Elvis lives, uh-huh

On Friday, fans of Elvis Presley marked the 25th anniversary of his death with appraisals of his career. The old argument – did the King popularise black music or colonise it? – was aired to no great conclusion, although the most convincing response is that he did both. The anniversary also provided an opportunity to revisit Elvis's flourishing post-mortem existence, in which the singer seems to have eschewed showbiz in favour of a series of low-paid jobs in the service industry. The most frequent sightings involve Elvis working in either a burger bar or a supermarket, and usually conclude with an ironic acknowledgement that his true identity has been rumbled.

The notion that he is still alive is extraordinarily resilient and reinforced, for believers, by elaborate theories that he deliberately faked his own death. In 1977 he was found collapsed on a bathroom floor, where he had been unconscious for hours; the imprecise explanation given on his death certificate, cardiac arrhythmia, has encouraged flights of fancy, some of which implicate state agencies in a massive cover-up. One of them apparently has Elvis living at a secret location under a witness-protection programme after working as a captain in the Louisiana state police. Another has him hiding out in secure accommodation in California after giving evidence in a murder trial.

The charm of these anecdotes lies not just in their improbability but in the recurrence of a single theme: the idea that after all the years of drugs, over-eating and rhinestone jumpsuits, Elvis has been resurrected as an ordinary American guy. He may not have come out publicly in support of an increase in the minimum wage, but he has belatedly demonstrated his solidarity with the poor white Southerners among whom he grew up. There are fascinating insights here into the fantasies of blue-collar Americans, who clearly cherish the idea of someone rejecting wealth and fame to return to his roots, as well as nursing a deep distrust of the state.

There is also an interesting contrast with the claimed sightings in this country, where Elvis has reportedly been spotted in an Indian restaurant in Palmers Green, north London, and returning a vacuum cleaner to the John Lewis department store in Welwyn Garden City. The notion of the King as a curry addict, or a consumer dissatisfied with the performance of his Dyson 8 Cyclone cleaner, is hardly the stuff myths are made of, except for the most schematic urban variety.

Those who most fervently subscribe to the legend may not realise it, but their beliefs are a modern manifestation of a very ancient theme. Resurrection has been central to many religions, including the Mithraic cult which, through its notion of sacrifice and rebirth into immortal life, provided the main competition to Christianity in the Roman empire. Resurrection is closely related to reincarnation, the cycle of death and rebirth favoured in different forms by Buddhists and the Druze, a secretive Middle Eastern sect who believe that recently deceased family members are reborn in young children.

It does not seem to me that any of this is innately more improbable than believing that Jesus was the son of God and rose from the dead. It is a testament to the power of the irrational over the human psyche, which craves teleological explanations for our existence and evidence that death is not the end. Whether Elvis faked his demise or came back from the dead does not matter in our theologically inexact times, where personal beliefs take precedence over hieratic pronouncements, but it does satisfy all kinds of vague yearnings for transcendence.

The Elvis whose death was mourned last week is, in the fantasies of his most devoted fans, an escape artist par excellence. He has triumphed over mortality and the emptiness of a particular kind of American dream, which promises untold happiness but delivers loneliness, addiction and obesity.

As irrational convictions go, this latest cult is far less harmful than the formalised belief systems that have provoked wars down the ages, and are still getting us into trouble in the 21st century. The US government, as we all know, is stuffed with born-again Christians who want to invade Iraq. In the circumstances, there is something positively beguiling about people who believe that Elvis was alive and well last year, ordering peanut-flavoured ice-cream with hot fudge sauce in a suburb of Philadelphia.