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Keep Your Place: The Self-deifier as Rebel Keep Your Place: The Self-deifier as Rebel
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Subversion Subversion
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Self-deification and Monotheism Self-deification and Monotheism
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Personal Utopia: The Self-deifier as Hero Personal Utopia: The Self-deifier as Hero
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Self-deification and Society Self-deification and Society
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Self-deification Today Self-deification Today
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Conclusion: The Many Myths of Self-deification
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Published:October 2016
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Extract
Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility.
bertrand russell1Close
One must become divine to become human; by reaching for the ultimately divine realm from one’s limbo in Eden one thrusts oneself into reality, further away from divinity. Yet is this passage not inevitable?
susan niditch2Close
as documented in this study, myths of self-deification follow a basic typology. In what can be called the locative type, the self-deifier is put in his place: the dark pit of the underworld. In the utopian type, by contrast, the self-deifier rises—even from the grave—and ascends to the stars.3Close In the first type, the soaring antihero slams against the vaulted roof of heaven and cannot break through. In the second, the hero, though persecuted on earth, finally glides through heaven’s gate. In the first kind of self-deification, the action is coded as transgression; in the second, it is deemed transcendence. Practically speaking, however, the act of self-deification (claiming to be a god, or God) remains in both cases threateningly similar.
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