NEITHER GOD NOR
D~VIL
223
to face with the naked world, shaken with fear, man seeks another
shelter, no matter what. Deprived of god and seized with panic man ,
deifies a man:
Mikado, Fuhrer, Leader
or
Chef:
or an entity-nation,
empire, race or Reich. Ever since the trauma of light, cold and
drought at
his
birth, man has been used to changing his shirt, taking
off one only to put on another. For centuries
his
habit has been to
abandon one myth only to create a new one. After each
elan
towards
nakedness, light, freedom, atheism, man falls back into a shirt, into
mud and chains, into religion, before he can spring forward again.
On casting off Egypto-Gneco-Roman paganism, occidental man found
almost no difficulty in donning the new shirt christianity had woven
for him. Twentieth-century man has not yet created the human
myth he needs in place of the divine. The transition from Pharaoh
to pope, from Jupiter to god, from Isis and Venus to the virgin Mary
was comfortably managed for our fathers. Indeed, they noticed the
difference so little that worship of the Black Virgin was carried on
almost to our day, and Priapus, disguised as Saint-Foutin, still stirred
the bowels of our great-grandmothers. There is no need to go into
ecstasies over the farsightedness or the genius of the priests of that
time. Their task was quite easy, and lay merely in exchanging one
oppression for another. The task of the great thinkers of today is
nothing less than to change a myth of oppression for one of the libera–
tion-for a myth that allows man to escape from god without selling
his
soul to the devil-a myth which does not leave man, freed from
god, alone with himself-a collective
mystique
whereby the individual
will be:mystified neither by collectivity nor by a leader-a myth where
neither
capital
nor
captain
are synonyms for virility-a myth of moral
and material liberation, where order and disorder become one and the
same activity.
No wonder the great doctors of today are still unable to fulfil
their task:
it'
is beyond the potentialities of a single man, and they are
still scattered to the four corners of the world of thought. The creation
of a modern myth coincides with the problem of knowledge. Philoso–
phers, physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, doctors, biol–
ogists, economists, psychologists, painters, engineers, architects, revo–
lution¥ies, poets and lovers--each selfishly keeps to himself
his
own
share of present-day knowledge. Only from their encounter can the
myth be born, from their work and suffering in common and from
their joys shared. Like political, economic or social revolutions, like
scientific or philosophic upheavals, moral revolutions may be con–
ceived by one alone', but must be fulfilled in a collective parturition.
Here as elsewhere segmentation is rife. Moral man is but half a
