Fifteen years ago, the British religious scholar Christopher Partridge proposed the concept of the occulture. Since then, it has been actively used as a working model for analyzing the forms of existence of esoteric elements in modern culture. When Partridge created his concept, he drew on the situation of the late 90s and early 2000s, a time when esoteric elements were entrenched in the culture. The distance between us and Partridge’s work was bound to make adjustments to his theory, to determine the extent of these adjustments, we turn to contemporary narratives that have become hubs of esoteric mythology. Analyzing the screen culture, Partridge separately focused on the case of “The X-files”. For him, this show was the “strongest metatext” that condensed various narratives of the occulture. In the year of Partridge’s book’s release, a new show, “Supernatural”, was released. This show has become a new meta-text, accumulating almost the entire array of esoteric mythology accumulated over the centuries of deviant religiosity. The article analyzes the mythology of the series on three topics: world-mechanism, demons as antagonists, and monotheism. The article is concluded that the modern occult metatext not only condenses all the plots of the occulture but also transforms them. Screen culture creates new religious myths using elements of classical mythology. At the same time, it is obvious that such a construction is based on modern ideas about ethics and spirituality.
Keywords: Western esotericism, screen culture, God, monotheism, demonology, exorcism
DOI: 10.22250/2072-8662.2021.2.66-74
About the author
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Pavel G. Nosachev – DSc (Philosophy), Professor, Saint Tikhon's Orthodox University; Moscow Theological Academy; |