The Overmind is Clarke’s vision of a possible transcendent future for humanity, and in the story, functions symbolically as a higher power and a final destination, an alternative for God and his authority and a vision of heaven as an eternal state of consciousness.
The Overmind is a universal cosmic consciousness that will come to Earth and absorb a portion of humanity into itself, allowing humanity to live on through the ages in a higher form of existence. The Overmind is the future home of humanity once it learns to transcend the material world, without its physical laws and bodily confines. Although the Overlords, who bear a symbolic parallel to both devils and angels, seem at first to be god-like to humanity, the Overmind is in fact the master and the Overlords are its servants. This, combined with its transcendent, non-corporeal state of being, puts the Overmind in the function of an ultimate higher power akin to God.
Pointedly, only those who have maintained a mystical capacity—those who have an openness to believing in things beyond the natural world—are able to join the Overmind; “God” will only accept those who “believe,” at which point they will shed their physical form, relinquish their individual selves, and enter “heaven” (that is, the Overmind’s cosmic consciousness). Although the Overlords abolish religion in the midst of their building a utopian world, the Overmind rekindles that lost spirituality, though not in the same format. As the children, in preparation for its coming, develop their latent psychic abilities, the evidence of a non-rational plane of existence is plain for all to see. Ultimately, the God-like Overmind ushers in the apocalypse, absorbing its children into itself and laying waste to the rest of the world, alluding to the Christian prophecy of the Rapture.
Although it is certainly not the Christian God, the Overmind thus functions as a parallel alternative, based not in divinity but in a belief in the mystical, paranormal potential of the universe.
The Overmind Quotes in Childhood’s End
He felt no regrets as the work of a lifetime was swept away. He had labored to take man to the stars, and now the stars—the aloof, indifferent stars—had come to him.
The universe was vast, but that fact terrified him less than its mystery. George was not a person who thought deeply on such matters, yet it sometimes seemed to him that men were like children amusing themselves in some secluded playground, protected from the fierce realities of the outer world.
In the space of a few days, humanity had lost its future, for the heart of any race is destroyed, and its will to survive is utterly broken, when its children are taken from it.
“And do you not resent being used as a tool by the Overmind?”
“The arrangement has some advantages: besides, no one of intelligence resists the inevitable.”
That proposition, Jan reflected wryly, had never been fully accepted by mankind.
For all their achievements, thought Karellen, for all their mastery of the physical universe, his people were no better than a tribe that has passed its whole existence upon some flat and dusty plain. Far off were the mountains, where power and beauty dwelt […] And they could only watch and wonder; they could never scale those heights.
The Overmind Symbol Timeline in Childhood’s End
