My thesis: I’m starting to understand why monotheism took over the Mediterranean world.

The first modern superhero character was the Count of Monte Christo. Batman, Iron Man, they’re just adaptations of Dumas’ original avenging badass. Seriously, go read *The Count of Monte Cristo*.

Additionally, since George Lucas read about John Campbell’s monomyth theory, we’ve been living in a new era of polytheism.

The monomyth is the idea that all human stories, or myths, are really adaptations and riffs on one foundational story, the Hero’s Journey. George Lucas and his contemporaries hypothesized that this monomyth was the source of what we know as classical religious myths, like Zeus, Isis, Marduk, etc. The Old Testament is, in this interpretation, an extremely old script treatment.

And a pretty good one, frankly! Greatest story ever told, and all that. Anyway, if ancient religions were just a body of interesting stories, why couldn’t modern storytellers, that is filmmakers, invent new myths that would live in the common consciousness? That’s how we got *Star Wars*, but it’s also how we got Superman and Spider-Man. When Zack Snyder wonders in his films how new gods might behave in our world, he’s just taking Campbell’s ideas to their logical conclusion. We all are.

One of my personal intellectual subjects of study has been the rise and fall of monotheism. Why did almost everyone in the West and Middle East embrace the idea of worshipping the godhead directly and singularly? 

Imagine you’re in a world where the presentation and interpretation of mythological characters like Ant-Man and the Flash are not just weird meaningless arguments as they are now but actual theological debates that affect politics, economics, and justice? Why, you might just might spend your time going around Athens convincing the city’s wealthy sons to ask loaded questions about this bullshit. Or perhaps you’d rant about the moneychangers’ corruption of the sacred spaces until someone turns you in to the authorities for being a revolutionary (or for not being revolutionary enough). Or maybe you’d just wake up in your 40s with the realization that your own tribe profits off of people who literally worship this ever-expanding collection of knickknacks stored down at the shrine where Abraham received his calling from the one God. In any case, you might just get it in your head that this polytheistic japery is literally hurting people, and you’re gonna put a stop to it.

So that’s what I think is happening with superhero movie pushback. Critics are playing the role of Socrates, Jesus, or Mohammed and just doing their part to put an end to what they see as madness.