The Fifth Mask of God: The Dawn of the Post-Creative Society

This paper proposes that we are entering a fifth mythological epoch: the Fifth Mask of God. Building on Joseph Campbell’s framework of the Masks of God as negotiations between human finitude and cosmic infinity, this new era is defined by artificial intelligence. It marks a shift from the Fourth Mask’s modern myth of the autonomous artistic genius to a “post-creative society” in which human participation in creativity becomes optional. Generative AI removes the necessity for struggle, offering frictionless production and consumption. The central risk is not the death of creativity—a cosmic constant—but a voluntary human exodus from the “meaning-space”: the alchemical, psychological transformation forged through demanding creative engagement. Drawing on depth psychology (Jung, Freud, Jaspers) and existential philosophy, the paper argues that art functions as society’s psychic metabolism, transforming raw cosmic and unconscious material into bearable symbolic forms. The Fifth Mask architecturally enables the bypassing of this process, leading to a potential collapse of meaning-space, an atrophy of symbolic capacity, and a redirection of unmetabolized creative energy into hyper-egoic or pathological outlets. The choice presented is between conscious participation in the cosmic creative flow and passive abdication to algorithmic generation, with profound implications for individual psychology and cultural health. Keywords: creativity, artificial intelligence, Joseph Campbell, meaning-space, post-creative society, depth psychology, mythology, existentialism, metaphysics of creativity, philosophy of technology, generative AI, psychic metabolism, Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Jaspers, boundary-situations, myth and technology, alienation, symbolic thought.