The Cult of Morris, Part 1: Chthonic Beginnings

To make things easy, you can read part 1, part 2, and part 3 by clicking on their respective links. 

An English degree doesn't seem too useful at a glance.  Sure, you can write well, you're less likely to mix up to, two, and too (though it happens) and you appreciate literature on levels undreamed of by the lay person, but unfortunately a lot of the people with the power to give you a job are themselves lay people, and they're not particularly impressed with your knowledge of esoteric middle-English poetry.

While it's some consolation to know that, thanks to a glut of business colleges and lemming-like career-minded students, the MBA and other business-type degrees are about as valuable as toilet paper nowadays (less valuable, in fact, than the super-nice quilted and perfumed kind), there are still enough practical and profitable degrees to make an English BA, and by proxy a creative writing MFA, look silly and self-indulgent.  

 The world is your oyster, Hemingway

Regardless, there are a few degrees with even less practical application than an English BA, and right around the top of the list is anything having to do with religious studies.  Luckily for you, I am going to spend some time this week sharing my own knowledge of comparative religion by way of an easy and accessible metaphor.  Look at it this way - I'm sparing the most frivolous and self-indulgent among you 50,000 dollars and 4-8 years of your life.  You can thank me later.  Now is fine too, though.

Rather than make you guess what I'm driving at, I'll put my thesis here:  across three of its four incarnations, Saved by the Bell is a model of religious evolution.   Taken as one contiguous line of cultural history, Saved by the Bell represents early chthonic cosmogony, classical polytheism, and prophetic cults akin to that seen in Western Ibrahimic religions.  Taken as a whole, Good Morning, Miss Bliss, Saved by the Bell, and Saved by the Bell: the New Class depict religious archetypes found across multiple cultures, and illustrate the evolution of religious modalities in a way that is accessible to the layperson.

Bow before your new god

So first things first: the winding path of the Saved by the Bell Franchise.   

Saved by the Bell didn't start out as Saved by the Bell.  It started out as a show called Good Morning, Miss Bliss (a great and telling title with which to begin anything) and it only ran for one season.  Good Morning, Miss Bliss focused primarily on the titular teacher played by Haley "Parent Trap" Mills, and introduced many of the running characters who would persist through several incarnations of the franchise:  Zack Morris, Screech, Mr. Belding, and Lisa Turtle.

Unfortunately, nobody gave a crap about Miss Bliss and nobody gave even that much of a crap about middle school kids in Indiana, so some of the cast was picked up  for a continuation series and others were dumped, doomed either to B-list hell or total obscurity.  The setting moved about 2000 miles west to Bayside, California, and as the cast had aged, so too did their characters.  Saved by the Bell, the only series of which most casual viewers of SBTB are aware, covered four years of high school in five seasons, and became a vital element of modern American pop culture.

I'm so excited, I'm so excited, I'm so...scared

After high school, much of the cast naturally went on to college - Kelly, Zack, Screech, and Slater all went away to fictional Cal U, and it turns out that even though they were by far the most recognizable of the show's characters,  that alone couldn't carry the weight of the franchise.  Ultimately, Zack and Kelly announced plans to marry, and that was that for them. 

Then a curious thing happened - Screech returned to Bayside as a teaching assistant on the laughably bad Saved by the Bell: The New Class.  Trying to get any semblance of coherency from SBTB:TNC is like trying to build a cow out of hamburger.  There are chunks and fragments, and maybe a human finger, but even the few contiguous threads of character and setting meander into nonsensical nothing (idiosyncratically, it also had the longest run of any SBTB series).  While it serves to illustrate a point I'll make later, it's just a terrible show, and under no circumstances should you actually watch it. If you should accidentally get some Saved by the Bell: The New Class in your eyes, rinse with cold water for 30 seconds and then drink yourself to death. 

Or just watch Showgirls

This is all well and good, but what does all this have to do with Religion? 

We can compare SBTB most readily to Western mythic cycles in part because those are the most ingrained into Western culture (naturally) and also because those are the ones I myself studied (I'll leave comparisons between Mr. Belding and Bodhisattva to a more accomplished Far East Studies scholar), so let's look at how Western religions developed by discussing Chthonics.  

No, Chthonics is not a cardio class for those who lay dead-but-dreaming in the cyclopean city of R'lyeh.  Chthonic deities are earth-gods - they represent primal elemental forces (strictly speaking, they are only earth gods, but I'm using the term to mean elemental or nature-gods here), and are typically the first form of divinity worshiped by cultures around the world - think sun god, sky god, water god, etc.

In Greek myth, the Chthonics were Gaia and Uranus, but we can also include the titans in the Chthonic classification since any worship of those second-generation gods is lost to pre-history:  they may be just so much cosmogonical back-story, or they may at one time have had cults of their own - there's no way of knowing for sure. It is worth noting that sometimes the "old gods" are the gods worshipped by an indigenous population that are in turn denigrated and "killed" when new populations displace the old.  This explains why the snake-haired goddess of the Minoans becomes the dread Medusa, and why the fertility bulls of the Minoan Labrys cults become the hated Minotaur.

Similarly, we can see chthonic entities in Norse myth:  these are the giants, the trolls, and the dwarfs - alien beings that live in the wilds and besiege the more anthropomorphic Aesir gods, though here I digress:  chthonic deities are noteworthy for two reasons:  First, they are gods-of-old, those who are no longer directly worshipped or who are worshipped only on special occasions when need or delight call for archaic ritual. Second, their powers are broad and flexible, and they are almost always subsumed or usurped by younger gods with more narrowly prescribed powers and domains.

"Starring" is such a strong word...

But if you've never heard of Mist-Calf or Rhea or Borr, there are two readily accessible figures who closely mimic the chthonic gods in function:  Miss Bliss and Principal Richard Belding.

Miss Bliss is a gaia figure - she is Freudian femininity, teaching by way of example and inference, letting her students come to their own conclusions.  She is at times permissive to a fault, but never to the point of ruin: she has a deep wisdom and a nurturing sense of discipline: all the things one would expect of an earth goddess.

Her counterpart is Principal Belding, who is assertive, authoritarian, and masculine.  By comparison, he is a rigid and angry figure (such as anyone ever really gets angry on a Disney show) and it is he who acts as law-maker and law-bringer, and woe betide any who test his wrath.  Because, you know, they'll get detention or something. 

And so the series starts in the same way that Western spiritual culture starts:  with elemental forces and emerging masculine and feminine identities.  Interestingly enough, it is the earth-mother Miss Bliss who is the leading character, and this is reminiscent of the powerful fertility figures of Minoan and Celtic myth.  Miss Bliss holds tremendous power in her shaping of the young, and I think it is heavily symbolic that she is completely forgotten when the students go to High School, a realm which will become the province of male authority and enforced gender dichotomy.

Destroyer of Worlds

And so this is the origin of the Saved by the Bell franchise - feminine and chthonic with a nurturing goddess at its core.   This goddess is set in direct opposition to the ordered masculine forces of the universe, and though they are in conflict, they cooperate (sometimes unwittingly) to forge a new generation in their image.

But in so doing they sow the seeds of their own destruction for just as Cronus castrated Uranus, Zeus threw Cronus into Tartarus, and the Aesir cast out the Vanir, so too will Zack, Screech, Lisa, and their friends form a new Pantheon at Bayside. 

To be continued...

***When you buy off Amazon through this site, I make money***