What does he most truly need, this anthropos? I’ve heard tell that he lives not on bread alone, but on the word from the mouth of God. Is that Spinozas?—Nietzsche’s?—The Ancients’?
If from Nature’s word issues what man needs, and if culture is begotten of nature, then man needs culture. Is culture self-determined? That’s going well.
Spinoza
Let’s split up the gods, because too many of us are too under-read to realize that there are two and that we worship each. Always have been, even if you’re a “Christian.”
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness…”
Genesis 1:26
It’s not plural by accident. A mother and a father; and every father came from a mother. Thus Deus, god of consciousness that possesses our minds; Sive, sieve, strained through, as in a mesh or matrix (mother); Natura, nature. There was a mother nature from whence father, as culture, ceteris paribus, becomes patriarchal quite quickly, and indeed puts order to her orgiastic pre-agrarian, celery eating ways. He is violent but only to tame her violence. He is orderly but only to re-order her more to his liking. He fears her and so he commands her. This is the story of the two gods
Nietzsche
If this patriarchal solar god is dead, as His own modern American Jew, blessed beyond belief with the gifts of father’s consciousness and even still hotly pursuing them, oft claims —if he cares to claim at all— or worse, that “He” was only ever a story for material’s mysteries, that he never existed in the first place, and thereby that their ancestors were essentially wandering fools rather than prophets following silly photons rather than symbols set out by the innate thrust of the universe to become conscious of itself; if this god is dead, well, then dead is the symbol that begot conscious man—man as such, and his manna in the desert along with it. And Nietzsche would have been better off to summarize his madman not as “straying through an infinite nothing” in search of an inner Will absent his ancient solar guidepost, but rather as a man who couldn’t be bothered to care for the bread of god—from where would such a Will come? And we moderns have sorted this out nicely: fear.
The Ancients (Aegyptians)
Now to the ancients: more holy, more true. Isis veiled, gods paraded annually by festival and feast. Simple living under the god-king, Osiris-Horus. In this system only the king and priests were burdened with the knowledge of the deus abscondis, creator not bygone but escaped into his creation. Icons for the laity: bread, pageantry, wholehearted belief in the glyph.
That each modern now pursues nature’s secrets —consciousness of curious god inside them— and cannot find “Him” outside —how stupid a game of misunderstanding and in-erudition— each a silly scientist but na’er a lover of wisdom (for Sophia lives in those guiding stars in symbolum); that he can rattle off the formula for bread but bakes without love. Is this what he most truly needs?
Modern problems
Art is surely his answer. Because god absconded into us, as evidenced by our maddened minds, our broken vessels, and our insistence upon fixing the world —no matter if we’ve forgotten that was the pursuit from the beginning; call it the redemption of matter, alchemy, the solvent arm of Baphomet, or the salve(ation) of Christ who points his same arm in just the same position, man articulates upon the earth. Nevermind whether he believes the old glyphs. He is one, and produces them. He falls head over heels with new transformations at his own hand. Where does man get his much needed symbolic bread? He produces it himself—in art. And all of his problems are only solved (salved, saved) by this god of consciousness that possesses his (mother-made) natural body. The symbols are articulated through him now. Sophia become us.
Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn’t matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.
neil gaiman