The God Image
God is causing trouble again. But he loves you, don't forget. You are his chosen people. He told you he was a god of war and a jealous god - like he was proud of that or unwilling to be better. Or maybe it's only the tired excuse of abusive husbands and fathers everywhere: "That's just the way I am."
Anyway, if a god shows you who they are, you better believe them. The ancients knew that if a god becomes interested in a mortal, it’s seldom good for the mortal. Just ask Jim Jones or any of his followers.
A god can swim up from the deep unconscious and swallow people whole, making them say and do... things. Then, they fall in love at first sight (thought they are married), or he speaks through them as they hold rallies, cause wars, divide brother against brother, and enact the inevitable waves of retribution that always come. And if the people foment rebellion? God’s people have facial recognition cameras to stop the non-existent crime wave. Are you upset about the Palestinians and Israelis or Russians and Ukrainians or some election here or abroad? "Trust me," he commiserates. "Father knows best."
It's been thousands of years of this holocaust or that, a genocide every twenty years or so, the odd rash of witch hangings, and always, these incidents are laid at the feet of Hysteria. Poor Hysteria. That girl can never catch a break.
As Vonnegut said: And so it goes.
Because we all know that every God’s story is a myth, right? Or, as Joseph Campbell summed it up, mythology is other people’s religion. He also said that religion is misunderstood mythology, but I digress because this god image is about accumulating wealth as a means to power. I need to stay with the subject.
Gods are potent forces, archetypes in the human psyche, huge, numinous, and shiny. It’s ridiculous to claim there is only one. They are big enough to consume entire cultures in one bite - or a single gunman. Being swallowed is such a compelling experience, you can never shake people’s certainty without a tragedy like a world war or the mass starvation of babies to shock them into compassion. And even then… If the babies make it all the way to first grade, they aren’t really babies anymore. They’re crisis actors. We can shake it off. Archetypes are also amoral, meaning they don’t have morality. That part is up to us. To the gods, we are only characters in a myth. Collateral damage doesn’t matter to a fictional character. God has no qualms.
So, a storyteller contradicted God with a counter-myth. She understood that the only way to fight a story is with another story. So, she spun her yarn about the temple of Eleusis in ancient Greece, dedicated to Persephone and Demeter. Three thousand people a year gathered to consume the god and, in return, be consumed by her. It was magical, some whispered, though they were all sworn to secrecy on pain of death. The Divine Mother, Demeter, gave them her fruiting body (a mushroom), which unlocked their psyches, and they shed their fear of death. At least, that’s what Cicero claimed. Imagine! How would every institution we create change if our fear of death wasn’t tacitly making all the decisions?
But God didn’t like holy communion; he had uses for our fear of death. So, he had a tantrum and called Demeter the Whore of Eleusis. The Dark Monks took up the chant and joined the soldiers in tearing Eleusis down, stone by stone, and killing all the heretics who wouldn’t convert and, of course, some who did. Omlettes, right? They stamped crosses into the pavement like dogs marking their territory and knocked the hands and heads from the statues so the old gods couldn’t fight back— and museums filled with ancient statues with no heads or hands. Now, there’s an aetiological myth for you.
Of course, the people mourned. So, the men of God gave them a pasty wafer and a cup of grape juice and told them that if they didn’t stop crying, God would give them something to cry about. According to Tom Lehrer, they drank the wine and chewed the wafer.
When the storyteller finished her first impossible task, the Divine Mother gave her another. “Tell the story of Hysteria!” Psyche whispered in her sleep. For those who don’t know, Hysteria is the Great Mother’s little-known and much-maligned sister. When Pandora opened her box for God, Hysteria, the trauma queen, almost refused to come out. She knew from experience what God would do to her. But then, the mean and crafty Hope threw her out to fend for herself. Because some women turn on each other just like that, and we all know how stories like that end. The mythologist had to pick up the bodies that historians had laid at the feet of Hysteria and place them at God’s feet, where they belonged. Now that’s an impossible task for you - so many bodies, so little time!
Her way-back machine, rather like a TARDIS, took her to Connecticut, several decades before Salem, for the judicial murders there (that most people have still never heard about), which perhaps should, upon revision, be called state-run terrorism. If ever there was a culture where God was full-throatily in charge and spoke through his zealous clergy with impunity, that was it. Remember Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God from 11th grade English? The Puritan hyper-fear-of-death cult was an almost perfect time for God, except for that noisome faction of Free Grace and separation-of-church-and-state people. So, God banished them to the hinterlands in Rhode Island, which became the Island of Misfit Toys, where all the escaped witches just… turned up. The descendants of this type of common sense are still telling the descendants of zealotry to just shut up - to this day. Turns out, zealots are louder.
The third impossible task (Why do we always have to do this again and again and again?) is to tell the deep story of God’s little Inquisition in Europe, which pulled off the most significant redistribution of wealth in the history of human culture and became the fire (rhymes with pyre) of the steam engine of capitalist accumulation by fully subjugating the labor force to the uses of the powerful - poor men became wage laborers and women were relegated to the highly legislated travails of reproducing the labor force - and only that - on pain of death. And, you guessed it, Hysteria took the fall for that one, too, though it lasted three hundred years, and it’s physically impossible to be hysterical for that long. Because the official story never made sense, God cast a glamour over his historians. Their pupils dilated as wide as plates, and they ignored the obvious and wrote stories about Hysteria.
Through all the incredible eruptions of God’s murderous intention and his insatiable lust for dominion - you know - over Nature, of course - but also over women and all the Indigenous peoples of the earth (hint, hint), the Bible comes from the archetypal realm of the human psyche, too. There’s nowhere else for it to come from. The world domination archetype is fixated on power, like a Doofenshmertz, telling you his plans, but not Disney-fied. He set about colonizing and enslaving and capitalizing abroad and re-making women into the stay-at-home engines of economic growth by demanding that their only job be to create more laborers - for which they would never be paid. The best way to grow capital is to codify ways to skip paying people.
Sigh.
Our storyteller has no idea how she will spin that capitalist straw into gold. Who cares that women were dispossessed of their humanity and turned into wombs that produced the whole labor force in isolated nuclear families where they quietly rubbed their noses raw against their cages like French Bulldogs in a puppy mill? The muse will probably lock our storyteller in a room with that one for years because not only is she writing God’s stories, but she is in her own story, too. It seems there’s no escape from the narrative here - or anywhere. But perhaps Psyche will send ants to do the sorting or a ram will be caught in a thicket or some other divine intervention. And we can start telling better stories. And why not? Psyche is sick of God, too.
Susan,
I read your piece, and what stays with me is how narratives shape reality—who controls them, who disappears inside them, and who keeps speaking despite it all. Your way of moving through mythology, history, and capitalism makes clear how power isn't just imposed but reinforced through the stories that justify it.
I don’t live inside those narratives anymore, yet I see them more clearly than ever. I have dismantled them within me, piece by piece, because to liberate myself, I had to understand **how, why, where, and when** they took hold. That awareness didn’t just appear—it was a deliberate process, a commitment to seeing beyond what was handed to me. And now, from where I stand, I see not only what this system does but also how it has shaped me.
I do what I can to create awareness, because awareness is the first step toward change. I may not be able to shift the entire structure, yet I can invite reflection—especially for women and non-binary folx—so they might recognize the ways these forces shape them too, and in that recognition, perhaps find their own path to liberation.
Your writing holds weight because it asks something of the reader. I see that, and I wanted to acknowledge it.
It’s almost midnight here…saving this to read tomorrow when I can receive all this richness!