I’ve thought quite a bit about Greek and Roman mythology since the advent of MAGA and Trumpism. So much of our gaming and franchise entertainment culture is saturated with violent and sometimes misogynistic characters drawn from all kinds of mythology. But the actual stories surrounding the Greek-to-Roman gods are often devoid of the football-spiking and crotch-grabbing moments favored by the bro-sphere. When I learned a few of the stories in high school, autocracy was something that happened in olden times or else in bad countries. I wondered how these freakish, depraved, and cartoonishly single-minded gods could inspire awe when people had to have seen that they were simply jerks with power. The answer was always with them: they were primitive, with an average life expectancy of 28; we are modern, living longer by the second. As a teenager, I couldn’t imagine fear and ignorance being as palpable as weather.

Three years of Trump’s America have changed my assumptions about every previous era—from the near past to ancient worlds. I am now willing to consider the malevolence of Trump and his cronies as mythic. This is not to give any individual actor classical stature as antagonist; they are irredeemably shills. Whereas Nixon’s conspirators got the Shakespeare treatment during Watergate, Trump’s flunkies cannot break the cartoon barrier. The obsequiously manic Rudy Guiliani getting wound up by Laura Ingraham is like Slim Pickens riding the Strangelove bomb. Bill Barr, the Attorney General, alternates between Droopy Dog catatonia and—because of those glasses—Blue Meanie Chief. The entire cabinet you imagine as Minions ready to spring from inside Melania’s red trees.

But fear and ignorance are now as palpable as weather in America. Trump’s coterie are mythic in their collective subjugation to the lure of tyranny while being cognizant of their replaceability. (In antiquity, the term tyrant referred to a ruler with no legitimate claim to rule, much as someone who lost the popular vote.) What places all of us at the mercy of mythic power is the darkness of fear and ignorance that keeps expanding. As the lies of Fox News are replicated through the mainstream media, the darkness spreads to incapacitate even the democratic and rational-minded. We are hamstrung by a faulty Constitution that we are powerless to fix and more immediately by a faction of Americans whose votes count more than the votes of the majority. We don’t know how or who to fight within such darkness.

I thought even more about the dark upon overhearing a young woman on the subway telling her friend that they both would benefit when the planet Pluto stopped being retrograde on October 3. If you’re a reader of the New York Times, you know that astrology is one of the things that has filled the vacuum of organized religion in our country, especially among millennials and Gen Z. Psychotherapists must now be prepared to understand their clients’ fear of Mercury retrograde in addition to their fear of not having their parents’ unconditional love.

When I heard this about Pluto, however, I thought not of the small, distant planet but of the Roman god of the underworld. He’d been called Hades (brother to Zeus and Poseidon) by the Greeks, a name that meant “Unseen One,” which makes perfect sense for a god from underground. He was a grim figure, never smiling, but the thing I remembered was the Cap of Invisibility that he was given by the Cyclopes to help in the blood-lusty battles he and his brothers were always getting into. This helmet not only concealed his visibility; it also concealed his true nature, making it easier for him to deceive. Within his helmet, all that could be seen was a dark shadow—the Robert Motherwell version of Darth Vader.

Astronomers named the planet after the god because of this shadow aspect. Astrologers believe the planet rules over the shadow side of everything and everyone. When Pluto is retrograde, they say, things get murky and dark; when it moves forward again, issues of corruption and buried stories are likely to surface as we confront the darkest parts of ourselves and others.

The Greeks are always interesting in regard to democracy because they had everything in place except the “good of the people” part, like a Scrabble set without vowels. They rarely dwelt on the subtleties of human nature (too female); it was always the testosterone of sudden, unprovoked violence and enormous reach that dominated what they thought to scratch onto papyrus. Hades was known as the most feared of all gods, with people afraid to speak his name. Oddly, however, he was also known as Pluton, the Giver of Wealth, because there was a lot of good stuff to be found across his underground real estate. The Romans liked the wealth part and called their version Pluto, the god who periodically brought up gold, silver, diamonds, and other mined lucre.

Both the Greeks and the Romans had a glaring lack of a firewall between humans, gods, and all kinds of other creatures we meet in their literature. Separating fantasy from reality was not a priority; everything got mixed in the same pot for effect—which happens to be the way Donald Trump thinks about his presidency and profitmaking as well as fabrication and reality. In their myths and epics, the Greeks and Romans were less fascinated by the brute force of the man or god than the brazenness of it—which also happens to be the way much of the press thinks about Trump’s ignorant, petty, and vengeful behavior.

I don’t know about the astrology, but it feels to me that America is living under a dark, fearsome force—and that this force is not necessarily Donald Trump. Israel’s Iron Dome has been operational since 2011, but who can say when America came under the sway of what I’ll call Pluto’s Helmet, a force that conceals our true nature from ourselves? Not only do we believe lies; we don’t recognize ourselves as a people desiring to believe lies over visible reality. It’s sad to think that this force was probably operational when I was a teenager thinking that American democracy would save the world and that Greek gods were transparent jerks. But like most people then, I didn’t understand the concept of American “exceptionalism” as a codeword for imperialism, Romantic nationalism, and white nationalism.

What Americans have more of than any Western country is the capacity for belief. Faith comes before understanding, or so said Augustine, and Americans have a deep spiritual thirst for the former at the expense of the latter. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James wrote that religion in its broadest sense is “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” But American belief evolved to become more powerful, even, than any beatific God it was based on. In Anti-intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter wrote about “two pervasive American attitudes toward civilization and personal religion—first, a widely shared contempt for the past; and second, an ethos of self-help and personal advancement in which even religious faith becomes merely an agency of practicality.” In the 1950s, we saw the end of God coming, but we refused to choose rationalism and logical skepticism. Instead, we chose Norman Vincent Peale and The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). We chose “the law of attraction” and the auto-divination of our individual desires.

I don’t think the establishment left has any clue how pervasive magical thinking is in this country. Magical thinking is responsible for conspiracy theories and QAnon, but it is also responsible for Mercury Retrograde dates getting on Google calendars and young women announcing on Instagram that they are “manifesting” a Birkin bag. As Vice magazine explains, manifesting “has found a resurgence in the wellness, Instagram-influencer, self-care world. You can find advice on blogs and Instagram accounts on how to manifest an apartment in Paris, an ideal husband, or dream job. There are now several websites where you can print yourself a blank check from the ‘Universe,’ fill in the amount of money you want, and if you ‘believe and feel that you have the money now,’ the money will find its way to you on the date you wrote on the check.”

You can’t help associating this mania for manifesting with manifest destiny—the term we all learned in that murky part of the American history timeline, when at the conclusion of the Spanish–American War in 1898 the United States annexed the Philippines under the Treaty of Paris, sparking a grossly lopsided “war” that resulted in the deaths of 250,000 to 1 million civilians, mostly from famine and disease. In Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (2009), Jackson Lears argues that the hopes and dreams of Progressive Era Americans were fueled by “their dependence on empire for their prosperity, for their racial, social, and even moral identity as a people.” Hence the direct line between imperialism and a Birkin bag.

This is not to slam useful spiritual self-help in the Eckhart Tolle vein, but the self-help legacy of self-dealing that began with Peale’s conflation of Christianity and property has had close Republican associations: Peale was friends with Richard Nixon and opposed the candidacy of the Catholic John F. Kennedy; he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan and officiated Donald Trump’s marriage to Ivana Zelníčková. But then magical thinking in regard to the self runs across the political spectrum. In his 2017 book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, Kurt Anderson points out that Oprah Winfrey “is responsible for giving national platforms and legitimacy to all sorts of magical thinking, from pseudoscientific to purely mystical, fantasies about extraterrestrials, paranormal experience, satanic cults, and more.” And that “for three decades she has had a major role in encouraging Americans to abandon reason and science in favor of the wishful and imaginary.”

Under Pluto’s Helmet, astrology and other magical thinking fill the vacuum of not just religious identity but of religious community. Americans believe in idiosyncratic systems and theories that benefit and cater to the self (and maybe the family of the self) but not any larger group of strangers. Even practicing Christians opt for a choose-you-own-adventure suite of beliefs, the Golden Rule be damned. “Doing my own research” is the answer to expertise and academic and scientific institutions. What this means is a conscious withdrawal from participatory government on a mass-scale and at all levels . . . and an opening for despots possessing a Plutonic capacity for deception.

When Pluto went retrograde back on April 24, all we wanted to know was the truth within the darkness, the whole story that would connect the dots about Russian interference in the 2016 election and who in our government might be a Russian asset. Topping the news then were the many failures of the Mueller Report, but one item stood out: Joe Biden announced his presidential candidacy on April 25. Now retrograde is over. Hooray! But the dots remain unconnected. When will we ever know the truth? We may eventually free ourselves from the darkness of Donald Trump, but it’s anyone’s guess about the darkness of Pluto’s Helmet. When will we free ourselves from fear and ignorance and our world of lies? §