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  1. #1
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    Default The Machine Spirit of Humanism: A Mythology of The Future

    Serious comments are greatly appreciated as I make rewrites. Thanks so much for reading.

    -LL-


    Mythology of the Future
    The Greatest stories ever told, the true classics which deal with the most fundamental truths of humanity come from the most primitive cultures. They are stories that provide the foundation for all other modern literature, indeed, the modern reader would be hard pressed to find a single work of Western literature, up till the end of World War I, which does not make some use of classical allusion, or expands upon the timeless Greco-Roman motifs spoken by illiterate bards before writing was even a popular medium. The reason for the perpetuation of these themes which include such ideas as regeneration, redemption, vengeance, and the Hero’s Journey just to name a few, is that the classics explored these themes first, they explored them best, and they have become part of the academic consciousness of the Western world since the Renaissance (And in the case of the Biblical Tradition, before 1400. when they at last made rounds outside of the monasteries where they were kept for hundreds of years.)
    Beowulf, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, all these works provide a literary touchstone that enabled the ancients to explain the terrifying events in nature, to make sense of the absurdity of life and death, and to show what a king and warrior should be. We too, up until the Modernist movement, have used these foundations sometimes with reverence and sometimes arbitrarily, but always with effect. For example, the Odyssey paints a picture of Hell which is so incorporated by the Christian tradition as to become part of popular theology, even though the ironic eternal punishments started by Sisyphus and ingrained by Dante have no Biblical precedence. (This may also be due to the fact that, with the new illiteracy, most professing Catholics and Protestants haven’t actually read the Bible.) We, along with the ancients, make use of these elements to explain our world and our situation, to wrestle with the human condition, but the most common and universal of these elements is used to explain our origins.


    Before the ridiculous number of Olympians can begin the long lexicon of fables, myths, and religious explanations for thunderstorms and seasonal changes, there had to be a creation myth. There had to be a point of origin which started all of it, Aquinas, Aristotle, and Plato all had their own versions of it, but it is usually called the Uncaused First Cause , and is usually Theist Apologetics’ opening attack, and has held its own over the millennia. Up until the early 1990s when Hawking and a handful of others suggests a self-contained Universe which needs no point of origin and, later, the idea of a self-perpetuating universe , many thought that this would lead to a broad-stroke refutation of Theism, but even Hawking admits that it does not answer the question of why the Universe bothers to exist in the first place which immediately invites back the creative design debate just as we thought it was banished forever, but this essay is not to argue for or against God, I only want to make the reader aware that I too am aware of recent scientific thought, and that, nonetheless, man still needs to incorporate a type of mythology or at least metaphysics if he is seriously attempting to try and explain his origins and, even more importantly, his purpose. For the majority of the population, this is the case, A survey of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2009, found that 51% believe in some form of deity or higher power. 95% of the American public believes this way, and 78% in the UK.


    Warhammer’s Mythology of The Future believes this way as well, as warp energies are often referred to as forces of creation, though as we will see, this Mythology of the future has been secularized to accommodate scientific progress as well as the cosmological gymnastics of the past decade to force the Imperium’s theology into a classically humanistic and yet completely polytheistic theistic tradition.


    Birth and death are symbolically and psychologically linked; some go as far as to suggest that the fear of death is traced back to residual memories of the trauma of birth. Just as man has been unable fathom his origins without the existence of gods, he also needs gods to envision his ending. Every great mythology has an ending of all things The Greeks actually have four with one still pending, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have end time prophecies; and the Vikings have Ragnarok, which details the deaths of both men and gods at the hands of the ice giants and the world serpent. These end time events have required the assistance of supernatural forces up until the development of nuclear weapons and post-apocalyptic literature, but we find that these works are not a real ending, for there is usually someone around who is left to tell the story, and even in those rare works which deal with a post-humanity setting, the aliens or other transcendent beings are either commenting on humanity’s existence for the purpose of showing us how flawed we are, or are human characters in aliens’ bodies for the purpose of spectacle or Avant-garde technique. Warhammer 40,000 has created a system of gods which fulfills the need to end ourselves through supernatural means, but is unique in that it incorporates humanism and acknowledges a scientific world view to give birth to a mythology of the future, which further emphasizes the theme of incredibly advanced technology existing alongside a primitive and superstitious culture.


    Warhammer 40,000 is a tragedy. It is the story of our ending, yet such a galactic empire as could be envisioned by the writers cannot be ended by any of the scientific or secular means we have at our current literary disposal. Even the big crunch is not proven and black holes have been found to be less than the all-consuming singularities that they were once thought to be in Einstein’s lifetime. Rather our Theistic heritage is so ingrained that we reject a totally secular ending “Well, we blow ourselves up. The End,” first because it is boring, second because this scenario has been played out ad nauseum, and third it has become implausible not only for the rise of certain technologies such as missile defense and the future of humanity being galactic colonization making nuclear obliteration somewhat difficult, even the infamous Exterminatus edict falls short on some occasions (Prospero Burns) it would rather require a cataclysm of God-like proportions, a catastrophe requiring a singular mythology, a mythology of the future.


    This mythology builds itself within 40k by first establishing a tradition of the arcane. The setting incorporates Neo-Gothic architecture and grotesque imagery with no little help from Blanche and other artists. Its Inquisition gives dark homage to a devolved, superstitious past, to set an appropriate stage for establishing a primordial mythology of the past and the future.
    Warhammer’s mythology is unique in that it is no longer subject to current end time theories whether they be of a religious nature or not, and by the time of Horus we see a race which has moved beyond the old religions, and as time has moved on, science progressed, and man no longer looks to the sky for his savior, we are taken beyond the book of Revelation, yet by the time the God-Emperor has come, religion has reemerged with a vengeance, new gods have been discovered, and the Savior of humanity has indeed come but he has not saved his people. By 40,000, all is lost and despite the advances of technology we are thrown back to a neo-mediaeval setting ripe for an end time prophecy with old gods and a new type of humanist theology.


    Warhammer clearly states that the body of man is holy, indeed the worship of the God-Emperor as the pinnacle of humanity and some say even of Christ is thinly veiled humanism as we glorify ourselves under the guise of piety. Warhammer pays tribute to this idea with its futuristic mythology, for although the primordial origins and endings of man cannot be fathomed without gods, man cannot endure a mythology created apart from his own image, and in 40k, this working theology acknowledges man’s greatest scientific and philosophical achievements while still maintaining a universe with functional gods. Think of it as secular humanism with a machine-spirit. For example, humanism will not be denied in 40k, and will adjust our mythology so that even though we are subject to it, we are still involved in its inception. The new gods of Chaos who have been created negate all that has been, and by crediting the warp gods with having always been, yet having been created, in real time, by man’s emotional echoes within the warp, we fulfill both a secular and theological desire with an answer that is not quite a paradox, but a fulfillment of both that makes use of Relativity, extra-dimensional forces, and humanism, all while having gods to worship and fear. In this way we are able to bestow scientific attributes to this mythology and on the surface we may celebrate some semblance of understand after all this time, yet it still remain mysterious and inexplicable upon looking deeper into the theology of 40k, thus we gain a small sense of control over the pragmatic spiritualism of 40k yet the authors’ implicit statement from the “we created Them” idea is that we have made significant progress since the Greek Pantheon and fantastic explanations for the rising of the sun, but all this still has its roots in wizards, even if these wizards were human.


    By introducing this mythology of the future, we criticize ourselves as being responsible for the gods of Chaos and so indirectly responsible for our own impending doom, yet we still impart elements of the mysterious and inexplicable to these primordial forces and we still have the problem of origins despite the elegant paradox of the chicken or the egg in reference to the gods’ creation. 40k’s mythology is, indeed, unique, but despite its secular edge, it is still a pantheon of gods leading us to ultimate destruction and that is the greatest tragedy of the Warhammer Universe.
    Last edited by The Last Lamenter; 06-18-2013 at 09:26 AM. Reason: rewrites based on input 1st of many
    Innocence Proves Nothing

  2. #2

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    I have to admit, LL, I'm not really sure where your thesis really is in this one.

    EDIT: Also, you just called Gilgamesh "Greco-Roman"

  3. #3
    Brother-Sergeant
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    fixed the Gilgamesh problem, I'll probably end up putting the first two sections as disclaimer. Trying to anticipate objections to the premise before I start. Thanks for the read, I'll make the appropriate edits and rewrites this week.
    Innocence Proves Nothing

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