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Psychological Obsolescence of the Gods

Psychological Obsolescence

Giegerich’s diagnosis of modern consciousness begins from a datum: the gods are gone, and their going is itself a psychological event. “The widespread feeling of a loss of meaning and the death of God is the spontaneous self-manifestation of the psychological obsolescence of God and Gods” (Giegerich 2020, p. 179). The honest modern response is neither revival nor denial but historicism — the acknowledgment that the gods of polytheistic antiquity have passed through reflection and cannot return as literal presences.

“You respect the Gods only as Gods if you acknowledge them as Gods of the bygone past. The logic of our reality today is such that only a dead God can be a real God (can be revered as a real God). The moment you want to pull the Gods out of the sleep of the dead into modern life, you have turned them into contents of modern consciousness… and inevitably reduced them to allegories of Gods” (Giegerich 2020, p. 182). This is the sharpest edge of Giegerich’s critique of archetypal-psychology-charter: Hillman’s Zeus is “anorectic,” “emaciated to the bone,” precisely because he is held onto as still alive. The dead form, being atemporal, “can potentially be ‘kept alive’ (mummified) forever” (Giegerich 2020, p. 170).

The consequence is that psychology — the “new officeholder” of the function once discharged by shamanism, mythology, ritual, religion, and metaphysics — must do its work in the logical medium, not by restaging the ancient cults in imagination (Giegerich 2020, p. 84). The task is “to dream the [Christian] myth onwards.”

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