Yet another god, perhaps promoted from a mere muse to a full-fledged deity, is Calliope, who is now the ruler of the craving for fame. People may want money in order to obtain material goods. They may want sex for amusement, sometimes even for procreation. But Fame is now a thing in itself — it is an addiction. What does the relatively new term "celebrity" mean? It means that one is a well-known nobody. And the better one is well known, the less people care who and what one is. Indeed, many young girls and boys want to be film stars — not because they wish to be beautiful or powerful, but because they want to be known all over the world.

One may ask: where are all the temples of these gods? Well, the temples of Jupiter-Mammon are in almost every other building in the City of London and in Geneva — only they are called banks and their priests and high priests are called managers and executives. The temples (as well as the images) of Astarte are everywhere. And Calliope has little shrines in almost every household, in the form of television sets.

Does this mean that in the past, people did not crave power, did not want money and abstained from sex? I do not think so. All these things existed from the beginning of humanity, perhaps even earlier. But in the past, they were hidden desires. For some, they were temptations, while others branded them demons. Nowadays, however, these cravings are naked and are flaunted openly and unabashedly. So the Western world is now ruled by this trinity — which is quite different from the Christian one. This is neither a sermon nor an admonition, but a statement of fact. 

There are, however, some changes that come as a result of the times. The old-new gods now have more modern garments and they drive better cars. Today's Jupiter often wears a business suit, Astarte has undergone plastic surgery and Calliope very often appears on television.

This neo-paganism is also not completely official, yet: there are still various kinds of camouflage, such as universities or political institutions. But what makes them run? Surely not love. And one can see that they, too, are crumbling as real centres of power. Universities, although they are still teeming with people and activities, no longer have the same attraction, since knowledge is no longer a general passion, while politics is almost a bare drive for power, not a striving for any ideas. Along with them crumble all of the 19th-century ideologies. Ideologies nowadays are worth less than the paper they are printed on. Take nationalism or Marxism: at the beginning of the 20th century, both were very strong semi-religious ideologies. But today, how many people would be willing to die for the glory of their nation or for the proletariat? Oxford University once had a number of spies, some of them believers, or half-believers, in one of those ideology-religions. Today, there are no longer any spies at Oxford — not because people are purer or better, but because there is no reason for it, no sense in it. Communism is dead and today the world is ruled by these other powers.