Despite our postmodern, polysemiotic, ironic, avant-garde, deconstructed, psychoanalytical sophistication, it is still so damned difficult for us to shed our historical monotheism. I once heard Karl Kerényi, who taught me mythology in Zurich almost fifty years ago, say it was impossible to return to the Greek style of mind. We cannot escape two thousand years of Christianity and its pervasive monotheistic psychology, which favors an abstracting, cohesive, unifying, and centrally organizing viewpoint—or what psychology has baptized as “ego.” We seem unable to escape obeisance to “one-sidedness” (Jung’s definition of neurosis, by the way), which raises one or another perspective above all others. Thus it is not Hermes who has caught the psychology of our times, but the perdurance of monotheism. Hermes and his computer is merely the fashionable frontman.
The shifts in gods influencing twentieth-century psychology do not indicate a true displacement of the monotheistic model in favor of a polytheistic consciousness. One god rises to the foreground to vanquish all others and then subsides. For a while it was the Great Mother. Neumann, Bowlby, the Kleinians took over the entire pantheon. Earlier there wasthe dominance of the heroic ego: “where id was there ego shall be,” draining the Zuider Zee like Hercules cleaning the stables, resisting the regressive monsters and sirens of the id, like Ulysses tied to the mast, a good-enough husband heading home. We have also had a monocular focus on Artemis and on the Amazons with anti-phallic combative feminism. And, we have had, or been had by, a one-sided identification with the abandoned child, victimized, abused, and sentimentalized.
These vagaries in the patterns of myth influencing psychological theory are merely slight twists in the same kaleidoscope of monocular vision. Each is a point of view, interpreting phenomena in terms of one god or goddess only. Changing the gods, their names, or their locations (from Judah to Attica), or gender (from upward phallic arrow to descending pubic cross) does nothing to the unifying insistence of Western Christianized consciousness (our cultural psyche) and its faith in singleness. The shift to Hermes is one more such turn, as if the contemporary psyche were desperately trying to writhe free from the ouroboros of Western History that swallows every emerging potential back into the same unifying loop. Remember what the patristic thought-police said in their debates with the ancient polytheistic texts: “We take prisoner every thought for Christ” (Gregory of Nazianus).