Vortex, of the Lack of Center, of Difference, of
