The supernatural has been an element of literature from the beginning. By the time Gilgamesh left Uruk on his quest, and no doubt long before, the gods were already firmly established and whiling away the tedium of eternity by meddling in human affairs. (We will ignore the fact that the word "supernatural" is self-contradictory. Everyone thinks they know what it means, so we'll play along with that.) All early literatures are full of god-stuff, demons, jinni, demiurges, and so on. Most gods are dead now, victims of the human lust for novelty and the natural desire to have a bigger, better god than that of the next guy, but the survivors still have quite a voluble press corps. As always, they have some stories to tell.

If dread Cthulhu is once again menacing mankind, his minions may be repelled by the graven stones of Mnar while the Elder Gods are invoked to stuff him (or rather, it) back into the benighted cthonic subterranean abysses of R'lyeh, where vast, tenebrous entities slowly, grotesquely and hideously dance to the mad skirling of strangely and obscenely carved bone flutes and the clattering of crotala fashioned from the skulls of creatures whose mere shadows would blast human reason. (I think I was channelling H. P. Lovecraft for a minute.)

If someone is demon-posessed, then you need to call in a specialist with a strong stomach and a full armory of godstuff; mere human agency is laughably insufficient.

If a giant, mutated, and radioactive Atomic Monster is devastating Tokyo, then you need to send somebody to Monster Island to wake up Godzilla, who will come and stomp on it. He has become rather fond of the Japanese in his later years, which is surprising after the way they've treated him.

If you're bothered by a vampire, then you need somebody with a crucifix, a wooden stake, and the mental acuity to determine if it's daytime or not. Our hero may drive the stake, but it's God, manifested in the crucifix and in daylight, who holds the vampire down. A mere human couldn't do it. Speaking of vampires, the original vampire of Transylvanian folklore was a dull, bestial creature, more like a zombie than the sexy, sophisticated modern vampire. Although the real Dracula "Vlad the Impaler" was not a vampire, he would have been a lot more interesting and a lot less lethal if he had been one (new model.) Romanians now consider him a national hero, mainly for killing a lot of Turks, and tend to regard the ornamentation and general improvement of his story as a sort of Western cultural imperialism. Wretched ingrates.

Anyway, this is simply the way these things have always been handled. In every case where there is a supernatural menace, a countervailing supernatural force must be invoked to deal with it. Or at least a giant, mutated, and radioactive one, which is almost the same thing.

However, about two hundred years ago, a most extraordinary thing happened. Scientific method began to be seriously applied to the world at large, and immediately began yielding knowledge and power to those who used it, and "future shock" to those who didn't pay attention. The supremely conservative godbiz reacted very badly, and some elements of it still do; but there was no getting around the fact that these strange new ideas had a certain intrinsic power, absolutely amoral and working equally well for the infidel and the faithful. The empowerment of humanity had begun; and from that time to this, the process has continued and is still accelerating. Citizens of the First World now enjoy the closest thing to a Golden Age that the Earth has ever seen. To those who imagine that they might have preferred to be an oligarch in Periclean Athens or a plantation owner in the ante-bellum South or somesuch, I say one word: medicine. The presumed pleasure of a life of leisure supported by slaves is far less compelling than a kidney stone or an impacted wisdom tooth.

The empowerment of the individual puts the current crop of gods in an increasingly tight spot. In order to keep well ahead of mere humans, they had to keep upping the ante. Until pretty recently, none of them have claimed actual complete omnipotence, possibly due to the realization that such a claim leads unavoidably to an infinitude of logical contradictions. Sure, the Old Testament god claimed omnipotence, but he was just as much a mere magnified human as any of the gods of Olympus. (See Gen 3:8, Ex 33, 34:5-14, Num 12:5, Ex 12:13, and 1 Sam 8:21.) Immensely powerful, but still just a crochety and somewhat crazed old man sitting up in the clouds, full of arbitrary rules and regulations and deeply concerned about your sex life. He was too parochial to withstand contact with the power and magnificence of the Roman Empire, and morphed into the first modern god, immanent and omni-whatever, and logical contradictions be damned; and when called upon to be god of the modern universe, infinitely vaster and more complex, he transcended our ability to say or think or feel anything at all meaningful about him. There is a real cognitive dissonance in imagining a being potent to shape galaxies, but still more demanding of worship and detailed abjection than any pop star, and still enraged if you break the Sabbath or piss against a wall. (See 1 Ki 21:21) Those who have no mental difficulty with this generally do not seem to integrate anything; they simply have an odd lot of facts and claims lying jumbled about in their strangely inert minds. A curious and depressing thing to see.

Meanwhile, back at reality, ever-increasing human efficacy continues to marginalize the gods. More deadly to them than any direct opposition is the fact that human thought simply bypasses them as irrelevant or useless. Attempts to make themselves more palatable and "friendlier" only dissipate their power and underscore their philosophical and psychological problems.

And then, as a whimsical little grace-note to all this endless tormented theogony, came "Ghostbusters." We have a genuinely and explicitly supernatural problem, but now human courage and human technology are sufficient to deal with it. Gods need not apply. Almost surprisingly the vehicle of this heretical idea was eagerly consumed, though no doubt in many cases by those who don't realize just what they've swallowed. This is something quite different from the philosophical atheism that has long been entertained by a tiny, bold minority. Thus is a beginning made toward busting the biggest ghosts of all, and (we may hope) the nascence of the first adult culture on earth.