Why is Star Wars Interesting?

Money from They Live

In the remote past, my ancestors lived a life that was governed only by the cycles of nature, by the rising and setting sun, by the seasons, and by rain and drought. They were of nature, and in nature. Their gods and mythology was right there. What was within them was also all around them.

Today, the people of the West are far removed from our origins. As discussed in an earlier post, we're cut off from nature, and our ancestors have lived in a succession of cities, states, and Empires. Historically, Empires have stripped people of their religious identity by dissolving old systems of belief, and imposing new ones. Also, Empires strip people of their tribal identity. Beliefs and ties of loyalty to a tribe stand in the way of domination from a central location by a small group of people. After millenia of this process, the wild places of the western mind were settled and paved over, and controlled by imperialists. Shamanic religion and mythology were replaced with History and a strident insistence that mythical stories really happened.

Serapis

One prime example of this process is provided by the introduction of the god Serapis by the Ptolemies. The cult was fabricated to fuse the Greeks and Egyptians together and bind them to their rulers. Another example is the Christianization of pagan Europe by the Catholic Church, but perhaps the most recent, and therefore best documented example is the ethnic cleansing and forced conversions of Native Americans by the succession of Empires that dominated the New World from the 15th century on. The cultures of the Native Americans were probably analogous to western peoples' ancient cultures. They lived in tribes and had shamanic religions, and in many cases, they lived a pastoral way of life.

Their way of life conflicted with the English way of life, of land ownership and agriculture, money, and domination by remote rulers through bureaucratic systems. This type of conflict, on the surface of it, seems to be about land and resources but maybe on a deeper level it's about what you're going to do with those resources or maybe its about which gods have hold of your consciousness.

Star Wars relies on buried, paved over and nearly forgotten mythological themes for story telling. As a retelling of The Contendings of Horus and Set, one of countless such clones, it draws upon a very basic story that was well known in the ancient world. It is a story about the cycle of the sun, about the seasons and vegetation, and about birth, death, and rebirth, and the body and the soul. For the average person living in the West, these myths are unknown, and the natural cycles that inform them only exist on TV and beyond the concrete covered landscape they inhabit.

Terminally ill Star Wars Fan Daniel Fleetwood

By imbuing the movie with imagery drawn from mythology, consequently, imagery drawn from nature: solar imagery, lunar imagery, phallic forms, and rounded breast forms, Star Wars resonates with patterns that are stored inside us, patterns that make us. But for most people, those patterns are buried under layer after layer of debris. They are not conscious of why they like the movies so much. For many people the movies are a religion. Daniel Fleetwood, for example, was a huge Star Wars fan and was able to see the latest unreleased version of the movie before his recent death. His remains will be stored in a light sabre shaped urn.

The connection with the gods, with mythology can be a source of liberation, a source of delusion, or a tool of manipulation. A point I'll make over and over again is that by its very nature, this exploration is radically subjective and personal and loaded with paradoxes. (like a blog about what's radically personal)

The Constellation Lepus, a rascally rabbit