Corporate Religion and Comic Book Movies

I watched a pretty good breakdown of the mythological basis of the Avengers: Endgame movie yesterday. The author of that video does a good job identifying which comic book characters are which Olympian gods. I won't duplicate any of that here, rather, I want to point out how odd it is that characters that are several thousand years old keep being recycled in stories and really the same story is told over and over again ad nauseam. The same pantheon of "gods", really beloved characters, spans the globe and has many names. The Norse gods, for example, are very similar to the Olympian Gods, who were very similar to the Egyptian gods.

There are a handful of plausible explanations for this. There's an old book that tackles this subject: Anacalypsis which proposes that there was a worldwide religion at some point in the remote past. Other people have argued that the pantheon of gods are really like an artifact that shows the peoples of the western world have a common origin--the Indo-Europeans. More modern explanations for this phenomenon revolve around psychology, really "natural psychology", and argue that the pantheon represents some built-in archetypes in the human mind.

None of that speculation, however, directly explains why Hollyweird makes the same movie and recycles the same characters over and over again. Is there a lineage of priests from the classical era that survived to our time? That's the really interesting point to ponder.

I think it's plausible it did.

Really, what is religion? The classical world religions were really corporations. Religion was corporatized at some point in the remote, forgotten pre-historic civilizations of the Mediterranean. The Temple of Mercury in Rome, for example, was basically a shopping mall. I pointed out in older posts that it was really the mainstream corporate media of its day. As a corporation, it didn't depend on the life of any one individual, and as a corporation it has very little ability to create.

Corporations are a way for individuals to externalize agency and will. For some people the corporate voice is "the voice of god".

I think it's really plausible that the pantheon of gods that show up again and again in movies and stories are ancient advertising characters that weren't even invented by the priests who worshipped and celebrated them. They might have been plucked from ancient folk stories and assembled into a collection.