No.44 Gods became monstrous beings (1)

August 30, 2002
By Yasuji Sada

Monotheism looked down upon Gods as devils. But there lived Gods on the earth in the ancient times, and they formed brilliant worlds as passed down by mythology. Monotheism confined such Gods underground as monstrous beings and erased people who could communicate with Gods under the pretense of witch-hunting.

After witch-hunting cooled down, Christianity changed into the religion of angels. Angels ascended to the position of ancient Gods, and human beings started to live in Heaven as saints. Diabolized Gods changed to fallen angels and disappeared as idols to which the idea of human beings gave rise. This is the current of history in Western civilization.

For a period of time after elves gave up their seats to human beings and flowed into far east Japanese archipelago, there existed a time when gods flourished in Japan as they had in the Aegean Sea and Babylonia. But now after the lapse of time when computer civilization is thriving in the 21th century, Gods have become something obscure and disappeared somewhere even in Japan where Gods were vivid.

By the way, Mr. Shun Miyazaki produced animation films such as "Momonoke-Hime", and "Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi" which won the Gold-Bear Prize in the Berlin Film Festival this year. He has a thought that old sacred Gods in Yamato (Japan in the earlier times) have changed into monstrous beings at present. His reading is much interesting and shrewd. The author wonder where such sense wells out from. Intuition grasped by the sense of an artist is admirable and it may be equivalent to that of super-science such as SF and SFX.

From the stand point of the author concerned in religious field, it is an undeniable fact, and the author has to take my hat off for such intuition. Because his thought in the modern ages of the computer civilization exceeds religious intuition. The author is delighted that Japanese are not altogether bad.

"Mononoke" is a spirit of a dead person or a living one which will cause curses, and "Yokai" is a apparition which will delude people. But such definition is given by rather old sense. They can be defined as computer apparitions in spritual level and specters of robotized gods in divine level by contemporary sense with the advance of civilization.