#CULT OF CELEBRITY
I wrote the first draft of this essay a decade or so ago, hence the somewhat dated references, but however names and faces may change, I believe the core concept is still valid. I am arguing that the cult of celebrity represents an authentic representation of divinity, living as we do in a godless world where Satanism has become an accepted belief system while we teeter on the edge of a technological evolution that could transform humanity into data fodder.
I realize that to label our world ‘godless’ may seem at the least eccentric and at the most, bizarre, considering the flood of fundamentalism that is threatening to engulf us all. But just as I would argue that monotheism is itself primarily the deification of an aggressive male ego, so I would suggest that fundamentalism has less to do with religion and more to do with an unhealthy psychology masquerading as religious fervour. I would argue that genuine religion sacralizes reality rather than demonizes it; it celebrates the material world and recognizes the immanence of divinity in the beauty and passion of life itself.“Pagan religion was close to nature. People worshipped the most powerful forces in the universe: the sky, the storm wind, the sun, the sea, fertility, death. The statues they erected were like icons in a church. The statues depicted the god or goddess, reminded the worshipper of the deity’s presence, showed the humans’ respect for their gods, and perhaps made the humans feel closer to their gods. But, as a Babylonian text points out, the statue was not the god.”
Money and power — these are the fundamental motives that seem to drive religious establishments no less than they drive commercial or political ones. Am I the only person appalled by the ostentatious display of wealth that adorns the Vatican? Am I alone in analyzing dogma as a major method of control of the many by the few?
For those of us who have grown up under the Western religious tradition, I would argue that the anthropomorphic expression of deity as celebrated by the ancient Greeks for example, and its concomitant infusion of nature with sacred beings, is still the healthiest and most logical representation of the divine we can aspire to. It was for this reason that its rituals and iconography were borrowed so heavily by the Catholic tradition as it struggled to impose itself as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Not to mention the myths and stories of paganism which were rewritten and renamed to credit them to the new Christian saints rather than the old gods:
“The old festivals sacred to Cybele as Magna Mater in the days of the Roman Empire were now celebrated on days renamed as sacred to the Son of God or to certain saints, and the old earth spirits were named as demons. Female saints took the place of the grain goddess…the goddess Isis…bequeathed her images to Mary in the first to fourth centuries AD…”
In Catholic Christianity, the Mother Goddess, Mother of the Gods, is thus demoted to the mere Mother of God, never to be officially venerated on a par with her male relatives. But She is there, nonetheless, albeit disguised as Mary, the human mother, in spite of the influence of St.Paul, whose misogyny glares through his teachings. However, by opening a minor Jewish cult to the pagan masses, he paved the way for the development of rituals, luscious in their pagan glory. I would agree with Jung that Protestantism suffers from “…the odium of being nothing but a man’s religion.” Martin Luther himself declared “Ye shall sing no more praises to Our Lady, only to Our Lord.” In fact, the masculine bias of monotheism in general has been well documented by a range of feminist scholars. In Judaism it is Israel that has become the ‘bride of God’, replacing the divine consort, Asherah. And Fatimah Farideh Nejat informs us: “It is undeniable that the holy law of Islam seems to openly assert the superiority of men over women.
”It was William James who noted that the popular religion of the so-called ‘common people’ has always been ‘a polytheism’; my argument is that the current adulation and elevation of celebrity-hood is no less than a popular movement developing its own spiritual reality as an antidote to the barren nothingness at the heart of monotheism and the poisonous aggression of fundamentalism. Nor is it an accident that celebrity-hood recalls the template of the divine pantheon of ‘the old gods and goddesses’, whose myths flourished at the very foundation of Western culture. Film critic Parker Tyler argued “…that the actors of Hollywood are an enlarged personnel of the realistically anthropomorphic deities of ancient Greece.” He recognized the similarity between the cinematic actor/actress and the ancient gods and goddesses — both are seen to love and die again and again — as in myth so in movie. Thus the performers “…are fulfilling an ancient need, unsatisfied by popular religions of contemporary times.”
Perhaps more than any other art form, cinema has fulfilled our need for gods with whom we can identify, because, just as the ancient Greeks watched their gods represented in tragedies designed to affect them cathartically, so the cinema takes us on a vicarious journey that can have a similar effect. And cinema has frequently been referred to using religious language. Take this letter concerning Dennis Hoey (1893–1960), an English character actor who enjoyed a solidly successful career in Hollywood in the 1920s and 30s. Gordon Dean writes: ‘Another export who did us proud in the film mecca of his time’ [italics mine].By the late twentieth century Biskind could write: “Film [c1967–1980] was no less than a secular religion.” He observes the 1967–1979 generation of film-makers “…started out as believers. They behaved as if film-making were a religion. But they lost their faith.”
‘There was a mystic wildness about the partying, the drugs, the clothes, the free sexuality — the interchange of partners, the constant fucking of boys, girls, it was so shocking and exhilarating. People like Shrader were attracted to it because they understood there was something religious in the intertwining of sex, death, and ecstasy.” George Lucas took a less hedonistic but equally spiritual stance: “I wanted to make a kids’ film that would…introduce a kind of basic morality. Everybody’s forgetting to tell the kids, ‘Hey, this is right and this is wrong.”
To create his new morality tales, (the Star Wars series), Lucas turned to Robert Campbell’s analysis of myth, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949), as did the Wachowski Brothers when they created their morality series The Matrix. In his analysis, Campbell mapped out “…the common underlying structure behind religion and myth.” Interestingly, Kristen Brennen points out that although Campbell was “scrupulously cross-cultural” in his analysis in general, in the section labelled ‘Temptation Away From the True Path’, in which the hero is led astray by a female temptress, he refers only to the Judeo-Christian tradition. This perhaps indicates that the concept of woman as evil is a peculiarly monotheistic notion. Brennen speculates as to whether this was because of the author’s own Catholic upbringing, thus reminding us of the inherent subjectivity of all academia.
Although cinema and its younger sibling television are perhaps the primary and predominant vehicles of the cult of celebrity-hood, Don Cupitt widens the scope to include all media:
“Writers such as John Updike and Umberto Eco have suggested that in modern, media-led culture, we have in affect a return of the Middle Ages: it used to be the Church that supplied everyone with an imaginary world in his or her own head; now the media do that job, with celebrity as the new sainthood.”
(Cupitt writes from a Christian position, therefore sees saints where I would see gods and goddesses, but the conclusions are the same.)
In c500CE, the great goddess temple at Ephesus was closed down and re-opened as a Marian church. From that point, those of us living in a Western culture have been offered no holistic image of a divine female, no Queen of Heaven and Earth, no fully rounded female deity in whom all is born and dies. The nearest comparable thing we are offered is a mother of a god who supposedly never even enjoyed normal sexuality. What a bad bargain we women have been labouring under!
This bizarre, not to say perverted image has eaten into women’s self-esteem for a thousand years. Thus alternative goddess images have had to be created to fulfil the function, if not the title, of Goddess.
The 1998 film, Elizabeth offers an intelligent and imaginative explanation for Queen Elizabeth the First’s refusal to marry and her transformation into the ‘Virgin Queen’. The director suggests that in a Protestant country, she was offering her people an alternative to the proscribed Virgin Mary. If this was historically what she did, it was inspired. Elizabeth enjoyed a long and fruitful reign from 1558 to 1603, perceived by many to have been England’s ‘Golden Age’.
The demonization of the divine female has been remorseless and very effective, focussing primarily on female sexuality as the defining evil. By 1965, Hollywood could produce The Love Goddesses, “[a] light-hearted account of female sexuality on the Hollywood screen.”
In 2006, ‘bringing out the goddess in you’ was what you did when you use a particular brand of razor to shave your legs!
The concept of the Triple Goddess, the trinity of Daughter, Mother and Crone has no relevance in our youth-obsessed, sexually active culture, but we can probably compare the concept of A-list celebrities with the Olympian pantheon of the Bronze Age. Then a handful of truly powerful Immortals ruled over lesser spirits and humans. Today, pop stars and sportsmen have joined the ranks of the ”divine,” starting with Elvis Presley, who was adored and feted as if he were a Young God and footballer George Best, another beautiful young man who drove the girls wild, while the reverberating chords of the electric guitar fired a Dionysian ecstasy of teenage girls for the early stars of rock ’n’ roll.
When John Lennon boasted in 1966 that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, he was affirming the Age of Celebrity-hood. By 2001, pop star Madonna’s opening concert at Olympia London on her first world tour since 1993 was greeted as if she were the Second Coming! Mentioned on both the 6pm and 7pm TV news, there was, on the same night, a one-hour programme shown at 10.35pm on BBC1 entitled ‘There’s Only One Madonna’. (Not true. Ask any Catholic!) And, as if to reinforce the importance of this singer’s appearance, the Radio Times carried a two-page article with a full page photo (pp32–33). Furthermore, as if believing the religious undertones of her own publicity, Madonna (whose very name encourages deification) then became a devotee of a New Age Jewish sect supposedly based on Kabbalah, the ancient Jewish mysticism, while she opened her next stage show suspended from a cross! This is surely a breathtaking example of the cult of celebrity-hood believing its own publicity!
It may be that being religious is genetic. Dr Robert Winston argues that “…man was a deeply threatened species from the savannah. I think that having a powerful feeling there’s something above you may have been a powerful help to survive.” If this is true, it seems to me to reinforce my argument that religion is, by its very nature, rooted in the natural environment. The ‘above’ to one on the savannah, at the dawn of humanity, is surely more likely to be the sky, rather than one abstract notion of otherness, an altogether more sophisticated concept.
Dean H. Hamer agrees there may be an inherent disposition for spirituality and likens it to… ‘the capacity of language: Humans are genetically predisposed to have it, but the language people speak and the religion they practice are learned rather than inherited characteristics. ‘This argument certainly explains why mystics tend to have their visions depending on what faith group they belong to. It also challenges any notion of the monotheistic god being ‘the one true god’, and suggests that all gods and goddesses are true for those who believe in them.
Gods perform miracles. Whether it was Jesus turning water into wine or Zeus granting Midas the ability to turn all he touched into gold, the miraculous and the granting of boons are intrinsic gifts of divinity. Could it be that the glittering prizes offered by TV companies are the modern equivalent of the miracle? Lives can be transformed by the almost omnipotent power of broadcasting — a woman achieves beauty she never had, courtesy of ‘Ten Years Younger’; a family wins a villa or a car or a lump sum of money via ‘Good Morning’; a contestant walks away with a million pounds thanks to ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ We used to make offerings to Fortuna, the goddess of luck, to win her favour. Now we offer our pound-plus-per-minute phone call to the Olympian heights of the TV companies.
Even more grandiose is the transportation to celebrity heaven offered by programmes such as The X Factor, or Britain’s Got Talent. By undergoing a series of trials in the guise of auditions, the winner achieves a place in the new pantheon, albeit for a very short time in some cases. There are even relics associated with this new cult, as with all religions. Suzanne Moore describes taking her daughter to The X Factor finalists live tour in 2010. She writes: “… [b]ut the highlight, of course, was when One Direction ran off stage and my youngest touched Zane with a giant foam hand that I purchased for an extortionate price. It is now in her bedroom with “Touched Zane” felt-tipped on.” A post-modern equivalent of the True Cross, indeed!
In a post-modern world, truth is subjective. So argues Hilary Lawson; we believe what we choose to believe. If celebrity-hood fulfills someone’s longing for the divine and miraculous, on what objective basis can any of us argue that that person is ‘wrong’? There is no empirical proof of the existence of ‘God’; the concept itself is dependent on believers in it. There are those who hold the late Princess Diana in almost saint-like reverence, a very good friend of mine included; she displays a photo of the dead princess as one would display a religious icon. If my friend finds comfort from it, that is a truth for her and none of my business.
Even our obsession with stars’ bodies and the way they look may be rooted in Ancient Greek religious beliefs. The Greeks believed that gods came to earth and so created statues of sublime perfection, which they could inhabit. The aesthetics of Greek ideology have continued to infuse our culture since the Renaissance, therefore to demand physical perfection from our stars is merely to continue in that tradition. However, the spread of eating disorders in our culture and the obsession with thinness in the female body has a lot to do, I believe, with an observation made by Simone de Beauvoir in her seminal work ‘The Second Sex.’ She argued that the entry of women into the work force should not necessarily ‘take away women’s sex appeal’, rather she thought that ‘a new aesthetic has already been born…the feminine body is asked to be flesh, but with discretion: it is to be slender and not loaded with fat, muscular, supple, strong, it is bound to suggest transcendence.” In other words, women are acceptable if we more resemble men! Could this be because of the deep-seated homoerotic narcissism that has underlined Western culture since the days of Socrates and his ‘golden boys’? Or is it merely because the camera puts on several pounds?
In conclusion, I would argue that although the word ‘religion’ is derived from a Latin verb meaning ‘to bind’, we also assume it contains an essence of the spiritual and not just the dogmatic. Perhaps that assumption is founded upon unrealistic expectations fuelled by the propaganda of each faith tradition. But if religion is about celebrating life and not just obeying some invisible deity via his all too visible hierarchy, then celebrity-hood fulfills the functions of a religion in that it provides a focus for the dreams and longings of its adherents and a theatre in which the age-old myths of life, birth, love and death are continually played out.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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