We are taking a look at sequential art on one of the greatest structures in human history. Not the Nashville one, but the Parthenon. In the past, this medium of sequential art was almost solely reserved for religion. It was a grandiose spiritual mechanism, a symbolic structure. One need only look at the Stations of the Cross to see a really clear image of a comic book. All of the Egyptian hieroglyphs are sequential art. And of course, we get something like tarot, which kind of messes it up, becomes non-sequential, but it’s still about random sequences, making meaning out of random sequences.

And there is a sort of natural sequence to the tarot, as well as the Iche, and so on. There are many precursors to comics. I think perhaps one of the most recent, most vital is, of course, William Blake. William Blake’s work. But comic books, as they exist now, their subject has become vulgar. Of course, the subject is the gods and the heroes, but it is a perverse, vulgar mirror to the beautiful symbolic reality of the Greek and Roman gods with capitalized comic book characters who exist to make money. They make this money because they are symbolically resonant.

They are archetypal in nature, but they are prevented from truly fulfilling their purpose because of this. They are not allowed to die. They are not allowed to change in a meaningful way. Batman must always be Batman, and he must last for as long as Warner Brothers can make money off of him. The art of the Parthenon, the art of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Egyptians, is immortal. The gods are allowed to die because they live endlessly in art. They are immortal. Even when gods die, they remain in existence. They are still doing things. Their death is not sequential.

Their death is not occurring on a linear timeline. The gods don’t exist in linear time the way that humans do, which is why they’re exploits. We have this great human desire to display them in a linear manner. We want to see the story. We want to grasp the story. Even though these myths are so bizarre and so far beyond our understanding, we hardly know why we tell them. In one of my very recent last videos, I talked about nursery rhymes and how they become more and more ridiculous the farther that we get from them. The gods are a similar thing.

The comic books are kept relevant because Batman can go on his iPhone. Superman can hang out with Jake Paul and drink Prime. He’s always going to be there to drink Coca-Cola. These are gods imprisoned by capital. Let’s talk about the gods themselves. How did they survive? Throughout Christianity, the gods have retained profound importance. I’ve been reading a fantastic book called The Survival of the Pagan Gods. We need only look to magic, to the occult, to see why they survived, how they survived. While the religious belief, proper, worship and temples and such have kind of gone to the wayside, we still name the gods daily.

We revere the gods daily. One need only look to lunes, the day of the moon, Sunday the day of the sun, Thor’s day the day of Thor, and so on. These originally, you know, are pagan gods. You have Mirkoles, the day of Mercury. What is it? Ueves, the day of Jupiter, of Jove. The gods survived in time, particularly in time. They survived as days, and then really, most importantly, they survived as the planets. Believe it or not, this was something that early Christians desperately tried to undo. They wanted planets to be named for saints. They did not want planets and days to be named after gods, and especially not constellations.

Tried to rename the constellations. They wanted the ram to be the lamb. They wanted, you know, Jupiter to be Jon’s planet, and so on. None of that worked, obviously, because the pagan gods are there. They are powerful. They are real. The popularity of astrology, which was ancient even during the time of the Greek and Roman gods, you know, it goes really, you know, as far back as it gets, it goes back. In fact, I believe animals have astrology too, but the gods as planets, you know, this kind of cosmotheology, they call it, cosmotheogony, one need only look to that for fear, for terror.

Because even if you have Christ on your side, even if you have God on your side, if you have a bad star, if you’re born under a bad star, a wicked moon, you know, you are cursed, you’re ill-fated, and you know that you have to talk to the pagan powers to deal with that. You know, I’ve talked about the Madonna Whore complex quite a bit in some of my past videos. This is a religious example of it. You have Christ, you have God, Mary, and the saints as the Madonna, and you have the old pagan gods, the dirty gods, the fearful gods, the gods that are going to get you sick.

It’s the Whore, but it keeps them powerful. It gives them life when you fear the influence of a bad planet. And believe it or not, throughout history, we have feared it quite terribly. I think for a very brief period, we thought astrology was ridiculous, and now it’s already kind of back to a lot of people believing in it. ESPN had a natal chart on. People were analyzing natal charts on ESPN. These are normal people. These are not occultists talking about it. Normal people are moving away from newspaper horoscopes, backed into the terror of planets and charts.

It’s very fascinating. Fear is how the gods have survived. Fear of the planets. And also the stories are really cool and really good, and they work, and we still like them. Worldbuilding, lore, the idea of these kind of fictional universes, these fictional realities with profound depths, they provide a simulation of a very real drive for meaning and for understanding in our lives. But they fail. They fail in a profound and dangerous manner. We need only look to Carl Jung, his book Synchronicity, specifically to a quote from, I believe, Paracelsus, in which he describes the importance of forming a model, a model of humanity, a model of man, that is a perfect mirror to the universe itself.

If there’s anything out of place or anything wrong, you will do terrible harm. This is something that alchemists and physicians have to do. They have to form a perfect macrocosm and microcosmic understanding of humanity. This is really the role that the gods play in ancient times. We are given a model of humanity. Today, when young people are using pop culture, using Star Wars or whatever, as their model for understanding life, they are endangering themselves severely because they are simply not pure reflections. They reflect nothing but the perversities of their demiurgic creators. Obviously, I’ve talked about the internet in this way as well, but I think a lot of fiction has this problem.

I’ve never understood D&D for that reason. You learn all these rules, you learn all these stories and myths and gods and characters and things, but you can just do that in real life. You can just go on adventures. You can have fun. You can do these things, believe it or not. You fall into the fiction. You fall into the trap of believing that all adventure, all joy and beauty must be fictional, that reality is a place of ugliness and hideousness. You reject what is good. You reject what is in front of you for the sake of a false narrative.

The gods are not like this. The Greek and Roman gods, the Christian pantheon, which there is, these are far more real. These are still powerful. It is still a source of vitality and potential, far more than Star Wars, far more than Warhammer or Lord of the Rings. These are all escapes from the real power of the gods. As always, remember, memes matter. [tr:trw].