A New Gnosis

Comic Books,
Comparative Mythology,
and Depth Psychology

Edited by
David M. Odorisio
Contemporary Religion and Popular Culture

Series Editors
Aaron David Lewis
Arlington, MA, USA

Eric Michael Mazur

Virginia Wesleyan College
Norfolk, VA, USA
Contemporary Religion and Popular Culture (CRPC) invites renewed
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 David M. Odorisio
Editor

A New Gnosis
Comic Books, Comparative Mythology, and Depth
Psychology
Editor
David M. Odorisio
Mythological Studies, Pacifica Graduate Institute
Santa Barbara, CA, USA

ISSN 2945-7777     ISSN 2945-7785 (electronic)

Contemporary Religion and Popular Culture
ISBN 978-3-031-20126-4    ISBN 978-3-031-20127-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1

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For my brother, Joey
 Acknowledgments

To the students, faculty, and staff of the Mythological Studies program at

Pacifica Graduate Institute, for continually inspiring and supporting a pas-
sion for this work. Your collegiality and friendship over the past several –
challenging – years is wholeheartedly appreciated. To the volume
contributors, several of whom are former students, I extend my sincere
thanks for your time, patience, and for the privilege of learning from each
of you. To Jeff Kripal, for your generosity and intellectual inspiration over
many years. To the anonymous reviewers of the initial book proposal –
your helpful feedback improved this project in significant ways. To Phil
Getz at Palgrave and Eliana Rangel at Springer, with gratitude for your
support throughout the proposal and production stages. To Joanna, for
encouraging this project, and for seeing it – and me – through, as you so
generously do, with patience, love, humor, and playfulness. And lastly, to
my brother Joey, for whom this volume is dedicated, and the weekly rides
in our mother’s blue Mercury Sable station wagon (thanks mom for driv-
ing) in search of comics – and more.

vii
 Contents

A New Gnosis: The Comic Book as Mythical Text  1

David M. Odorisio

Part I A New Gnosis: Comic Books as Modern Mythology  13


Dreaming the Myth Onward: Comic Books as Contemporary
Mythologies 15
Craig Chalquist


From Horror to Heroes: Mythologies of Graphic Voodoo in
Comics 25
Yvonne Chireau


Mystico-Erotics of the “Next Age Superhero”: Christian
Hippie Comics of the 1970s 59
Amy Slonaker


The Flying Eyeball: The Mythopoetics of Rick Griffin 83
Erik Davis

Graphic Mythologies113
Evans Lansing Smith

ix
x Contents

Part II Archetypal Amplifications: Comic Books,

Comparative Mythology, and Depth Psychology 139


Archetypal Dimensions of Comic Books141
Jeffrey T. Kiehl


All-Female Teams: In Quest of the Missing Archetype161
Jennifer Maile Kaku


Infirm Relatives and Boy Kings: The Green Man Archetype in
Alan Moore’s The Saga of The Swamp Thing181
John Bucher


The Shadow of the Bat: Batman as Archetypal Shaman197
John Todd


“To Survive and Still Dream”: Ritual and Reclamation in
Little Bird221
Jennifer Tronti


Graffiti in the Grass: Worldbuilding and Soul Survival
Through Image, Immersive Myth, and the Metaxis233
Li Sumpter


Afterword: Comics and Gnostics243
Jeffrey J. Kripal

Index257
 Notes on Contributors

David M. Odorisio, PhD, is Associate Core Faculty and Co-Chair of the

Mythological Studies program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara,
CA. David received his PhD in East-West Psychology from the California
Institute of Integral Studies and teaches in the areas of theory and method
in the study of religion, psychology and religion, and Christian mysti-
cism. He is editor of Merton and Hinduism: The Yoga of the Heart (Fons
Vitae, 2021), and co-­editor of Depth Psychology and Mysticism (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018), and has published in numerous journals in the fields of
Jungian and transpersonal psychology.
John Bucher, PhD, is the author of The Storytelling Almanac (SSMG
Press), Master of the Cinematic Universe (MWP), Storytelling for Virtual
Reality (Routledge), A Best Practice Guide to Sex and Storytelling
(Routledge), and The Emerald Tablet (SSMG Press), a graphic adaptation
of the classic esoteric text, among other books and articles. He serves as
the Creative Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and holds a
PhD in Mythological Studies with Emphasis in Depth Psychology from
Pacifica Graduate Institute. He teaches film, writing, and story courses in
the Los Angeles area and around the world. Follow his work at: telling-
abetterstory.com.
Craig Chalquist, PhD, is department chair of Consciousness and
Transformative Studies at National University. He teaches and writes
where psyche, story, nature, and myth intersect. His most recent book
is Terrapsychological Inquiry: Restorying Our Relationship with Nature,
Place, and Planet (Routledge, 2020). Visit his website at: worldrede.com.

xi
xii Notes on Contributors

Yvonne Chireau, PhD, is the Peggy Chan Professor of Black Studies at

Swarthmore College, where she teaches courses on Africana religions and
American religious history. She is the author of Black Magic: Religion and
the African American Conjuring Tradition (2003) and the co-editor of
Black Zion: African American Religions and Judaism (1999). Her writ-
ings on the historical intersections of magic, religion, and cultural dis-
courses on Voodoo can be found online at the research blog The Academic
Hoodoo: academichoodoo.com.
Erik Davis, PhD, is an author, award-winning journalist, and scholar
based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on the intersection
of alternative religion, media, and the popular imagination. He is the
author, most recently, of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary
Experience in the Seventies, co-published by MIT Press and Strange
Attractor. He also wrote Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern
Esoterica (2010), The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s
Spiritual Landscape (2006), a critical volume on Led Zeppelin (2005),
and the celebrated cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in
the Age of Information (1998). Erik’s scholarly and popular essays on
music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in scores of
books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a
dozen languages. He received his BA from Yale University, and earned his
PhD in religious studies at Rice University. www.techgnosis.com.
Jennifer Maile Kaku, PhDc, received a BA in English from Stanford
University and an MA in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate
Institute, where she is a doctoral candidate. She holds a French postgradu-
ate degree (DEA, Diplôme d’études approfondies) in Histoire et Sémiologie
du Texte et de l’Image from the Université de Paris-Diderot. In addition
to Hawaiian and Indigenous myth, her research interests include the
mythological underpinnings of everyday life, the power(s) of story and
narrative, and a focus on issues of gender, ethnocentricity, and alterity.
Several of her essays have been published in the Mythological Studies
Journal. She is also a dancer and a teacher of hula who divides her time
between Paris, France, and Honolulu, Hawai‘i.
Jeffrey T. Kiehl, PhD, is a Jungian Analyst and senior training analyst at
the C.G. Jung Institute of Colorado and the Inter-Regional Society of
Jungian Analysts. Jeffrey is the author of Facing Climate Change: An
Integrated Path to the Future, which provides a Jungian perspective on the
 Notes on Contributors  xiii

climate crisis. He is also the author of “Engaging the Green Man” in

Depth Psychology and Climate Change, and “U.S. Cultural Complexes and
Climate Change” in Cultural Complexes and the Soul of America. Jeffrey
has been reading comic books since 1961.
Jeffrey J. Kripal, PhD, is the Associate Dean of the Faculty and Graduate
Programs in the School of the Humanities and the J. Newton Rayzor
Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He also
helps direct the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in
Big Sur, California, and sits on advisory boards in the U.S. and Europe
involving the nature of consciousness and the sciences. Jeff is the author
of numerous books, including, most recently, The Superhumanities:
Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities (Chicago, 2022),
where he intuits an emerging new order of knowledge that can engage in
robust moral criticism but also affirm the superhuman or nonhuman
dimensions of our histories, cultures, and futures. He is presently working
on a three-volume study of paranormal currents in the sciences, modern
esoteric literature, and the hidden history of science fiction for the
University of Chicago Press collectively entitled The Super Story: Science
(Fiction) and Some Emergent Mythologies. His full body of work can be
seen at http://jeffreyjkripal.com. He thinks he may be Spider-Man.
Amy Slonaker, JD, PhDc, is a doctoral candidate in the Mythological
Studies program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. After receiving her under-
graduate degree in Religious Studies from UC Santa Barbara, she attended
Seattle University School of Law and subsequently practiced as an attor-
ney for over 20 years in the areas of criminal defense and securities litiga-
tion. Since 2012, she has worked with the Morbid Anatomy Library of
Brooklyn, New York, by contributing programming and serving on
its board.
Evans Lansing Smith, PhD, has degrees from Williams College, Antioch
International, and The Claremont Graduate School, and is Core Faculty
in the Mythological Studies program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. He is
the author of ten books and numerous articles on comparative literature
and mythology, and has taught at colleges in Switzerland, Maryland,
Texas, and California, and at the C.G. Jung Institute in Kusnacht. In the
late 1970s, he traveled with Joseph Campbell on study tours of Northern
France, Egypt, and Kenya, with a focus on the Arthurian Romances of the
Middle Ages and the Mythologies of the Ancient World.
xiv Notes on Contributors

Li Sumpter, PhD, is a mythologist and multidisciplinary artist who

applies strategies of worldbuilding and mythic design toward building bet-
ter, more resilient communities of the future. Li’s creative research and
collaborative projects engage the art of survival and sustainability through
diverse ecologies and immersive stories of change. Li is a cultural producer
and eco-arts activist working through MythMedia Studios, the Escape
Artist Initiative, and various arts and community-based organizations in
Philadelphia, PA, and across the country. She holds an MA in Art and
Humanities Education from NYU and an MA/PhD in Mythological
Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate
Institute.
John Todd, PhD, is a diplomate Jungian analyst based in Evergreen,
Colorado. A native of Florida, he began his career as a children and
families counselor for Hospice of the Florida Suncoast for over a
decade before starting private practice. In 2006 he relocated
to Evergreen with his wife and two children. He is currently the
Director of Training for the C.G. Jung Institute of Colorado.
Jennifer Tronti, PhDc, is a doctoral candidate in Mythological Studies at
Pacifica Graduate Institute. She received her BA in English from California
Baptist College, and MA degrees in Literature in English from The
Claremont Graduate School and in Mythological Studies from Pacifica
Graduate Institute. She is an Assistant Professor of English at California
Baptist University, where she has also served as the English Program
Director, and teaches composition, creative writing, literature, and film.
She has been a conference presenter at the Western Regional Conference
on Christianity and Literature, and PAMLA: Pacific Ancient and Modern
Language Association on themes ranging from film, myth, ritual, and tears.

List of Contributors
John Bucher Joseph Campbell Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Craig Chalquist Consciousness and Transformative Studies, National
University, San Diego, CA, USA
Yvonne Chireau Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA
Erik Davis, San Francisco, CA, USA
 Notes on Contributors  xv

Jennifer Maile Kaku Mythological Studies, Pacifica Graduate Institute,

Santa Barbara, CA, USA
Jeffrey T. Kiehl, Santa Cruz, CA, USA
Jeffrey J. Kripal Department of Religion, Rice University, Houston,
TX, USA
David M. Odorisio Mythological Studies, Pacifica Graduate Institute,
Santa Barbara, CA, USA
Amy Slonaker Mythological Studies, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa
Barbara, CA, USA
Evans Lansing Smith Mythological Studies, Pacifica Graduate Institute,
Santa Barbara, CA, USA
Li Sumpter MythMedia Studios and the Escape Artist Initiative,
Philadelphia, PA, USA
John Todd C.G. Jung Institute of Colorado, Denver, CO, USA
Jennifer Tronti Modern Languages and Literature, California Baptist
University, Riverside, CA, USA
 List of Figures

Mystico-Erotics of the “Next Age Superhero”: Christian

Hippie Comics of the 1970s
Fig. 1 “Jesus Is Better Than Hash” (1971), Hollywood Free Paper.
(D.A. Hubbard Library. Fuller Theological Seminary. Used with
permission)69
Fig. 2 Al Hartley, Archie’s Sonshine (1974). (New York: Archie
Enterprises, Inc. Used with permission) 72
Fig. 3 “Is Your Name Being Carved in this Heart?” (1976), Hollywood
Free Paper. (D.A. Hubbard Library. Fuller Theological Seminary.
Used with permission) 74
Fig. 4 “The Little Flirty Fishy” (1982). (True Komix. Used with
permission)77

The Shadow of the Bat: Batman as Archetypal Shaman

Fig. 1 Zhong Kui (Source: Wikipedia) 203
Fig. 2 Guillaume Geefs, “Le génie du mal,” or “The Lucifer of Liège,”
1848. (Source: Wikipedia) 204
Fig. 3 The Rebis, from The Rosarium Philosophorum (16th c.). (Archive
for Research in Archetypal Symbolism [ARAS]) 207
Fig. 4 Hermaphrodite, from Aurora Consurgens (15th c.). (Archive for
Research in Archetypal Symbolism [ARAS]) 208
Fig. 5 Navajo Sand Painting (Archive for Research in Archetypal
Symbolism [ARAS]) 210

xvii
 A New Gnosis: The Comic Book
as Mythical Text

David M. Odorisio

Abstract Comic book authors and illustrators frequently incorporate

mythical – and mystical – elements into their narratives and onto their
pages, redefining the boundaries of what a comic book might convey and
enhancing the medium’s potential for transmitting certain revelatory or
“gnostic” truths. The inclusion of such material recrafts the comic book as
a gateway for readers’ own possible “non-ordinary” mythical encounters.
This introductory essay frames the volume as a whole from within mytho-
logical and depth psychological traditions and traces the origins and inter-
sections of these rich comparative fields, including their potential for
mining “hidden knowledge” (gnosis) in the graphic medium of
comic books.

Keywords Mythology • Depth psychology • Comic books • Gnosis

• Freud • Jung

D. M. Odorisio (*)
Mythological Studies, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
D. M. Odorisio (ed.), A New Gnosis, Contemporary Religion and
Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1_1
2 D. M. ODORISIO

Why are we still making myths? Why do we need new myths? And what sort of
stories attain this stature?
—Philip Ball (2021, 3)

For the past several years I have taught a graduate seminar on the topic
of “Comic Books as Modern Mythology,” focusing on the contemporary
resurgence of mythic motifs in popular culture, with an emphasis on the
comic book medium. Throughout the course, students are encouraged to
think both imaginatively and critically (alongside Jeffrey Kripal [2011],
whose Mutants and Mystics serves as the required reading), on the histori-
cal, cultural, and religious significance of this modern graphic renaissance.
Following Christopher Knowles (2007), I encourage students to ask, “Do
our gods wear spandex?” And if so, what might the (often humorous)
implications of this grand enactment convey? Following Kripal (2011), are
we moderns unconsciously caught in a Feuerbachian loop of self-­
reflexivity – projecting our own idealized selves, or even “human poten-
tial,” onto caped crusaders? Or, do comic books and popular “occulture”
(Partridge 2004), serve as a form of “cultural mourning,” akin to Homans’
(1989) portrayal of the origins of psychoanalysis, where acknowledgment
of cultural or spiritual loss leads to a form of personal or social renewal.
Perhaps the (old) gods are dead. But if so, comic books deftly – and defi-
antly – proclaim, “Long live the (new) gods!”
As Knowles (2007) boldly states, “American religion seems unable to
provide a viable salvation myth in this time of crisis…. It should not sur-
prise us, then, when Harry Potter, Star Wars, and The X-Men step in to fill
the void” (218). Nietzsche’s claim (in the mouth of Zarathustra) that
“God is dead,” created (or at least articulated) a spiritual vacuum that
reverberated throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
lingering perhaps even to this day. Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung’s own
response to the spiritual vacancy of post-World War I Europe was entitled,
Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933). For Jung, it involves a secular
religiosity (or religious secularism) that is ultimately a psychologized form of
religious expression – and experimentation. Particularly in his essays, “The
Spiritual Problem of Modern Man” and “Psychotherapists or the Clergy,”
Jung’s (1933) impassioned reply to the increasing despondency of post-­
War materialism and the dominance of scientific rationalism is a return to
interiority – the “search for soul.”
Homans (1989), in a similar-but-different key, traces the work of
Freud, Jung, and the early psychoanalytic circle, and argues that the
 A NEW GNOSIS: THE COMIC BOOK AS MYTHICAL TEXT 3

origins of psychoanalysis can be interpreted as a response to such cultural,

religious, and spiritual “loss.” The resultant interiority and introspection
upon which psychoanalysis establishes itself fosters the “ability to mourn” –
individually and collectively – and is followed by a reconstituted or renewed
sense of self-identity – “individuation” in the case of Jung; for Freud, the
wider psychoanalytic project of culture-formation (see, e.g.,
Obeyesekere 1990).
And yet – whence myth? Parallel, yet foundational, to the cultural and
meaning-making projects of early depth psychology lies the work that many,
especially Freud and Jung, would stake their widest (and most controversial)
claims. The rapid emergence of a field of “comparative mythology,” made
possible by centuries of colonialist expansion and European fixation upon,
and idealization of, non-Western cultures, would make possible the anthro-
pological and early comparative work of E.B. Tylor (1832-1917), J.G. Frazer
(1854-1941), and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939). Not without their
modern-day critics (see, e.g., King 2017), these formative comparativists
would initiate several disciplines upon which Freud and Jung would theo-
rize their universalizing psychological claims.
As part of their cultural mourning, pioneering depth psychologists such
as Freud (1899), Otto Rank (1909), Jung (1911-12/1956), and their
psychoanalytic-anthropologist counterparts, Géza Róheim (1992) and
Bruno Bettelheim (1976), would “return” to “primitive” (often romanti-
cized) wells of comparative mythology as universal, trans-historical sources
of theory-making – what Daniel Merkur (2005) refers to as the shift “from
mythology into meta-psychology” (1; see also Downing 1975, and
Segal 2020).
The contemporary (i.e., mid-late 20th and early 21st c.) situation which
birthed the monumental rise of the comic book genre and superhero
“mythology” in general is not that different from the early 20th c. post-­
War existential vacuum. If anything, the situation has only become exacer-
bated via the continued decline of organized “institutional” religion, and
the general existential malaise of late capitalist U.S. culture as a whole.
And yet this is not – and has not – been the complete (super)story. At an
accelerated pace, “Spiritual But Not Religious” (see, e.g., Parsons 2018)
and emerging new religious movements (Urban 2015), such as neo-­
paganism, have quickly – and vastly – populated American and European
horizons. To me, it is no surprise that many of these emergent move-
ments, beginning with 1960s counter-cultural ideas, have been – and con-
tinue to be – reflected in the multi-paneled pages of comic book
4 D. M. ODORISIO

phenomena. Following American sci-fi futurist, Philip K. Dick, the current

(and future) god(s) are found, not in an ‘above-ground’ mainstream, but
in the “trash stratum” (Davis 2019, 369) – often composed of, and includ-
ing, one’s own popular “occulture” (Partridge 2004).
The notion of “gnosis” (Hanegraaff 2016) – a hidden (“occult”) and
revelatory form of direct, experiential knowing – is not far removed
(indeed, it is akin), to Dick’s (1981) “VALIS,” a consciousness-zapping,
gnoseologically-informed extraterrestrial satellite, capable of spiritually
illuminating or mentally modifying its recipient. As Kripal (2011) ampli-
fies, the notion of transformation by being “zapped” or radiated – whether
scientifically or cosmically – is a key “mytheme” of his own reading of an
American and British comic book “super-story” – as well as foundational
to his own lived “mystical hermeneutics” (Kripal 2001, 3-5), and evi-
denced in several first-person accounts of his own gnosis-encoded “zap-
ping” (Kripal 2001, 2011, 2017).

St. Francis – Zapped (Francis, Brother of the Universe. 1980. Marvel Comics. Used
with permission)
 A NEW GNOSIS: THE COMIC BOOK AS MYTHICAL TEXT 5

To Kripal, the gnostic dimension of comic books and superhero narra-

tives enters into his postulation of mutants as mystics (2007, 2011). For
Kripal (2007), a living “comparative mystics” (93-6) takes into account
the “Real X-Men” (146-52) that populate the literature of the anomalous
and the mystical. In other words, the fields of Comics Studies and
Comparative Mysticism (and Mythology) have much to offer – and learn –
from one another, because to Kripal, they are in all actuality profoundly
(inter)related. The “Real X-Men” that he announces, whether Teresa of
Ávila and Joseph of Copertino in their mystic flights of levitation; the vari-
ous (and infamous) mediums of the psychical research tradition (e.g.,
Leonora Piper, Eusapia Palladino, Helene Preiswerk, and their principal
investigators, William James, Frederic Myers, and C.G. Jung, respec-
tively); Freud’s interest (and ultimately evidentiary belief) in telepathy (a
term coined by Myers), which he theorized as “unconscious communica-
tion”; or the more contemporary Michael Murphy, founder of the Esalen
Institute in Big Sur, CA (whom Kripal compares to fictional X-Man Prof.
Charles Xavier, with Murphy’s founding of a school for “human poten-
tial” akin to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, i.e. mutants) – in each
of these examples, “real life” mystics (or mediums) reflect back the super-­
powered realities that would mythically (re)emerge from the pages of
esoterically-encoded contemporary comic books as forms of gnosis (see
also DeConick 2016). In other words, the comic book as both mythical
and mystical text.
The essays in this volume are certainly not the first to suggest that
comic books serve as a form of “modern mythology,” or even as gnostic
or esoterically-encoded mythical, mystical texts. Far from it. Following in
the lineage and legacy of Schechter (1980), Reynolds (1992), Knowles
(2007), Kripal (2007, 2011), Morrison (2012), and Ball (2021), this vol-
ume offers an inter-disciplinary approach to comic books through the dual
lens of comparative mythology and depth psychology. This often ‘unholy
union’ is itself not without precedent as well. As highlighted above, Freud,
Jung, Rank, and others, built their depth psychological enterprises upon a
comparative mythology that, to them, “storied” and symbolically por-
trayed the otherwise inarticulate unconscious dynamics of modern per-
sons’ fragmented psyches. Freud’s “Oedipus,” Jung’s (1911-12/1956)
“mana personality,” and later, his concepts of “individuation,” “arche-
type,” and the controversial notion of a “collective unconscious,” all
attempt a theoretical claim on the “mythic origins” of the unconscious.
Perhaps most popularly influential of them all (at least in contemporary
6 D. M. ODORISIO

film and cinema) is Joseph Campbell’s (1949) psychoanalytically-inflected

(male) “hero,” who (following Jung 1911-12/1956), battles for “deliver-
ance from the Mother,” only to reach apotheosis through “the Father.”
The essays offered here, while not all commenting directly on this com-
parative mythological and depth psychological “genealogy,” are certainly
indebted to it, with several authors having dedicated their scholarly voca-
tions to undoing more than a few sins of the past (often sins of omission),
in critically re-thinking from feminist, gender-queer, or Black critical per-
spectives, what a “modern mythology” can or should look like, and how
comic books in particular might assist to “dream the myth onwards and
give it a modern dress” (Jung 1959, para. 271).
The essays in this volume fall under two main headings. Part I focuses
on the function of comic books as “modern mythologies,” and includes
both archaeological investigations from comics’ storied past, as well as
critical revisionings for (and from) the future. Part II underscores the
“archetypal” nature of comic book phenomena, focusing on recurrent
characters, myththemes, motifs, and the interconnectivity between Jungian
depth psychological hermeneutics and the study and practice of compara-
tive mythology.
Craig Chalquist’s essay opens Part I by further articulating Jung’s
injunction to “dream the myth onwards” through a critical glance at the
contemporary legacy of a “comparative mythology,” particularly through
a creative re-thinking of Joseph Campbell’s “mythogenic zone.” Chalquist
notes current examples of how authors of comics draw upon mythic mate-
rial from their own diverse cultural backgrounds to weave tales of fantasy
and magic relevant for our time. Chalquist argues that a valid “loreway” –
a network of storied performances rich with transformative ideas – has
more allure today than any project to reconstitute yesterday’s frag-
mented myths.
Yvonne Chireau’s exceptional essay, “From Horror to Heroes:
Mythologies of Graphic Voodoo,” examines the mythos of Voodoo in
comics from the early twentieth century to the present day. Unlike Vodun,
an indigenous tradition of West Africa, or Vodou, an African diasporic
religion in Haiti, Voodoo is a trope of imagined racial and religious other-
ness. Comics Voodoo, or what Chireau calls “Graphic Voodoo,” comes to
the fore in its envisioning of Black religion and spirituality as the loci of
spectacular figurations of horror and supernaturalism, and ultimately as an
origin source of the Black Superhero as Africana deity. For Chireau,
Graphic Voodoo simultaneously reflects and exaggerates fears of the Black
 A NEW GNOSIS: THE COMIC BOOK AS MYTHICAL TEXT 7

Sacred through the use of sensational narratives and visual illustrations of

Africana religions as savage, violent, and demonic.
Erik Davis’ single-author study of California’s Rick Griffin offers a deep
dive into arguably the greatest artist to emerge from the maelstrom of
psychedelic visual culture in San Francisco’s late 1960s. An early and influ-
ential underground “comix” creator, Griffin was additionally known for
his rock poster art and album covers. Griffin was also a genuine seeker,
drawing concepts as well as images from esoteric sources and fusing these
with psychedelia, humor, and dread, typified by his legendary “flying eye-
balls” vision. Taking Griffin’s esotericism seriously, Davis’ chapter shows
how Griffin’s art intertwined with his concerns regarding the occult, car-
nality, judgment, and the soul, and how tensions visible in his work led to
his conversion to Christianity in the early 1970s, at the peak of the counter-­
cultural “Jesus Movement.”
Following and furthering Davis’ jaunt with the Jesus Movement is Amy
Slonaker’s “Christian Hippie Comics of the 1970s.” Slonaker examines
comics aimed at the “Jesus People movement” as it emerged in southern
California between the late 1960s through the late 1970s. Her focus on
Christian Hippie Comics includes Al Hartley’s Spire Christian Comics, and
True Komix, the official comic book of The Children of God, a Christian-­
based cult born of the Hippie era. Following Jeffrey Kripal, Slonaker’s
analysis unearths a libidinal structure to Christian Hippie Comics in their
conjoining of the numinous and the erotic. She posits that such “tantric”
elements in Christian comics may be surprising given Christianity’s tradi-
tionally repressive attitude toward forms of sexuality; however, as Slonaker
suggests, these tantric motifs reflect the Asian influences of the hippie cul-
ture which these comics targeted for conversion to Christianity. The
resulting comic style includes elements of a tantric revisioning of the
Gospel aimed at the hippie youth of the day.
Evans Lansing Smith’s “Graphic Mythologies” rounds out the first part
of the book in his exploration of the mythologies of the Egyptian Books
of the Dead, Navajo Sand Paintings, and C.G. Jung’s Red Book, with a
focus on the journey to the “otherworld.” For Smith, such texts form the
archetypal ground for the contemporary (re)emergence of graphic media,
such as comic books, animated film, and video games, often with overt
influence from mythic materials and traditions from past cultures.
Part II, “Archetypal Amplifications,” leads with Jungian analyst Jeffrey
Kiehl’s rich “Archetypal Dimensions of Comic Books.” Kiehl’s personal
opening affords an overview of the Silver Age of comics, with its more
8 D. M. ODORISIO

complex and multidimensional characters, focusing on their psychological

depth and nuanced nature. Writing as a psychologist, Kiehl interprets the
long-standing popularity of comic books as resting upon comics’ connect-
edness to an archetypal dimension of the unconscious. From a depth psy-
chological perspective, these characters serve as personified forms of
archetypal energies operating within Jung’s “collective unconscious.”
Kiehl focuses his analysis on archetypal patterns and dynamics within the
Fantastic Four stories published during the Silver Age, followed by a paral-
lel analysis of Alan Moore’s more contemporary comics series Promethea.
He concludes by considering how each of these comic book series illus-
trates a “religious function” within the psyche.
Maile Kaku’s compelling “All-Female Teams: In Quest of the Missing
Archetype,” critiques long-standing narratives of all-male heroic teams.
To Kaku, such all-male teams have inspired not only comic-book charac-
ters but real-life exemplars of comradeship and adventure among
“brothers-­ in-arms.” Conversely, Kaku notes, nothing comparable has
existed for the opposite sex, with no mythological female-identified arche-
types in the narrative landscape. Kaku then sets out in search of the “miss-
ing archetype,” asking, “If men have their celebrated Brotherhood
archetype, why do women lack an analogous Sisterhood archetype?” The
archetypal images that emerge of all-female teams resembles what Kaku
calls “Furyhood,” rather than Sisterhood. The Furies, Maenads, and
Amazons of ancient mythologies resurface in the guise of male-bashing
superheroine teams and female-ruled planets in the narratives of modern-­
day comics. Surprising as it may seem, Kaku discovers that stories of female
bonding are a relatively recent innovation in the history of comics and in
Western narratives as a whole.
John Bucher’s “Infirm Relatives and Boy Kings” explores the Green
Man archetype in Alan Moore’s celebrated Swamp Thing. Tracking the
archetype of the Green Man, Bucher draws historical connections from
this mythic figure’s origins to his triumphant 1984 reemergence in the
popular imagination via Moore’s Swamp Thing. Bucher reads Swamp
Thing as one of the most expansive explorations of the Green Man arche-
type – even though the mythological figure is never referenced directly.
While Bucher’s exploration is not the first to suggest that Moore’s execu-
tion of Swamp Thing may be an amplification of the Green Man archetype,
his unique approach demonstrates connections beyond the ecological and
Dionysian, and instead embraces a lens that magnifies wounding in the
representation and narrative of the creature.
 A NEW GNOSIS: THE COMIC BOOK AS MYTHICAL TEXT 9

John Todd’s “The Shadow of the Bat” explores the shamanic arche-
typal underpinnings of the Batman legacy. Tracing notions of the bat
throughout history, Todd investigates changing attitudes of this revered-­
reviled and fascinating creature. Despite the bat’s clear benefit to human
and planetary ecology in general, Western culture has demonized it, which
begs the question, “Why has so much negative shadow material has been
projected onto the bat?” And further, despite such fear of the bat, why has
contemporary culture so thoroughly embraced a “Bat-man”? Through
interpreting Batman as “psychopomp,” Todd explores the redemptive
imagery of the bat and what it symbolically contains for modern Westerners.
Jennifer Tronti’s “Ritual and Reclamation in Little Bird” examines the
recent Eisner Award-winning series, Little Bird: The Fight for Elder’s Hope.
Little Bird presents a “postapocalyptic vision which pits an obscenely cor-
rupt totalitarian religious regime against an indigenously-inspired rebel
community.” To Tronti, the comic book offers a picture of archetypal
contrasts: institution and individual, other and self, death and life, real and
imagined, and story and experience. Through subtle psychological and
spiritual depths, and utilizing the hermeneutic landscape of Ritual Theory,
Tronti underlies the graphic spectacle of blood and violence in Little Bird,
giving voice and shape to the myriad ambiguities and ambivalences of the
human condition.
Graphic mythologist Li Sumpter’s Epilogue on “Worldbuilding and
Soul Survival” concludes the volume. Sumpter’s work as a community
activist-educator as well as artist-mythmaker underscores and spotlights
the future-forward direction of worldbuilding amidst fantasies (and reali-
ties) of apocalypticism in contemporary urban America. Sumpter imagines
new worlds “where black and brown people, women, and all humans not
only survive, but emerge more resilient and self-reliant, so they can thrive
through whatever comes next.”
As a whole, this volume celebrates the plurality, diversity, and richness
of over a century of sustained comparative reflection. Utilizing historical-­
critical, mythological, and depth psychological tools, comic books come
to life through a spectrum of hermeneutic horizons – vividly and boldly
exemplifying the “new gnosis” that first appeared in the early American
“super-story” (Kripal 2011), only to spread rapidly across the Atlantic,
and around the globe. While Knowles’ (2007) claim that superhero com-
ics provide a “viable salvation myth” in times of crisis might prove difficult
to demonstrate empirically, the essays in this volume certainly support, or
at least point towards, the gnoseological significance of comic books in
10 D. M. ODORISIO

and for contemporary culture. A “new gnosis” crash-landed in Smallville

in 1938 and U.S. and British – and perhaps the world’s – popular culture
(and consciousness) has never been the same.

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Bettelheim, Bruno. 1976. The Uses of Enchantment. New York: Thames & Hudson.
Campbell, Joseph. 1949. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Davis, Erik. 2019. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in
the Seventies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
DeConick, April. 2016. The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality
Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Dick, Philip K. 1981. VALIS. New York: Bantam.
Downing, Christine. 1975. Sigmund Freud and the Greek Mythological Tradition.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43 (1): 3–14.
Freud, Sigmund. 1899/1913. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Macmillan.
Hanegraaff, Wouter. 2016. Gnosis. In The Cambridge Handbook of Western
Mysticism and Esotericism, ed. G. Magee, 381–392. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Homans, Peter. 1989. The Ability to Mourn: Disillusionment and the Social Origins
of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jung, C.G. 1911-12/1956. Symbols of Transformation. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
———. 1933. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. London: Kegan Paul.
———. 1959. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton: Princeton
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King, Richard. 2017. Religion, Theory, Critique: Classic and Contemporary
Approaches and Methodologies. New York: Columbia University Press.
Knowles, Christopher. 2007. Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic
Book Heroes. San Francisco: Weiser, Ltd.
Kripal, Jeffrey J. 2001. Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity
in the Study of Mysticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2007. The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2011. Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the
Paranormal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 A NEW GNOSIS: THE COMIC BOOK AS MYTHICAL TEXT 11

———. 2017. Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Merkur, Daniel. 2005. Psychoanalytic Approaches to Myth. New York: Routledge.
Morrison, Grant. 2012. Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants,
and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human. New York:
Spiegel & Grau.
Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1990. The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in
Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Parsons, William, ed. 2018. Being Spiritual But Not Religious: Past, Present,
Future(s). New York: Routledge.
Partridge, Christopher. 2004. The Re-Enchantment of the West, Vol. 1: Alternative
Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture. New York: T
& T Clark.
Rank, Otto. 1909/2004. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Reynolds, Richard. 1992. Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. Jackson, MS:
University Press of Mississippi.
Róheim, Géza. 1992. Fire in the Dragon and Other Psychoanalytic Essays on
Folklore. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Segal, Robert. 2020. Myth Analyzed. New York: Routledge.
Schechter, Harold. 1980. The New Gods: Psyche and Symbol in Popular Art.
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Urban, Hugh. 2015. New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements:
Alternative Spirituality in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
 PART I

A New Gnosis: Comic Books as

Modern Mythology
 Dreaming the Myth Onward: Comic Books
as Contemporary Mythologies

Craig Chalquist

Abstract As Joseph Campbell noted, our mythologies are in tatters, as

fragmented as the global collective consciousness we now reside in. The
new “mythogenic zone” of myth-making is not a geographical location, as
of old, when communities could tell stories in relative isolation, but within
the creatives: the artists, filmmakers, dancers, writers….and comic book
creators? This chapter argues this to be the case, noting current examples
of how authors of comics draw upon mythic material from their own
diverse cultural backgrounds to weave tales of fantasy and magic relevant
for our time. A second point is that a valid “loreway,” a network of storied
performances rich with transformative ideas, has more allure today than
any project to reconstitute yesterday’s fragmented myths.

Keywords Mythology • Joseph Campbell • Story • Mythogenic

• Loreway

C. Chalquist (*)
Consciousness and Transformative Studies, National University,
San Diego, CA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 15

Switzerland AG 2023
D. M. Odorisio (ed.), A New Gnosis, Contemporary Religion and
Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1_2
16 C. CHALQUIST

Hold an antique ceramic jar three feet above a marble floor and, when
your arms get tired, let go. Bang. There you have the state of traditional
mythology today: scattered fragments shining and alluring but impossible
to reassemble into an undamaged original.
Joseph Campbell is best known as the explicator of the “Hero’s
Journey” (2008), a pattern George Lucas copied onto Luke Skywalker
(who was not so much a Hero, archetypally, as a Mage or Wizard). Myth,
declared Campbell, Jung, and a host of other scholar-storytellers, lives
everywhere, in all places and times. Yet The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
one of the most influential English language books ever published accord-
ing to Time, declares that the mythic mysteries “have lost their force,”
their symbols no longer of interest to the psyche (236). From Campbell’s
book Creative Mythology:

I have employed the term “mythogenetic zone” to designate any geographi-

cal area in which such a language of mythic symbols and related rites can be
shown to have sprung into being. All such codes are today in dissolution;
and, given the miscellaneous composition of our present social bodies and
the fact, furthermore, that in our world there exist no more closed horizons
within the bounds of which an enclave of shared experience might become
established, we can no longer look to communities for the generation of
myth. (1991, 93)

With collective archetypes “in full dissolution,” states Campbell’s Flight

of the Wild Gander, “the scientific method has released us” from the abso-
lutes of mythological ages (2018, 154). With the dissolving of horizons of
collective meaning, “the psychological hold is weakening of the mytho-
logical images” (2012, xix). In The Way of the Animal Powers, Campbell
writes, “We live, today, in a terminal moraine of myths and mythic sym-
bols, fragments large and small of traditions that formerly inspired and
gave rise to civilizations” (1998, 8). To Bill Moyers: “What we have today
is a demythologized world” (1991, 9).
How is it, then, that mythic images, themes, and motifs return to life
continually: the willful Golem robot prototype in Artificial Intelligence;
wild Pan, the nature god in our pandemics; Procrustes, the infamous inn-
keeper and his leg-lopping axe hard at work in “evidence-based” research;
Trumpian zombies overrunning the U.S. Congress; Moloch the sacrificial
bull god of Assyria alive and hungry on Wall Street?
 DREAMING THE MYTH ONWARD: COMIC BOOKS AS CONTEMPORARY… 17

Although intact mythologies live on here and there around the world,
many more have either ossified into literal-minded ideologies or melted
into fiction or ridicule. The same is not so, however, for their mythic
ingredients. Having splashed out of the broken jar, they now run freely
everywhere tales are told, performed, or enacted while grasping zealots
ignorant of the flow fight over which fragment holds the most absolute
truth. The creatives know better. “The mythogenetic zone today is the
individual in contact with his own interior life, communicating through
his art with those ‘out there’” (Campbell 1991, 93). We do not need
Campbell’s overemphasis on individualism to see how mythic life goes on
not only in our unconscious reenactments, but in film, dance, theater, TV,
painting, music, sculpture, sports, scientific discoveries, and everywhere
people play creatively. We are stuck with it. As C. G. Jung put it, “The
most that we can do is dream the myth onward by giving it a modern
dress” (1981, 160).
Including comic books.

The Mythically Tinged Origins of Comic Books

Images strung together into stories reach far back into the history of writ-
ing. Cartoons as such have flourished in America and England since the
early 1800s. In 1893, William Schmedtgen, an engraver in that most
mythic city Chicago, printed color comics into the columns of a newspa-
per. The first comic strip emerged in 1903 (Ware 2021).
Some of those strips showed a remarkable broadmindedness for their
time. “Lucy and Sophie Say Goodbye” (1905), which ran for eight weeks
in the Chicago Tribune, depicted a star-crossed lesbian couple in love. In
the graphic novel Gasoline Alley (1918), Frank King’s creations aged along
with their readers. Admiring the work and beauty of nature, a boy charac-
ter says, “She can paint better than I can.” Thomas Nast’s cartoons helped
expose “Boss” Tweed’s corrupt influence in New York (Kowalski 2020).
Although Rodolphe Töpffer had combined a sequential art narrative
into a book back in 1837, the first to bear “comic book” on its back cover
was The Yellow Kid in McFadden’s Flats, created by Richard Outcault
(who also popularized word balloons) and published in 1897 as a black-­
and-­white reprint. The Yellow Kid wore only a hand-me-down nightshirt
and lurked in slums; the slang printed on his shirt made fun of billboard
advertising. Nevertheless, commercial success eventually turned the Kid
into merchandise and affirmed its critique.
18 C. CHALQUIST

To consider Outcault for a moment: a cartoonist and painter of out-

door scenery, he provided illustrations for Edison’s display of electric
lights at the 1888 Centennial Exposition in Cincinnati and, later, set up
exhibits for Edison at the World’s Fair in Paris. He also made mechanical
drawings. Post-Yellow Kid, he followed up with Buster Brown, whose
name became a brand of shoes. He crafted the comics for children, but
they grew ever more popular with adults, who liked his wit and the mor-
dant honesty of his portrayals of the shadows of city life. He eventually
retired to paint, seen walking about here and there sporting a cape and
beret. In photographs he resembles Agatha Christie’s detective
Hercule Poirot.
Like the comics themselves, Outcault of the interesting name presented
an alchemical blend of past and future, traditional and progressive. A mas-
ter of technological life, he also told stories and painted rustic landscapes.
He used cartoons supposedly designed for the young to offer adult per-
spectives on the tribulations of his time. He concerns us because he set an
interesting pattern for other creators of comics: bringing together materi-
als from the cultural past and giving them an innovative direction.
Much of this was also true of Schmedtgen, an unhappy illustrator for
the Chicago Daily News, who sketched the flight of a wild mallard he spot-
ted one day in Lincoln Park. His forays into nature saved his sanity from
exposure to traumas like the Spanish-American War and the Haymarket
Riot hangings, both of which he covered for the paper. His creativity,
inspired by current events and the workings of the natural world, poured
into the newspaper comics of the kind that Outcault would eventually
format into books.
These progressive transformations of old themes into today’s doings
run rampant as motif and image in Chicago itself, named after a wild garlic
or onion growing there: a Continental Divide homeland for more than a
dozen American Indian tribes, then a water transit hub turned industrial
metropolis and haven for immigrants. Two of the red stars on the city’s
flag symbolize innovation: the World Columbian Exposition and the
Century of Progress World’s Fair. “It is hopeless for the occasional visitor
to try to keep up with Chicago,” observed Mark Twain in 1883. “She
outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a
novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through
the last time” (2018, 446). The city’s first settler was Jean Baptiste Point
du Sable, a free Black man who built a new farm there.
 DREAMING THE MYTH ONWARD: COMIC BOOKS AS CONTEMPORARY… 19

All in all, these founders and locales—we could include Cincinnati and
New York City, both thematically relevant—seem fitting vehicles for the
reassembly of mythic fragments into a new kind of popular literature.
The first monthly comic had appeared in 1922. By the mid-1930s, sci-
ence fiction, detective stories, and Superman followed. The first Age of
Superheroes was at hand, ushered forth by creatives fascinated by the mys-
tical and esoteric (Kripal 2011). In other words, by creatives gripped by
the ancient tales of myth and magical lore and willing to bring mythic
heroes back to life, albeit in different guise.

The New Mythographers

According to Laurence Maslon and Michael Kantor (2013), today’s comic
books are our Greek myths. Not just Greek, however. The groundswell
began humbly, with an author here and a raconteur there retelling their
ancestral sacred stories. And not only about Heracles, Thor, or Zeus, but
about Oshun, the goddess of fresh water and love; Osiris, the overseer of
the Underworld; heroic Hou Yi, the archer from China; wise Spider
Woman of the Navajo and Hopi; and La Llorona, the weeping woman
who drowned her children rather than letting them be taken away from
her. All over the world, the tellers were reclaiming their storied heritage.
Some were also transforming that heritage, fitting it to their time and
place and personal struggles and insights. Dr. Lee Francis of Laguna
Pueblo, New Mexico, refers to himself as an “indiginerd.” He has also
been called “the Stan Lee of Indian Country.” With four partners he
founded Red Planet Books & Comics in 2017 as the only Native comic
shop in the world. It also serves as headquarters for the Indigenous Comic
Con and the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. Lee also
founded Native Realities Press to encourage American Indian comic writ-
ers, game designers, and artists. The press has published Tales of the Mighty
Code Talkers by Kickapoo author Arigon Starr (author of the comic book
Super Indian), for example, and Tribal Force by Yaqui and Mexican Jon
Proudstar. His was the first book to present an entire team of Native
superheroes (Kamerick 2017).
These comics take on hard issues. These Savage Shores, written by Ram
V. with a team of artists, blends vampirism with East India Company greed
and colonization in 1700s India. Helm Greycastle by Henry Barajas is a
Latinx fantasy about an abducted dragon prince immersed in Aztec
mythology and Mexican history. Djeliya, by Senegalese author Juni Ba,
20 C. CHALQUIST

starts where the world ends after a wizard pushed a button and destroyed
it. You will find the very last prince in a disco, accompanied by a West
African bard and musician, both planning on how to pick up the pieces
that remain.
“What is the inner life of a shunned figure?” Robin Ha addresses this in
Gumiho, named for a Korean succubus. What is life like as a first-­generation
immigrant in Northern California? Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel
American Born Chinese responds, fantastically and poignantly. What does
it mean to return to a homeland you have never been to? Chinese American
writer Ethan Young, author of The Dragon Path, knows. Audiences, he
notes, want to hear from people who share their lived experiences
(Quaintance 2021).
Are these and other comic book creators at work on a new Big Story,
Religion, or revived Mythology for our time? No. Rather than investing
their energies in globalizing frameworks that will never hold everyone,
they pour their vitality into collaborative fantasies that stretch between
how things are and how they could be. Rather than institutionalizing their
visions, they invite us all to share them.
Like myths, the comics don’t stay in the comic books. The Wakanda
Dream Lab (n.d.) moves Afrofuturism and Blacktivism forward by draw-
ing on the magical world of Wakanda to “develop a vision, principles,
values and framework for prefigurative organizing for a new base of activ-
ists, artists, and fans for Black Liberation. We believe Black Liberation
begets liberation of all peoples” (wakandadreamlab.com/about). My term
for these sorts of creative imaginings with real-world consequences is
enchantivism: telling tales that may begin in injustice or injury but grow
more spacious in the telling, inviting the listeners to imagine the kind of
just, equitable, and delightful world we would enjoy living in (2007).

A Gnosis of Bright Fragments

In the context of a traditional mythology, the symbols are presented in
socially maintained rites, through which the individual is required to experi-
ence, or will pretend to have experienced, certain insights, sentiments, and
commitments. In what I am calling “creative” mythology, on the other
hand, this order is reversed: the individual has had an experience of his
own—of order, horror, beauty, or even mere exhilaration—which he seeks
to communicate through signs; and if his realization has been of a certain
depth and import, his communication will have the value and force of living
 DREAMING THE MYTH ONWARD: COMIC BOOKS AS CONTEMPORARY… 21

myth—for those, that is to say, who receive and respond to it of themselves,

with recognition, uncoerced. (Campbell 1991, 4)

Michael Foster and Jeffrey Tolbert edited The Folkloresque, a volume in

which they gave examples of how folklore and popular culture overlap
(2015). The folkloresque occurs when folkloric elements inform commer-
cial works, and from there return to the audience. The relationship is not
linear, producer to consumer, but circular, a conversation between creator
and reader (or listener, or performer) informed by mythic fragments.
In our time, ancient mythologies do not speak to world audiences
(hence the paucity of myth programs in academia), but myth-embedded
fantasy productions certainly do. Spirited Away, an animated film bursting
with mythic motifs from many cultures, is the most popular film ever to air
in Japan. Star Wars, Star Trek, DC Comics, and Marvel have swelled into
billion-dollar financial empires protected by threshold-guardian copyright
attorneys. Their success depends directly on public enthusiasm.
Franchises have no monopoly on this enthusiasm. The Kalevala, an
epic stitched together out of Finnish folktales by country doctor Elias
Lönnrot in the late 1800s, galvanized Finnish independence, national
pride, regional art and music, architecture, education, and language stud-
ies. Kalevala characters show up all over Finland as locale and business
names. The Finns celebrate Kalevala Day on February 28th; it is also called
Finnish Culture Day (Ennelin 2019).
According to Campbell, living myth serves four functions: 1. the reli-
gious (metaphysical-mystical) by putting us in touch with the numinous;
2. the cosmological, to picture our vast surround; 3. the social, for group
norms; and 4. the psychological, for lifelong individuation. Can popular
literature and art fulfil these? 1. They certainly speak to our sense of won-
der, awe, and even spiritual resonance. 2. Campbell believed the cosmo-
logical function, which explains our place in the cosmos, was now met by
science. We might add science fiction, magical realism, and scientifically
informed comics. 3. Belief in authorities, divine or otherwise, continues to
give way to finding a center of ethical meaning not only within, but
between us—including in the fantasies and fables that inspire us. 4.
Campbell and Jung believed that every age must bring forth its own
archetypally rooted symbols, making use “not of one mythology but of all
the dead and set-fast symbologies of the past,” via imagination, storytell-
ing, art, performance, and creativity, “out of which his own myth and
22 C. CHALQUIST

life-building ‘Yes because’ may then unfold” (1991, 677). Comic books
do that, in abundance.
Incidentally, we have been at this crossroads before:

The mythopoetic creativity of the Celtic bards and fabulators of the period
of the great European awakening from 1066 to c. 1140 was in essence
equivalent to that mythogenetic process: an appropriation and mastery, not
of space, however, but of time, not of the raw facts of a geography, but of
the novelties, possibilities, raw facts, dangers, pains, and wonders of a new
age: a “mythological updating.” (Campbell 1991, 521)

Which suggests an important question: if our mythically tinged cre-

ations, including comic books, possess “the value and force of living
myth,” what is to stop us from creating our own mythic wisdom pathways
and even spiritualities out of these scattered materials?
In the online article “Do We Really Need a New Mythology?” I wrote:

We start with a series of fascinating stories packed with folkloric symbols,

plots, and other rich ingredients. Then we add drama, ritual, music, move-
ment, personal practices, celebration feasts marking special times of the year.
Emblems and artwork. Rites of passage. Ethical values and ideals, including
service to each other (2020).

Then we thicken the mixture with ingredients not normally found in

institutionalized religion:

Self-correcting comedy to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously, for

example. Communities not of obedience but of creative collaboration and
mutual support. Games of various kinds. Health and wellness routines that
don’t become compulsive. Instead of tithes or indulgences (= pay us to get
to heaven), transparent donations to sustain, not inflate, the work and its
dreamers as well as to support urgent social justice causes. Instead of a clergy
power pyramid, fantasists dreaming together and inspiring one another.
Instead of a sacred manual, a flurry of living books, articles, stories, comics,
films, and who knows what so long as it’s imaginatively true to the
spirit of…(2020)

Of what? Of the new loreway: an imaginative body of fictionally framed

narrative, performance, entertainment, and personal practice that fills out
a mythic-feeling story arc and provides a sense of play, fun, community,
 DREAMING THE MYTH ONWARD: COMIC BOOKS AS CONTEMPORARY… 23

and meaning to participate in. Not a legendarium, mythology, sect, or

franchise. Not an antique jar glued together from its shards. Instead, art
and craft, film and performance that draw on mythic symbols and motifs
and characters to convey deep life truths, inspiring role models, practices
to try out, and embodied realizations about who we are, where we are,
and who we can be to one another.
Dream up a set of inspiring stories that fit our time, add ingredients,
and cook. Can a meal prepared from our loreologizing recipe offer spiri-
tual, philosophical, and psychological food for the hungry and thirsty
soul? Judging from those among us whose creative work serves as their
wisdom path as well as their main source of enthusiasm for life, it would
seem possible.
Perhaps that word “gnosis” can give us a hint. The study of myth is said
to confer it. The ancient Greeks used various words for different kinds of
knowledge: to be skilled at something (techne), to theorize or conceptual-
ize scientifically (episteme), to be wisely practical (Aristotle’s phronesis). In
Plato’s hands, another of these words, gnosis, joined itself to deep reflec-
tion. By the time the walkers of the Path of Hermes Trismegistus, other-
wise known as Hermeticism, got ahold of this word in first-century
Alexandra, from where it moved over into the Gnostic branch of that
ancient Egyptian tradition, gnosis referred to a number of interior know-
ings of the deep sort:

• Visionary or imaginative seeing below surfaces and appearances

• Self-identification as a spiritual seeker outside the mainstream
• A sense of liberation from the mainstream illusions and delusions
• A sense of meaningful continuity extending beyond one’s lifetime
• Knowledge of ever-deepening spiritual strength
• Interpretation of everyday events as symbols (Lachman 2011).

As the Hermetics knew and the Gnostics demonstrated by going extinct

as elitists, we develop gnosis not to separate from others, but to join with
self, others, world, and cosmos. With authentic gnosis—what some
Gnostics called kardiognosis, knowledge of the heart and mind, imagina-
tion and intuition—we face inward and outward simultaneously.
Gnosis used to be the prerogative of the few: Egyptian priests, followers
of the Way, self-called Gnostics praying in private. We live in a different
time, where maybe—who knows?—a bit of enlightenment awaits the
turning of a comic book page.
24 C. CHALQUIST

References
Campbell, Joseph. 1991. Creative Mythology. The Masks of God. Vol. 4.
New York: Penguin.
———. 1998. The Way of the Animal Powers. New York: Harper and Row.
———. 2008. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Novato: New World Library.
Campbell, Joseph, and Bill Moyers. 1991. The Power of Myth. New York: Anchor.
Campbell, Joseph. 2012. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and
Religion. Novato: New World Library.
———. 2018. The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological
Dimension—Selected Essays 1944–1968. Novato: New World Library.
Ennelin, Esa. 2019. Kalevala Day—A Celebration of Finnish Culture. Discover
Helsinki. Retrieved from https://discoverhelsinki.fi/arts-­culture/
kalevala-­day-­a-­celebration-­of-­finnish-­culture/.
Foster, Michael, and Jeffrey Tolbert. 2015. The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in
a Popular Culture World. Boulder, Colorado: Utah State University Press.
Jung, C.G. 1981. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Collected Works.
Vol. 9. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kamerick, Megan. 2017. With This Publisher, Native American Superheroes Fly
High. NPR KQED. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2017/04/02/
522223987/with-­this-­publisher-­native-­american-­superheroes-­fly-­high.
Kowalski, Jesse. 2020. Comics: Comic Books. Norman Rockwell Museum,
Illustration History. Retrieved from https://www.illustrationhistory.org/
genres/comics-­comic-­books.
Kripal, Jeffrey. 2011. Mutants & Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the
Paranormal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lachman, Gary. 2011. The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus: From Ancient Egypt to
the Modern World. Edinburgh: Floris Books.
Maslon, Laurence, and Michael Kantor. 2013. Superheroes!: Capes, Cowls, and the
Creation of Comic Book Culture. New York: Crown Archetype.
Quaintance, Zack. 2021. For These Comic Artists, Heritage and Folklore Are
Superpowers. NPR KQED. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2021/
08/27/1031382980/for-­t hese-­c omic-­a r tists-­h eritage-­a nd-­f olklore-­
are-­superpowers.
Twain, Mark. 2018. Life on the Mississippi. Orinda, California: SeaWolf Press.
Wakanda Dream Lab. n.d.. Retrieved from https://www.wakandadreamlab.
com/about.
Ware, Chris. 2021. American Vernacular: Chicago and the Birth of the Comic.
Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-­desk/american-­
vernacular-­chicago-­and-­the-­birth-­of-­the-­comic.
 From Horror to Heroes: Mythologies
of Graphic Voodoo in Comics

Yvonne Chireau

Abstract This essay examines the mythemes of Voodoo in comics from the
early twentieth century to the present day. Unlike Vodun, an indigenous
tradition of West Africa, or Vodou, an African diasporic religion in Haiti,
Voodoo is a trope of imagined racial and religious otherness. Comics
Voodoo – or what I call Graphic Voodoo – comes to the fore in its envi-
sioning of black religion and spirituality as the loci of spectacular figura-
tions of horror and supernaturalism, and ultimately as an origin source of
the black Superhero as Africana deity. It is my contention that Graphic
Voodoo simultaneously reflects and exaggerates fears of the black Sacred
through the use of sensational narratives and visual illustrations of Africana
religions as savage, violent, and demonic.

Keywords Horror • Graphic Voodoo • Black superheroes •

Comics • Race

Y. Chireau (*)
Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

Switzerland AG 2023
D. M. Odorisio (ed.), A New Gnosis, Contemporary Religion and
Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1_3
26 Y. CHIREAU

Introduction
Throughout much of the twentieth century, religion and comics were
viewed with ambivalence. Religious topics were considered too “adult”
for underage readers and too sectarian for general audiences, and religion
was largely ignored by the secular newspaper strips, cartoons, serials, and
anthologies that made up American comics media. Moreover, after the
mid-century, disparagement of religion was deemed off-limits, when com-
ics publishers established industry guidelines in order to regulate their
content. “Ridicule…of any religious or racial group is never permissible,”
declared the general standards adopted by the Comics Code Authority in
1954.1 Nevertheless, a marked exception to the rules can be seen in com-
ics’ treatment of the spiritual practices of black people. Specifically, the
indigenous religions of Africa, black diaspora religions such as Haitian
Vodou, and the African American vernacular traditions known as Hoodoo-­
Conjure, were signified in ways that remained remarkably consistent for
over a hundred years.2 Due to their subordination in the grand hierarchy
of racial representation, these Africana traditions were portrayed in ways
that amounted to the visual slander of their sacred beliefs and practices.3

1
“Comics Magazine Association of America Comics Code: 1954,” in Amy K. Nyberg, Seal
of Approval : the History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 192.
This article focuses primarily on twentieth century comics that were created and scripted by
white writers and artists, and distributed by commercial, white-owned comics publishing
companies.
2
One of the earliest comics illustrations of African-derived religion is an 18th century
English cartoon broadside of a Jamaican Obeah practitioner named Mumbo Jumbo the Obi
Man. See “Johnny Newcome in Love in the West Indies” (London, 1808), original print at
the British Museum, online at https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/
object/P_1877-0811-207, accessed 2-26-22. On Vodun in West Africa, see Dana Rush,
Vodun in Coastal Benin: Unfinished, Open-Ended, Global (Nashville: Vanderbilt University
Press, 2013); and Timothy Landry, Vodun: Secrecy and the Search for Divine Power
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). On Haitian Vodou, see Benjamin
Hebblewaite, A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2021), and Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996); on Hoodoo-Conjure, see Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Religion
and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2006), and Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo
System (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012).
3
Joseph M. Murphy, “Black Religion and ‘Black Magic’: Prejudice and Projection in
Images of African-Derived Religions.” Religion 20 (1990): 325.
 FROM HORROR TO HEROES: MYTHOLOGIES OF GRAPHIC VOODOO… 27

In this article, I examine how Africana religions have been abstracted

and denigrated in twentieth-century comics with reference to Voodoo. The
propagation of Voodoo as a comics trope commenced with the marginaliza-
tion of a cluster of black sacred traditions from Africa, Haiti, and the US,
which are known by similar-sounding names: Vodun, a West African reli-
gion of initiation and ceremonial activities for divine beings called Vodun;
Hoodoo, a black American system of ancestral ritual, magic, and healing;
and Vodou, a Haitian religion of rituals and prayers of dedicated service to
spirits called loa.4 The promotion of Voodoo in popular culture began in
earnest during the 1920s and would continue throughout the rest of the
century with Voodoo-themed literature, theatrical performances, and
Hollywood films as well as comics. As a mythic invention, Voodoo mani-
fests what Adam McGee has called a “psychic disease” of the collective
imagination, with little relationship to historical religious practices.5 My
goal is not to offer a literary appraisal of this phenomenon; rather, I wish
to bring scholarly insights to bear on a hermeneutics of religion, using the
term Graphic Voodoo to refer to the characterization of the deeply rooted
beliefs and rituals of Africana faith traditions as evil or malignant.
The complicated genealogy of Voodoo belies its origins as a synecdoche
for black religious alterity. The term entered the American lexicon more
than one hundred twenty- five years after the antislavery rebellion that
brought independence to Haiti in 1791. In the early nineteenth century,
the shocking events that led to the downfall of the world’s richest colony
and the wrenching liberation of the enslaved black population reverber-
ated across the French- and English-speaking world and the US South.
Stunned by the cataclysmic fracturing of an old regime and the coming
forth of the new, European and American writers established the contours
of a Voodoo mythos gleaned from the literary tradition known as the
Victorian Gothic. Nineteenth-century writers blurred the lines between

4
Having family resemblances, “Africana traditions” is used here to refer to black religions
with historical origins in Africa and its diaspora that share similar cultural antecedents. I use
the term “black religions” as an ideological designation to describe the religious orientations
of the religions of black people and their descendants in the Caribbean and the US. The
“Africana Sacred” is an idea that incorporates black religious traditions into a generalized
category of academic analysis. See Dianne M. Stewart, and Tracey E. Hucks. “Africana
Religious Studies: Toward a Transdisciplinary Agenda in an Emerging Field.” Journal of
Africana Religions 1, no. 1 (2013): 28-77.
5
Adam McGee, “Haitian Vodou and voodoo: Imagined religion and popular culture.”
Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 41.2 (2012): 231-256.
28 Y. CHIREAU

fiction, history, and political commentary by their “Gothicisation” of the

Haitian Revolution in travel narratives, romantic novels, and broadsides
that functioned as “sources of imaginative fancy and personal
entertainment.”6 Caribbean Gothic texts dramatized the dangers and
powers of black spirituality with forbidding stories of Obeah and Vaudoux
that described mysterious conspiracies and subterranean cults of sorcery,
flourishing among former slaves. By the twentieth century, the term
“Voodoo” had supplanted the earlier Vaudoux to describe an assortment
of unauthorized practices of African origin. The true essence of Haitian
Vodou, a religious tradition of reverent interactions with sacred forces of
nature, ancient deities, and ancestral spirits, would be adulterated by writ-
ers and artists in the sensational fictions of Graphic Voodoo.7
It was in the early twentieth century that Graphic Voodoo took on a life
of its own in the comics. During the 1930s era of American pulp periodi-
cal magazines and syndicated strips, Voodoo would be headlined alongside
popular costumed hero comics like The Blue Beetle, The Angel, and The
Sandman as a force that perpetrated despicable criminal activity. Voodoo
was the utility term given to the mysterious impulse that pitted crooks
against grim-faced vigilantes in seedy noir dramas like Detective Comics
and The Spirit. Meanwhile, entertainment industries seized upon American
fascination with Voodoo, prompting a cultural turn in film, theater, and

6
Matt Clavin notes that the rise of Gothic romance at the turn of the nineteenth century
coincided with the publication of historical narratives of the Haitian Revolution, which use
many of the conventions of the former (“Race, Rebellion, and the Gothic: Inventing the
Haitian Revolution,” Early American Studies 5.1 (2007): 1-29; see also Lizabeth Paravisini-
Gebert, “Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean,” The Cambridge Companion to
Gothic Fiction [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 229-257).
7
Vaudoux was used to refer to a “dance” and a “serpent god” believed to be worshiped by
enslaved African people in Saint Domingue. See Alasdair Pettinger, “From Vaudoux to
Voodoo.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 40.4 (2004): 415-425. For a corrective his-
tory on the uses and misuses of the word Voodoo, see Kate Ramsey, “From’ Voodooism’ to
‘Vodou’: Changing a US Library of Congress Subject Heading,” Journal of Haitian Studies
(2012): 14-25; and Leslie Desmangles, “Replacing the Term” Voodoo” with” Vodou”: A
Proposal,” Journal of Haitian Studies (2012): 26-33.
 FROM HORROR TO HEROES: MYTHOLOGIES OF GRAPHIC VOODOO… 29

musical productions, as comics followed suit.8 Within the nascent US ani-

mation industry of the 1930s, for instance, Voodoo themes abounded in
mimetic performances of black folk worship that were restaged as comedy
for the pleasure of white spectators. In syndicated newspaper comic strips
like Tarzan and Jungle Jim whiteness was promoted as exceptional and
blackness as subversive with stereotypes of African Voodoo priests and
witch doctors (here, ironically, we find one of the first black antagonists to
be featured in a recurring role, a character aptly named The Voodoo Man,
starring in two late depression era comic book series, The Flame and Weird
Comics). In the early twentieth century, animators would use caricatures
and minstrelsy to represent African American folk religions with some of
the most egregiously racist depictions of black culture to appear in
Hollywood’s technologically advanced “colored cartoons.” Later, cartoon
properties such as Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck were branded in comics
books with titles such as Voodoo Hoodoo. During World War II, Graphic
Voodoo was used as a dramatic foil for iconic superheroes like Captain
America, the Human Torch and Wonder Woman, whose patriotic efforts
involved battles with incongruously-placed Voodoo Nazis in Africa. Comic
books in the postwar period also situated Voodoo plots in the remote
tropical settings of Africa, the fantastic backdrop of dramatic confronta-
tions between white jungle kings and indigenous black miscreants. And in
the 1950s to the mid 1960s, when the black presence would largely disap-
pear from American mainstream comics, Graphic Voodoo still thrived in
the subterranean realms of horror fiction, with titles like Voodoo, Tales of
Voodoo, Terrors of the Jungle, and Phantom Witch Doctor, which recycled
the tropes of primitive supernaturalism in Africa and the Caribbean.
Finally, in the last decades of the century, comics would re-appropriate
Graphic Voodoo as a mythic domain of black spirituality and supernatural-
ism that featured Africana superhero characters. All of these diverse and

8
Christian Garland, “Hollywood’s Haiti: Allegory, Crisis, and Intervention in The Serpent
and the Rainbow and White Zombie,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 19:
273-283; Melissa Cooper, Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the
American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Michael
Largey, Vodou Nation: Haitian Art, Music, and Cultural Nationalism (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2006), 147.
30 Y. CHIREAU

varied examples disclose the continuity of Graphic Voodoo in the comics,

from the demonic to the divine, and from horror to heroes.9
As a “medium of extremes,” says Fredrik Stromberg, comics utilize
caricatures to simplify their subjects, reducing physical characteristics with
a shorthand of basic, recognizable symbols. The use of stereotypes to
depict members of racial and ethnic groups is a means of forsaking com-
plexity and nuance to highlight perceived group attributes or features to
delineate the whole, a common practice in the comics.10 Representations
of race evince the ideological beliefs of comics creators and consumers,
where the stereotyping of black subjects and white supremacy are mutually
constitutive. In the history of black representation, comics have held a
disreputable place, as they have been used to portray Africans and African-­
descended people as inferiors, whether in political cartoons, illustrated
dime novels, or pulp magazines. Furthermore, we will see that comics
defamed Africana sacred traditions as a matter of course.11 Publishers of
religious comics graphica, for the most part, generalized depictions of race
within sequential art renderings of the Bible, Christian comics, and

9
These sources include Graphic Voodoo comic books from a period of more than fifty
years. See, “The Voodoo Sacrifice,” Blue Beetle Comics (1939); “The Voodoo Man Cometh!”
Weird Comics 1 (April 1940); “Voodoo in Manhattan!” The Spirit (June 1940); “The
Voodoo Murders,” Human Torch (All Winners Comics, May, 1941); “Black Voodoo
Murders!” Captain America 28 (July 1943); “Voodoo Magic,” “The Voodoo Sorcerer!”
Adventure Comics 63 (June 1941); The Sandman (June 1941); “Tale of the Witch Doctor’s
Cauldron,” Wonder Woman 19 (September, 1949); The Human Torch 36 (April 1954); “The
Smashing Case of Voodoo in New York,” Blue Beetle Comics 23 (July 1943), and “Vladim
the Voodoo Master” (Winter 1940); “Voodoo Boo Boo,” Bugs Bunny 78 (April 1961);
“The Voodoo Doom of Superman,” Action Comics 413 (June 1972); “The Voodoo
Showboat,” Captain Marvel Adventures 22, (March 1943); On Voodoo and cartoon anima-
tion, see Henry T. Sampson, That’s Enough, Folks: Black Images in Animated Cartoons,
1900-1960 (Scarecrow Press, 1998).
10
Fredrik Strömberg, Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History (Fantagraphics Books,
2003), 7; on blackness and caricature, see Rebecca Wanzo, The Content of Our Caricature:
African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (New York: NYU Press, 2020).
11
Jeffrey A. Brown, “Panthers and Vixens: Black Superheroines, Sexuality and Stereotypes
in Contemporary Comic Books,” in Howard & Jackson, eds. Black Comics: The Politics of
Race and Representation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 126-129; Frances Gateward &
John Jennings, The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015); Mark Singer, “Black Skins, White Masks: Comic Books
and the Secret of Race,” African American Review 36.1 (2002): 107–119.
 FROM HORROR TO HEROES: MYTHOLOGIES OF GRAPHIC VOODOO… 31

illustrated tracts created for churches and parochial schools.12 However, in

order to depict Africana religious subjects, comics artists and writers often
distilled specific, racialized elements, whether they reflected real character-
istics or not. For example, visual clichés like the “Voodoo doctor” illus-
trate how the African sacred was linked to signature objects in order to
create negative associations between religion and magic, fetishism, and
idolatry. Voodoo imagery embellished outward attire with religious attri-
butes, using raffia skirts, ceremonial masks, horns, skulls, bone necklaces,
and plumed headdresses to convey the tangible presence of blackness and
“Africanness” as spiritual affect, even when applied to anthropomorphized
animal characters and diminutive pickaninnies, as was common with the
serial cartoon comics of the so-called golden age of animation.13
In this essay I treat Graphic Voodoo and its racial and religious artifacts
as mythic formations. The archetypes of Voodoo are deeply imprinted on
the collective imagination with images of bloody sacrifices, ugly heathen
gods, bizarre rituals, relics of death, and the unfathomable blackness of
bodies dancing and chanting to throbbing drums around a circle of flames.
What is the meaning of these cynical appraisals of the human experience?
Graphic Voodoo externalizes symbols that originate from the depths of
the psyche, as a demonizing category of Western consciousness.
“[R]acism,” as Laennec Hurbon observes, “gathers its efficacy from the
unconscious level of phantasms.” Since myth expresses itself through
material forms, it is possible to locate those forms within a precise histori-
cal milieu through processes of ontological excavation. In what follows I

12
Joshua Fronk, Sequential Religion: The History of Religion in Comic Books & Graphic
Novels (PhD diss., Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York, 2016). An
exception to the race- neutral approach taken by sectarian publishers can be seen with
American Catholic comics such George Pfaum’s series Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, pub-
lished from 1946-1972. See “Catholic American Citizenship: Prescriptions for Children
from Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, 1946-1963,” in Graven Images: Religion in Comic
Books and Graphic Novels, ed. A. David Lewis & Christine Hoff Kraemer (New York:
Continuum, 2010), 63-77; on black religions in the comics, see Yvonne Chireau, “Looking
for Black Religions in 20th Century Comics, 1931–1993,” Religions 10.6 (2019): 400.
13
Nelson, “Studying Black Comic Strips,” in Black Comics: Politics of Race and
Representation, 94; Bruce Lenthall, “Outside the Panel – Race in America’s Popular
Imagination: Comic Strips Before and After World War II,” Journal of American Studies
32.1 (1998): 39-61; Ian Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945 (London:
Smithsonian Institution, 1998), 62-75; Sarita McCoy Gregory, “Disney’s Second Line: New
Orleans, Racial Masquerade, and the Reproduction of Whiteness in The Princess and the
Frog,” Journal of African American Studies, 14.4 (2010): 441.
32 Y. CHIREAU

argue that the epistemological impact of the Haitian Revolution was sus-
tained through psychosocial projections of the black Other. In order to
uncover the patterns of Graphic Voodoo we look to the xenophobic world
views that originated the categories of race and religion in modernity – not
only as the material products of oppositions that emerged in the Atlantic
world but as collective formations of the global unconscious.14
Recent studies of comics and religion have considered the phenomeno-
logical aspects of religion and mythology in comic books, graphic novels,
and fictional literature. In his book Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction,
Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, Jeffrey Kripal examines the power
of myth in catalyzing paranormal experiences for comics readers and writ-
ers. The notion of “living mythology” might normally be applied to per-
formances of fan culture such as LARP, and comics cosplay, but for Kripal,
comics mythologies are composed of dynamic narratives and capacious
symbolism that can also evoke extraordinary shifts in consciousness. The
background scripts that play out in comics storytelling and worldmaking
are what Kripal calls comics mythemes, which are an extension of the
authorization functions of myth. The notion of comic book mythemes
points us to the ways that obscured aspects of the psyche can become
“real.” This method of reading comics and religion provides the point of
departure for the following discussion of Graphic Voodoo.15
Drawing upon Mutants and Mystics' interpretative framework, I main-
tain that Graphic Voodoo mythemes constitute and are constituted by a
racial “Super-story” that runs like a current through the comics universe.
However, if comics are presumed to project archetypes from beyond mun-
dane reality, then the social dimensions of myth cannot be overlooked. An
analysis of Graphic Voodoo brings both race and religion to the fore of

14
Laënnec Hurbon, “American Fantasy and Haitian Vodou,” in Sacred Arts of Haitian
Vodou (1995): 181-197. Recent theories of geopsychoanalysis provide suggestive insights
into what is called the “colonial unconscious” as a site for charting the psychic imprint of the
diverse national, political, and cultural collectivities of the early modern Atlantic world. On
the idea of the “global unconscious” see Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jenson, & Richard
C. Keller, eds. Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global
Sovereignties (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
15
Jeffrey J. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the
Paranormal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). In this vein I argue that the ori-
gins of the racial epistemology of Graphic Voodoo might be located in the deep structures of
myth, since myth also gives form to history and religion. On comics, religion, and myth, see
Christopher Knowles, Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes
(Newburyport, MA: Weiser Books, 2007).
 FROM HORROR TO HEROES: MYTHOLOGIES OF GRAPHIC VOODOO… 33

comics mythologizing. And while Graphic Voodoo texts reveal little that
is real or true about historical Africana religions, they do highlight pat-
terns that have inured in particular forms of the racial-religious imaginary.
A closer look at Graphic Voodoo can shed light on the ways comics sub-
sume racial and religious meanings in tropes and patterns that approxi-
mate Kripal’s idea of mythemes.16
Focusing primarily on white comics creators, subjects, and readers,
Mutants and Mystics expands on figurations of myth in superhero and sci-
ence fiction comic books with an eye toward the paranormal experiences
they evoke. These comics recount glorious epics of mankind’s cosmic des-
tiny, the potentialities of expanded consciousness, and vivid contacts with
extraterrestrial beings of light and wisdom. Similarly, Graphic Voodoo
comics underwrite a kind of speculative fiction that encompasses science
fiction, fantasy and horror. In these, however, progressive and positive
visions are inverted with atavistic fixations on imagined threats to white-
ness, often with disturbed and unsettling presences that highlight stunted
ideations of death and fear. Unlike Kripal’s comics mythemes which vali-
date transformative states of awakened spiritual cognition with elevating
experiences of the divine and liberating notions of the human-as-god,
Graphic Voodoo mythemes reformulate acute anxieties of the demonic
that are drawn from the inner structures of the subconscious. Within
Graphic Voodoo figurations of race and religion, apperception derives not
from edifying mystical experiences, nor from the actualization of the spiri-
tual Self, but from an awareness of whiteness in relation to blackness, in its
racist subliminalities.17

16
While not using the term mythemes, Anna Beatrice Scott identifies aesthetic “confla-
tions” in what she calls “confabulations” of blackness in comics images and stories, including
racialized ideas of supernatural power and embodiment (“Superpower vs Supernatural: Black
Superheroes and the Quest for a Mutant Reality,” Journal of Visual Culture 5.3 (2006):
295-314.
17
Kripal, Mutants and Mystics; on whiteness as religious orientation, see Stephen C. Finley
& Lori Latrice Martin, “The Complexity of Color and the Religion of Whiteness,” in Color
Struck: How Race and Complexion Matter in the “Color-blind” Era (Leiden: Brill, 2017),
179-196. Of course, in referring to “race,” in this paper I emphasize whiteness as the domi-
nant ontology in US culture over and against blackness. An example of the de-racializing or
un-racializing of one of the most well-known Graphic Voodoo symbols can be seen with the
figure of the zombie, who has been transformed into a monstrous entity and most dreaded
effigy of malign sorcery, a pop culture and cinema celebrity, now deracinated and universally
appropriated. See John Cussans, Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror, and the Zombie Complex
[Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017], 101-07).
34 Y. CHIREAU

What then, are the secret origins of Graphic Voodoo? As an early viral
concept, Voodoo was formed as an aftereffect of the first successful antico-
lonial uprising in the western hemisphere, a devastating and violent
encounter that transformed black slaves into free citizens. As an overdeter-
mined cultural proposition that burdened Africana religions with insur-
gent supernaturalism, the idea of Voodoo channeled centuries of racial
angst from Haiti, the modern harbinger of terror in the global uncon-
scious. In the twentieth century, submerged memories of the legacies of
Haiti and its discontents would shape how racial and religious encounters
between Africa and its diaspora, and the West were imagined. In one vital
stream, Graphic Voodoo can be traced to the inception of the Gothic aes-
thetic in white European literature. The Victorian Gothic incorporated
descriptive elements of Africana traditions of the Caribbean in writings
that referenced Obeah in the English-speaking West Indies and Vaudoux in
the Francophone context.18 Yet, in another stream, it was the historic fall
of Saint-Domingue that brought deeply repressed fears of African-inspired
spirituality and black empowerment into white mythic self-consciousness.
In the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution – a calamitous event of epic
proportions – Western powers would register the image of the new repub-
lic as a “monstrous anomaly” upon which nightmares of race and religion
would thereafter be imprinted. Followed by a nineteen-year military occu-
pation of Haiti in the early twentieth century, the Voodoo mythos culmi-
nated in the ongoing revilement of Africana spirituality in Western culture.
These mythologies of religious and racial alterity would transform images
of the esteemed traditions of the Africana Sacred into debased icons.19

18
Obeah, an African-originating practice of spiritual healing, harming, and self-defense
originated among enslaved black people in the English Caribbean, including the islands of
Jamaica and Barbados. Much like Vodou in Haiti, obeah was associated with slave resistance
through magical means and was persecuted as a kind of sorcery and witchcraft by authorities
in various periods. See J. Brent Crosson, Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking
of Religion in Trinidad (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), and Kate Ramsey,
“Powers of Imagination and Legal Regimes against ‘Obeah’ in the Late Eighteenth-and
Early Nineteenth-Century British Caribbean,” Osiris 36.1 (2021): 46-63.
19
On Haiti’s forgotten histories in myth and memory, see especially Michel-Rolph
Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press,
2015); Cussans, Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie Complex, 29; Nick Nesbitt,
“Haiti, the Monstrous Anomaly,” in The Idea of Haiti: Rethinking Crisis and Development
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 3-26.
 FROM HORROR TO HEROES: MYTHOLOGIES OF GRAPHIC VOODOO… 35

Graphic Voodoo in the Jungle

Prior to Haiti becoming the “magic island” of religious horror, American
comics looked to the “dark continent” of Africa for racial fantasies and
adventure. Jungle adventure comics were the distant offshoots of travel
accounts and ethnographies of Empire in the nineteenth century, which
referenced Africa as a timeless and abstract geographical Other. By the mid
twentieth century, jungle-themed adventures had become some of the
most profitable and widely-read comics publications. With titles like Jungle
Comics, Jungle Action, and Jungle Adventures, comics gave voice to
mythemes that treated race and religion at the margins while mapping the
adventures of white protagonists and black villains in exotic locales.
Graphic Voodoo comic books adopted action hero conventions with por-
trayals of white jungle queens and kings and their black nemeses, who
were most often depicted as malevolent Voodoo priests and witch doctors.
Jungle fantasies positioned African characters as savages while also mini-
mizing their roles so as to magnify white heroic figures whose presence as
savior symbols obscured or ignored the real history of black subjugation
by Europeans, and the special horrors of colonialism in Africa.20
Characterizing the subordination of black figures in World War II era
comics in contrast with strong, morally superior white male and female
heroines, comics historian William Savage remarks that:

Like Tarzan…jungle lords and ladies…were white people who “ruled” or at

the very least held considerable influence over various “inferior” species,
including lions, panthers, snakes, elephants and black people. The status of
blacks as items of fauna underscored the imperialist, colonialist, p
­ aternalistic,

20
The most popular characters of the jungle adventure genre included leading white pro-
tagonists in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ celebrated Tarzan novels, published some
25 years earlier, such as The Phantom (1936), Sheena: Queen of the Jungle (1938), and
Mandrake the Magician (1934). Brian Street describes the consensus imaginary of the
“primitive” that shaped views in fiction and non-fiction writings on African religions in the
twentieth century. He notes, “‘Primitive’ man…spent his whole life in fear of spirits and
mystical beings; his gullibility was exploited by self-seeking priests and kings, who manipu-
lated religion to gain a hold on the minds of their simple subjects; he worshiped animals and
trees, tried to control the mystical forces of nature by ceremony, ritual, taboos, and sacrifices,
and explained the wonders of the universe in imaginative but unscientific myths” (The Savage
in Literature [New York: Routledge, 1975], 7; see also Marianna Torgovnick, Gone
Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990]).
36 Y. CHIREAU

and racist thrust of the jungle comics – a thrust otherwise indicated by spe-
cific descriptions of black behavior.21

African religious authorities played secondary roles in the comics as

devious Voodoo masters, conniving witch doctors, and sinister sorcerers
with powers and abilities that emanated evil intent. Jungle adventures
were hugely popular during the World War II era, as they capitalized on
male readers' desires for escapist literature with exciting fantasies in far-
away places. In real terms, however, Graphic Voodoo jungle adventures
reimagined encounters between Africans and the West within the asym-
metries of empire, white male subjectivity, and other discursive configura-
tions of race and power. Protagonists with ideophonic names like Toka,
Jo-Jo, Ka-Zar and Ka’Anga, acted as purveyors of justice in the essential
struggle between good and evil, externalizing formations of scientific rac-
ism, and affirming the display of embodied male whiteness as the visual
ideal of comics heroism.22 Consider the cover of Jungle Comics #77, a
series from the World War II era. The gaze is drawn to the striking confla-
gration of racialized terror and erotic supernaturalism. The stylistic realism
contrived a wild untamed African backdrop, although it is not clear, geo-
graphically, where the action takes place. Featuring a black-skinned masked
villain, posed as a mad scientist, to experiment on a supine, scantily-clad
white female captive. With ominous ritual accoutrements, a Kota sculp-
ture, and embattled half-naked bodies, the Voodoo-Master is called out on
the cover blurb as a murderous villain. An incipient spear fight and a titil-
lating bondage scenario round out the tableau of the physical enactment
of deadly force on the bodies of the white and black figures. Graphic
Voodoo jungle comics such as these normally depicted conventional crime
and mystery stories set in an otherworldly African wilderness where whites
encountered primitive blacks in need of the guidance and influence of
western civilization. As a combination of the “crash landed alien” concept
from Mutants and Mystics and the “super hero with a secret identity”
trope, Tarzan-type protagonists engaged foreign Otherness as an exten-
sion of the nineteenth century US frontier doctrine. Kripal’s mythemes of
“orientation” and “alienation” also figure prominently in jungle comics’
allegorizing of white fantasies of prehistoric tribal worlds, with Africa

21
William Savage, Comic Books and America, 1945-1954 (Norman, OK: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1990), 76.
22
Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997), 161-163.
 FROM HORROR TO HEROES: MYTHOLOGIES OF GRAPHIC VOODOO… 37

pictured as a timeless geography of tropical ecologies, lost cities, and back-

ward black tribes existing in thrall to the tyranny of Voodoo sorcery.23
Black religions were exemplified by charlatan characters, corrupt leaders,
and venal criminals of varying persuasions. As mythical accounts of white
supremacy, jungle adventure comics enacted African immorality and spiri-
tual derangement in imagined geographies that were formed in the con-
text of black subjection in America.
Comics' jungle adventures may be contrasted with Graphic Voodoo
productions that introduced younger audiences to Africana traditions by
framing race and religion as more of a laughing matter. Deploring the
insidiousness of black stereotypes, Fredric Wertham, a psychologist and
harsh critic of comics’ negative social impacts on children in the 1950’s,
highlighted the racist implications of jungle comics. “The [comic] book
depicts colored natives as stereotyped caricatures, violent, cowardly, can-
nibalistic and so superstitious,” he claimed, “that they get scared by seltzer
tablets and popping corn and lie down in abject surrender before the
white boys.”24 While situating Africana religions as savage, the older
Graphic Voodoo tropes trafficked in humor as racial and religious ridicule
with cartoons and animation that provided a kind of comic relief with
reassurances of white superiority to American youth.

Graphic Voodoo in Cartoon Comics

In his book The Colored Cartoon: Black Presentation in American
Animated Short Films, 1907-1954, Christopher Lehman argues that the
success of depression-era cartoon animation owed much to the resonance
of caricatures of blackness. Blackface minstrelsy and vaudeville entertain-
ment styles inspired the creation of many noteworthy cartoons and comics
in the decades prior to the Second World War. Graphic Voodoo cartoons
synthesized versions of the African sacred, exaggerating clownishness with
an egregious use of “Negro” dialect, along with frantic dancing and shout-
ing. Religion-themed cartoons during this period included the biblical

23
Kripal, Mutants and Mystics, 32, 41. Jungle adventure comics were specifically directed
at male readers, as they tapped into social attitudes of the day and served as a mirror for
gender, race, and cultural anxieties after the mid-century (see Savage, Comic Books and
America).
24
Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 25, 309. On Wertham’s role as a critic of racism, see
Daniel Yezbick, “‘No Sweat!’: EC Comics, Cold War Censorship, and the Troublesome
Colors Of ‘Judgment Day!’” in The Blacker the Ink, 19-44.
38 Y. CHIREAU

satire Goin’ to Heaven on a Mule (1934), the Merrie Melodies animated

parody Clean Pastures (1937), the supernatural ghost comedy A Haunting
we Will Go (1939), the jazz-inflected live-action short Voodoo in Harlem
(1938) and Hanna-Barbera’s Swing Social (1940), a musical with talking
fish inhabiting a cartoon setting of black church performances. Animated
films were populated by racialized characters, what theorist Sarita McCoy
Gregory has termed subpersons, non-human caricatures of blackness that
held a status somewhere between animals and living objects.25 By appro-
priating the coded speech and manners of minstrelsy, animators fused
Africanized tropes with illustrations of black American religious degener-
acy. Swing Social, for instance, was a short cartoon film that juxtaposed
Africana spirituality with community worship in the fantastical setting of
an underwater didactic morality play. Using parody as racial hyperbole,
Swing Social mimicked black vernacular ritual practices and folk traditions
like Hoodoo-Conjure, contrasting the churchly African American devo-
tional performance with Voodoo in technicolor venues that featured anthro-
pomorphized blackfish and other sea creatures. “It’s ‘dat ole devil,”
whispers a kingfish preacher in one scene, launching into a sermon on the
tempting lure of the evil “Voodoo,” as a grizzled catfish beats on tomtom
drums, intoning: “If it ain't got that old Voodoo, it ain’t got a beat, all the
same with a different name, that’s Voodoo!” Like other animated cartoon
productions, Swing Social reproduced a variety of Graphic Voodoo memes
that distilled Africana religious performances into lucrative entertainment
commodities in the 1930s and 40s.26

25
On the idea of “subpersons” as racial caricatures in animated films, see Sarita McCoy
Gregory, “Disney’s Second Line: New Orleans, Racial Masquerade, and the Reproduction of
Whiteness in The Princess and the Frog,” Journal of African American Studies 14.4
(2010): 441.
26
Christopher P. Lehman, The Colored Cartoon: Black Presentation in American Animated
Short Films, 1907-1954 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). See also Daniel
Ira Goldmark, Tunes for ‘Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005). While an analysis of film animation is beyond the scope of this arti-
cle, one observation is worth considering in light of the persistence of racialized motifs in
Graphic Voodoo animation. In many of these cartoons an elision of the symbols related to
indigenous African religions and black American sacred cultures is a common device. The
presence of the drums, for example, a prominent ritual instrument for spiritual evocation
throughout the African diaspora, is typically coded as Voodoo and erased from its religious
context.
 FROM HORROR TO HEROES: MYTHOLOGIES OF GRAPHIC VOODOO… 39

Graphic Voodoo extended to printed ‘funny animal’ stories and color-

ful comic books based on animated films.27 These comics showcased pop-
ular cartoon properties such as Mickey Mouse, Tom and Jerry, and Bugs
Bunny, while recreating the visual logics of racial and religious alterity with
depictions of black people’s obsessions with the supernatural world. Here,
in print, as with animated cartoons, Africana spirituality was presented as
an object of comedy and contempt. Comic book cartoons resignified black
folk traditions with reference to Graphic Voodoo stereotypes with insipid
characters and their exaggerated fears of ghosts, haunted places, and
witchcraft. In representations that reflected on the authentic religious
condition of black people, traditional practices of Hoodoo-Conjure, as
exemplified by the immediacy of ancestors and other invisible inhabitants
of the spirit realm, were lampooned as spooky superstitions and ghost
tales. Cartoon comics also belittled African American religious practitio-
ners for their propensity for unrestrained worship, exuberant devotional
practices, and joyful, rhythmic music. In this manner the sacred theater of
the black American church was abstracted into an irreverent entertain-
ment and comedic spectacle. Cartoon comic books based on animated
characters such as Lil Eight Ball (from Woody Woodpecker creator Walter
Lanz) and Donald Duck, utilized Africanizing caricatures and black folk
religion stereotypes that linked African American spirituality with retro-
grade superstition. As with their motion picture counterparts, cartoon
comics were replete with minstrel figures whose terrified antics provided
colorful sight gags for readers.28
A closer look at the 1949 comic book Donald Duck Voodoo Hoodoo,
from the series Donald Duck Adventures (Dell Comics Four Color #238)
reveals a typical Graphic Voodoo comedy populated with characters from
the beloved Walt Disney franchise. Voodoo Hoodoo is the story of Donald
27
Nicholas Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American
Animation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). The blackface figure is one of the
most recognizable visual representations of blackness in the culture industries of music, per-
formance, print and graphic media. Beginning in America in the 1800s and persisting into
the twentieth century, blackface minstrelsy became the conventional style for representing
blackness by way of the racialized abject in popular forms of entertainment and literature.
Blackface minstrelsy denied black personhood with ridicule, whether on screen, stage, or in
graphics. See also Rebecca Wanzo, The Content of our Caricature: African American Comic
Art and Political Belonging (New York: NYU Press, 2020).
28
Walter Lantz, New Funnies 65 (July 1942). See Michael Barrier, Funnybooks: The
Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2014), 236-237.
40 Y. CHIREAU

Duck and his three mischievous nephews, famous as intrepid and well-­
meaning tourists on the hunt for lively adventures in faraway places. In
Voodoo Hoodoo, Donald Duck is cursed by a “living Voodoo doll” named
Bombie the Zombie and must travel to Africa to seek a cure from a witch
doctor named Foola Zoola. On his journey Donald Duck encounters a
tribe of blackface characters who embody the classic stereotypes of tropical
savagery, illustrated with the credulous African native, with oversized lips,
sharpened teeth, nose rings, and bulging-eye racist physiognomy. Although
the story is ostensibly set in a South African village, the comic uses black
American dialect in captions, as characters exclaim “Nossuh!” and “Oh
Lawsy, Lawsy!” when encountering the Duckburg stars. Considered by
fans to be an important and outstanding work by creator Carl Barks,
Voodoo Hoodoo was just one of many episodes in the Donald Duck comics
series that incorporated Graphic Voodoo characters and place names like
Darkest Africa, Bongo on the Congo and Jungle Bungle.29
Cartoon comic books imposed racial meanings on their subjects by
connecting Africana cultural and religious practices with the silly antics of
well-known animated characters. Another cartoon franchise that success-
fully transitioned into print was that of Bugs Bunny, with the longstanding
crossover series Dell Four Color Comics. Several issues of this comic book
were singled out by none other than Fredric Wertham, the crusading psy-
chiatrist whose book Seduction of the Innocent helped to set off a
national backlash against excessive gore, sex, drug use and criminal activity
in comic books and comics advertisements in the 1950s. Wertham, a vocal
critic of derisive portrayals of minorities, argued that reading comic books
contributed to rising rates of juvenile delinquency and caused psychologi-
cal harm to American youth. Referencing an episode in which Bugs Bunny
is chased by a retinue of subperson figures with spears and shields,
Wertham’s book pointed out that the “superstitious natives'' and African

29
Carl Barks, “Donald Duck in Voodoo Hoodoo,” Four Color #238 (1949). Tom Andrae,
Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity (Oxford, MS:
University Press of Mississippi, 2006); Joonas Viljakainen, Representations of Nationality in
Carl Barks’ Lost in the Andes and Voodoo hoodoo (BA Thesis, University on Jyväskylä, 2013);
Katja Kontturi, “Not Brains, Just Voodoo: A Zombie in Disney’s Donald Duck Comics,” in
RePresenting Magic, UnDoing Evil: Of Human Inner Light and Darkness (Leiden: Brill,
2012), 31-38; and Daniel Immerwahr, “Ten-Cent Ideology: Donald Duck Comic Books
and the US Challenge to Modernization,” Modern American History 3.1 (2020): 1-26.
“Darkest Africa” was a 22-page Disney comics short story written, drawn, and lettered by
Carl Barks, first published in March of Comics #20 (1948).
 FROM HORROR TO HEROES: MYTHOLOGIES OF GRAPHIC VOODOO… 41

tribesmen that were depicted as blackface characters were especially

deplorable. And while publishers did address issues of religious and racial
representation in the development of a Hollywood Hays-style comics
code, industry-wide participation was voluntary, and Graphic Voodoo
themes continued to reaffirm whiteness and white superiority within a
popular culture medium that promoted the vilification of Africana religi-
osity as a matter of comedy and farce.30

Graphic Voodoo in Horror Comics

To conclude this discussion of religion and race in the comics we turn
finally to horror publications. Contrasted with the African jungle adven-
tures from an earlier period, Graphic Voodoo horror reveled in a terrifying
blackness that was based much closer to home. Haiti, the mythical land
par excellence of evil Africana religion, provided the primary source mate-
rial for Voodoo horror texts and images for much of the twentieth century.
Like their Gothic literature counterparts in the 1800s, Voodoo horror
comics promoted lurid fantasies of Vodou by corrupting a history that had
been suppressed and denied, for it was in Haiti that racial horror was first
apotheosized in western consciousness. As the “obsessively-retold master
tale of the Carribean’s colonial terror,” the mythos of the Haitian
Revolution conjured the dual specters of white terror and the ominous
prospect of black rule. Repurposing the jungle adventure comic, Voodoo-­
horror reenacted the plight of Haiti in mythologies of memory that linked
to concomitant anxieties that circulated in American culture during the
1950s and 60s, particularly around threats to white male heterosexual
subjectivity.31 For example, Voodoo horror comics projected collective
fears of white annihilation by members of the US military in Haiti, from
1915 to 1934. Even as nineteenth century literatures referenced race and
religion within a colonial backdrop of bloodly massacres and white geno-
cide, twentieth century wartime accounts similarly condemned Vodou as a
threatening force in Haiti, where Africana supernaturalism was believed to
be a crucial pillar of resistance by anti-occupation forces and local rebels.
Counter-histories written by Marines and other denizens of the

30
Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 32; Bart Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of
Mass Culture,163.
31
Michael Goodrum and Philip Smith, Printing Terror: American Horror Comics as Cold
War Commentary and Critique (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021).
42 Y. CHIREAU

occupation focused on the dangers of Africana spirituality in Haiti, allego-

rizing the past by recapitulating their demise in the present. Through the
reassertion of colonial-style policies of forced labor and brutal measures of
discipline against the indigenous population, US occupiers transformed
Haiti into a landscape of terror. Nevertheless in the hands of these outsid-
ers, Voodoo in was created as the quintessence of religious and racial men-
ace; but it was never the authentic religion of Vodou, only its simulacrum,
conveyed with “true-to-life” accounts of zombies, cannibalism, and
human sacrifice.32 White American ethnographers, journalists, and mili-
tary officers thus implicated the twentieth century geopolitical order by
providing a subjective experience of racial and religious Otherness by
reframing propaganda in fictionalized accounts set in occupation-­
era Haiti.33
Reports of wartime Voodoo-horror embellished Haitian Vodou rituals
that were seemingly perpetrated by the enemies of the Occupation, cen-
tered around themes of sorcery, violence, and conspiratorial secrecy.
William Seabrook, an American journalist who went to Haiti as a military
observer in 1915, wrote what became a prototype for later popular zom-
bie fictions, a controversial autobiographical memoir called The Magic
Island. Similarly, former Marines John Huston Craige and Arthur J. Burks
published horror writings purportedly from personal eyewitness reports.
Burks would describe Voodoo as a “most terrible religion” in a collection of
magazine short stories on the “rites of Voodooism” from the mid-1920s
that depicted a grotesque vista of blackness and sexual excess, depravity,
and ecstatic violence.34 And so we see with the Voodoo horror imaginary
an indirect acknowledgement of the American occupiers as the true agents
of barbarism, as those who projected their fears of spiritual contagion onto

32
Laënnec Hurbon, “American Fantasy and Haitian Vodou,” in Sacred Arts of Haitian
Vodou (Los Angeles: University of California Museum of Art, 1995), 181-197; Cussans,
Undead Uprising, 40-41.
33
See, for example, the comic book story “Famous Marine Crowned King of the Voodoos,”
Picture News Comics 4 (March 1946). Jeffrey Kripal describes comics authors of the paranor-
mal who imagined themselves as subjects who wrote themselves into their own texts (Mutants
and Mystics); on white Vodou writers as spiritual explorers see John Cussans, Undead
Uprising, 22-41.
34
See George Romero’s introduction to the reissued version of Seabrook’s Magic Island in
2016. See also Cussans, Undead Uprising; Michael Goodrum, “The Past That Will Not Die:
Trauma, Race, and Zombie Empire in Horror Comics of the 1950s,” in Documenting
Trauma in Comics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 69-84; Mary Renda, Taking
Haiti, 165, 178.
 FROM HORROR TO HEROES: MYTHOLOGIES OF GRAPHIC VOODOO… 43

the very populations who were subjected to the brutality of the invading
forces. In a recent history of horror comics, Michael Goodrum observes
that in addition to creating an archive of wartime trauma, Voodoo horror
allowed white male comics writers and readers to “stage fears of their
extinction in and through modernity.”35 He notes that racial themes in
horror comics in the 1950’s period often fixated on cautionary narratives
of the threat posed by Voodoo in relation to whiteness in stories of mys-
tery, murder, and crime. Graphic Voodoo source texts from Haiti also
functioned as amateur spiritual ethnographies for explorations by white
males that were taken as authentic recountings of their experiences of psy-
chic discovery.36 Voodoo fiction writers documented the surrealism of
Vodou rituals, positioning themselves as metaphysical seekers while simul-
taneously acting as unwitting apologists for the militaristic campaigns and
neo-colonial exploits of the occupiers. Like Kripal’s comics’ writers of the
uncanny and the impossible, white male ethnographers in Haiti partici-
pated in desacralized rituals of radical alterity with hallucinogens and
explored their own “subjective obliteration” in transgressive acts of ego-­
extinction and self-dissolution that exploited the community-based tradi-
tions of worship and initiatory service in Haitian Vodou.37
In the years following World War II, Voodoo horror was a staple in
American comics and other fields of popular culture. Nevertheless, by the
mid-1950s the perceived unwholesomeness of the genre sparked a moral
panic among an array of religious organizations, parents’ groups, and pub-
lic officials in the US. Senate hearings were called to address the impact of
comic books on juvenile delinquency and mental health, with the testi-
mony of psychiatrist Fredric Wertham garnering particular interest.
Wertham’s 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, as noted previously, chal-
lenged racist representations in the comics, including Africana religion

35
Michael Goodrum, Printing Terror: American Horror Comics as Cold War Commentary
and Critique (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), 109-146.
36
Susan Zieger, “The Case of William Seabrook: Documents, Haiti, and the Working
Dead,” Modernism/modernity 19.4 (2012): 737-754; Kripal, Mutants and Mystics, 217;
Steven Gregory, “Voodoo, Ethnography, and the American Occupation of Haiti: William
B. Seabrook’s The Magic Island,” in The Politics of Culture and Creativity: A Critique of
Civilization Vol. 2, University Press of Florida, 1992: 169-207.
37
Cussans, Undead Uprising, p. 135. Kripal notes that horror, “with all its depictions of
the dead and the monstrous, is a profoundly religious genre, even when it is not explicitly
religious, since terror, a close cousin of trauma, can also catalyze transcendence” (Mutants
and Mystics, 296).
44 Y. CHIREAU

caricatures. With the formation of the Comics Code Authority in the same
year, grisly violence, monstrous creatures, and terms like “weird” and
“horror” were stricken from mainstream comics so as to contain the
excesses of the trade.38 Subsequently, many prominent horror comic books
agreed to excise the images of vampires, ghouls, and demons on comics
cover art, and the word zombie was replaced in the comics lexicon. And so,
the paradigmatic figure of the monstrous undead would be eventually
freed from its racial origins, as an obscure character of Haitian folk tradi-
tion that had transcended its roots in African culture.39
Black representation in mainstream comics reached its lowest point
after 1950, as if race had ceased to exist and Africana characters were irrel-
evant.40 From the 1960s on through to the 1970s, Graphic Voodoo in the
comics played out as horror, with the uncertainty of a shifting cultural
milieu and an era that included increased American engagement with
international geopolitical conflicts, foreign anti-colonial independence
movements, the Cold War, Vietnam, and nuclear proliferation. Then, in
1973 a character by the name of Brother Voodoo debuted in the Marvel
Comics anthology Strange Tales. Brother Voodoo comics, which melded
Vodou and Voodoo, featured a protagonist whose secret identity was that of
a repatriated Haitian psychologist, instead of an African or black American
character. With his unusual pedigree, Brother Voodoo was likened to the
popular comics character Dr. Strange, who had been introduced in Strange
Tales ten years earlier with a similar origin story, that of a brilliant neuro-
surgeon turned exotic Orientalist master. Adilifu Nama asserts that the
practice of “cloning” new black characters from established white

38
Markman Ellis, The History of Gothic Fiction, 205; Elizabeth McAlister, “Slaves,
Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies,” Anthropological
Quarterly 85 (2012): 457-486; Raphael Hoermann, “Figures of Terror: The “Zombie” and
the Haitian Revolution,” Atlantic Studies 14 (2017): 152-173; Emiel Martens, “The 1930s
Horror Adventure Film on Location in Jamaica: ‘Jungle Gods’, ‘Voodoo Drums’ and
‘Mumbo Jumbo’ in the ‘Secret Places of Paradise Island,’ Humanities 10 (2021): 62.
39
Although a defining symbol in the corpus of Graphic Voodoo mythemes, the zombie
will not be discussed here. Zombification plays a somewhat insignificant role in the religion
of Vodou in Haiti and should be considered to be an amplification of the peculiar fears of
white westerners in expressions of dread and paranoia. The zombie first appeared in American
film in the 1920s and was an immediate hit (Hoermann, Figures of Terror). A recent discus-
sion can be found in Michael Goodrum, “The Past That Will Not Die: Trauma, Race, and
Zombie Empire in Horror Comics of the 1950s” (in Documenting Trauma in Comics, 2020).
40
Lenthall, “Outside the Panel.”
 FROM HORROR TO HEROES: MYTHOLOGIES OF GRAPHIC VOODOO… 45

characters resulted in a remixed class of superheroes that were often more

compelling and provocative than the original source material:

…racially remixed superheroes offer audiences familiar points of reference

that, as black superheroes, suggest a range of ideas, cultural points of inter-
ests, compelling themes, and multiple meanings that were not previously
present. Frequently, the black versions are more chic, politically provocative,
and ideologically dynamic than the established white superheroes they were
modeled after.41

However, in representing Africana religion as horror, Brother Voodoo

comics attempted to balance older, racist Graphic Voodoo distortions with
the character’s putative embrace of his sacred heritage as an Houngan and
magical adept with mythemes of redemptive heroism. Despite its reimag-
ining of Haitian Vodou as an inspiring source of black identity, the comic
trafficked in clichéd racial stereotypes, appropriating blaxploitation film
tropes and overdetermined visuals of male physical brawn and hyper-­
masculine affect.42 Brother Voodoo’s initial appearances in two episodes of
Strange Tales, for instance, demonstrate the tension between the comic’s
productive use of horror-fantasy styles and black superhero conventions.
The cover of issue #1 featured an urban battle zone and a quasi-­psychedelic
backdrop with black antagonists, blazing guns and bullets, as the super-
hero strides into the foreground. Superimposed with his signature “mysti-
cal smoke” and pulsating with electrical energy, Brother Voodoo is shown
inhabited by his Vodou marassa, or spirit twin, in a fantastical illustration
of subtle bodies and altered states that literalizes Kripal’s “radiation”
mytheme. In contrast, issue number two presents Brother Voodoo in full
brawling mode against an Africana super villain named Damballah, and a
writhing serpent demon, a style that recalls the extreme kinetics of men’s
naturalist pulp magazines of the 1950s. Here, the superhero presents as a

41
Adilifu Nama, Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 2011). Brother Voodoo was introduced in the horror series
Strange Tales in 1973, with additional appearances in Tales of the Zombie, Tomb of Dracula,
Werewolf by Night, and The Avengers, before undergoing a 21st century revamp as the new
Sorcerer Supreme in Doctor Voodoo, Avenger of the Supernatural.
42
Rob Lendrum, “The Super Black Macho, One Baaad Mutha: Black Superhero
Masculinity in 1970s Mainstream Comic Books,” Extrapolation 46.3 (2005): 360. On black
superhero masculinity, see also Jeffrey A. Brown, “Comic Book Masculinity and the New
Black Superhero,” African American Review 33.1 (1999): 25-42, and Nama, Super Black.
46 Y. CHIREAU

muscular action figure, fighting for his life in the jungle, subduing feral
beasts and treacherous enemies.
Although it was imagined as a vehicle for a new kind of comics charac-
ter, Brother Voodoo re-inscribed older Graphic Voodoo horror tropes by
bastardizing Africana religiosity. In the comic, Haitian Vodou was trans-
formed into a black superhero's weapon of enhanced powers by caricatur-
ing the venerable deities known as loa as vengeful demons, misrepresenting
the holy artifacts of spiritual protection and healing as fetishism, and cast-
ing the sacramental practices of ritual spirit possession as necromancy.
Heedless to the religion of Haitian Vodou as a deeply rooted spiritual tradi-
tion, the comics reduced a vibrant faith to a magical arsenal of warfare
against witch doctors, criminal sorcerers and, of course, zombies. As a
comic book that ostensibly challenged conventional racial and religious
identities, Brother Voodoo carried forth the misrepresentation of Vodou as a
primitive system of violent occultism.
Near the end of the twentieth century, Voodoo horror comics only
occasionally tackled racial issues, which included topics such as prejudice
and inner-city violence. Stories were just as often set in black majority cit-
ies like New Orleans or other racialized urban spaces as they were located
in unnamed torrid zones in the South Pacific or Africa. Horror comics also
explored black subjectivities in the context of the distinctive regional cul-
tures of the southern United States, referencing the past and its legacies of
slavery with fantasy-inflected Graphic Voodoo mythemes. A story arc in
the Vertigo series Swamp Thing #42, for example, about a human-plant-­
monster superhero, used images lifted directly from William Seabrook's
The Magic Island to illustrate what Quina Whitted describes as a “post-
modern slave narrative.” A gratuitous gothic fantasy set on a contempo-
rary Louisiana plantation, the comic condensed Haitian Vodou practices
and images of malformed black bodies, rotting corpses, and haunted land-
scapes. The creator of this particular story was Alan Moore, a ceremonial
magician and one of Kripal’s “writers of the impossible,” utilized dream
and flashback sequences to create a paranormal fantasy of race, subjection,
and ancestral revenge. Likewise, other Voodoo-horror comics of the late
twentieth century recycled Graphic Voodoo stereotypes and violent super-
naturalism with conventional fantasy and science-fiction mythemes
in comics superhero formats, adding a slew of original characters such as
the Jamaican Voodoo priest Papa Midnite, biracial New Orleans jazz
 FROM HORROR TO HEROES: MYTHOLOGIES OF GRAPHIC VOODOO… 47

player Shadowman, the trickster-rapper Jim Crow, and the exotic dancer
Priscilla Kitaen as Voodoo.43

Conclusion
Although I have used the idea of Graphic Voodoo to describe the Africana
sacred and its mythic associations with race, religion, and Otherness in the
comics, it is important to recognize that Voodoo is neither a historical tradi-
tion nor a genuine spiritual practice. It is, rather, a discursive formation.
By way of sociological analogizing, Graphic Voodoo might even be inter-
preted as a “religion of whiteness,” as Stephen Finley posits, since it
emerged as the material embodiment of racist ontologies of violence and
subjugation.44 The implications of Graphic Voodoo discourses, however,
are very real. The narration of jungle adventures and neo-colonial incur-
sions in the comics parallel the ways that whiteness and black subordina-
tion were inscribed into racial social hierarchies between Africa and the
West in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Graphic Voodoo, we
have seen, played a role in the material practices of US cartoons and ani-
mation films by perpetuating the gross devaluation of black American ver-
nacular traditions and folk religions such as Hoodoo-Conjure, and their
vital connections to ancestral spiritism and the enchanted world, with
degrading stereotypes and imagery. And finally, the imagined horrors of
blackness and its spiritual atrocities were incorporated into the sordid fic-
tions of Vodou that rationalized the US role in Haiti, with its institutions
of military repression and foreign control during the Occupation,
from1915 to 1935, and again at the end of the twentieth century. The
totalizing effect of Graphic Voodoo has been to create a kind of historical
revisionism that aestheticizes race and religion and validates postulations
of white supremacy in the comics and elsewhere in popular culture.

43
Qiana J. Whitted, “Of Slaves and Other Swamp Things,” in Comics and the U.S. South
(Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 187; Kripal, Mutants and Mystics, 11,
28. See also Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2010).
44
Post-colonial analysis explores the ways that consciousness was fashioned within particu-
lar regimes of historical knowledge. See Steven Finley and Lori Latrice Martin, “The
Complexity of Color and the Religion of Whiteness,” in L.L. Martin, et al (eds.), Color
Struck. Teaching Race and Ethnicity (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2017). See also Stephen
C. Finley, et al (eds.), The Religion of White Rage: Religious Fervor, White Workers and the
Myth of Black Racial Progress (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).
48 Y. CHIREAU

Moving into the twenty-first century, we find that Graphic Voodoo has
been appropriated by a new generation of comics creators, artists, and
writers of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, cultural sensibilities, and
religious commitments. In contrast with the contested representations of
Voodoo in twentieth century comics, the ongoing presence of Africana
religions is “open-ended and unfinished,” with comics mythemes that
offer greater respect for the enduring traditions of Africa and its diaspora.
Graphic Voodoo has also given way to creative interlocutions between
comics and the contemporary arts movement such as Afro Futurism, as
well as the neo-horror aesthetic known as the ethno-Gothic.45 Afro
Futurism, in particular, explores the intersections between science, black-
ness, and spirituality, much like the speculative genres of Mutants and
Mystics, as it reimagines Africana heroes, racialized divinities, and black
transhumans that are based in authentic histories that draw upon animis-
tic, supernatural, and technocultural traditions. African, African diasporic,
and black American religions exemplify a global blackness in which human-
ity is interconnected as the past is drawn into the present, and the future
into the now, grounding quantum theories of time and space with indig-
enous cosmologies in spectacular convergences. Afro Futurist mythemes
in twenty-first century comics texts and narratives look beyond temporal-
ity to the ancestral spiritual realm to create mythic futures from displaced
African and African American pasts.46
The invention of Voodoo issued from a world that had witnessed the
demise of whiteness and its brutally extractive regimes of slavery in the
West, which marked a turning point in modernity. Graphic Voodoo in the
comics consolidated the racial and religious apprehensions of the Other

45
See Dana Rush, Vodun in Coastal Benin: Unfinished, Open-ended, Global (Nashville, TN:
Vanderbilt University Press, 2013). “Ethnogothic” uses Graphic Voodoo styles to transgress
comics depictions of race and religion by resignifying black abjection. These include stories
of black retribution that are often presented as nightmares or ghost stories that manifest in
the return of the repressed, i.e., black monsters and ghosts as racial subjects that linger at the
metaphysical margins, mired in traumatic histories and memories. See Whitted, Comics and
the U.S. South, 189; Donna-Lyn Washington, ed. John Jennings: Conversations (Jackson, MS:
University Press of Mississippi, 2020), 2.
46
See Reynaldo Anderson, “Critical Afrofuturism: A Case Study In Visual Rhetoric,
Sequential Art, And Postapocalyptic Black Identity,” in The Blacker the Ink, 171-192; Yvonne
Chireau, “Looking for Black Religions in 20th Century Comics, 1931–1993,” Religions 10.6
(2019): 400.
 FROM HORROR TO HEROES: MYTHOLOGIES OF GRAPHIC VOODOO… 49

after the nineteenth century Gothic ‘literature of nightmare.’ In the earlier

period, the violent anticolonial uprising that led to the ensuing triumph of
black sovereignty in Haiti initiated a transhistorical, world-shifting crisis
that impacted the collective imaginary in its reactionary formations. The
Voodoo mythos that haunted the West for over a century was marked by
a fascination with the morbid, the abject, and the uncanny. The same
might be said of the neurotic fantasies of whiteness that were formed out
of the cataclysmic rupture of intelligibility that ensued from the emer-
gence of the first western nation to claim universal emancipation of its
enslaved citizens. Did the relentless focus on Africana supernaturalism in
Graphic Voodoo comics come about as a result of psychosocial projections
of white trauma in light of the Haitian uprising? Graphic Voodoo pro-
duced a subjectivity in whiteness that envisioned itself in relation to the
African sacred, apprehending that which it feared but could not perceive
as part of itself. “It is…the other part of the self,” says Laennec Hurbon
with reference to American fantasies of Vodou, “which, because inadmis-
sible, is devalued and returned to the self in the grimacing form of the
cannibal and the sorcerer.” This conflation of the demonic-divine flows
out a primal experience of the “absence of difference” between the sacred
and the monstrous, an encounter with an unHoly Other, a critical turn
that takes the comics reader, as Kripal reflects, “back to terror and
bedazzlement.”47 Conceived as a most archaic form of sublime fear, as
Rudolf Otto describes the human experience of the mysterium tremendum
et fascinans – it is the utter horror caused by the Self's confrontation with
its own negation or annihilation.48 Regardless of its appeal for consumers
and creators, Graphic Voodoo reflects the actual terrors of history and
memory, the xenophobic anxieties, racist distortions, and white suprema-
cist misrepresentations of the black and Africana Sacred. And with these
mythemes of race and religion in the comics, the horror is the hero.

47
Laennec Hurbon, “American Fantasy and Haitian Vodou,” in Sacred Arts of Haitian
Vodou, 195; Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible, 9; on blackness as the terrifying and
attractive supernatural other, see Stephen Finley, “The Supernatural in the African American
Experience,” in Jeffrey Kripal, Religion: Super Religion (New York: Macmillan, 2017), 233.
48
Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (London: Oxford University Press, 1950).
50 Y. CHIREAU

Voodoo Comics #19, “Tales of Jungle Magic,” January 1955

 FROM HORROR TO HEROES: MYTHOLOGIES OF GRAPHIC VOODOO… 51

Strange Tales #169, featuring Brother Voodoo, September 1973

52 Y. CHIREAU

Vault of Horror #28, December 1952

 FROM HORROR TO HEROES: MYTHOLOGIES OF GRAPHIC VOODOO… 53

Wonder Woman #19, “Tale of the Witch Doctor’s Cauldron,” July 1946
54 Y. CHIREAU

Action Comics #413, “The Voodoo Doom of Superman,” June 1972

 FROM HORROR TO HEROES: MYTHOLOGIES OF GRAPHIC VOODOO… 55

“Voodoo Hoodoo,” Walt Disney’s Donald Duck Adventures, Four Color Comics
#238, June 1949
56 Y. CHIREAU

Jungle Comics #77, May 1946

 FROM HORROR TO HEROES: MYTHOLOGIES OF GRAPHIC VOODOO… 57

Strange Tales, Featuring: Brother Voodoo #170, July 1973

 Mystico-Erotics of the “Next Age
Superhero”: Christian Hippie Comics
of the 1970s

Amy Slonaker

Abstract This essay examines comics aimed at the “Jesus People move-
ment” as it emerged in southern California between the late 1960s
through the late 1970s. The focus on Christian Hippie Comics includes Al
Hartley’s Spire Christian Comics, and True Komix, the official comic book
of The Children of God, a Christian-based cult born of the Hippie era.
Following Jeffrey Kripal, my analysis unearths a libidinal structure to
Christian Hippie Comics in their conjoining of the numinous and the
erotic. The essay posits that such “tantric” elements in Christian comics
may be surprising given Christianity’s traditionally repressive attitude
toward forms of sexuality; however, as I suggest, these tantric motifs
reflect the Asian influences of the hippie culture which these comics tar-
geted for conversion to Christianity. The resulting comic style includes
elements of a tantric revisioning of the Gospel aimed at the hippie youth
of the day.

A. Slonaker (*)
Mythological Studies, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 59

Switzerland AG 2023
D. M. Odorisio (ed.), A New Gnosis, Contemporary Religion and
Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1_4
60 A. SLONAKER

Keywords Jesus People • Christian Hippie Comics • The Children of

God • Jeffrey Kripal • Mystico-Erotics

Introduction
Growing up in an evangelical church in California in the 1970s, I came in
contact with a variety of Christian comic books that conveyed the stories
of the Bible and the message of salvation through Jesus Christ. Many of
these comics are now part of my personal comic book collection. When I
look back on them as an adult, I am struck by the way these Christian texts
reach outside of their own tradition to incorporate themes of the broader
youth counterculture and its messages of peace and “Free Love.” Through
their incorporation of “hippie” themes, Christian comic books can be
viewed as part of the movement that Christian and secular observers called
“The Jesus People,” a segment of Christian youth that also embraced the
hippie ethos and its philosophy of love as an antidote to society’s woes
(Eskridge 2013, 2).
The Jesus People Movement, with its roots in the hippie culture of San
Francisco and Los Angeles, developed from a cultural milieu steeped in
Asian philosophies. As noted by religious studies scholar Jeffrey Kripal,
“Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist systems of yoga were central features of the
American counterculture [of the 1960s and 1970s]…. [W]hat was prob-
ably the most historically influential version of these in the West [was] the
Hindu Tantric system” (Kripal 2011, 170). Tantric philosophy is noted
for conjoining ideas of the sacred and the sexual in a “mystico-erotic”
system of spiritual enlightenment (308). This joining-as-one is indicative
of a larger concept of non-dualism that is found across a variety of Asian
traditions that perceive the nature of reality to be illusory in its separation
of subject from object, of individual from God. These ideas came to be
reflected in the broader popular culture of the hippie era and also, I sug-
gest, in the culture of the Jesus People Movement, including in its
comic books.
In this chapter, I will use the term “Christian Hippie Comics” to
describe those comic books that are targeted toward the Jesus People
Movement as it emerged from California in the late 1960s into the late
 MYSTICO-EROTICS OF THE “NEXT AGE SUPERHERO”: CHRISTIAN HIPPIE… 61

1970s, or that draw upon its symbols. The two Christian Hippie Comic
texts focused on here are: (1) Archie’s Sonshine, written and drawn by the
conservative Christian Al Hartley, and published under the Spire Christian
Comics imprint in 1974; and (2) The Flirty Little Fishy, ([1974] 1982)
published under the True Komix imprint of The Children of God, a reli-
gious group widely considered to be a cult that flourished during the hip-
pie era (Eskridge 2013, 192). I suggest that both of these Christian-based
comic texts employ themes of their contemporary counterculture to make
their message appealing to a youthful audience. More specifically, they
draw upon the Eastern philosophies that permeated California hippie cul-
ture, including tantric ideas about latent spiritual powers related to human
sexuality.
Such tantric themes in comic books are examined by Kripal in his book
Mutants & Mystics (2011), in which he looks specifically at superhero
comics and examines their mystico-erotic themes in support of his idea of
the “Super-Story.” The Super-Story, according to Kripal, is a sort of
“metamyth” (5) that underlies and shapes most of contemporary popular
culture. Through its central tropes, or “mythemes” (26), as Kripal calls
them, the Super-Story conveys a positive message of the evolution of
humankind. According to Kripal, the Super-Story's mythemes emanate
from “the ancient history and universal structures of the human religious
imagination” (5), so that over the centuries these separable or indepen-
dent mythemes can be found in a “mind-boggling array of combinations”
(26) within narratives that range from Biblical accounts of Jesus in the
New Testament up to contemporary superhero films of the latest Marvel
Renaissance.
I use the framework of Kripal’s Super-Story and its mythemes to exam-
ine mystico-erotic elements in the two examples of Christian Hippie
Comics named above in order to assess how they do – and do not – par-
ticipate in the Super-Story's positive message of human evolution. I argue
that Archie’s Sonshine participates in the Super-Story through its use of
mystico-erotic elements that encourage spiritual growth, but that, in The
Flirty Little Fishy, these same elements subvert the positive message of
Kripal’s Super-Story, or perhaps present a “Bizarro” Super-Story that is
just one more twist on the Super-Story itself. By examining how each of
these texts relate to the Super-Story, we can observe how popular culture
works to form a modern, living mythology –one that leaves room for read-
ers to write their own future and create their own reality (Kripal 2011, 330).
62 A. SLONAKER

Kripal’s Super-Story and Its Mythemes

In order to use the Super-Story as a lens through which to analyze the
Christian Hippie Comics in question, it is useful to say more about the
nature of the Super-Story as an emergent metamyth (Kripal 2017, 271),
highlighting those aspects of the Super-Story which are of particular inter-
est in the analysis to follow.
The Super-Story’s own “origin story” can help unpack its connection
to a form of “cosmic consciousness” (Bucke 1901), and not just super-
hero powers. Kripal found inspiration for his Super-Story in the writings
of Michael Murphy, co-founder of The Esalen Institute in Big Sur,
California (Kripal 2011, 29). Murphy’s tome of human potential, The
Future of the Body (1992), notes that “superordinary” powers in literature,
“cartoons,” and movies, “might express intuitions of capacities that are
available to us …[and] might prefigure luminous knowings and powers
that can be realized by the human race” (Murphy 1992, 211, 213).
Building on Murphy’s idea, Kripal points out the commonalities among
narratives about “superordinary powers” (Kripal 2011, 29) and how they
all seem related to one, over-arching story. Kripal explains that the Super-­
Story takes many forms and has operated historically to shape many of our
culture’s narratives. It may, Kripal writes, have existed for millennia with-
out, “any single plot, cast of characters or definite ending” (26), but ulti-
mately the same underlying narrative persists through all the manifestations
of the Super-Story; that is, a narrative about the evolution of the human
being (1) and our capacity for developing what Kripal calls “extraordi-
nary” and “paranormal capacities” (6). These superhuman capabilities,
such as telepathy, teleportation, or the manipulation of subtle bodies of
energy, are treated in superhero comics as fantasy, but, according to Kripal,
such powers may be better thought of as “foreshadowings or intuitions”
(182) of humanity’s unfolding evolutionary path. Ultimately, this evolu-
tionary path promises more than superhero powers. It also suggests a path
toward the realization of one’s own divinity, of which superhuman powers
may be an outgrowth (279). In this way, Kripal’s Super-Story describes a
“new evolutionary or cosmic humanism” (430) that shares the hope in
human potential with the founders of Esalen.
According to Kripal, this overarching Super-Story can be divided into
seven tropes, or “mythemes,” each of which operate to support the overall
narrative while acting as separate categories for the varieties of tropes and
symbols that make up the Super-Story. For example, the mytheme Kripal
 MYSTICO-EROTICS OF THE “NEXT AGE SUPERHERO”: CHRISTIAN HIPPIE… 63

calls “Mutation” (2011, 173) provides a framework for thinking about

narratives that present humans as evolving and mutating beings. This
Mutation mytheme can be seen, for example, in the pages of Stan Lee’s
The X-Men, first published in 1963. In the first issue the leader of the
X-Men, Dr. Xavier, explains that he has created a school for evolutionarily
mutated superhumans whom he has deemed “X-Men.” The X-Men are
so-called, he explains, because they "possess an extra power ... one which
ordinary humans do not!! ... X-Men, for EX-tra power!" (Lee 1963, 8).
The X-Men's extra capabilities are explained as being a matter of evolu-
tionary mutation occurring at the same time these teenage characters are
physically developing into sexual maturity. The mutating and developing
bodies of its main characters reflect the mutation mytheme, which, in
turn, supports the Super-Story's focus on the evolving nature of human
capabilities.
The mytheme of central interest to this analysis is what Kripal calls the
mytheme of “Orientation” (2011, 31). For Kripal, the Orientation
mytheme works as an “imaginative construct” (27) within Western civili-
zation to locate ideas of sacred power and wisdom “’far away,’ ‘long, long
ago,’ and more often than not, ‘in the East’” (27). Locating such ideas of
the supernatural in an Eastern hinterland, for example, creates an alternate
reality wherein the possibility of their existence can be entertained.
Through the veil of foreign lands and customs, readers can suspend their
disbelief and engage ideas about the supernatural.
To illustrate his point, Kripal examines the mytheme of Orientation in
the Marvel comic book Doctor Strange (Lee 2016), which features a plot
steeped in eastern esotericism. Originally created by Stan Lee and Steve
Ditko in 1963, the character of Doctor Strange starts out as a rational man
of science––Dr. Stephen Strange, M.D.––one of the greatest neurosur-
geons in the world. But despite a successful career saving lives, Stephen
Strange cares only for money and prestige. When a violent car crash injures
his hands, every possible medical intervention fails to help him, leaving his
hands with a tremor that prohibits him from ever performing surgery
again. In desperation, Stephen searches the globe for a way to heal his
hands. This leads him to the palace of “The Ancient One,” high in the
Himalayan Mountains. From this Eastern sage, Doctor Strange learns
how to heal himself and gains the wisdom to unlock superhuman powers
such as astral projection, levitation, and clairvoyance. Ultimately, the fig-
ure of Doctor Strange becomes the successor of the Ancient One and
64 A. SLONAKER

takes on his title of Sorcerer Supreme, a master of the mystic and martial
arts (Lee 2016).
In Doctor Strange’s evolution from man of material science to master
of mystic arts, we can perceive the outline of the Super-Story with its mes-
sage of humanity’s supernatural potential. In the case of Doctor Strange,
it is through the mytheme of Orientation that this message is conveyed, as
evidenced in the numerous far eastern tropes and symbols employed
throughout the Doctor Strange saga. For instance, the type of superpow-
ers that Doctor Strange develops are, according to Kripal, similar to the
“siddhis” or superpowers from “Indian Yogic lore” (2011, 172). These
powers, like astral projection and the ability to manipulate subtle energies,
are specifically associated with the tantric practice of Kundalini yoga (172).
In this practice, meditative techniques can tap human sexual energy
through the chakra system of the subtle body to achieve spiritual enlight-
enment and the accompanying capacity for superhuman powers. The
rooting of Doctor Strange’s superpowers in an esoteric yogic tradition is
one way the mytheme of Orientation uses the West’s own mystical impres-
sions of the East to create a setting to ponder ideas about the outer limits
of human potential.
The mystico-erotic themes present in the Orientation mytheme are
likewise present in the other mythemes of Kripal’s Super-Story. As noted,
in the context of the Mutation mytheme, the mystico-erotic motif in the
X-men is seen in the pubescent mutants whose superpowers come to frui-
tion at the same time as their sexual maturation process. For Doctor
Strange, it is the sexually-charged secrets of tantra that imbue him with his
superpowers. Kripal’s location of mystico-erotic themes throughout the
various mythemes of the Super-Story supports his idea that “on some pro-
found metaphsyical level…sexual expression and superpowers” manifest
together (170). To support this suggestion, Kripal traces the historical
connection in comic books between themes of the erotic and mystical
superpowers. Using the historically relied upon model of descending
orders of metals (Gold, Silver, and Bronze) to describe the descending
“Ages” of comic books (24), Kripal shows how, in each age, the superhero
embodies a different mystico-erotic relationship that manifests, in what he
calls, that superhero’s unique “libidinal organization” (165).
For instance, in the Golden Era of Comics (1938–1956), erotic energy
and sexuality were separated from superpowers as exemplified by
Superman’s “implicit vow of chastity” (Kripal 2011, 168) that is key to his
stoic, unfuckwithable demeanor. In contrast, the libidinal organization of
 MYSTICO-EROTICS OF THE “NEXT AGE SUPERHERO”: CHRISTIAN HIPPIE… 65

Silver Age comics (1956–1970) “sublimates sex into the superpower” by

repressing overt sexuality which later manifests mystically in the cosmic,
atomic, and psychedelic powers of the era’s superheroes, something which
is demonstrated by Stan Lee’s X-Men (1963). Most important for this
argument is the unique libidinal organization of what Kripal calls “the
next age superhero” of our contemporary era of comics (169). In this
period, the erotic energy previously denied or repressed is now the basis
for the superpowers of the comic book heroes. Kripal points to the recent
characterization of Dark Phoenix in the Morrison/Quitely “New X-Men"
series (2002), where she is depicted in poses of “explicit eroticism” as “a
cosmic goddess figure akin to those found throughout Hindu and
Buddhist Asia” (Kripal 2011, 211, 214). It is the conjoining of sexual and
superpowers that Kripal says heralds the “new erotics” of the Next Age
superhero (170). Like the Next Age superhero, the Christian Hippie
Comics examined below exhibit a union of mystical and erotic powers. By
tracing this mystico-erotic theme in an analysis of Christian Hippie
Comics, one can better understand how they function as part of the
Super-Story.
The final mytheme of particular interest to this paper’s analysis is what
Kripal calls the mytheme of “Authorization” (254), a concept suggesting
that “our cultural and religious worlds are authored by us” (Kripal 2014,
389) such that through them one comes to understand the boundaries of
reality and what is humanly possible – or (im)possible. Kripal explains this
concept using the phrase “decrire-construire,“ or “to describe is to con-
struct,” which he borrows from French philosopher Bertrand Méheust
(Kripal 2010, 222). As Kripal explains the phrase, decrire-construire refers
to how, "human intellectual and social practices, particularly in their nam-
ing and institution-creating functions, somehow circumscribe reality,
somehow create the real for a particular place and time” (222). The result
is that to a “very large extent,” our realities are “culturally loaded, con-
structed or even determined” (202) such that our lives––and those reali-
ties––are a reaction to that authored culture. As Méheust himself describes
it, decrire-construire has the ability to “function as the actualization and/
or the inhibition of potentialities” (in Kripal 2010, 223) because, as Kripal
now explains, “to acknowledge openly and to describe authoritatively
some aspect of the real is to make possible a psychological experience of
the same” (223). It is through this “Authorization” process that Kripal’s
Super-Story can impact the real. In the case of the superhero comics Kripal
studies in Mutants & Mystics, this means that narratives of superhero
66 A. SLONAKER

powers provide audiences with a psychological experience of these capa-

bilities which, in turn, provides a step toward expanding our human
potential and cosmic consciousness. But Authorization also has the poten-
tial to describe realities that do not promote the evolution of human
potential in a positive manner. As Méheust notes, the power to author
culture also holds the power to inhibit potentialities (223). In the comic
texts examined below, there is evidence of both positive and negative uses
of Authorization. While Archie's Sonshine supports the Super-Story's idea
of human spiritual growth and enlightenment, the Children of God’s The
Little Flirty Fishy promotes sexual abuse and deception. Despite the oppos-
ing realities each comic presents, they both rely heavily on the same mys-
tico-erotic themes that will be traced below as part of Kripal’s Super-Story.

The World of Christian Hippie Comics

The Christian Hippie Comics examined in this paper can be viewed as one
aspect of a broader youth outreach by evangelical Christians that came in
response to the flourishing number of counterculture youth or “hippies”
that were finding Jesus and converting to Christianity toward the end of
the 1960s. As this cultural phenomenon continued to grow into the
1970s, the term “Jesus People” was often adopted to describe the thriving
subculture (Eskridge 2013, 3). The Jesus People phenomenon received
increasing amounts of media exposure, appearing on the cover of Time
magazine in June of 1971 with a front-page story heralding “The Jesus
Revolution” and featuring a psychedelic image of Jesus looking like a hip-
pie, but more than usual (Time 1971, 3). The accompanying article
described how counterculture youth were returning to the fold of
Christianity, stating “The search for a ‘yes’ led thousands to the Oriental
and the mystical, the occult and even Satanism before they drew once
again on familiar roots” (3).
Six months later, this Time magazine cover was cited by Billy Graham
in the preface of his new book, The Jesus Generation (1971), which
explained how the counterculture youth of the day were turning away
from drugs, gurus, and protests, and turning instead toward Jesus Christ.
As Graham put it, “tens of thousands of American youth are caught up in
it. They are being turned on to Jesus” (Graham 1971, 9). Graham con-
cluded, “I have become convinced that the Jesus revolution is making a
profound impact on the youth of America and shows all signs of spreading
to other countries” (11–12). To capitalize on the increase in the
 MYSTICO-EROTICS OF THE “NEXT AGE SUPERHERO”: CHRISTIAN HIPPIE… 67

counterculture's interest in Jesus, Billy Graham and other Christian evan-

gelicals began to imbue their youth ministries with countercultural sym-
bols from a variety of sources including music, politics, and spirituality. In
the area of music, for example, evangelicals staged their own version of
Woodstock in Dallas, Texas, from June 12 through June 17, 1972, in
order to appeal to youthful Jesus seekers. The organizers, Campus Crusade
for Christ, called the event EXPLO ’72 (Eskridge 2013, 173). Christianity
Today referred to it as “Godstock” due to its crowd of approximately
180,000 young attendees who assembled in front of a massive stage with
a 35-foot high, psychedelic backdrop of Jesus People symbols (169, 173).
The stage was flanked on either side by towering stacks of speakers crank-
ing out 3000 watts of Jesus jams (173). After the newly born-again Johnny
Cash completed his Bible-soaked set, Billy Graham took the stage to close
out the event by leading the crowd in song, repeating the refrain, “They
will know we are Christians by our love” (174).
Another way evangelical Christians coopted youth culture in order to
present its message of salvation was through an appeal to the younger
generation’s penchant for political activism and protest. In 1969, an off
shoot of the evangelical Campus Crusade for Christ sought to establish a
Jesus People outreach in Berkeley, California, amidst the waves of student
unrest on the UC Berkeley campus. To this end, they established the
Christian Word Liberation Front (CWLF), whose name dubiously mim-
icked that of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), an already active
student coalition on the Berkeley campus that used protest and police
conflict to push for greater rights of non-white students (Christian World
Liberation Front Collection, GTU 94-9-03 n.d.). By playing off the name
of the radical TWLF, the CWLF hoped to take advantage of the TWLF’s
cultural cache amongst Berkeley’s counterculture youth. The CWLF
delved head long into adopting the symbols and aesthetics of the radical
student protests at UC Berkeley, adopting the language and style of
Berkeley’s “New Left” (95). One CWLF placard announced, “Pig State
No, Anarchy, No, Jesus Yes!” (95). Like any legitimate student protest
group, the CWLF produced its own broadside called Right On, starting in
1969 (96). The format and design of Right On made it nearly indistin-
guishable from the radical student publications of the day, but only within
the pages of Right On were the words of Jesus laid directly alongside mat-
ters of student politics.
While Right On’s content provides evidence of evangelicals’ coopta-
tion of left-wing political culture, it also provides evidence of the
68 A. SLONAKER

evangelicals’ willingness to wade into topics of Buddhism, Zen, and

other Eastern philosophies. One article from Right On’s September 6
issue in 1969, entitled “Meditational Brain Bust,” analyzes Eastern med-
itational practices and their claim to help practitioners locate the god
inside themselves (Christian World Liberation Front Collection; Right
On 1969). Another Right On article from September 1971 critiques an
Alan Watts lecture on Zen, finding his philosophy to be an inferior alter-
native to Christianity and characterizing Watts’ choice to practice Zen as
a failure to “cope with the guilt” of our inevitably sinful nature (Christian
World Liberation Front Collection; Right On 1971). Despite ultimately
rejecting Eastern ideas, the evangelical Right On knew that swaying the
radical left to the side of Christianity meant engaging with their favorite
Eastern philosophies.
Evangelical engagement with Asian philosophies also took place on the
Hollywood hippie scene, which had its own evangelical newspaper
designed to attract wayward youth to Jesus. The Hollywood Free Paper,
printed from 1969 to 1978 by the evangelical Duane Pederson, while less
strident than Right On’s political tone, similarly engaged tropes of Eastern
philosophy to attract its hippie audience (Hollywood Free Paper and Jesus
People Magazine Collection n.d.). For instance, the front page of a special
edition from 1971 boasts the headline “JESUS IS BETTER THAN
HASH,” and features a cartoon parody of a charlatan guru that appears
similar to the Maharishi made famous by the Beatles’ travels to India
(Fig. 1; Hollywood Free Paper and Jesus People Magazine Collection 1971).
The unfolding comic scene depicts a disappointed hippie seeker who has
ascended a mountainous precipice only to discover that his long-haired
guru charges flat rates for meditation lessons while living in Western-­
style luxury.
In the examples from Christian newspapers above, Eastern philosophies
are depicted as inferior to Christian ideas. But despite their ultimate criti-
cism of these ideas, it is clear that evangelical Christians felt the need to
engage Eastern thought in order to create a meaningful dialogue with
young converts. These same elements of Eastern philosophy are also
engaged in the Christian Hippie Comics analyzed below. However, these
Christian Hippie Comics approvingly incorporate non-Western concepts
of the mystico-erotic into their depictions of a Christian lifestyle. Like
those evangelical outreaches that coopted secular musical and political cul-
ture to attract young seekers, these Christian Hippie Comics coopt the
tantric themes embraced by the counterculture.
 MYSTICO-EROTICS OF THE “NEXT AGE SUPERHERO”: CHRISTIAN HIPPIE… 69

Fig. 1 “Jesus Is Better Than Hash” (1971), Hollywood Free Paper. (D.A. Hubbard
Library. Fuller Theological Seminary. Used with permission)
70 A. SLONAKER

A Brief History of Archie's Sonshine (1974)

In 1972, the same summer that Billy Graham took the stage at “Godstock”
to promote a hip version of his Christian message to young people, vet-
eran Atlas Comics artist and born-again Christian Al Hartley completed
his first Christian comic book for the Spire Christian Comics imprint. It
was a well-received adaptation of The Cross and the Switchblade, which, like
Billy Graham’s outreach, sought to target youthful converts through its
format and subject matter related to saving teen souls. From this success-
ful beginning, Hartley went on to a prolific career with Spire Christian
Comics, due in part to a deal he struck with the co-founder of Archie
Comics, John L. Goldwater, which allowed Hartley to draw all the char-
acters of the Archie gang, but with plot lines that emphasized a message of
Christian salvation. As Hartley described it, “all the laughs and excitement
and bloopers would just be hooks to get the reader’s attention and lead
him to Christ. The books looked exactly like comics, but they were really
supertracts” (Hartley 1977, 38). Hartley attributes his unlikely licensing
arrangement with Archie Comics to divine intervention and the fact that
the traditionally Jewish John L. Goldwater was a God-fearing man, just
like Hartley (39). Goldwater felt a connection to Hartley’s strong faith
and agreed to the deal as being in keeping with the “wholesome family
values” (Blumenthal 1999) of the Archie brand.
Archie’s Sonshine (Hartley 1974), was one product of this deal, and, like
the other comic books in this series, featured on its back page a greeting
from Hartley himself. Pictured at his drawing desk, smiling and wearing a
LaCoste V-neck sweater, Hartley warmly greets his readers and encour-
ages them to give their lives to Jesus Christ. His greeting also includes a
message that is often emphasized by Hartley, his desire to show how God
operates in every aspect of our daily existence. As Hartley puts it, “our
great motivation is to take a slice of life that the reader can identify with,
and then show precisely how God wants to be involved in that life experi-
ence … day in and day out in the very nitty gritty of our lives” (Hartley
1998, iv). As we will see below, Hartley achieves this goal in Archie's
Sonshine by showing how God’s love is present in the “nitty gritty” of the
amorous liaisons of the Archie gang. In this combination of love for God
and romantic, teenage lust, I identify a combination of the mystical and
the erotic, and trace its development as a theme that links Archie’s Sonshine
to Kripal’s Super-Story.
 MYSTICO-EROTICS OF THE “NEXT AGE SUPERHERO”: CHRISTIAN HIPPIE… 71

Mystico-Erotic Themes in Archie’s Sonshine

The plot of Archie’s Sonshine incudes the whole Archie gang, but focuses
primarily on the character of Big Ethel, whose quest for romantic love
blends seamlessly with her new-found experience of Christian zeal. As the
story opens on a teen-packed beach, Big Ethel complains to Betty about
her lack of luck finding a boyfriend. In response, Betty raises a “One-Way
Jesus” finger toward the sky and tells Ethel, “You can look up!!!” Just at
this moment, a custom van careens onto the sand. The side of the van
boasts a mural that says “LOVE” in a groovy font, along with an emblem
of a white cross superimposed over a pink heart. From out of the van steps
a hunky, bare-chested preacher who looks a bit like Warren Beatty from
Shampoo and a lot like Jesus Christ. The unnamed preacher starts to share
a message about love to the gathered teens. He tells them, “It’s never
enough until its shared!!!” Under the preacher’s sway, Big Ethel has been
turned on for Jesus and rushes throughout the beachgoers to share the
message of God’s love. The first person she approaches turns out to be a
cute, single Christian boy who shares Ethel’s spiritual fervor. As he speaks
to Ethel about his faith, she is overcome in a paroxysm of amorous feelings
as indicated by a tornado of floating hearts around her bulging and crossed
eyes. Finally, unable to endure the romantic spark between them, Ethel
gasps and falls unconscious into a pose that begs comparison to the Ecstasy
of Saint Teresa as sculpted by Bernini in the seventeenth century (Fig. 2).
Holding the spent Big Ethel in his arms, the cute Christian boy says, “I
think the sun got her!!!” Archie responds, “It was the SON all right!” The
final scene of the comic book shows Ethel holding hands with the cute
Christian boy as they walk on the beach at sunset. Above the pair is embla-
zoned a New Testament quote from 1 John that says, “If you walk in the
light of God’s son you’ll have true fellowship with each other”; heavily
suggesting that due to Ethel’s belief in Jesus she was able to find a roman-
tic partner.
As presented, the story of Big Ethel in Archie’s Sonshine tends to unite
romantic love and the love of God. It conflates the eros associated with
human sexuality and the mystical, or spiritual, path of salvation through
Jesus. In this way, Big Ethel is like Kripal’s Next Age superhero, who
reflects a “Tantric yoga model of sexual energy” (2011, 170) with its
direct relationship between erotic powers and superpowers. We can see
this in the direct relation between Ethel’s romantic success and her grow-
ing awareness of God’s love. Once Ethel meets her boyfriend she has a St.
72 A. SLONAKER

Fig. 2 Al Hartley, Archie’s Sonshine (1974). (New York: Archie Enterprises, Inc.
Used with permission)
 MYSTICO-EROTICS OF THE “NEXT AGE SUPERHERO”: CHRISTIAN HIPPIE… 73

Teresa-style experience of God’s love and, by the last page of the comic
book, finally achieves “true fellowship” with God.
The gawky figure of Big Ethel may seem an unlikely embodiment of a
tantric super-mystic, but the suggestion is supported by Hartley’s own
emphasis within Christianity on a non-dual aspect of the Christian God
who, Hartley asserts, can be found in the minute details of our day to day
lives. Such an attitude was visible in the broader Jesus People Movement
that presented Christianity as a lived daily practice involving Jesus at every
moment and not just as a weekly Sunday activity. This blending of God with
the quotidian as part of a Christian worldview can arguably be seen as incor-
porating ideas of non-duality from those Asian religions that find no separa-
tion between God and the individual. If we see Hartley’s theory of God as
incorporating aspects of Eastern philosophies, we can understand why his
tantric-tinged gospel message might appeal to its young audience already
steeped in the Eastern philosophies of contemporary hippie culture.
While this combination of sex and Jesus may seem unlikely in an evan-
gelical comic book, Hartley was not alone among Christian Hippie Comic
artists who appealed to youth by suggesting a connection between Jesus’
love and the eros based in romantic sexual desires. For instance, comic
artist and evangelical Christian, Jackson Wilcox, drew many illustrations
for the hippie-targeted Hollywood Free Paper, including the cover of the
1976 February edition which features a cartoon image of a smiling man
with a pocketknife who has carved a heart into the trunk of a tree. Inside
the heart is carved “Jesus+_____” (Fig. 3). The cartoon man asks the
reader, “Is your name being carved in this heart?” (Hollywood Free Paper
and Jesus People Magazine Collection 1976).
In Christian Hippie Comics like those of Wilcox and Hartley, mystico-­
erotic tropes create a tantric-tinged gospel message we can link to the
Super-Story and its positive message of human development. However, as
examined below, in the case of The Little Flirty Fishy these same tropes
have been used by other Christian Hippie Comics to subvert the Super-­
Story's message and to weave a narrative that inhibits potentialities and
individual growth.

A Brief History of The Little Flirty Fishy

Like Archie’s Sonshine, The Little Flirty Fishy combines romantic love and
spiritual enlightenment in a religious tract that appears in comic book
form. The Little Flirty Fishy (hereafter, Flirty Fishy) was a publication of the
74 A. SLONAKER

Fig. 3 “Is Your Name Being Carved in this Heart?” (1976), Hollywood Free
Paper. (D.A. Hubbard Library. Fuller Theological Seminary. Used with permission)
 MYSTICO-EROTICS OF THE “NEXT AGE SUPERHERO”: CHRISTIAN HIPPIE… 75

Children of God (COG), a religious group with roots in the Christian

Hippie scene of Huntington Beach, California, where, in 1968, COG
operated an evangelical teen outreach center ministering to the beach
town’s wayward hippie youth (Eskridge 2013, 64). From there, they grew
into an international network of communal homes that supported the
larger organization through proselytizing activities such as the publication
and distribution of its own literature, which was sold to the public through
street sales. However, certain publications were reserved for group insid-
ers only and communicated official COG doctrine which emanated from
the prophetic revelations of the group’s leader, David Berg. Within a few
years of the group’s founding, Berg changed his name to Moses David and
disappeared from public view, thereafter directing the movement in absen-
tia (Jones 2021, 15). He accomplished this almost solely through the use
of published newsletters called “Mo Letters” (Zandt and David 1991,
20). Mo Letters transmitted Moses David’s prophecies as being received
via direct communication with God. Certain Mo Letters were chosen to
be converted into comic book form and were published under the group’s
comic imprint, True Komix (54). True Komix were all illustrated by
trusted members of COG, who used pseudonyms such as “Ethan Artist”
and “Phillip LaPlume” through which to identify their artwork (197).1
COG’s use of newsletters and comic books to lead its organization was
a method adopted in response to the growing general consensus that the
Children of God were a cult (Jones 2021, 15). By operating in an under-
ground manner (16), and with no visible leader, COG could more easily
avoid the mounting scrutiny of outsiders. By 1971, an organization of
aggrieved parents had formed, which claimed that their children inside
COG were victims of kidnapping, drugging, and brainwashing while being
forced to live in a “slave-like atmosphere” (Zandt and David 1991, 37;
Eskridge 2013, 191). Through such outcry, stories of sexual promiscuity
surfaced which were later confirmed as evidenced by official COG policies
that encouraged free and open sexual activity, including a form of religious

1
It is difficult to precisely date the issues of True Komix given their underground produc-
tion style. Some True Komix have been gathered and dated by scholar David E. VanZandt,
who dates True Komix issues from 1976 and 1977 and lists dozens of Mo Letters dating
from 1969 to 1989 (Zandt and David 1991, 221, 197). In addition, a large archive of True
Komix has been collected on a website maintained by ex-members of the Children of God.
This archive notes that in 1982 a compendium of True Komix was created, collecting the
illustrated versions of Mo Letters that had been written throughout the 1970s (https://
www.xfamily.org/index.php/True_Komix_-_The_Love_of_God).
76 A. SLONAKER

prostitution called “Flirty Fishing” (Zandt and David 1991, 46). COG
pioneered this proselytization technique whereby female-only COG mem-
bers approached potential male converts “on the pretense of sexual or
romantic attraction,” and, if it became necessary for a successful witnessing
interaction, “the family member may engage in sexual relations with the
prospect” (Zandt and David 1991, 46; Eskridge 2013, 208). The goal was
to attract new male members who would ultimately be introduced to David
Moses and encouraged to join COG and donate money to the group.
Flirty Fishing was just one aspect of the overall emphasis within COG
on the sexual act of love as an avenue to finding God. Through this
emphasis, COG capitalized on the hippie message of “free love” in order
to attract the young dropouts whom the group targeted (Eskridge 2013,
65; Zandt and David 1991, 29). The hippie youth of the day, already
acclimated to ideas of blending sex and spirituality as espoused, for exam-
ple, by tantrism, were targeted by COG with a similar Christian message
that blended traditional Christian doctrine with ideas about the power of
sexual union. In this way, COG’s sex-soaked version of Christianity
attracted youthful converts, and, in the process, presented a tantricized
version of the gospel.

Mystico-Erotic Themes in The Little Flirty Fishy

Of the numerous True Komix publications, the example of The Little Flirty
Fishy is useful for its discussion of the theological basis of Flirty Fishing,
which reveals a conception of Christianity tinged in tantric ideas due the
connections it draws between sexual union and closeness to God (Family
2007). According to the comprehensive internet archive maintained by
ex-COG members, Flirty Fishy is based on a Mo Letter originally drafted
in 1974 by Moses David and then reprinted as an illustrated True Komix
issue in a 1982 compendium titled True Komix (Family 2019). It is also
typical in its graphic illustrations of male and female nudity and sexual
intercourse that are set alongside the New Testament words of Jesus and
the prophecies of Moses David. As Moses David explains in Flirty Fishy, it
is through the act of sexual union with potential converts that the woman
(the bait), and the male convert (the fish) become one with God, or, as he
says, “The bait is upon the hook and the hook and the bait and the fish,
lo, these three become one and inseparable, one body pierced with My
love! The bait and the fish become one flesh, both on the hook of My
Spirit! See?” (Fig. 4) (The Flirty Little Fishy, 5). Accompanying these
 MYSTICO-EROTICS OF THE “NEXT AGE SUPERHERO”: CHRISTIAN HIPPIE… 77

Fig. 4 “The Little Flirty Fishy” (1982). (True Komix. Used with permission)
78 A. SLONAKER

words are illustrations of a naked couple engaged in sex with a massive

fishhook plunged through their torsos, uniting them as one. Moses David
adapts his fishing metaphor from Jesus‘ words to his disciples, when He
promises them they will win souls for Jesus like “fishers of men,” citing
this passage at Matthew 4:19 and Luke 5:10. The comic illustrations used
to accompany these words of Christ include a libidinous, slack-jawed fish
and a woman in a beckoning pose wearing a see-through negligee.
The sexualized and degraded status of women is depicted throughout
Flirty Fishy, which employs a manipulative and coaxing tone to urge its
female members into sex. For example, next to a cartoon image of a
woman disco dancing in a revealing dress, female COG members are
informed “you must not let self and pride enter it” (2). In later pages of
Flirty Fishy, a crying woman is assured by the voice of God that “David
[Moses] is My master fisherman who useth thee for My bait to catch many
fish for Me!” (7). Thus, through personal revelations from God, and
through appeals to warped interpretations of the Bible, Flirty Fishy is typi-
cal of how True Komix presents COG’s mystico-erotic themes in comic
book format.

Conclusion
Both Archie’s Sonshine and Flirty Fishy participate in Kripal’s Super-Story
by using mystico-erotic themes to present a Christian-based message that
blends spiritual seeking and sexual energy. Both comic books employ these
themes within the imaginative construct of Kripal’s Orientation mytheme,
with its frequent references to Asian locales or ideas to explain the anoma-
lous to Western audiences. In the case of Archie's Sonshine, the Orientation
mytheme is visible in its tantric blend of sex and mysticism as embodied in
Ethel’s teenage lust and her simultaneously escalating spiritual epiphany.
In Flirty Fishy, the Orientation mytheme is present in COG’s assurance to
female members that through tantric-style sexual relations they may expe-
rience “God’s spirit.” In both cases, these themes present a tantric-tinged
gospel message.
However, despite both comics’ use of these elements of the Super-­
Story, it is only Archie’s Sonshine that maintains the Super-Story's plot on
its trajectory to cosmic consciousness. This seems fitting since the artist
and author, Al Hartley, describes his own comics as “supertracts” due to
their message of salvation promising to free humanity from its earthly
bonds. In Hartley's supertract Archie’s Sonshine, the character of Big Ethel
 MYSTICO-EROTICS OF THE “NEXT AGE SUPERHERO”: CHRISTIAN HIPPIE… 79

can be compared to Kripal's Next Age superhero who masters tantric prac-
tices to achieve the extraordinary powers of the Super-Story. In Ethel’s
case, her superpower is her spiritual growth toward communion with
God, a pathway of human development that aligns her course with that of
the Super-Story. When Ethel becomes turned on for Jesus, both spiritually
and physically, she changes from a depressed loner to a sexually and spiri-
tually fulfilled Christian.
In contrast, Flirty Fishy, despite using the same mystico-erotic themes,
doesn’t tell a Super-Story but instead creates––as Méheust describes it––
"the inhibition of potential” by authorizing a world view based on decep-
tion and human degradation through false love. The female characters in
Flirty Fishy, who blend sex and proselytizing, have been duped by a disin-
genuous leader into deceiving male converts for money. This does not
conform to Kripal’s idea of the Next Age superhero whose empowerment
comes from mastering their own sexual powers, and not being enslaved by
them. In addition, the Flirty Fishy comic does not comport with the over-
all outline of Kripal’s Super-Story, despite the fact that, as Kripal says,
there “isn’t any single plot, cast of characters, or definite ending” to the
Super-Story (2011, 6). Still, the foundation of the Super-Story is about
human potential and the possibility of personally evolving into cosmic
consciousness. The deceptive practices depicted in Flirty Fishy can’t be
described as promoting individual growth when individuals are manipu-
lated like bait on a hook. Unless we consider Flirty Fishy as a Bizarro ver-
sion of the Super-Story, its narrative doesn’t hold hope for the superpower
of spiritual enlightenment.
This analysis demonstrates that elements of the Super-Story are not
always used for good. If one pays attention to how these tropes are manip-
ulated, it is possible to critically deconstruct narratives that have been writ-
ten without the reader’s best interests in mind. This can be important
when such themes begin to appear not just in comic books or literature,
but in daily, lived socially constructed realities as well. As Kripal writes,
“[I]f one can realize that visionary landscapes and paranormal realities
[are] authored by oneself and one's culture, then one can also realize that
things like ‘society,’ ‘religion,’ ‘self,’ and ‘other,’ even physical reality itself,
are equally authored, and so also illusory” (38). Within this framework, it
is possible to reject artificial barriers that inhibit one’s trajectory towards
the fulfillment of human potential.
80 A. SLONAKER

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 The Flying Eyeball: The Mythopoetics
of Rick Griffin

Erik Davis

Abstract Rick Griffin was arguably the greatest artist to emerge from the
maelstrom of psychedelic visual culture in California in the late 1960s. An
early and influential underground comix creator, contributing to
R. Crumb’s legendary Zap, Griffin was also known for his rock poster art
and album covers, including the Grateful Dead’s Aoxomoxoa album.
Griffin was also a genuine seeker, drawing concepts as well as images from
esoteric sources like Manly P. Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages, and fusing
these with psychedelic metaphysics and an ambiance of humor and dread
typified by his legendary “flying eyeballs” vision. Taking Griffin’s esoteri-
cism seriously, this chapter will show how Griffin’s art intertwined with his

An earlier version of this essay appeared under the title, “Rick Griffin, Superstar,”
in HiLobrow (July 24-25, 2012). Consult that piece for additional images:
https://www.hilobrow.com/2012/07/24/pop-­arcana-­6/.

E. Davis (*)
San Francisco, CA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 83

Switzerland AG 2023
D. M. Odorisio (ed.), A New Gnosis, Contemporary Religion and
Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1_5
84 E. DAVIS

concerns with the occult, carnality, judgment, and the soul, and how ten-
sions visible in his work led to his conversion to Christianity in the early
1970s, at the peak of the counter-cultural Jesus Movement.

Keywords Rick Griffin • Mythopoetics • Comix • Jesus Movement

The peak years of California’s bohemian counterculture were suffused

with sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, but they were also saturated with the
spirit. Turbo-driven by the widespread use of psychedelics, the Beat mysti-
cism of the 1950s had bloomed, by the late 1960s, into a vibrant peacock
tail of gods, symbol systems, and supernatural encounters that drew from
all manner of times and places and religions without quite fixing on any of
them. The iconic cover for The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Axis: Bold as
Love—which superimposed Roger Law’s painting of the band over a mass-­
produced offset Hindu god poster picturing the theophany of Krishna
from the Bhagavad Gita—captures this lysergic cosmic effulgence as well
as anything. But for a more bracing and diverse iconographic stroll through
the mystic carnival of California consciousness, one cannot do better than
to look—closely, and then again—at the work of Rick Griffin.
Soul surfer, psychedelic poster illustrator, and underground comix
weirdo, Griffin channeled the visual smorgasbord of freak esoterica while
lending it a uniquely visionary, fluid, and symbolic depth. And when
Griffin accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior in 1970—a conversion
that inflected but did not squelch his ongoing engagement with waves,
visionary art, and popular cultural forms—Griffin gave visual voice to the
Jesus Movement, one of the oddest and most misunderstood currents of
California freak religiosity: the rebellion against the rebellion, the One
Way of Christ that cut through all the hazy labyrinths of mystical hedonism.
Griffin’s career can be loosely divided into three overlapping and inter-
penetrating social identities: surfer, psychedelic visionary, and born-again
Christian. Griffin’s relationship to these passionate in-groups is key to
understanding and appreciating the mythic charge of his art. As Los
Angeles art critic Doug Harvey has explained in an excellent overview of
Griffin’s work, “The various subcultural contexts of Griffin’s life and
career can be read as a sequence of tribal situations—Surf Culture,
Psychedelic Culture, Jesus Freak Culture—that sought to create utopian
splinter microcosms of human society to which various consciousness-­
transforming sacraments were central. In each case, Griffin’s role was to
act as an intermediary between the experiential and the symbolic realms,
 THE FLYING EYEBALL: THE MYTHOPOETICS OF RICK GRIFFIN 85

translating and codifying the transcendent weightlessness and timeless

immediacy of the Green Room, the ego-shredding electricity of LSD, and
the redemptive living waters of Christ’s presence into pictorial equiva-
lents—as roadmaps for the novice and reminders for the initiated.”1
Griffin grew up on the knob of Ranchos Palos Verdes, which lies on the
coast between Los Angeles and Long Beach. Outside of school, the young
man spent his time surfing and drawing. Griffin’s father, who worked as an
engineer, was also an artist and a serious amateur archaeologist, and the
family regularly visited Indian reservations and ghost towns throughout
the Southwest. Kachina forms and other Amerindian iconography would
come to infuse Rick’s work, as did the Mexican styles he absorbed from
the restaurants, churches, and taquerias of Southern California and, later,
on surfing expeditions south of the border. Though Griffin was raised
without religion, he was also fascinated with Catholic iconography and the
rococo density of Churrigueresque Mexican church architecture, which
inflected many Spanish revival churches in Southern California. While
these samplings raise the vexed issue of appropriation, we should at mini-
mum recognize Griffin’s graphic innocence and symbolic hunger, feelings
that were shared by many artists of his generation, who sought for inspira-
tion outside the boundaries of mainstream American society. Griffin also
loved Mad magazine; Don Martin’s goofy illustrative line infused Griffin’s
early semi-autobiographical surf bum character Murphy, who was quickly
adopted as a friendly icon of the early 1960s SoCal surfer scene, which
navigated its own path between clean-cut kookery and Beat
antinomianism.
Murphy—and Griffin’s style—would change considerably as Griffin
himself changed, first by attending Chouinard Art Institute, the ancestor
of CalArts, and then by diving deeper into bohemia as a member of the
southland jug-band tribe the Jook Savages. Another significant mark was
left—literally—by a terrible auto accident in October 1963, which dislo-
cated Griffin’s left eye, put him in a hospital for weeks, and, following
Griffin’s refusal of plastic surgery, left his handsome face scarred for life,
with an air of piratical suspicion etched into his countenance. Griffin had
caught a ride hitchhiking, and in some accounts, awoke to find the driver
laughing demonically while weaving across the road—a creepy echo of the
maniac Kustom Kulture hot rod art of Von Dutch and Ed “Big Daddy”

1
Doug Harvey, Heart and Torch: Rick Griffin’s Transcendence. (Laguna Beach, Ca.:
Laguna Art Museum, 2007), 10.
86 E. DAVIS

Roth, who, along with Stanley Mouse’s early monster parade, also influ-
enced Griffin’s style with their greasy kidstuff. Whatever the truth of that
tale, Griffin did hear a nurse reciting the 23rd Psalm in the hospital once he
regained consciousness. A seed—or a holy eyeball—had been planted.
As Harvey notes, Griffin’s work darkened and thickened after the acci-
dent, as he turned to the dense cross-hatching and deeper textures that
anticipated the psychedelic horror vacui to come. In 1965, Griffin and the
Jook Savages headed north, and by the following year, Griffin was installed
in the Haight-Ashbury. Inspired by a legendary poster for the Charlatans
(an undersung San Francisco group who popularized the Wild West look
among budding hippies), Griffin created a poster for a Jook show, a home-­
run effort that rather quickly led to Griffin becoming one of the most
significant poster artists of the era.
Drawing from Old West and Native American iconography, hallucina-
tory typography, biomorphic arcana, and his own mightily expanded and
mystically inclined nervous system, Griffin concocted scores of striking
rock posters for both Bill Graham and the Family Dog. Griffin’s penman-
ship was already unmistakable, but now his images featured intense plays
of color that were magnified by Griffin’s painstaking use of hand color
separation. While some of these images were ferocious, others were inten-
tionally homely. Much of his early poster work was inspired by the engrav-
ings found on antiquated product labels, especially from items associated
with food and the kitchen. In a late interview, Griffin described the “sub-
conscious endearing quality” of these labels, which reflected both the
“tender loving care” of the original artists and the fact that these old-timey
styles were being jettisoned as postwar advertising embraced modernism.2
As the critic Walter Medeiros writes, for Griffin, “the trademark images of
these domestic staples were broadly symbolic of care, beginning with care
about one’s work and extending to family love and human brotherhood.”3
A sense of love and spiritual brotherhood also infused the images Griffin
made for the Human Be-In, an important festival in Golden Gate Park,
and The Oracle, the Haight’s colorful hippie newspaper. These images
directly tapped the spiritual zeitgeist, but Griffin was also using his art to
develop a more personal and idiosyncratic symbolism. Lightning bolts,

2
Patrick Rosenkranz, ed., “The Rick Griffin Interviews,” The Comics Journal, 257
(December 2003): 82.
3
Ted Owen, High Art: A History of the Psychedelic Poster (London: Sanctuary Publishing,
1999), 76.
 THE FLYING EYEBALL: THE MYTHOPOETICS OF RICK GRIFFIN 87

scarabs, eggs, hearts, flames, eyes—these seemed to emerge from some

fractal dimension between the flat plane of design and the copulating
archetypal underworld of primal archetypes, as if Griffin’s own visions,
unleashed through his devoted consumption of psychedelics, were invad-
ing the page. As his friend Gordon T. McClelland explained, “Rick was a
serious seeker. He was convinced that spiritual power and truth existed,
but wasn’t sure how to tap into it. His main way to access something he
thought was on track was to take massive doses of LSD and combine it
with lots of pot smoking. When he was in he was all the way in, and the
regular use of psychedelic drugs provided a resemblance of something
spiritual.”4 The art that resulted from Griffin’s psychedelic journeys was
often deeply esoteric, but it had an exoteric effect. As Harvey points out,
the explosion of global media in the 1960s allowed such highly local and
personal visual codes to literally spread across the world, enabling a “tiny
LSD-saturated bohemian subculture” to influence planetary signs and
meanings, producing what Harvey rightly calls “an unprecedented semi-
otic convulsion in the history of human culture.”5
Griffin’s masterful cover for the Grateful Dead’s 1969 album
Aoxomoxoa, which was titled by Griffin and designed with Dead lyricist
Robert Hunter, is a beautiful example of the artist’s dark and carnal bio-
philia. With its solar spermatozoa, avocado wombs, phallic skulls, sprout-
ing mushrooms, and curling streams of incense smoke, the image—originally
a poster—presents an eerie mandala of pagan recurrence and psychedelic
sex-and-deathery. The image also demonstrates Griffin’s remarkable
deployment of lettering, which squeezed the humble Roman alphabet
into Gothic hieroglyphs at once fecund, cosmic, and sinister. The sym-
metrical letters that thread through the palindromic album title—A, O,
M, X—also appear in many of Griffin’s comix panels, where they some-
times take on various esoteric overtones—Alpha and Omega, AUM—and
sometimes escape into pure formal play. On the album cover, hovering
beneath the winged solar disc of ancient Egypt, the meaty Old West
typography for “Grateful Dead” verges on incoherence—indeed, Griffin
was disfiguring band names with spidery script twenty-five years before
black metal artists hit the scene. Griffith knew that such formal ambiguity
only seduces you into trying to decipher the enigma—like the drugs, like
the scene itself, it draws you in. That’s why the gaze is rewarded as well,

4
Harvey, Heart and Torch, 126.
5
Ibid, 33.
88 E. DAVIS

since the Dead’s name is also an ambigram that conceals the phrase “We
ate the acid”—which is of course precisely the sort of semantic excess one
might notice when you have eaten the acid.
Griffin’s most celebrated psychedelic image—and arguably the most
iconic San Francisco rock poster of all time—is BG-105, the famous “flying
eyeball” design he used to announce a 1968 Jimi Hendrix performance.
The first thing that must be said about this extraordinary image is that it is
not fucking around. Through a transcendental hole ripped in reality, and
outlined with hot-rod flames, a bloodshot eyeball hustles toward us clutch-
ing a memento mori. The eyeball’s appendages—angel wings that suggest
the outline of a (sacred) heart and the talons and tail of some fell dragon—
strike a swastika pose more Vedic than Nazi but still creepy as hell. Though
reminiscent of an 1882 Odilon Redon drawing (L'Œil, comme un ballon
bizarre se dirige vers l'infini), Griffin probably lifted the flying eyeball from
the pinstriper Von Dutch, who used one as a signature icon, an image that
Dutch also linked to ancient Egyptian and Macedonian culture. But as Eric
King notes in the poster collector’s intriguing essay on BG-105, Von
Dutch’s eyeballs were friendly, while Griffin has given us an image of impla-
cable judgment—not the mulchy merry-go-round of Aoxomoxoa but the
horror of final days. “It is Rick’s vision of the all-seeing eye of God the
father, the Old Testament ‘jealous and angry God’ before whom Rick felt
we were all wanting, all guilty, all unworthy sinners doomed to burn for-
ever in the lake of fire.”6 There may be some backwards projection here,
since the Griffin of 1968 was still a few years away from his Christian con-
version, and much more immersed in occult esoterica than the gospels. For
all we know, the artist originally saw this eyeball thing hurtling at him from
the rafters at an Avalon Ballroom show. Whatever its origins, the icon has
all the disturbing ambivalence of the in-your-face sacred, famously limned
by Rudolph Otto as Mysterium tremendum et fascinans—a mystery at once
enchanting and terrifying.
King argues that the tension between the love of the spirit and the love
of the flesh defined hippie culture, and that Griffin—who by most accounts
was a sometimes-intense lover of life—wrestled with this polarity more
intensely than most, an agon that eventually led him to Christ. But when
did the struggle begin in earnest? After all, Christian imagery was not
uncommon among psychedelic freaks—having a “Christ trip,” crucified

6
Eric King, “Some words on BG-105, Rick Griffin’s ‘Eyeball,’” 1996, http://www.
therose7.com/eyeball.htm.
 THE FLYING EYEBALL: THE MYTHOPOETICS OF RICK GRIFFIN 89

for all, was almost run-of-the-mill in some corners. In “Pieta,” a 1967 art
photograph taken by the photographer Bob Seidemann, Griffin gender-­
bends Michelangelo’s famous image while incarnating the physical ideal of
the hippie Jesus. In the photograph, Griffin holds a bloody palm towards
the camera, his identification with Jesus seemingly complete. At the same
time, Griffin’s wife Ida, his girlfriend at the time, insists the photograph
was wholly Seidemann’s creation.
More explicitly religious resonances characterize some of the panels
Griffin created for R. Crumb’s revolutionary Zap Comix the following
year, when Griffin shifted away from the poster scene and started to
explore the emerging genre of underground comix. In Zap Comix #2,
Griffin gives us some more eyeballs of judgment, now set against a dizzy-
ing abstract astral plane that draws equally from Krazy Kat and Salvador
Dali. The eyes are ambivalently split between angelic and demonic forms,
but they announce their possible apocalyptic union as “Alpha and Omega”
(A, O). The following issue, which appeared in the fall of 1969, also
includes a remarkable example of Griffin’s sincere (if still playful) interest
in esoteric symbolism: a single-panel piece called “Ain-Soph-Aur” that
reflects the influence of Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages
(1928), a popular and heavily illustrated occult compendium that
Griffin adored.
The panel is an original if eccentric remix of the Kabbalistic Tree of
Life, a cosmogram that traditionally depicts an emanationist view of real-
ity, in which sacred forces are “stepped down” through ten spheres or
dimensions known as the sephirot. Above and beyond the first sphere of
the Tree lie three layers of the Unmanifest—here accurately tagged as Ain,
Ain Soph, and Ain Soph Aur—a space that announces itself as “the vac-
uum of pure spirit.” This cosmic plenum in turn give birth to Kether, the
supernal Godhead, or “highest crown.” Griffin illustrates this supreme
sephirot with a heavily abstracted Kachina mask that riffs on a particular
Hopi figure known as Tawa, or “Sun Face.”7 The Kachina Godhead then
“speaks” a primal pair of sephirot: Binah and Chokhmah, dark and light,
here rendered as O and X, code letters that recur throughout Griffin’s

7
Again, you can think of this usage as appropriation or appreciation or both; like many
Haight Street heads, Griffin had great respect for Native American cosmology as well as the
peyote religion. For more on the complex and sometimes mutually beneficial relationship
between hippies and Indians, see Sherry L. Smith, Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red
Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
90 E. DAVIS

work. The yin-yang tension between these two in turn creates the mate-
rial, elemental world. Here light spills down from the sun but can also, like
the holy dove we see, travel upstream, back to the Source, in a fashion
highly reminiscent of the Renaissance alchemical emblems that also packed
Hall’s encyclopedia. The lower dimensions of Griffin’s Tree are more
“pagan.” Here the carnal procreative power of an Egyptian royal couple
manifests further elemental connections—a patriarchal lightning bolt and
a maternal stream of milk, which feeds a baby wailing away like Max
Fleischer’s Swee’Pea, alone on the darkling plane of Malkuth, the lowest
sephirot.
As with the Dead cover, “Ain-Soph-Aur” suggests an organic and psy-
chedelic ecology of erotic energies, fluid dynamics, and sacred transforma-
tions. But despite their mandala-like symmetry, there is something tense
and unsettled about both these diagrams, as if, for all their humor, they are
seething beyond themselves. A lot of Griffin’s psychedelic work is marked
by this feeling of anxious polarity, of vessels breaking, of a coincidentia
oppositorum that cannot quite hold. To use therapeutic language, it seems
like Griffin is trying to “work something out” with his language of sym-
bols, something to do with sex and death and the long cosmic view on our
mortal condition occasioned by profound psychedelic mysticism. That
such sacred alchemy is taking place on the cover of rock LPs and in the
sometimes-lewd pages of underground comix only intensifies a tension
that, as King suggests, was also intensely personal for Griffin. In Zap #3,
for example, Griffin’s “Ain-Soph-Aur” is followed across the gutter by an
R. Crumb strip called “Hairy.” A sour depiction of urban hippie deca-
dence, the strip features two hirsute Haight street crusties who at one
point plunge a syringe full of speed into the pert ass-cheeks of a wide-eyed
13-year-old girl. It’s classic Crumb, but many of the blowjobs and spurt-
ing demon cocks in the pages of Zap lack the buffer of Crumb’s neurotic
social satire, and read more like the pornographic id gone raw and ugly. If
Griffin was seeking or staging something sacred in his art, he did so in a
cultural zone faintly smelling of sulfur.
But perhaps there was a way out of the bind. For the cover Zap #3,
Griffin created an uncanny full-color image that suggests a more explicitly
religious turn than the merely esoteric. This picture features the same sort
of circular portal as the Jimi Hendrix poster, only this time a solar swastika,
with a rainbow ouroboros halo, is escaping away from us, out of the womb-
tomb of carnality and into the clear blue sky. A pilgrim scarab, surrounded
by the wreckage of violence and gluttony, looks up towards the glowing
 THE FLYING EYEBALL: THE MYTHOPOETICS OF RICK GRIFFIN 91

swastika, and utters a word in Hebrew. The letters spell out the tetragram-
maton, the four-lettered name of YHVH, with the odd addition of the
letter shin wedged in the middle, making the word Yahshuah—in other
words, Jesus. As Griffin almost certainly learned from Manly P. Hall, who
discusses the matter in Secret Teachings, this so-called pentagrammaton—
which does not reflect the correct spelling of “Jesus” in early Hebrew
sources—was first used by Christian occultists during the Renaissance,
when the great stream of Kabbalistic mysticism entered into non-Jewish
esoteric circles. The shin also appears in “Ain-Soph-Aur” in the place of
Tipharet, the sephirot associated with Christ in Christian Kabbala.
Like other artists of his era, Griffin raided the archetypal archive of the
religious imagination for the same reasons he raided the history of adver-
tising: to achieve resonant psychedelic and illustrative effects in a pop her-
metic game of surface and depth. But this deeply esoteric reference to
Jesus—guaranteed to be missed by the overwhelming majority of Zap
consumers, not to mention his fellow underground comix artists—sug-
gests that Griffin was doing more than minting pop arcana for the freaks.
He was opening up to something inward through his art, something as
personal as it was collective, a possibility of salvation he wanted to
announce to the world and simultaneously conceal.
Consider another color image that Griffin crafted around the time of
his turn to Jesus in late 1970: the cover for a collection of underground
comix artists called All Stars. Here a peculiar hooded figure enters a room,
holding a scourge and what appears to be a combination of the Shroud of
Turin and the Veil of Veronica—an image of the suffering Jesus that medi-
eval Catholic lore held was miraculously transferred to the cloth that
Veronica used to wipe the sweat from Christ’s face as he climbed to
Calvary. Note that both the Shroud and the Veil are artifacts of sacred
representation, of the power associated with pictures of Jesus, but that the
presumed god-man himself—who the hot-red devil in the lower right cor-
ner recognizes as “Emanuel”—is hooded.
In the center of the image we see a highly disturbed young man, whose
desperate prayer may reflect some of Griffin’s own internal turbulence.
“I’m sick of it…dope, crime, smut…it don’t gimme no peace of mind—
dear Lord…I…I really need help…please God…” This fellow, red like the
devil, is surrounded by the paraphernalia of drugs and street thuggery, but
it’s the porn magazine that catches our eye, a crude and curvy pussy shot
that in some sense exposes one of the formal primitives that underlies
Griffin’s organic biomorphs. This poor soul, with his pimples and greaser
92 E. DAVIS

hair-do, looks like a Basil Wolverton character from Mad, and though the
magazine he seems to be praying to (and beyond) is clearly smut, it is
also—literally—a comix panel. As such, this visionary mise-en-scene of sin
and redemption is also a stand-off of sorts between genres of profane and
sacred illustration.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James argued that the
people most likely to undergo conversion already possess an extensive psy-
chological domain, a “field of consciousness,” in which “mental work can
go on subliminally, and from which invasive experiences, abruptly upset-
ting the equilibrium of the primary consciousness, may come.”8 Many
people who become “born again” unconsciously incubate their transfor-
mations beforehand—intensifying the personal conflicts in their lives,
experiencing heavy and heavenly dreams, noticing suggestive coincidences,
staging symbolic encounters. Strong psychedelic experience, of course,
also uncorks the subliminal dynamics of the unconscious, with its awe-
some archetypes, polarities, and archaic and even beastly urges. Perhaps
every powerful trip is a conversion of sorts. What makes Griffin’s work so
extraordinary from a religious studies perspective is that we can see traces
of this subliminal process on the page. In a sense, we can see Griffin set
himself up for conversion, incubated partly through his own work.
James speaks of “invasive experiences,” and it is no accident that
Griffin’s famous Fillmore flying eyeball represents an otherworldly or
divine invasion: an all-seeing vector of vision that climbs through a portal
into our world—a portal that, it pays to notice, recurs in many Griffin
images, both before and after his turn towards Jesus. But even after Griffin
stepped over the Christian threshold, he continued to evolve the idiosyn-
cratic and powerful psycho-spiritual language that already informed his
comix and illustrations. Though there was a change, there was not a clean
break, which means that those of us who resonate with his earlier work can
also follow him into his Christianity, a faith that becomes, for Griffin, a
stage on a longer psychedelic journey rather than an utter rejection of
that path.
Griffin had already left the Haight by the time he found Jesus. In 1969,
he abandoned San Francisco with his girlfriend Ida and their two children
for travels in Texas and Mexico. Longing for the mellower surfer lifestyle of
the southland, Griffin then returned to southern California, settling in San

8
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin Books,
1985), 237.
 THE FLYING EYEBALL: THE MYTHOPOETICS OF RICK GRIFFIN 93

Clemente. In 1970, Griffin was filmed surfing at the remote and legendary
Hollister Ranch for John Severson’s classic surf film Pacific Vibrations,
which also features footage of Griffin and some pals tripping-­out a hippie
bus with spray-paint. Griffin’s notorious intensity seemed evident—though
friends describe a man of great innocence and enthusiasm, one account of
the period describes Griffin’s ability to “scare the living shit out of anybody
not ready to deal with his quietly mysterious persona.”9 After painting his
first major acrylic for the Pacific Vibrations poster, Griffin drove up the
coast and visited Paul Johnson and Monique Timberlake at a commune in
Mendocino, friends who, in the freaky way peculiar to the era, had become
Christian. They “witnessed” about Jesus to Griffin. During his return trip,
one story goes, his car broke down, and somehow he walked away from the
experience with Jesus as his lord and savior.
Ida played a role in his conversion as well. While Rick was up north, Ida
was witnessed to by some friends in San Clemente, including the born-­
again brother of John Severson. She bought a little pocketbook New
Testament, illustrated with Renaissance paintings, and one afternoon she
took LSD and “it all came alive for me.” The letters of scripture glowed
like gold, and she heard a voice from the blue skies saying “Do you want
to live or do you want to die?” Ida wrote Rick about her experience about
the same time that Paul Johnson was talking about Jesus with him. When
Rick returned, he and Ida began to attend a local Baptist church and
started to collect Christian art. Rick soon tied the knot with Ida, dedicat-
ing his life and art to Christ, though Ida points out that he didn’t quit
smoking pot.
Needless to say, these were not exactly Bible-belt Christians. Griffin and
Ida were born again during the heyday of the Jesus People, or the Jesus
Movement, a distinctly countercultural expression of American Christianity
that would come to mainstream prominence by 1971, when a host of
books and major magazine articles drew attention to the hordes of hirsute
youth who combined hippie mores with rock-solid biblical faith and a
conviction that the Second Coming was just around the corner. For many
of the Jesus People, sometimes somewhat disparagingly called “Jesus
Freaks,” the Lord was a kind of guerrilla guru, an intimate and

9
Brad Barrett, “Motorskill Tripping with Brad Barrett: ‘Griffin Gave us an Evil-eye Fleegle,
and it Scared the Shit Out of Me,” Encyclopedia of Surfing, July 15 2018, https://eos.
sur f/2018/07/15/motorskill-tripping-with-brad-bar rett-grif fin-gave-us-an-
evil-eye-fleegle-and-it-scared-the-shit-out-of-me/.
94 E. DAVIS

revolutionary spiritual pal who offered, in the face of countercultural con-

fusions around sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, “One Way” to go. In a famous
Wild West-styled wanted poster that first appeared in the UC Berkeley
Christian street paper Right On!, Jesus is described as a “notorious leader
of an underground liberation movement,” a man who possessed the
“extremely dangerous” potential to set people—especially young
people—free.
The origins of the Jesus Movement can be traced to the Bay Area, and
especially to a Haight Street coffee shop called the Living Room, which
was set up by Ted Wise and some fresh freak converts in 1967. A small
commune in Novato called the House of Acts developed from the cafe,
one of whose members—whose friendly charisma was matched by his
remarkable name of Lonnie Frisbee—subsequently moved to Orange
County. There Frisbee sparked the most important Jesus Freak cross-over
revival when he started preaching at Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel, an
otherwise middle-of-the-road evangelical church. He drew mostly young
people—including, for one sermon, the future Mrs. Ida Griffin, who, hav-
ing been raised Episcopalian, noted some important differences in these
new converts. “They played acoustic guitars,” she explained in conversa-
tion, “and they referred to the Lord as ‘Jesus’ without the ‘Christ.’” This
deeply intimate relationship with Jesus came before the ideological com-
mitment to dogma; as such, it fed the countercultural predilection towards
powerful personal experience, even if the call itself subsequently demanded
the rejection of most countercultural values. Many Jesus People, like
Frisbee and Ida Griffin, first glimpsed the One Way on LSD; even when
drugs were set aside, forms of worship and communion often retained the
ecstatic and exuberant character found in religious competitors like
ISKCON, better known as the Hare Krishnas.
Whatever offshoot of whatever ministry Griffin came in contact with, it
is clear that his conversion was a profound and singular experience, one
that Ida compared to “a bolt of lightning.” As such, the moment is out-
side our view. At the same time, as noted above, conversion is not a single
punctured and ineffable event, but precipitates out of a long-bubbling vat
of emotional tensions, symbolic obsessions, sacred longings, and meta-
physical dislocations that exert pressure over time. As a psychedelic, or
“psyche-manifesting,” illustrator, Griffin had the rare gift of being able to
incorporate some of this “metanoia stew” in his art. In other words, the
bolt from the blue that Griffin experienced in late 1970 was not totally
separate from the white lightning that literally shot through his art.
 THE FLYING EYEBALL: THE MYTHOPOETICS OF RICK GRIFFIN 95

This is, in any case, how I think we should approach Man from Utopia,
a remarkable and deeply weird 28-page publication that Griffin completed
just months before his conversion. On the thick, card-stock cover that
parodies classic EC Comics covers, Jesus appears as one of the featured
superheroes of the issue, along with a vaguely malevolent duck-billed crea-
ture with a Roman brush helmet identified as “The Moniter” (Griffin was
never a great speller). Despite its throwback cover—whose unfortunate
Gumbo image, inspired by old-school racist advertising labels, I make no
apologies for—Utopia is not really a comic. Instead it presents a portfolio
of more-or-less thematically related images, which, rumor has it, may have
suffered the additional confusion of getting mixed up by a tripping Griffin
before getting handed off to the printer. The themes reflect Griffin’s core
obsessions: surf, sex, death, Christ, flesh, liquid, and lysergic gnosis. Yet
the work as a whole refuses summary as it refuses overall coherence, even
as its recurrent images and narrative fragments resonate with a remarkable
intensity, its heavy, sometimes demonic imagery balancing the daffy
bounce and fluid power of Griffin’s masterful line. Man from Utopia is an
opus of psychedelic and mythopoetic consciousness, one that Griffin felt
strongly enough about to print on high-quality paper rather than the
usual pulp.
While hints of prophetic Christianity had appeared in Griffin’s work
before, Utopia reflects a more tangled opening to the man on the cross, a
visionary struggle that would shortly condense into a new identity, which
Griffin himself would self-describe as a “disciple of Jesus Christ.”10 But
there is no dogma here, none of the preachiness that would show up in
some of Griffin’s subsequent work. Instead of born-again resolution,
Utopia expresses the agonizing and often absurd turbulence of metanoia
in motion—the kind of ferocious and foreboding almost-revelation known
by serious acidheads, and by all those poets facing Rilke’s stony Apollo,
with its demand that “you must change your life.”
Here I would like to look more closely at a single two-page Utopia spread
that may or may not be part of a larger “story” called “Silver Beetles or
Mystery Monitor.” These two images feature no explicit Christianity, but
present two enigmatically related panels that grapple with the mythopo-
etic vectors of light, revelation, and mediation. As noted earlier, some of
Griffin’s comix panels reference the letters Alpha and Omega, which are
identified with Christ in Revelation 22:13. On the left panel of the Utopia

10
Rosenkranz, “The Rick Griffin Interviews,” 65.
96 E. DAVIS

spread we see an A=A scroll that unfurls above a bizarre revelatory icon,
one that, in a distant echo of medieval Doom paintings, scares off fright-
ened souls to the left and exudes stars and galaxies to the right. Against a
cross of light, this meta-icon presents a palimpsest of pop archetypes:
lightbulb; soap bubble; a 2001: A Space Odyssey star child emerging from a
cosmic yoni; even an untimely echo of the alien Greys. Whatever we think
about these component parts, which are not so much integrated here as
laminated together, we know we are facing a glyph of illumination. But
for all the mystic resonances of that term, illumination here is also a mate-
rial fact: a lightbulb, an industrial commodity, its twisted base ominously
reminiscent of a serpent coil or the rattlesnake tail that appears in BG-105.
This conjunction of the sacred and the mundane recalls a photo that
André Breton wove into his marvelous 1928 Surrealist text Nadja: the
shot of an advertising poster, “l’affiche lumineuse,” decorated with a blaz-
ing lightbulb and the word “Mazda”—at once the name of a trademarked
half-watt Edison lightbulb and, as Ahura Mazda, the ancient Zoroastrian
lord of light.
Griffin’s A=A lightbulb fuses the intense polarity found throughout his
work, not just between sacred and profane, or sex and death, but between
metaphysical being and the quotidian commodities of the profane modern
world. As such, his glyph of illumination invokes a crucial question asked
by the scholar of religion Alexander van der Haven, a question with pow-
erful implications for contemporary sacred art: “How do revelations work
in a religious cosmos that is not transcendental?”11 Van der Haven poses
this query in a discussion of the mad writer Daniel Paul Schreber, whose
late-nineteenth-century religious visions included a God who communi-
cates through a “light-telegraphy” of rays and vibrating nerves. Der Haven
suggests that, in the non-transcendental cosmos of technological moder-
nity, you are faced with the problem that, even if you hold out the possibil-
ity of divine revelation, that revelation is still subject to the entropy and
distortion that haunts any physical communications channel, whether
lasers or light-telegraphs or Edison lightbulbs. Illumination is gnosis, but
it is also a technological (or pharmacological) event, a material process
that further refracts, degrades, and ironizes the divine message. Griffin’s
lightbulb, then, recalls the famous hippie appropriation of the DuPont

11
See Alexander van der Haven, “God as Hypothesis: Daniel Paul Schreber and the Study
of Religion,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion: Working Papers from Hanover, ed.
Steffen Führding (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2017), 176-198.
 THE FLYING EYEBALL: THE MYTHOPOETICS OF RICK GRIFFIN 97

company slogan “Better living through chemistry”—ironic, but only

in part.
The mystical irony of the profaned sacred, and the sacralized profane, is
a key feature of acid mysticism, and it can come off as both funny and
dreadful. Both qualities are apparent in Man from Utopia, especially in the
weirder and more complex image that faces the A=A lightbulb on the
right side of the spread. The cherubic character clutching the pen would
be familiar to many a resident of the Southland: he is the mascot for Bob’s
Big Boy, a once popular burger franchise that Bob Wian started in Glendale
in 1936. Large fiberglass statues of this figure appeared in front of many
Bob’s Big Boy restaurants. Holding aloft the double-decker burger the
chain originated, this young fellow in red checkered overalls charmed little
kids with his cheery, friendly vibe, which nonetheless belied certain enig-
mas. Who was this seemingly very big kid? “Bob” we know is Bob Wian,
and “Big Boy” the name of his famous burger. So, is this a Big Boy serving
a Big Boy? Does the possessive indicate that he belongs to Bob, or does this
big-eyed mascot stand as Bob’s (or the burger’s) emanation, a sort of car-
nivore theophany? Either way, Griffin recognized the Big Boy as an unpar-
alleled SoCal icon of the sort of sacred absurdity that the Church of the
Subgenius describes as “bulldada.” (Praise Bob!)
To further unpack this strange picture, we need to consider an impor-
tant subcategory of visionary or psychedelic art: the diagrammatic image.
In a diagrammatic image, the picture plane is composed of multiple
dimensions, scenes, or realms that are linked together through various
frames, portals, borderlines, arrows, vibrations, and connecting lines.
Griffin’s good pal and fellow comix artist Robert L. Williams provides
many examples of such hallucinogenic diagrams in his extraordinarily
dense and reverberant “Low Brow” canvases. As Williams’s work makes
clear, the diagrammatic image is deeply linked to comic book art, with its
plurality of panels and variable deployment of borders, overlapping frames,
and suturing elements like lightning bolts, arrows, speech balloons, excla-
mation marks, and other abstract symbols that often represent sounds and
emotions that cross between and across individual frames.
The diagrammatic image from comics also invokes older traditions of
illustration. In the early modern period especially, a variety of allegorical,
esoteric, and alchemical images used similar diagrams to illustrate both
spiritual and natural relationships (and often a combination of the two).
Take, for example, the frontispiece to Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1646)
by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, who pioneered the camera
98 E. DAVIS

obscura and other optical marvels in an era when light was both a sacred
radiance and an increasingly manipulable feature of the material world.
Again, Griffin was familiar with these kinds of pictures through Hall’s
Secret Teachings (itself born, like Griffin and Bob’s Big Boy, in Southern
California). We have already discussed “Ain-Soph-Aur,” Griffin’s kabbal-
istic diagrammatic image, aspects of which resonate with the Big Boy
panel. Here too we see the “stepping down” of illuminating power from
an abstract supernal plane—pictured by the same Kachina Sun Face figure,
now partly obscured—to the profane world. But unlike the Zap panel, the
Utopia image is not a mandala, that familiar symmetrical template used by
so many visionary and psychedelic artists, not infrequently to the point of
cliché. Here, instead, this cosmic flow is askew: the holy light emerges
from the upper corner, where the Sun Face Godhead is mostly cut off by
the frame. From there the light passes through a creepy, fleshy, long-haired
intercessor out of Tales from the Crypt, and from there through the Big
Boy’s eyes to the object he is drawing into existence with his Rapidograph
pen (needless to say, one of Griffin’s own tools of art). This object, which
strongly resembles the “A=A” figure on the left of the spread—and which
the Big Boy appears to be looking at across the gutter—echoes the inter-
cessor’s strangely shaped head, even as that same morphology recurs as a
lightbulb that pops up in a thought bubble on the upper right.
This lightbulb is an important key to the meaning of the diagram,
which is as much about artistic inspiration as mystical revelation. Again, as
in Breton’s Mazda photograph, the lightbulb is both a modern industrial
feature of the electrical grid and an avatar of sacred illumination. But the
device of the “idea bulb” is also old-school cartoonese for the eureka
moment of inspiration, a trope that one obsessive on the Internet traces
back to Felix the Cat cartoons from the 1920s.12 The lightbulb, then, is at
once symbol, sign, and icon, a blazing self-mediating condensation of the
looping, concatenating vertigo that characterizes psychedelic revelation.
Yet here at least, the elusive circuits of illumination birth the aesthetic
object that the Big Boy artist manifests on the page before us: a strange
embryo that, reminding us of the animism in animation, manages to rise
off the page, echoing the shapes of higher planes with heft and dimension.

12
Nicholas Graham Platt, “How did the lightbulb become associated with a new idea?”,
Medium.com, February 13, 2016, https://medium.com/navigo/how-did-the-lightbulb-
become-associated-with-a-new-idea-1dce1b6d648.
 THE FLYING EYEBALL: THE MYTHOPOETICS OF RICK GRIFFIN 99

The human artist at the center of the frame—goofy, oblivious, clothed

in the commercial—is hardly in control of this process. He may wield the
Rapidograph, but his personal idea bulb is embedded in a deeper circuit
driven by strange forces working behind the scenes, forces that barely
appear on the page before us. In other words, the human artist is a hollow
fiberglass mascot of secret influences. That’s why the checkered pattern on
his worker’s overalls merges into the pattern on the table before him,
which unfolds exactly like the mosaic pavement of Masonic temples. In
the First Degree lecture, these black-and-white tiles are described as
“emblematic of human life, checkered with good and evil,” and they rep-
resent the place where the aspirant undergoes initiation—an initiation
that, here at least, is indistinguishable from inspiration, and illumination,
and invasion, perhaps even something like a cosmic game between black
and white.13
Notice as well that the bulb shape drawn by the Big Boy artist is expand-
ing in three dimensions, seeming to rise off the page. These shapes, these
phonemes of the visionary revelation, are alive—enlivened by Griffin’s
inimitable penmanship, whose carves and grooves cause the picture plane
to fruit into full dimensionality. This alien-lightbulb form recurs through-
out the pages in Man from Utopia, a process of morphological resonance
and transmutation that Griffin raises to a daemonic and deeply psychedelic
pitch – “cant quite putcher finger onit,” goes one later caption, “some
kinda warp.” A sense of terrible spiritual enantiodromia runs throughout
Utopia, as if the Zap-worthy demon armies pictured in one panel are the
vanguard of a holy superhero who might in turn keep the dark at bay, or
as if the labial mantle that cloaks a rose-crowned Grateful Dead skeleton
announces the sacred secret of sex, a secret that remains nevertheless
obscene.
But it is the Jesus portraits in Utopia that seem, through their very out-­
of-­placeness, the most disturbing images of this weird stew. In one panel,
the Moniter—looking not unlike Marvin the Martian—is shown clutching
a Veil of Veronica as he maneuvers a Roman chariot led by scarabs.
Elsewhere, the Moniter’s lightbulb head appears on the crucified Christ,
also crowned by the antlers seen on the All Stars cover. These are personal
images beyond our ken, perhaps unknown to Griffin himself, who, con-
temporary photographs show, hung a similar pair of antlers on the wall of

13
The Euphrates, “The Checkered Flooring,” Freemason Information, March 7, 2009,
https://freemasoninformation.com/banks-of-the-euphrates/the-checkered-flooring/.
100 E. DAVIS

his San Clemente studio, alongside a soft charcoal image of Jesus photo-
graphed and included in Man from Utopia under the title “Our Darling.”
The lines that Griffin unleashes here do not easily converge.
Perhaps the most shocking Christian image is also, again paradoxically,
the goofiest. Holding out hands punctured with eyeball stigmata, a
Murphyish surfer with egg-shaped Aoxomoxoa eyes nose-rides towards us
on a burst of foam that emerges from a juicy and explicitly vaginal sacred
heart. (Recall the split beaver in the All-Stars cover.) Lest we speculate on
the audacious profanity of such a conjunction, it should be recalled that
the influential eighteenth-century German Pietist Count Zinzendorf
encouraged his followers to meditate on Christ’s side wound as a vulva, an
organ of spiritual rebirth. And indeed, that is what Griffin has given us,
and given himself as well: the ultimate carnal-cosmic Jesus Freak icon of
getting born again.
Though the graphic intensity of Man from Utopia would reappear in
other Griffin pieces from the early 1970s (“Tales from the Tube,” “OMO
Bob Rides South”), Griffin did shift the focus and ultimately the style of
his work following his conversion. He began doing work with Southland
churches, creating tracts and illustrating the cover for a directory pro-
duced by his local Baptist Church. He even did an evangelical billboard
that echoed his Human Be-In poster from the previous decade. He con-
sciously stepped away from some of his earlier concerns, reducing and
even mocking his former attraction to occult iconography. When he
revised and republished a famous psychedelic Murphy strip called “Mystic
Eyes,” he replaced the translation for an esoteric magic square he had
furnished on the earlier version with the phrase “Primitive Pre-Salvage
Mumbo Jumbo!” In one 1974 interview, he explained this shift: “Before
I knew Christ I was really into symbols, because I tried to use symbols to
explain to myself what it was I was trying to find. I don’t think I would use
any Christian symbols now.”14
Despite his conversion, however, Griffin did continue to use symbol-
ism, and to work as well for secular outfits like Surfer magazine, Zap, and
the Grateful Dead. While no doubt influenced by economic pressures—
Griffin had a wife and family to support—these gigs also gave Griffin the
opportunity to evangelize in his own way. He laced Christian images and
prayers into recognizably Griffinesque scenarios, like claustrophobically
illustrated Mexican adventure comics or surf tales starring his old character

14
Rosenkranz, “The Rick Griffin Interviews,” 70.
 THE FLYING EYEBALL: THE MYTHOPOETICS OF RICK GRIFFIN 101

Murphy. Though some of his underground comix pals were unhappy with
his new life—a few reportedly tried to bring him back to the fold by burst-
ing into his home with a bottle of tequila, only to wind up drunk them-
selves—R. Crumb continued to support his work with no questions asked.
Zap #7, from 1974, included a beautiful and minimalist four pages from
Griffin called “And God So Loved the World,” which appeared alongside
the usual bestial romps.
Stylistically, however, Griffin did start to turn away from the dense sym-
bolism and psychedelic intensity of his earlier work towards more accessi-
ble designs influenced by classic children’s book illustrations and what
Doug Harvey calls “orange crate art.” A marvelous example of this is
Griffin’s cover for the 1973 Grateful Dead album Wake of the Flood.
Though the verse from the Book of Revelation he had originally pegged
to the image got cut, the cover plays with familiar Griffin devices, includ-
ing the round portal, the sea, and the scythe. But there is no fear of the
reaper here. As Griffin explained at the time, “I didn’t want to have a real
grimacing Grim Reaper image. I didn’t want the usual death image
because I’m concerned with life. The Bible is the giver of life, and it con-
tinually talks of Eternal Life, whatever that is. I don’t know. So I wanted
it to be more of a loving thing – a loving harvest.”15
Despite his apocalyptic sense of urgency about the coming harvest,
Griffin felt no need to cut himself off from his earlier sources of income
and creative opportunity. The continuity between Griffin’s secular and
Christian work reminds us of his ability to integrate sources as diverse as
commercial labels and archetypal symbolism. In other words, before and
after Jesus, Griffin was a master of literally drawing the sacred and profane
into a coincidentia oppositorum. This sense of dynamic continuity can also
be seen by lining up Wake of the Flood with another album cover he did
two years later for the California soft-rock Christian band Mustard Seed
Faith. Once again, the sea and the circular portal appear, suggesting mor-
tal transition, though here that passage is no longer gently somber but
illuminated with an amazing splash of fairy-tale light reminiscent of
Howard Pyle or Maxfield Parrish. The Mustard Seed Faith cover became
a popular image in the Southland’s vibrant Christian scene, and subse-
quently inspired the cover for the 1977 album Point of No Return by the
group Kansas, whose primary songwriter Kenny Livgren in turn converted
to Christianity in 1979.

15
Rosenkranz, “The Rick Griffin Interviews,” 63.
102 E. DAVIS

Mustard Seed Faith was on the Maranatha! Music label, which subse-
quently hired Griffin as art director, giving him and his family a badly-­
needed steady paycheck and a new home in Santa Ana. Maranatha! was
associated with Chuck Smith’s aforementioned Calvary Chapel, whose
ministry, since Lonnie Frisbee had come and gone, had successfully wed-
ded the earnest and emotional informality of the Jesus People to more
mainstream currents of American evangelism. Along with John Wimber’s
splinter Vineyard movement, Calvary Chapel’s revival would also go on to
significantly influence the language, look, and feel of modern American
evangelism. The oppositional cultural expressions by the early Jesus People
(casual clothing, rock music, long hair) would—paralleling the counter-
culture’s transformation into a dominant commercial culture—become
absorbed by more mainline evangelical currents through the 1970s and
early 1980s. The blue jeans and acoustic guitars of today’s megachurches
have freak origins, as does, in part, contemporary Christianity’s opposi-
tional “counter-cultural” stance. But a more important spiritual legacy
was the sense of intensity and intimacy that many Jesus People brought to
their relationship with Jesus, which helped shape the personal and even
magical sense of communication with God that characterizes much con-
temporary evangelism.16
Towards the end of the 1970s, Chuck Smith asked Griffin to provide the
illustrations for a paraphrased version of the Gospel of John, perhaps the
most important book of the New Testament for American evangelicals. The
Gospel of John appeared in 1980, and was reissued in 2008 in a handsome
hardbound volume with extra images not featured in the original 8”x11”
magazine format. Though Griffin made wonderful art until the end of his
life, The Gospel of John stands as his last great work. The images encompass
both acrylics and black-and-white line drawings, including punchy and
sometimes playful cartoons for each of the chapter numbers—chapter nine,
in which Jesus heals a blind man, is accompanied by two flying eyeballs.
Though Griffin brought a palpable reverence to the task of illustrating scrip-
ture, he did not hesitate to continue the spunky reflection on pop culture
and commercial art that marked his entire career. One illustration shows
Bob Dylan—recently in the news for his own Christian conversion, brought
about in part through Orange County’s Calvary-inspired Vineyard
Movement—stepping though the porthole of death; while one of the paint-
ings pictures Christ entering Jerusalem, and includes, alongside portraits of
16
For more on this, see Tanya Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the
American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Vintage, 2012).
 THE FLYING EYEBALL: THE MYTHOPOETICS OF RICK GRIFFIN 103

Griffin and his wife, a skateboarder wearing a Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt.

Though humorous, these figures also incarnate what the scholar Robert
Ellwood described as the evangelist’s desire “to collapse into nothing all
time between himself and the New Testament.”17
Stylistically, Griffin continued to reflect on the illustrations of
N.C. Wyeth and Dean Cornwell, though in his acrylics he often preferred
to replace the crisp lines of classic illustration with more impressionistic
air-brushed gestures. These strokes lent great but informal power to two
of the most powerful acrylics in The Gospel of John, both of which fore-
ground water. For his illustration of Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan
woman at the well—one of the most beautiful stories in the gospels—
Griffin presents an erotically charged encounter overlaid with a visionary
but realistic rendering of liquid: three round splashing “crowns” repre-
senting the everlasting water that Christ offers the female outsider.
Meditating on these, we realize these shapely drops are still the biomor-
phic love-spurts of his earlier work.
The other marvelous water painting in The Gospel of John is a green,
moonlit scene of the boat-bound apostles cowering before Jesus as he
walks towards them on the surface of a churning sea. Here Griffin captures
the uncanniness of the miraculous, but also embeds the prophetic in the
personal. For though there is no surfboard here, those with ears to hear
can pick up the California Christian koan that Thomas Pynchon asks in
Inherent Vice: “What was ‘walking on water’ if it wasn’t Bible talk for
surfing?”18 Indeed, ghosting the painting from The Gospel of John is a
Griffin drawing from a 1977 calendar, which shows Jesus surfing the edge
of a tube, his arms upraised in benediction and athletic grace. Beneath him
a typically demotic Griffin blob-being rides the wave, pronouncing “just a
closer walk with thee.” The image is at once so audacious and so economi-
cal that it both harmonizes the clash of contexts and celebrates the sweet
absurdity of it all.
This marvel of sassy naïveté also serves as documentary evidence for the
cult of born-again surfers that, as Pynchon recognized, was and to some
muted degree remains a vital strand of Southern California beach culture.
It also reminds us that for true soul surfers, the waves are a mysterium in
motion, a sentiment Griffin expressed in a 1974 exegesis on tube riding,
which he considered the apotheosis of surfing:

17
Robert S. Ellwood, One Way: The Jesus Movement and Its Meaning (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 31-32.
18
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (New York: Penguin, 2009), 99.
104 E. DAVIS

Water is water, energy is energy and a wave is the combination of the two. It
has inertia and momentum, and the object is to blend with it as much as you
can and still retain your identity, because the tube is constantly collapsing
and if you get too far back in there, it collapses and you collapse with it. You
get wiped out. If you get too far out in front of it, you’re out on the shoul-
der of the wave, and it’s slower out there. You don’t get that real excite-
ment. So the tube, like I said, is always a mystery spot.19

Like an unrolling revelatory scroll, waves symbolically mark the passage

between our dust-to-dust world and the deep ocean of death. As such they
form the foaming face of creation, a face that for Rick Griffin belonged, at
least in the 1970s, to Jesus. By the early 1980s, friends report, Griffin began
to “backslide” from the faith to some degree, though he remained a deeply
spiritual person. He eventually separated from Ida and started partying
robustly again; a hit of acid appears on the clown’s palm in his 1990 cover
painting for the Grateful Dead’s Without a Net. In an interview a year later,
Griffin no longer sounds like a born-again evangelist, and he makes refer-
ences to “Pre-Salvage Mumbo Jumbo” like karma, Shiva, and the Acid
Tests. But none of these shifts of belief and practice effected his core com-
munion, which was surfing, and art, ever nourishing, ever teaching.
Griffin was killed on his Harley Davidson motorcycle in 1991 at the age
of forty-seven. He may have been driving recklessly, with some of the hard
innocence that people who knew him well describe. Some of his ashes were
taken up to Mysto’s, a favorite surf spot near Fort Ross in Sonoma County,
now sometimes called El Griffo’s. For the cover of the Zap issue that fol-
lowed the accident, his old poster pal Victor Moscoso crafted a sunset surfer
image featuring classic Griffiana—a flying eyeball, a stigmata hand, globular
spume. But the greater homage came within, greater for being more crusty.
On a single page, all of Griffin’s old underground pals teamed up together
to offer a visual send-off to “the mystic one” by working together on a
parody of the Last Supper—a send-off that is rendered, by Griffin’s ghostly
presence as a comix Christ, both more and less than a parody.
For all the intensity of his turn to Jesus, Griffin’s conversion should be
seen alongside his psychedelic use, as part of his broader spiritual search
rather than a fundamentalist rejection of it. Though he sometimes spoke
disparagingly of his attraction to “symbolism”, Griffin’s work was satu-
rated with archetypal visions drawn from the collective well of images in an

19
Rosenkranz, “The Rick Griffin Interviews,” 71.
 THE FLYING EYEBALL: THE MYTHOPOETICS OF RICK GRIFFIN 105

utterly idiosyncratic and singular way. In his visions, commercial signs and
sacred presences merge, as the hunger for enchantment and release is
sated, temporarily, within the pulp-pop zone that Philip K. Dick called
“the trash stratum.” What unites the various worlds that Griffin traveled
through is his artistic line, a restless, luxuriant, juicy vector that, like a
wave, never stopped moving, even as it returned again and again to the
same carnal mysteries. There is something like fate to Griffin’s line, some-
thing at once heavy and amusingly light, not unlike the destiny the artist
believed was inscribed on the acorn of his name. As he explained in a late
interview, “The name Griffin implies to draw with a pen, to scrawl and
scribble and inscribe, to carve a groove, to form an image, to stand guard
and to grip and to grapple. I like to think this is an inheritance of mine, my
very name, and the things it implies…I guess it is part of my karma and
destiny…I didn’t plan it that way; that’s just the way it is.”20 Drawing
himself forward into forming images, Griffin carved the groove he rode.

Zap Comix #2 (1968). © Rick Griffin. Used with Permission

20
Rosenkranz, “The Rick Griffin Interviews,” 84.
106 E. DAVIS

“Ain-Soph-Aur,” Zap Comix #3 (1969). © Rick Griffin. Used with permission

 THE FLYING EYEBALL: THE MYTHOPOETICS OF RICK GRIFFIN 107

From “Silver Beetles or Mystery Monitor,” Man from Utopia (1970). © Rick
Griffin. Used with permission
108 E. DAVIS

From “Silver Beetles or Mystery Monitor,” Man from Utopia (1970). © Rick
Griffin. Used with permission
 THE FLYING EYEBALL: THE MYTHOPOETICS OF RICK GRIFFIN 109

Frontispiece, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, Athanasium Kircher (1646)

110 E. DAVIS

From “Our Darling/Rock of Ages,” Man from Utopia (1970). © Rick Griffin.
Used with permission
 THE FLYING EYEBALL: THE MYTHOPOETICS OF RICK GRIFFIN 111

“Grant Me Lord,” Calendar (1977). © Rick Griffin. Used with permission

 Graphic Mythologies

Evans Lansing Smith

Abstract This chapter explores the mythologies of the Egyptian Books of

the Dead, Navajo Sand Paintings, and C.G. Jung’s Red Book, with a focus
on the journey to the otherworld. Such texts form the archetypal ground
for the emergence of graphic media such as comic books, animated film,
and video games.

Keywords Egyptian Books of the Dead • Navajo sand paintings

• C.G. Jung • Red Book • Nekyia

This chapter explores the mythologies of the Egyptian Books of the Dead,
Navajo Sand Paintings, and C.G. Jung’s Red Book, with a focus on the
journey to the otherworld. I argue that such texts form the archetypal
ground for the later emergence of graphic media, such as comic books,
animated film, and video games.

E. L. Smith (*)
Mythological Studies, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 113

Switzerland AG 2023
D. M. Odorisio (ed.), A New Gnosis, Contemporary Religion and
Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1_6
114 E. L. SMITH

Egyptian Books of the Dead

Civilization’s oldest graphic mythologies—those which combine text and
image—are the so-called Egyptian Books of the Dead, a category which
would include the Pyramid, Coffin, and Papyrus Texts. All share the cen-
tral theme of the soul’s journey to the otherworld, and therefore implicate
the complex mythologies of Ra, Osiris, Isis, and Horus. The oldest of
these, the Pyramid Texts, dating back to at least 2400 BCE, were inscribed
on the subterranean walls and sarcophagi of the pharaohs (Piankoff 1968).
They were not illustrated and were concerned primarily with the celestial
destination of the departed soul. The Coffin Texts, dating back to 2100
BCE, were available to ordinary Egyptians who could afford them; they
combined funerary spells having to do with the soul’s journey through the
underworld, with a rich tradition of painted and engraved images on tomb
walls, stelae, canopic jars, sarcophagi (both wood and granite), and
mummy masks. The Papyrus texts—known collectively as the Books of the
Dead—emerged from this tradition and developed increasingly elaborate
narratives of the soul’s journey and last judgement, with a finely sophisti-
cated fusion of text and image (Goelet 1994). These texts come later, at
the beginning of the New Kingdom, yielding such splendid documents as
the Papyri of Hunefer (c. 1275 BCE) and Ani (c. 1250 BCE). These latter
may be regarded as truly archetypal—the first narrative texts accompanied
by images which can be amplified by comparative mythological analysis.
I use the term “necrotypes” to refer to these images, combining the
words “archetype” and “nekyia,” the Homeric term for the journey to the
underworld.1 There is a wide range of such images, catalyzed by the
descent to the underworld—whether it be in the form of the Books of the
Dead, inscribed on tomb walls, sarcophagi, mummy cases, and papyrus
scrolls; Mesoamerican codices and Navajo sand paintings; the great texts
of the literary canon; or in contemporary films, comic books, and graphic
novels. Examples of the necrotypes would include the kind of threshold,
ocular, oreographic, astronomical, aquatic, ornithological, diurnal, oreo-
graphic, and textual imagery characteristic of the Books of the Dead, in
which doorways, eyes, mountains, solar, lunar, and planetary symbols,

1
Technically speaking, nekyia refers to the necromantic invocation of the shades of the
dead (as in Book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey), while the word katabasis refers specifically to the
descent. In common usage, however, the term nekyia is used to refer to both the descent to
and return from the underworld.
 GRAPHIC MYTHOLOGIES 115

river crossings, birds, mountains, and actual books recur as central motifs
associated with the journey to the otherworld.2
In the Egyptian versions of the nekyia—for example, as exemplified by
the Amduat texts on the walls of such tombs as that of Amehhotep II—
one typically finds the journey of the soul of the Pharoah on a barge along
the Nile, flanked by symbols of the western mountains of the Valley of the
Kings, and passing through twelve hours of the night, often represented
by doorways and chambers, with uraeus serpent guardians and magical
spells, prayers, and incantations inscribed around the portal. The images
accompanying the text often include key necrotypes central to Egyptian
mythology: the ornithological symbolism of the wings of the vulture god-
dess or the human-headed bird representing the Ba soul; the ocular sym-
bolism of the Eye of Horus; astronomical symbols of the phases of the
sun, moon, and Venus; and various zoomorphic necrotypes, such as the
dog-headed Anubis, the falcon-headed Horus, or the demonic crocodile
of the depths, Seebek.3
The famous judgement scene from the Papyrus of Ani may serve as a
point of departure for this exploration of the necrotypes in the graphic
mythologies of the Egyptians. The integration of text and image is, of
course, exquisite in this scene, the former relating the prayers, spells,
incantations, and invocations associated with the soul’s journey, and the
latter incorporating many of the necrotypes associated with Egyptian
mythology. These include the kind of clothing symbolism associated with
the nekyia from its very earliest origins in the Sumerian story of the
Descent of Inanna, in which the goddess descends through seven door-
ways, shedding an article of royal clothing she had put in on in preparation
for the journey, before she is killed by her sister Ereshkigal’s “Eye of
Wrath,” and then hung up on a peg on the wall for three days and nights.

2
For a comprehensive overview and graphic summary of the images, see my Myth of the
Descent to the Underworld in Postmodern Literature, “Chapter 1: A Brief Genealogy of the
Necrotypes.”
3
For examples see, among many others, Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the
Afterlife (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1999), and Hornung & Abt’s Knowledge for the
Afterlife: The Egyptian Duat (Einsiedeln: Daimon Verlag, 2003), and of course, the much
older Ur-Text by E.A. Budge, The Book of the Am-Tuat (1905).
116 E. L. SMITH

Judgment Scene, “Papyrus of Ani” (British Museum)

Here, in the Judgement scene, we see Ani escorted into the chamber by
Tutu, carrying the sistrum, and both clothed in the fine linen associated
with Egyptian burial practice. The implied clothing symbolism of divesti-
ture and reinvestment has already occurred, whereas in the Descent of
Inanna, both are vividly described in the cuneiform text. The central panel
evokes the zoomorphic and ornithological necrotypes so characteristic of
Egyptian iconography: we see the human bird standing on the top of a
tomb (with the portal in red just visible below the cornice), representing
the Ba Soul, perched directly above the canopic jar containing the heart
on the scales of the judgement, and the ostrich feather representing the
Goddess Maat, the principle of truth, law, and universal harmony on the
opposite scale. In addition, we have the crucial representation of Thoth,
the scribal inventor of writing, with the head of an Ibis, recording the
judgement in his own little book of the dead.
This is a fascinating, self-reflexive image, since we can imagine the book
that Thoth is writing as the very same hieroglyphic text surrounding the
judgement scene. It represents what I call the textual necrotype, a term I
use to indicate the many variations on the nekyia, across the millennia, in
which a sacred text is revealed at the climax of the descent. Examples
include the death dream of Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which
Belit-Sheri, “she who is recorder of the gods, and keeps the book of
death,” looks up directly at Enkidu from the tablet from which she read.”
The implication is that the nekyia itself serves as a complex allegory of the
 GRAPHIC MYTHOLOGIES 117

creative mysteries of the twin energies of poiesis (writing the text) and her-
meneusis (the reading or interpretation of the text). Both are central to the
imaginal journey into the realm of the imagination that we undertake
when we read and write. Another example of the textual necrotype associ-
ated with the mythology of the soul’s journey would be Michelangelo’s
Last Judgement Altar in the Sistine Chapel, in which we see two figures
holding books directly below the risen Christ, in a cluster of angels blow-
ing the seven trumps: the one to our left turned towards the resurrected
dead holding a small book (in which the names of the saved are to be
imagined), and the one to our right, holding a large book (with the names
of the damned) directly above the head of Charon in his ferry boat, row-
ing the souls across the Styx to their eternal home in hell.
The zoomorphic necrotypes in the judgement scene of the Papyrus of
Ani include the dog, the crocodile, and the baboon. Anubis is the jackal-­
headed deity of mummification, crouched beside the scales, his left hand
holding the strings of the scale with the feather of Maat, and his right the
plumb bob that steadies the scales. One needn’t rehearse here the wide-
spread diffusion of the dog as a guide and or guardian into the mysteries
of the underworld, from the Cerberus to the Hounds of Hell that haunted
the great blues singer Robert Johnson. The composite chimera with the
head of a crocodile, torso and paws of a lioness, and haunches of a hip-
popotamus is more specific to the Egyptian terrain. Its role is to devour
the unfortunate soul who fails the test of the scales, its heart falling into
the jaws of the beast, to suffer the second and final death, one that pre-
cludes further passage through the underworld. The lioness, however, is
indeed an archetypal symbol of the Great Goddesses of death and rebirth
in the ancient world, representing the solar principle that devours the
lunar bull—who will be reborn from her womb—during the monthly
cycles of the year.4
The feline necrotype occurs most prominently in Chap. 17 of the
Papyrus of Ani, depicting the lioness called “Tomorrow” looking back to
our left, towards vignettes of Ani and his wife Tutu playing senet, a board

4
The inversion of the genders of the solar lioness and the lunar moon bull was a frequent
motif in Joseph Campbell’s lectures, during which he would often point out that German
retains the distinction in the gender of its articles: die Sonne, and der Mond, as opposed to
the French, le soleil and la lune. He also writes about the associated mythologies of death
and rebirth in the ancient world in the chapter called “The Consort of the Bull” in Occidental
Mythology (1964, 54f.). Curiously enough, we also find the lioness as a goddess of death and
rebirth in a marvelous little Russian folktale called “Two Ivans, Soldier’s Sons.”
118 E. L. SMITH

game “serving as an allegory for the successful passage into the next
world” (Goelet 1994, 158) in one, and sitting as bird souls on the tomb
of the Ba soul of Osiris on in the other. The reciprocal lioness, called
“Yesterday,” faces to our right, towards the mummy of Osiris lying in his
tomb. I suspect there may be a mistake in the editorial captions for these
two lions, as it would make more sense to reverse “Yesterday” and
“Tomorrow” to represent Ani and Tutu while alive, playing senet, and
moving both towards an eternal “Tomorrow” presided over by Osiris,
Lord of the Resurrection. This is the logic Marie-Louise von Franz (1974)
suggests in her commentary on the Egyptian double lion, Rwti, Yesterday
and Tomorrow, representing the moment of enantiodromia when the sun
“reappears after its journey through the underworld, i.e., the rebirth of
consciousness after the ‘night-sea journey’” (71).
In addition to the feline, canine, and aquatic necrotypes in this judge-
ment scene, there is also the less-prominently visible figure of the royal
baboon seated on top of the central axis of the scales of judgement, at the
exact point of the cross. The baboon is an alternative animal form of the
god of writing and judgement in this scene, the Ibis-headed Thoth. It is
more prominently depicted in a papyrus fragment from the Book of the
Dead of Kenna (1405-1367 BCE) reproduced in Joseph Campbell’s Inner
Reaches of Outer Space (1985; Fig. 11). The crocodile Sebek appears in
this image as the “Swallower,” with its snout inserted between nodules 3
and 4—out of a total of seven, which Campbell relates to the chakras of
the Kundalini system—and pointing directly towards the large figure of
Thoth, in the form of a baboon, balancing the scales to our right. As
Campbell suggests, “Thoth is the Egyptian counterpart of Hermes, guide
of souls to the knowledge of eternal life,” while the African baboons are
famous for their cacophonous greeting of the rising sun. Hence, they
serve also as symbols of the resurrection in the Egyptian Books of the
Dead, as for example in the concluding scene of the journey through the
underworld, when, at dawn, six of them are shown with upright hands on
either side of the Djed pillar (symbol of Osiris) with a solar disk inscribed
on the axis of the Coptic cross, the Ankh (Plate 2). The baboons reappear
in a spectacular mandala scene (Plate 32), which depicts four royal apes
sitting at the corners of a rectangular pool of “firey liquid, reminding one
of the ‘Lake of Fire’ frequently mentioned in the BD” (Goelet 1994,
168). Remember this association between the apes, writing, and the
underworld when we come to explore the Mayan iconography of the
monkey scribes in the Popul Vuh.
 GRAPHIC MYTHOLOGIES 119

Another zoomorphic necrotype—in addition to that of the baboon, the

dog, and the lioness—is that of the wild boar, quite dramatically portrayed
in a judgement scene from another the Book of the Dead, in which Osiris
is shown seated on a throne with nine figures climbing a staircase leading
up to the platform where the scales of the judgement are suspended from
the shoulders of a mummy. In the upper right background there are two
baboons whipping a huge boar in a barge, presumably representing Set
being driven off into the wilderness after losing the battle with Horus
(Campbell 1974, fig. 391). The jackal-headed Anubis stands in the upper
right corner, observing if not supervising the scene. As Campbell persua-
sively demonstrates, the wild boar is an archetypal image associated with
the mysteries of death and rebirth, typically presided over by a goddess.
One of the most powerful amplifications of the symbol comes from John
Layard’s work, The Stone Men of Malekula, in which the departed soul
must inscribe half of a labyrinth drawn in the sand by a pig-headed god-
dess of death who draws the labyrinth at the base of a stone leading into
the underworld. She then erases half of it, which the departed must
restore, having memorized the maze during its puberty initiation rites.5
The image of Osiris as the Lord of the Staircase, therefore, situates the
necrotypes of the night-sea journey (journey by barge up the Nile), the
boar, and the dog in what we might call the architectural necrotype, in
which thresholds, staircases, and chambers form labyrinthine structures
associated with the underworld mysteries of death and rebirth. As in the
Sumerian story of the Descent of Inanna, the iconography of the Egyptian
nekyia is consistently structured by elaborate passages through complex,
labyrinthine spaces structured by doorways, stairs, and corridors (witness
the great tombs carved into the mountains on the west bank of the Nile in
the Valley of the Kings). Wallis Budge (2021) focused on the journey of
Amon-Ra through the twelve chambers of the Amduat in his account of
the Books of the Dead, in which spells, incantations, stories, and prayers
frame each of the twelve portals. In the Papyrus of Ani the image is com-
pounded by a double row of thresholds through the soul of Ani must pass
through on his journey: the upper register shows a sequence of seven
thresholds, and the lower a sequence of ten (Budge 2021, Plate 11). Each
has its own named pair of gatekeepers and guardians to be reckoned with,

5
Campbell (1974) provides numerous amplifications of the motif, including the role
played by the boar in the stories of Odysseus and Adonis, and in the Eleusinian Mysteries,
which involved sacrificial pigs (450-81).
120 E. L. SMITH

as in the sequence of seven doorways in the Sumerian myth of Inanna’s

descent. And the lower ten doorways are differentiated by the iconic
images of the journey into the land of the dead that I refer to as necro-
types—ocular images of the Eye of Horus; zoomorphic depictions of the
lioness, the hippo, the ram, and the crocodile; the herpetetic imagery of
the uraeus serpents; and the ornithological symbolism of the Ibis and the
Falcon. This complex synthesis of archetypal images associated with the
journey of the soul into the land of the dead lays the foundation for the
thousand and one variations on the iconography to come, as the tradition
of graphic mythologies develops across the millennia, right up to the
present day.

Navajo Sand Paintings

Where the Two Came to Their Father

Where the Two Came to Their Father: A Navaho War Ceremonial was the
first volume of the marvelous Bollingen Series, published in 1943. It was
a collaborative effort: Maud Oakes befriended the Navaho healer Jeff
King, who shared with her the story and the images for the sand paintings,
for which Joseph Campbell provided his commentary and analysis. Seven
years later, Bollingen published his Hero with a Thousand Faces, in 1949,
so it was inevitable that various themes of the later book would inform
Campbell’s approach to this famous story, which he would retell many
times during the course of his long career, with slide illustrations of the
unique paintings recorded by Maud Oakes. For those interested in the
development of graphic mythologies, the book is a cornerstone, most
especially in the first editions, with the large reproductions of the images
(later to be reduced in size to meet the needs of the paperback edition).
One also finds smaller reproductions and synoptic commentary on the
myth in Campbell’s last work, The Historical Atlas of World Mythology: The
Way of the Animal Powers (1983, 244-51). The story therefore frames
Campbell’s long, prodigiously productive career, and exemplifies many
key themes of his comparative method. For students of the archetypal
foundations of graphic mythologies, both volumes of the Atlas are indis-
pensable, covering a wide range of traditional media—rock art, birchbark
etchings, Aboriginal landscape art, stelae and temple inscriptions, and of
course sand paintings.
 GRAPHIC MYTHOLOGIES 121

Conception, Departure, and Journey

The texts for the sand paintings were not written down, nor included in
the images. They were transmitted orally, and subsequently recorded by
such artist/anthropologists as Maud Oakes, Gladys Reichard, and others.
We are fortunate, however, to have the images to refer to from the
Bollingen plates. The first has to do with the ‘Immaculate Conception’ of
the Hero Twins, Monster Slayer and Child born of Water. They are con-
ceived when their mother Changing Woman goes to sleep in the sun near
her Hogan on the top of Gobernador Knob, wakes up pregnant, goes to
wash in a spring, and conceives the second child. Changing Woman then
puts the babies into holes by the fire to protect them from the monsters
haunting the territory. The twins grow up quickly and depart on two
crosses via Cloud and Rainbow. Wondering where they have gone,
Changing Woman ‘casts her breath’ in four directions, with no results. But
when she casts her breath upwards, it doesn’t return, so she knows they
have gone in search of their father, the Sun. The painting illustrating this
scene is called “Starting Place from Where the Warrior Starts.” The circle
in the center represents Changing Woman’s Hogan, with a large white
cross marking the hearth, and two blue crosses that the boys stand on to
mount up the clouds. Footprints of the twins, Monster Slayer and Born of
Water. Their footprints lead downwards to four triangles (black, purple,
yellow, and white) representing the clouds they step on, in order to reach
the Rainbow Goddess arched across the bottom of the plate. She will carry
them to find their father.
The rainbow is “an insubstantial apparition composed of both matter
and light [….] Thus it is at once material and immaterial, solar and lunar”
(Campbell 1985, 97), and therefore an archetypal symbol of the interface
between the earth and the heavens. It and appears prominently over the
teepee of the six elders in Black Elk’s Great Vision. One also finds it as a
bridge in Wagner’s Rheingold, over which the gods cross to Valhalla. A
farther-reaching amplification would include the image of the souls of the
dead climbing up from a sea of suffering on a rainbow that leads them to
the entrance of one of the many heavens of the Buddhas of compassion in
the tradition of the Tibetan Thangkas. It therefore serves as a symbol of
the permeable boundaries between the physical and the spiritual worlds in
alchemical texts, such as the Splendor Solis, or in such dreams as the one
I had shortly after Joseph Campbell died, in which I found myself climb-
ing a staircase at the end of a dark alley in Manhattan, to enter a room
122 E. L. SMITH

where Joseph was sitting quietly, staring into a glass beaker, in which a
cloudy mist rose from the residue at the bottom, to form a rainbow, under
which a tiny homunculus danced. In the dream, Campbell turned to me
with that marvelous smile, as if to say, “Isn’t that the darndest thing!”
The next series of images in the sand paintings illustrate the various tri-
als and ordeals the twins encounter at the beginning of the journey. These
include a Sand Dune Monster who threatens to devour them, but
Waterspouts and the Rainbow carry them across while they stand of crosses
singing and praying in Plate II. They then encounter a decrepit woman,
stooped and tiny, who represents Old Age. The boys ignore her warning
not to follow directly in her footsteps, with the result that they get very
old very fast. She rejuvenates the boys by anointing them with the sweat
from her armpits and singing a Song of Old Age. It turns out that she is
Spider Woman, a hugely important figure in the mythologies of the
Southwest. The boys manage to crawl down into the tiny hole where she
lives, and she casts a web over the Sun to delay its setting. She then takes
four baskets (White Shell, Turquoise, Abalone, Jet), fills them with White
Cornmeal, Yellow Cornmeal, Seeds, Beeweed, and adds a pinch of
Turquoise and White Shell, which the boys ingest. She then gives them
Eagle feathers they will shortly need in their next ordeals.

House Made of Dawn

All these trials are in preparation for their ultimate ascent to the House of
the Sun, and include encounters with Cutting Reeds, where they think of
the turquoise and shell ingested in Spider Woman’s lair, then blow on the
Reeds and stand on their Feathers, passing through to the Clashing Rocks,
which they elude by standing on the Rainbow back and their Feathers.
Then come the Cat-Tail People, where a Little Wind tells them to sing and
blow on the cattails. Plate III illustrates this scene with admirable conci-
sion: the reeds that cut to the left and the cattails that stab to the right,
with the rocks that clap together to be imagined in between. One half of
a tall white feather on the left edge connects the upper and lower portions
of the composition. Its prominence emphasizes the archetypal nature of
feathers, suggesting the ornithological necrotype and reminding us of the
central role of feathers in Native American rituals and prayer sticks made
for the occasion. In addition, one thinks of the beautiful metaphor in
Farid Attar’s Conference of the Birds, in which we learn that a feather of the
mystical Simorgh has fallen from the heavens to China and impressed its
image on all human hearts and souls, inspiring the birds in the poem to
 GRAPHIC MYTHOLOGIES 123

begin their heroic quest. One also thinks of the feather of Maat in the
Egyptian Books of the Dead.
The ascent via feather and rainbow will, in a similar manner, bring them
to the celestial home of the Father, following the crucial passage over the
Big Water, where they see Water Bugs skating on the surface, chasing
hoops. A mysterious man appears and the Water Bugs make a path, while
Little Wind tells them to sing while standing on their feathers. They pass
across and upwards, to arrive at last at their celestial destination, the House
of the Sun—or, as Scott Momaday would put it, The House Made of Dawn,
the title of his great novel. Plate V represents the House of the Sun, with
the powerful condensed simplicity of a quadrated mandala. There are four
crosses on the path to the left, representing the four holy places the broth-
ers stop, before encountering a standing at the entrance. The Sun’s daugh-
ter (variously called Turquoise Girl, White Shell Girl, Grandchild of
Darkness) stands on the other side of the House, to our right, holding
cobs of male and female corn in her upraised hands. It will be in the black
and blue rooms that Monster Slayer and Child Born of Water will be given
their names.
But before entering the house, the twins encounter sets of four thresh-
old guardians, depicted in Plates XV-XVIII. These are quite marvelous
compositions, beautifully replicating the mandala structure in each, mov-
ing from the Bears to the Snakes to the Thunder Beings and the Winds.
The Big Bear Plate has a ceremonial basket with a small opening facing
east, with a cross in the center made of pollen, signifying the movements
of the singer. The East-West arm connecting the two crosses at the top of
the inner white rectangle represent the singer’s journey to the ceremonial
hogan and return home. Four semi-circles represent the strength given off
by the stars. These are all complex abstractions, with hieroglyphic motifs
relevant to the details of the chant and its ritual, which would be per-
formed in the Hogan, where the young soldier being sent off to war would
sit on the image. Both the bears and the snakes of course, play central roles
specific to the mythological chants of the Navaho. We see them again in
the Beauty Way chants recorded by Father Berard Haile and again illus-
trated by Maud Oakes, in which two sisters are abducted during a dance
after a Pueblo War.6 The older sister is taken to the Bear homes. Her
adventures are recorded in the Mountain Way chant. The younger sister
finds herself in a cave with the Snake People, and her adventures are
recorded in the Beauty Way chant.

6
Edited by Leland Wyman in the Bollingen Series (1957).
124 E. L. SMITH

The bear and the snake are both archetypal manifestations of those
zoomorphic necrotypes associated with the journey to the otherworld.
Campbell (1983) devotes a series of spectacular pages in The Way of the
Animal Powers to the bear (54-58)—perhaps the most archaic of all sym-
bols of death and rebirth, due to its hibernatory cycles and overwhelming,
numinous presence. The same may of course be said of the snake, petro-
glyphs of which in the American Southwest are numerous indications of
its importance in that domain. One could do no better than refer again to
Joseph Campbell’s writings on the archetypal, universal significance of the
serpent in a wide range of cultures, and also central to his own skeleton
key to world mythology—kundalini yoga.7
Once past these threshold guardians, the Sun’s Daughter comes to the
aid of the twins, hanging them from the ceiling inside the House of the
Sun in black and blue clouds. Plate V, illustrating the House of the Sun, is
a deceptively simple rendition of what I call the architectural necrotype,
since the otherworld is so often depicted as a mysterious, complex, sinis-
ter, and quite frequently labyrinthine domicile. In the Mayan story of the
twins confronting the Lords of Xibalba, for example, there are five under-
ground chambers, with severe tests associated with each. While Plate X of
the Navaho story shows a simple blueprint for the House of the Sun—a
mandala, with four rectangles of white, yellow, black, and green rooms—
the situation turns out to be far more complicated in the narrative. When
the Sun returns home, the tests and ordeals characteristic of the hero jour-
ney in general, and the nekyia more specifically begin. These begin when
the Sun returns and instructs his daughter to lead the twins to a blistering
hot Sweat Lodge, which they survive only because his daughter digs holes
for the twins to hide in to escape the heat. A series of ordeals and revela-
tions then proceeds, in the following sequence:

• 1st Room: Poison Meal: Inchworm says to turn the bowls and eat
only half;
• 2nd Room: 4 Poles covered with knives; Sun pushes them off but the
twins float by on their feathers;

7
On the serpent as a necrotype, shedding its skin to be reborn, and a plethora of images
and texts, I would recommend “The Serpent Guide” in The Mythic Image (Campbell 1974,
281-303), “The Serpent’s Bride” in Occidental Mythology (1964, 9-41), “Threshold Figures”
in The Inner Reaches (1985, 69-92), and the extraordinary pages devoted to the Raimondi
Stela in The Way of the Seeded Earth (1989, 2.3.377-79).
 GRAPHIC MYTHOLOGIES 125

• 3rd East Room: black clouds, lightning, flowers;

• 4th South Room: game animals (deer, sheep, antelope, elk);
• 5th West Room: domestic animals, grain, flowers;
• 6th North Room: big house: Sun asks where they are from, Little
Wind Whispers answers; this room is an armory (with bows, arrows,
knives, white-tailed eagle arrows); the twins ask for the medicine
bundle over the doorway
• 7th Room: darkness, lights, yellow and red Sunlight
• East Room: Rugs and Girl’s Girl’s Medicine Massage
• 8th Room: Sun tells Water Carrier to fetch the Thunder men
• 9th Room: Sparkling, blinding colors; twins stand on buffalo rugs;
Thunder Men come; the Boys are armed with flint shoes and caps,
eat turquoise and jet effigies, and the Sun names them Monster
Slayer and Child Born of Water, and identifies himself as their Father

This is indeed a labyrinthine rendition of the architectural necrotype,

which is always a kind of temenos—a sacred space of revelation and trans-
formation where the initiation rites are performed, here preparing the
twins for their heroic return to the world below.

Return to the Mother

Their return begins when they leave House of the Sun and say they want
to kill the Big Giant living on Mt. Taylor. The Sun says they may only do
so with his permission (since the Monster is also one of his children!) and
instructs to gather his four lightning arrows—a variation on the universal
theme of the arming of the hero. When they leave the House, they sud-
denly duplicate themselves and become four figures, instead of two (Plate
VII). One of the Lightning Beings then carries them to the hole in the
Sky, where they identify the four sacred mountains, and the Mountain
Around Which Moving was Done (where they were born and hidden out-
side Changing Woman’s Hogan). The Sun gives them his wisdom and
they descend to Mt. Taylor at the time of the May Moon, arriving at
dawn. This image of the hole in the sky is a fascinating motif of world
mythology: it is obviously a portal to the upperworld and is often repre-
sented in the great domes of sacred architectural tradition (such as the
Buddhist Stupas, the Pantheon in Rome, and indeed the Hogan itself). All
have an oculus in the center of the high ceiling to represent the threshold
between the worlds. Additionally, as Ananda K. Coomaraswamy pointed
126 E. L. SMITH

out, the soft spot in a baby’s head represents the same point in the body
through which the spirit enters at conception, and departs at death—it is
therefore called the Brahma door.8
The remarkable Plate VII shows the twins preparing for their descent,
and the four footprints on Mt. Taylor where they land, and begin their
heroic role as Monster Slayers. This begins with the Battle with Big Giant
who sees their reflections in the lake pictured on the Plate, drinks up the
water to drain the lake four times, shoots arrows at the boys four times,
until the boys shoot him on both sides of the heart and block the flow of
blood so he cannot be revived.
They drop their arrows as they return to mother, encountering Talking
God along the way, who teaches them six songs, doubled to 12 when they
run outside the Hogan where their journey begin. Here, the complete
hero journey cycle is represented by the reunion with the mother, rather
than the patriarchal pattern most often found in the great theme of the
atonement with the father. The fire poker in Hogan tells them where
Mother is hiding from the monsters, and they are all reunited.

Battles with Monsters

Another series of exploits then proceeds, before the boys have completed
their mission. They must fulfill their original mission to rid the land of the
various monsters plaguing the community. The first is the Horned
Monster, who lives in a flat place; the twins kill him and cut his heart out
with flint knives, and then return to their mother. The second is Monster
Eagle, living near Shiprock: they kill it and its nestlings, but they are then
stuck on top of Shiprock. A tiny old woman passing by far below becomes
Bat Woman, who helps the boys cut off the wings of the Eagle, and then
carries them down to the ground in her pockets. They chop up Eagle
Monster and throw pieces to sky, which will spawn a new generation of
eagles). Then they return to mother for a second time—the whole
sequence is a series of hero journey cycles, embedded within the larger
frame of their journey to the House of the Sun and return to Changing
Woman’s Hogan.

8
“An Indian Temple: The Kundarya Mahadeo,” Parabola III.1 (1978), and relevant
essays in The Door and the Sky. Ed. Rama P. Coomaraswamy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1997).
 GRAPHIC MYTHOLOGIES 127

The next monster to be dealt with is called Slayer with Eyes that mes-
merize people inside a hill south of Mt. Taylor. The boys shoot the front
and back of his head, and cut out his eyes. The rest of its body turns into
snakes, before they again return to their mother a third time. Their next
exploit involves a pursuit of a monster called the Bear that Tracks, which
they chase and corner in a canyon, where they cut out its heart, take meat
from its fat cheeks, and to dismember him to create the next generation of
bears. They then return to their mother a fourth time. This leaves one final
monster to be rid of: the Traveling Stone. It crushes people. The twins
chase it way up to the north, the region from which sickness, cold, bad
dreams, and witchcraft come. And then they for a final fifth time return to
their mother. But they are at this point so sick and exhausted that they
must move from their Mountain Around Which Moving is Done to
Navaho Mountain, where the Holy People recite four prayers, make a
sand painting of the Twelve Holy People, and perform “Where the Two
Came to the Father” four times—with the result that the twins now feel
fine and can move around again, talking of the “making of the future
people” (29).
As Joseph Campbell points out in his “Commentary” on the Chant,
the final plates (initially omitted by Jeff King), communicate the ultimate
secret hidden within the story: “that of the final identity of the heroes
themselves with the wonderful objects of their dreamlike journey, as
though the dangers of the way had been merely aspects of their own
psyches, dream figments; which indeed they are: the archetypal dream fig-
ments of the eternal dream of man [….] And the field of this marvelous
dream, the whole soul, is represented in the fourteenth picture: the pic-
ture of the Sky Father and Earth Mother” (46). This Plate (XIV)) shows
the night sky above, an elongated figure of one of the Talking Gods (with
a feather in his cap, so to speak) stretched across the top, covering the field
from East to West. Below we see the Milky Way, the Sparkling Star of the
East, a White Horned Moon, a small yellow Coyote Star below it, seven
Eastern Stars, the Pleiades, the twelve stars of Dipper, a golden Sun, and
the Big White Star of the West. Below, in the yellow rectangle representing
the earth, we see the White Mountain Around Which Moving Was Done
and Fir Mountain to our left, and the four holy mountains of the Navajo
to our right.
Perhaps most notable in this final plate is one of the grand symbols of
fulfillment often associated with the conclusion of the hero journey cycle:
that of the union of the solar and lunar necrotypes, both images
128 E. L. SMITH

embracing the opposites of life and death. The Sun and Moon are deli-
cately portrayed with feathers on the hooks at the top of their heads, as if
to suggest the ultimate apotheosis of the twins. The union of the Sun and
the Moon, of Sol and Luna in the alchemical version of what Jung (1955)
called the Mysterium Coniunctionis (frequently depicted at the conclusion
to the Opus), is an archetypal symbol of the union of time and eternity—
as represented in the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope, and in the
Christian iconography of the Crucifixion, in which we see prominent
images of the Sun and the Moon on each side above the Cross (as in
Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving).9 Hence this final Plate in the series is
a “picture of the soul, because, mythologically speaking, the microcosm is
a precise reproduction of the macrocosm; the whole mystery of the cos-
mos is the mystery of every atom; the embrace that sustains the universe is
the embrace of every living cell and is the secret of every living soul” (46).

C.G. Jung’s Red Book

While others have focused on the mythology of the descent to the under-
world in the text and narrative of Jung’s Red Book, none to my knowledge
have explored its pervasive imagery in the paintings. There are several,
beginning with the majuscule capital “D” on the first page. This first letter
of The Red Book is the part that contains the whole. Practically everything
to follow in Jung’s life and work is prefigured by it. Like the “seed sylla-
ble” of the Hindu tradition (AUM), the first letter of the name of Allah in
the Koran (bismallah), the tetragrammaton of the Old Testament (JHVH),
or the Aleph in the short story by Borges of that title, this one image
embraces the opposites of the entire work to follow. I call such images
“hologlyphs,” a coinage combining the words “holograph” and “hiero-
glyph.” In a holograph, the whole image is contained in every particle of
the plate, in the same way that each cell of our bodies contains the genetic
information of the whole organism—if not also of the entire created cos-
mos (William Blake’s “world in a grain of sand”). By “hieroglyph” I sim-
ply mean an image that communicates a spiritual truth or idea. Hence, a
hologlyph is a single image that contains and embraces the opposites of
the entire system—creation and destruction, Alpha and Omega,

9
On the union of the sun and the moon—including the kundalini system, in which the
two nerves (Ida and Pingala) are solar and lunar, converging at the position of the crown
chakra—see Campbell’s Inner Reaches (1985, 70-73), Occidental Mythology (1964, 162-64).
 GRAPHIC MYTHOLOGIES 129

Brahma-­Vishnu-­Shiva, male and female, life and death. Our world mythol-
ogies are founded on such images, and on the idea of the hologlyph, per-
haps most succinctly stated by the alchemical maxim of the one figure that
“contains the entire treatise” in the famous engraving in Michael Maier’s
Atalanta Fugiens of the alchemist squaring the circle with the use of the
triangle.
To begin with the necrotypes associated with the mythology of the
descent to the underworld, we note the imagery of what Jung (1952)
called “the night-sea journey” (a term he took from Leo Frobenius, cited
frequently in Symbols of Transformation) in this first illumination of The
Red Book: we find a fascinating evocation of the mysterious creatures of
the depths, below the water line of the lake in the foreground; and we
note the boat in the mid to background in its passage across the waters to
the yonder shore. And there we see a temenos (a sacred space of revelation
and transformation, here, an ancestral space) in the depiction of the medi-
eval city with its prominent steeple pointing up into the mountains
beyond. This yields a rich fusion of necrotypes long associated with the
journey to the underworld: zoomorphic (creatures commonly evoked by
the myth, like the deer, the dog, or the whale), aquatic (the crossing of the
waters to the land of the dead, as in the river Styx), and the oreographic
(mountains as the destination of the Nekyia, as exemplified by such works
as The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Egyptian Books of the Dead, or Thomas
Mann’s The Magic Mountain).
Of particular interest, perhaps, are the coral formations below the sur-
face of the lake in the foreground, which link the imagery of the nekyia to
the alchemical symbolism, also apparently present in this first image—let’s
call it the “Urbild aller Bilder,” following Hermann Broch’s lead. From
the perspective of the hermetic iconographies of the alchemical tradition
we notice several motifs in the image: first we have the serpent coiling up
from the alembic of fire at the base, to its crowned head at the top, on the
left side of the page. The belly of the snake is golden, and there are gold
dots running along its black top, suggestive of the emergence of philo-
sophical gold from the blackness of putrefaction. We also find common
symbols of the alchemical tradition at the top of the painting: the astro-
logical motifs of the signs of the zodiac, and the union of the cycles of the
sun and the moon—so often figured in hermetic engravings by the myste-
rium coniunctionis of Sol et Luna, King and Queen, and of the
Hermaphrodite in such texts as the Rosarium Philosophorum, central to
130 E. L. SMITH

Jung’s (1946) engagement with alchemy in his book on the Psychology of

the Transference.
Alternatively, one might see the coiling serpent as a prefiguration of
Jung’s later interest in the symbolism of yoga, where we find the seven
coils of the chakras through which the kundalini serpent ascends to the
crown chakra at the top of the skull (ajna). Hence this first image of the
text brings together the mythologies that would so engage Jung through-
out much of The Red Book, and of his life’s work: the Nekyia, alchemy, and
kundalini yoga. In a very real sense, the whole of his work is contained in
this first image.
When we turn to the narrative recorded in the chapters following this
initial image in the “Liber Primus,” the mythologies of the nekyia con-
tinue to play a central role, only now with a shift to Nordic and Egyptian
motifs. The key chapters here are Chaps. 5, “Höllenfahrt in die Zukunft”
(Descent into Hell in the Future) and 7, “Heldenmord” (Murder of the
Hero). Both involve the death of Siegfried—hero of the Nibelungenlied,
and central protagonist of Wagner’s Ring—and the mysteries of the depths
revealed during Jung’s imaginal explorations by the “geist der Tiefe” (the
spirit of the deep), which, at the beginning of Chap. 5, gives him a
“glimpse of inner things, the world of my soul” (“die welt meine Seele”)
in the form of a waking dream:

I see a gray rock face along which I sink into great depths. I stand in black
dirt up to my ankles in a dark cave. Shadows sweep over me. I am seized by
fear, but I know I must go in. I crawl through a narrow crack in the rock and
reach an inner cave whose bottom is covered with black water. But beyond
this I catch a glimpse of a luminous red stone which I must reach. I wade
through the muddy water. The cave is full of the frightful noise of shrieking
voices. I take the stone, it covers a dark opening in the rock. I hold the stone
in my hand, peering around inquiringly. I do not want to listen to the voices,
they keep me away. But I want to know. Here something wants to be
uttered. I place my ear to the opening. I hear the flow of underground
waters. I see the bloody head of a man on the dark stream. Someone
wounded, someone slain lies there. I take in this image for a long time,
shuddering. I see a large black scarab floating past on the dark stream.
In the deepest reach of the stream lies a read sun, radiating through the
dark water. There I see—and terror seizes me—small serpents on the dark
rock walls, striving towards the depths, where the sun shines. A thousand
serpents crowd around, veiling the sun. Deep night falls. A red stream of
blood, thick red blood springs up, surging for a long time, then ebbing. I
am seized by fear. What did I see? (2009, 237)
 GRAPHIC MYTHOLOGIES 131

Of the “luminous red stone” in the vision, Shamdasani notes that “The
Corrected Draft has: ‘It is a six-sided crystal that gives off a cold, reddish
light’” (in Jung 2009, 35), and then cites Albrecht Dieterich’s nekyia,
which represents the underworld in Aristophanes’s The Frogs as “having a
large lake and a place with serpents,” motifs which Jung “underlined in his
copy” at three places in Dieterich’s text, with a focus on the symbolism of
“Mud” (n. 83; 237). Then Shamdasani cites the 1925 seminar, during
which Jung narrated this episode, and said that the “light in the cave from
the crystal was, I thought, like the stone of wisdom,” and that “The beetle
of course I knew to be an ancient sun symbol, and the setting sun, the
luminous red disk, was archetypal. The serpents I thought must have been
connected with Egyptian material” (n. 85; 238). The note adds that Jung
said that “soon after I had a dream in which Siegfried was killed by myself,”
which he interprets as “destroying the hero idea of my efficiency. This has
to be sacrificed in order that a new adaptation can be made; in short, it is
connected with the sacrifice of the superior function in order to get at the
libido necessary to activate the inferior function” (n. 85; 238).
Both notes reinforce the central themes of the descent to the under-
world in the text and images of Chaps. 5 and 7, in which a kind of synthe-
sis of Nordic and Egyptian necrotypes occurs—in a way that reminds one
curiously of James Joyce, who does the same thing in Finnegans Wake.
Jung’s vision is a synthesis I would call speluncular, aquatic, insectomor-
phic, and solar necrotypes: he descends to the muddy waters of a deep
cave, where he sees a dead body floating on waters farther below, with a
black scarab floating past, in the light of an apparently setting sun.
Shamdasani’s notes show that Jung soon became aware of the Greek and
Egyptian motifs associated with the underworld, partly from Dieterich’s
Nekyia, and that the Nordic mythologies of the death of Siegfried would
shortly emerge, in the “Heldenmord” of Chap. 7 of the Liber Primus.
The illuminations that accompany this narrative vividly represent this
impressive variation on the descent to the underworld. In the first we see
that slain body of the vision followed by the scarab and solar disk menaced
by black serpents: And in the second, from Chap. 7, we see the moment
of the murder of the hero, Siegfried, shot in the back in a mountainous
landscape at sunset (imagery which evokes the diurnal and oreographic
necrotypes). The murder of Siegfried by Hagen is, of course, one of the
most magnificent moments in all of Wagner’s Ring, with its famous
“Funeral March” as Siegfried’s body floats back down the Rhine for the
final apocalyptic burning of the pyre in “Götterdämmerung.” The murder
132 E. L. SMITH

is a key moment both in The Red Book and in Memories, Dreams, Reflections
(Jung 1965), and Siegfried’s battle with the Fafnir (the giant turned into
a dragon, hoarding the Rhine Gold in the Ring) is the subject of one of
the most spectacular plates in The Red Book (Jung 2009, 119).
One sees here the golden disks in the coils of the dragon, in the process
of being dismembered by Siegfried, so that, in the Nordic myth, he may
retrieve the treasure of the Rhine maidens, and forge the Tarnhelm of
invisibility and the Ring that confers power but negates love. The myth of
the dragon slayer is, of course, a universal motif in world mythology: one
thinks of St. George and Perseus, both of whom slay the monster to rescue
the feminine that has been captured and imprisoned. Farther afield one
may consider the Hindu mythology of Indra slaying the dragon Vritra
with his thunderbolt, to release the sun and the waters of life. It is a
mythologem beautifully explored by Joseph Fontenrose (1959) which
connects the material to Apollo’s slaying of the dragon and founding of
the oracle at Delphi. There are even suggestions of Old Testament varia-
tions on the myth, the focus of Mary Wakeman’s (1973) evocative study,
in which Jahweh does battle with a demon of the depths variously named
(Rahab and Leviathan, for example).
Both Wakeman and Fontenrose narrow their discussion to the theme of
the emergence of cosmos from chaos that results from the conquest of the
dragon, as for example in the Mesopotamian variation in which Marduk
dismembers Tiamat to create the forms of the earth (the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers being the tears streaming from the murdered Goddess’s
eyes). Closer to the Jungian world, however, would be Marie-Louise von
Franz’s (1989) study of Creation Myths, especially the sections devoted to
the sacrificial victim. But even more to the point in the context of The Red
Book would be the Gnostic studies that Jung was engaged in when the
material was beginning to emerge during this critical period of his
“Confrontation with the Unconscious” (Jung 1965). In such Gnostic
myths as the Syrian “Hymn of the Pearl,” the dragon of the deep repre-
sents the material world, into which its soul—Anima mundi, Sophia,
Shekinah—has fallen, been taken captivity, and imprisoned. The hero’s
task is typically to dive to the bottom of the sea, retrieve the soul from the
dragon, and return with it to its heavenly source.
The redemption of the feminine, of course, would become a central
motif of Jungian studies following the refiguring of the myth in The Red
Book, in which it is associated with the central task of the birth of the new
god image, which is the primary purpose of the descent to the underworld
 GRAPHIC MYTHOLOGIES 133

recorded in the text and images. Hence, Siegfried’s battle with the mon-
ster and the Nekyia remain central motifs in the illuminations that accom-
pany the text in the second part of the book, Liber Secundus, such as the
image of “Der Tod” in Chap. 6 (Jung 2009, Plate 29).
This image of death exemplifies what I call the insectomorphic, or more
precisely the lepidopteric necrotype: because the Greek word Psyche means
both butterfly and soul, the butterfly becomes a symbol of the soul emerg-
ing from the cocoon of the corpse in the form of the chrysalis. It is a motif
abundantly illustrated by Marija Gimbutas (1989) in her The Language of
the Goddess, which includes several stunning images from Minoan Crete
(large vessels, the coffin of a child) in which the unfolding wings of the
butterfly represent the double-bladed axe, a symbol of the labyrinth, while
the chrysalis serves as a symbol of the soul (fig. 430). Jung’s image seems
also to echo the symbolism of both the Egyptian and Oriental mytholo-
gies first announced in the initial capital “D” of Liber Primus: here again
we find the solar disk associated with the journey of the soul through the
twelve hours of the night in the Egyptian Books of the Dead, and also a
hint of kundalini symbolism, with the chakras suggested by the coils of the
caterpillar standing on the red sun.
The hieroglyphics of the two borders of the image of Death, and par-
ticularly of the lower register, beneath the solar disk, bring Siegfried back
into the picture, and combine the motifs of the Nordic Nekyia with
Biblical and Mithraic mythologies. In the lower right side of the bottom
panel we see a reclining figure waving to us—like Siegfried, I would sug-
gest, lying on his funeral pyre, but indicating the possibility of rebirth by
his upraised left arm (Jung 2009, Plate 29). In the glyph immediately to
the left, in the middle of the bottom panel (in the depths of the under-
world), it seems that Siegfried has been devoured by the dragon: He is in
the belly of the whale—like Jonah, who cries out to us in the beautiful
“Hymn of Thanksgiving” that he has gone down to the “roots of the
mountains,” into “Sheol” (a Hebrew name for hell); or like Raven in the
Eskimo myth, swallowed by the whale, in whose belly he creates fire to
burn his way out; or like Pinocchio, who meets his father in the belly of
the whale. We could adduce numerous amplifications of the motif, in
which the belly becomes both the womb and the tomb, a temenos of
death and rebirth.
The image of rebirth, and of return from the underworld, is implied by
the image to the immediate left, at the lower corner of the bottom panel.
This image is clearly of Near Eastern provenance, a Mithraic motif of the
134 E. L. SMITH

birth of the god from the egg of Mother Night, which we find in Orphic
cosmologies as well, and which most likely derives from the Zoroastrian
mythologies of Ancient Persia, in which Ahura Mazda is typically repre-
sented in the center of a wingèd oval (Campbell, Mysteries: Plate III). The
motif also occurs at the top of Jung’s first mandala, the “Systema
Munditotius” previously noted, where the deity in the egg is identified as
“Erikapaios or Phanes, thus reminiscent of a spiritual figure of the Orphic
gods” (Shamdasani qtd. in Jung 2009, 364). It is an image we know as
well from a relief sculpture in Modena, in which we see Phanes born from
the egg of night (with the top and lower halves of the shell), holding a
lightning bolt and a staff, with a serpent coiled up his body, enclosed in a
mandorla illustrated by the signs of the zodiac, with the four winds at each
quarter. For Jung, in the context of The Red Book, the symbol is of that
new god image to be reborn from the depths of his descent; hence the
recurrent motif of the egg that runs through all the images of the Liber
Secundus, often in association with the mythologies of the underworld.
Another plate which brings the various mythologies of the nekyia into
a complex new relationship combines Egyptian, Mithraic, and Nordic
motifs (Jung 2009, Plate 22). This image gives us the full cycle of the
nekyia: the descent to the lower world of the bottom panel (beneath the
central tree) on our right; and the ascending return from the domain of
death and dismemberment on our left. The scarab beetle of Egyptian ico-
nography figures largely in both: on the right, pushing the solar disk into
the Amduat at dusk; and, on the left, pushing the sun up from the under-
world at dawn. And, on both sides, we find the serpent on the cross
(downward pointing on the right, upwards on the left), a Biblical symbol
of death and rebirth, of crucifixion and resurrection (the two poles of the
Christian nekyia). And on the upper right and left registers we find again
the Zoroastrian images of the wingèd disks, emanating from the rays of
the central sun, symbolic of the god of light and truth, Ahura Mazda.
The infusion of Nordic motifs may be implied by the tree in the center
of the green lozenge, and by the narrative that seems to unfold in the
underworld of the bottom panel. The arboreal necrotype recurs through-
out the imagery of the Liber Secundus, and is the subject of many of its
most beautiful plates. In this plate, the tree evokes Yggdrasil from Nordic
sources, with its branches in the heavens, its trunk in middle earth, and its
roots in the underworld of Nifelheim. It is the same tree that Odin hangs
from nine days and nights to win the runes of wisdom. In Jung’s image,
we find a battle in progress immediately below the roots of the tree, in the
 GRAPHIC MYTHOLOGIES 135

center of the lower panel. I would suggest that this image is another varia-
tion on the theme of Siegfried’s battle with the monster (the giant Fafnir,
hoarding the Rhine gold), which is also depicted in a “devouring” posture
on the lower right side of the panel. Our hero seems to emerge trium-
phantly from the encounter on the lower left side, with his arms upraised
in a posture of rebirth and return from the underworld. Immediately
above him we see the scarab beetle pushing the solar disk upwards at dawn.
This image is itself flanked by palms, a miniature version of the huge
tree in the green lozenge in the center of the plate—an image that may
evoke the motifs from the hermetic Nekyia: the alchemical tree and
Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, and dismemberment. This latter
motif recalls the image of Siegfried previously noted, in which he is simul-
taneously encoiled by and dismembering the dragon. One recalls here the
importance of the Visions of Zosimos of Panopolis (300 A.D.) that will
emerge later in Jung’s life, when he consciously engaged the iconogra-
phies of the alchemical traditions. In the second of the series of dream
visions in that document, Ion encounters a dragon at the entrance to a
temple with no beginning and no end, and with a spring of pure water
inside. The dragon is then flayed and dismembered, its bones made into
stepping stones leading into the temple (Linden 52).
The night-sea journey returns as the subject of one of the largest and
most beautiful illuminations of the Liber Secundus, which combines ele-
ments of the Egyptian and Nordic Nekyia (Plate 55). Shamdasani notes
the allusions to the Egyptian Nekyia:

The solar barge is a common motif in ancient Egypt. The barge was seen as
the typical means of movement of the sun. In Egyptian mythology, the Sun
God struggles against the monster Apophis, who attempted to swallow the
solar barge as it traveled across the heavens each day. In Transformations
and Symbols of the Libido (1912), Jung discussed the “living sun-disc” (CW
B, §153) and the motif of the sea monster (§ 549f.). In his 1952 revision of
this text, he noted that the battle with the sea monster represented the
attempt to free ego-consciousness from the grip of the unconscious (Symbols
of Transformation, CW 5, §539). The solar barge resembles some of the
illustrations in the Egyptian Book of the Dead…. The oarsman is usually a
falcon-headed Horus. The night journey of the sun God through the under-
world is depicted in the Amdaut, which has been seen as a symbolic process
of transformation. (in Jung 2009, n. 128, 284)

He also translates the calligraphic passage above the image:

136 E. L. SMITH

One word that was never spoken.

One light that was never lit up.
An unparalleled confusion.
And a road without end. (284)

Hence, the image echoes the other plates in which the night-sea jour-
ney occurs, often in close connection with the motif of the Belly of the
Whale. Here also one might add that the curved prow of the barge in
which the solar disk is being transported seems rather more Nordic than
Egyptian, more typical of Viking ships, than those to be seen in the Books
of the Dead. If this is the case, associations with Siegfried’s journey down
the Rhine, or even perhaps of Thor’s tangle with the World Serpent, would
not be irrelevant here. In addition, one might add that the language of the
inscription (“An unparalleled confusion/And a road without end”) evokes
the mythology of the labyrinth, often equated with the journey to the
underworld (as in Dante’s Inferno). And, as we will see, elements of the
Nordic nekyia will come back to Jung in association with the building of
the Bollingen tower.

Conclusion
These explorations provide an archetypal foundation for understanding
and interpreting the (re)emergence of our contemporary “graphic mythol-
ogies” in popular culture, including comic books, video games, animated
films, etc. The comparative perspective of mythological studies, incorpo-
rating the work of Joseph Campbell and C.G. Jung, among others, opens
the conversation to historical precedents that enrich our appreciation of
the long lineage of visual art—sometimes, but not always accompanied by,
some form of text—that stretches back to Paleolithic cave paintings and
rock art in Europe, Africa, and the American Southwest, and moves for-
ward to the Egyptian Books of the Dead, Native American sand painting,
Mayan and Aztec codices, and temple sculpture all over the world. Add to
this the sophisticated fusion of text and image in the alchemical engravings
of the Rosicrucian era (e.g., Michael Maier and Robert Fludd, among
many others), or the narrative sequences of such artists as William Hogarth
in Augustan England (e.g., “The Rake’s Progress”), and one has the sense
of the infinite possibilities of a newly emerging field of genre studies, one
that engages the material from historical, multicultural, and transdisci-
plinary perspectives.
 GRAPHIC MYTHOLOGIES 137

References
Budge, E.A. 2021. The Book of the Dead: The Complete Papyrus of Ani. Clydesdale.
Campbell, Joseph. 1983. The Historical Atlas of World Mythology: The Way of the
Animal Powers. New York: Alfred van der Marck Editions.
———. 1985. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion.
New York: Alfred van der Marck Editions.
———. 1974. The Mythic Image. Bollingen Series C. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
———. 1943/1963. Where the Two Came to Their Father: A Navaho War
Ceremonial. Given by Jeff King, Text and Paintings Recorded by Maud Oakes,
Commentary by Joseph Campbell. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gimbutas, Marija. 1989. The Language of the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper.
Goelet, Ogden. 1994. The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of the Coming Forth
by Day. Trans. Raymond Faulkner. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.
Jung, C.G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Ed. Aniela Jaffe. Trans. Richard and
Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1965.
———. The Red Book: Liber Novus. Ed. Sonu Shamdasani. Philemon Series.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009.
Piankoff, Alexandre. 1968. The Pyramid of Unas. Trans. Bollingen Series XL: 5.
Princeton UP.
Von Franz, Marie-Louise. 1974. Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and
the Psychology. Toronto: Inner City Books.
———. 1989. Creation Myths. Boston: Shambhala.
Wakeman, Mary. 1973. God's Battle with the Monster: A Study in Biblical Imagery.
Leiden: Brill.
 PART II

Archetypal Amplifications: Comic

Books, Comparative Mythology, and
Depth Psychology
 Archetypal Dimensions of Comic Books

Jeffrey T. Kiehl

Abstract Psychologically, the long-standing popularity of comic books

rests in their connectedness to the deep archetypal dimensions of the
psyche. C.G. Jung argued that creativity emerges from the play of imagi-
nation with fantasy images within the unconscious. From a depth psycho-
logical perspective these fantasy images are personified forms of archetypal
energies within the collective unconscious. A key archetype within the
unconscious is the savior, in which this figure facilitates engagement with
evil and opens pathways to wholeness. In this chapter, I explore how com-
ics provide images of the savior archetype and the psychological dynamics
associated with this figure. I analyze the archetypal patterns and dynamics
within the Fantastic Four stories published during the Silver Age and then
provide a parallel analysis of Alan Moore’s comic series Promethea. The
analysis considers how each of these series illustrates a religious function
within the psyche and explores how changes in the social arena over the
fifty years between the Fantastic Four and Promethea have affected the-
matic elements within comic book storylines.

J. T. Kiehl (*)
Santa Cruz, CA, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 141

Switzerland AG 2023
D. M. Odorisio (ed.), A New Gnosis, Contemporary Religion and
Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1_7
142 J. T. KIEHL

Keywords Archetype • Comic books • C.G. Jung • Promethea •

Fantastic Four • Silver Age

Introduction
My experience with comic books began in 1961 when I was nine years
old. I still remember walking a few blocks from my home to a small,
neighborhood corner store to purchase the latest issue of the Fantastic
Four, Spiderman, or the X-Men. The back of the store had a soda fountain
where you could sit at the counter and have an ice cream sundae or root
beer float. On the wall opposite to the soda fountain were rows of comic
books. Reading the comic books without purchasing them was strongly
discouraged, but kids did it anyway. If I had enough money after spending
ten cents for the latest issue of the Fantastic Four, I would sit at the coun-
ter, order an ice cream sundae, and peruse my comic book. After finishing
my ice cream, I would walk back home and find a secluded place to read
and re-read the adventures of the Fantastic Four. You did not read through
an issue only once, no, you read and reread the comic paying special atten-
tion to the colorful images, the letters from fans and, yes, even the adver-
tisements (“you too can make $3 a day by training in electronics!”).
Reading comics were entertaining, but also provided a means to expand
my imagination in ways I couldn’t understand at the time. I knew little
about the people who were creating these stories and how they were cre-
ated. I also knew nothing about the psychic depths from which these
images and words arose.
I now recognize that my early self was following the alchemical dictum
of “Ora, lege, lege, relege labora et invenies,” or “Pray, read, read, reread,
work, and discover!” Looking back sixty years, I realize how appropriate
this alchemical saying is for reading comic books. First, I prayed that a new
issue would soon arrive at my neighborhood store, I prayed that Stan Lee
and Jack Kirby – creators of the Fantastic Four – were working on new,
exciting issues, I read, read, and reread. Most importantly, each time I
read a comic book I discovered something new about myself.
Psychologically, the archetypal images in the comic books were working
on me all the time. I felt a numinosity, which I could not have articulated
at the age of nine or ten. Nevertheless, the feeling was real and has stayed
with me, such is the power of a comic book.
What did I find out or discover (invenies) about myself? I discovered
whole new worlds to explore. I experienced feelings for the characters and
 ARCHETYPAL DIMENSIONS OF COMIC BOOKS 143

their struggles. I discovered new sciences and facts about the universe.
Most of all I discovered whole new dimensions of imagination. Alchemically
these were the great treasures that helped me through some very dark
times. They transmuted my psyche through the nigredo to the albedo from
dark loneliness to seeing a semblance of light within and outside of myself.
In addition, my comic book experiences served as a gateway to reading
The Adventures of Tom Swift to the novels of Jules Verne and the science
fiction stories of Isaac Asimov. Those comic books that I looked forward
to reading every month transformed my young, developing psyche in so
many ways; I am forever grateful to Marvel comics for creating so many
worlds that animated my young life.
The outline of this chapter is as follows: first, I provide a brief overview
of the development of the Silver Age of comics and the psychological
dynamics within these comics. I then explore archetypal patterns in the
Fantastic Four comic book and provide a parallel analysis of the more
contemporary comic book series Promethea. I conclude with personal
reflections on the importance of comic books for psychological self-­
awareness and our current culture.

A Brief Overview of the Silver Age of Comics

Before discussing the Silver Age of comics, it is necessary to consider the
origin of comic books in America. Modern comics began in 1938 with the
appearance of the first issue of Superman, a year before the beginning of
World War II. Even before the beginning of the war there were clear signs
of growing, dark, dictatorial regimes in Germany and Italy. Although the
United States did not enter the war until 1941, the awareness of this
growing evil was quite evident. One explanation for the popularity of
Superman and other comics of the Golden Age is that they were America’s
reaction to the collective darkness appearing in the world. The growing
evil needed to be confronted by a being with superpowers. Jung
(1950/1989) notes, “In one form or another, the figure of the redeemer
is universal because it partakes of our common humanity. It invariably
emerges from the unconscious of the individual or the people when an
intolerable situation cries out for a solution that cannot be implemented
by conscious means alone” (776). Thus, psychologically, the appearance
of superhero comics can be viewed as an unconscious reaction to the pres-
ence of collective evil which transcends an individual’s ability to cope with
144 J. T. KIEHL

it. American culture in the 1930s needed superheroes to overcome what

perhaps felt otherwise unstoppable.1
As mentioned, my early comic book experiences began in the late 50s
and early 60s, as The Silver Age of Comics was just beginning. The Silver
Age is usually marked to span from 1956 to circa 1970. Historically, The
Silver Age occurred at the height of the Cold War, when as kids, we were
training to avoid nuclear fallout by hiding under our desks. It was the age
of “Duck and Cover!” I distinctly remember walking to school during
these times wondering if this was the day someone would ‘push the but-
ton.’ Of course, this was also a time of overt racial discrimination, immense
inner-city poverty, and the beginnings of the Vietnam War. Amidst these
dark temporal disturbances existed the excitement surrounding science
and technology. Sputnik was launched into space in 1957, soon followed
by space journeys by dogs, monkeys, and men. Nuclear energy was prom-
ising to provide cheap energy for all. Plastics were going to revolutionize
life as we knew it. There was a palpable tension between the dark shadows
of looming global nuclear annihilation and the bright horizons offered by
science and technology. Looking back on these times, I wonder how I, or
any kid, held the tension of these diametrically opposed forces of arche-
typal destruction and creation. In contrast, the mid- to late- ‘60s provided
a gigantic release valve for these archetypal tensions from the late ‘50s to
the early ‘60s. Perhaps Rock and Roll, the British invasion, the wholesale
arrival of Eastern religions in the West, and the appearance of psychedelic
mind expansion saved all of us from complete implosion. These means
were contained ways that the demonic forces could be released, renewed,
and reinvigorated without ending the world. I believe comics in the mid-
to early- ‘60s provided a prescient foreshadowing to the rebirth experi-
ences that appeared in the late ‘60s.
During the mid- to late- ‘60s, Silver Age Marvel comics didn’t shy away
from the world’s problems but integrated them into their manifold story-
lines. The tremendous popularity of Marvel comics and their later transi-
tion to widely popular films indicates how well they transmuted and
transmitted deep archetypal imagery to the public. The comic book images
with their rich colors, dynamic, and multi-dimensional structures were
captivating not just to young people but adults as well.

1
On the history of comics, specifically Marvel Comics, I recommend the following: Dauber
(2022), Howe (2012), Thomas (2020), and Wolk (2021).
 ARCHETYPAL DIMENSIONS OF COMIC BOOKS 145

Compared to the Golden Age, Silver Age comics provided a great leap
into the exploration of new thematic elements, creating more nuanced
villains who could evoke sympathy, and explored the flawed nature of the
superheroes themselves. Central to virtually all comic book storylines is
the struggle of good against evil, in which individuals using special powers
fight on either side of this archetypal dyad. Good represents the status
quo, the dominant paradigm, a society with order that allows for basic
freedoms and human rights. Evil represents any power or entity that wants
to subvert the status quo, the ordered society, and replace freedom with
autocratic, domination. It is a struggle between Chaos and Cosmos. Evil
is rooted in power and those who align with the central power figure live
in a state of servitude, even if they too have superpowers. While superhe-
roes who strive for good create order, are in healthy relationship with one
another, and exhibit teamwork.
Psychologically, this represents the savior archetype, the image of a
being who strives for good, while the savior’s opposite strives for evil. The
archetypal nature of the savior dyad suggests that this motif has existed
throughout history. For example, Manicheanism and Zoroastrianism are
ancient religions rooted in the eternal struggle between good and evil, in
which each religion has its savior fighting for good. The Judeo-Christian
religions have God and Satan, who struggle for the soul of man. Given the
struggles that humanity faced through its evolutionary development, it is
not surprising we would be immersed in this dyadic dynamic. As Jung
argued, archetypes are rooted in nature itself, in our evolutionary experi-
ences over vast time spans. Thus, natural human internal and external
struggles to survive and thrive, to find meaning in life led to the polarity
of good and evil. Given the preference for life over death, we yearn for an
‘Other’ who will help us overcome the dark exigences of life. The savior,
therefore, becomes a necessary part of our meaning-making to keep the
threatening dark forces at bay. Jung (1958/1989) notes that:

… immense power of destruction is given into [man’s] hand, and the ques-
tion is whether he can resist the will to use it, and can temper his will with
the spirit of love and wisdom. He will hardly be capable of doing so on his
own unaided resources. He needs the help of an “advocate” in heaven. (459)

Our daily challenge personally and collectively is to ‘temper our’ will to

power with the ‘spirit of love and wisdom.’ This is the fundamental strug-
gle of good against evil. But, as Jung observes, we need more than our
146 J. T. KIEHL

conscious will to do this, we need an “advocate in heaven” to prevent us

from destroying ourselves and the planet. Psychologically, this means we
need help from the archetypal realm of the collective unconscious. Again,
Jung (1956/1990) states:

What we seek in visible human form is not man, but the superman, the hero
or god, that quasi-human being who symbolizes the ideas, forms, and forces
which grip and mould the soul. These, so far as psychological experience is
concerned, are the archetypal contents of the (collective) unconscious, the
archaic heritage of humanity, the legacy left behind by all differentiation and
development and bestowed upon all men like sunlight and air. But in loving
this inheritance they love that which is common to all; they turn back to the
mother of humanity, to the psyche, which was before consciousness existed,
and in this way they make contact with the source and regain something of
that mysterious and irresistible power which comes from the feeling of being
part of the whole. (178)

The struggle between our egoic-focused ‘will’ and the deeper ‘spirit of
love and wisdom’ cannot be won through ego consciousness, since it is
biased towards will. We need to transcend our one-sidedness, which
according to Jung is the seed of neurosis, to a state of balance and whole-
ness. Psychologically, we need to develop a working relationship with the
collective unconscious to avoid catastrophic destruction. This fundamen-
tal struggle and aid of an advocate are the basic ingredients of most comic
book stories. When we open a comic book and fall into its colorful, multi-­
dimensional world, we come into contact with ‘the advocate.’ Perhaps it is
this deep psychological experience that unconsciously draws us to the
world of comic books, in which advocates abound.
Another interesting aspect of comics is the continuation of their com-
plex stories and motifs over many issues. Certain antiheros continue to
come back to subvert the dominant world order. For example, Dr Doom,
the Fantastic Four’s archnemesis, returns over and over to do ill. The anti-
hero is rarely destroyed in comics. If they are captured, they escape. If you
think the evil one is destroyed for good, they miraculously appear in a
forthcoming issue. The struggle between good and evil is never fully
resolved in comics – it transcends temporality. Archetypally, comic books
contain no eschatology, they are never-ending. Of course, the more mun-
dane interpretation of this situation is continued sales of comics, but there
is a deeper meaning implied in the never-ending struggle between good
 ARCHETYPAL DIMENSIONS OF COMIC BOOKS 147

and evil. As noted, The Silver Age also introduced more nuanced villains,
individuals who readers could sympathize with in some way. The first anti-
hero to appear in the Fantastic Four series was Mole Man, who was a
simple person denigrated and put down by those around him. To escape
this persecution, he fled down into the bowels of the earth and slowly
mutated into an evil being. As Jung (1954/1977) states, “Isolation in
pure ego-consciousness has the paradoxical consequence that there now
appear in dreams and fantasies impersonal, collective contents which are
the very material from which certain schizophrenic psychoses are con-
structed” (101). Thus, a common antihero motif is their isolation into
pure egoism and alienation from the world, ultimately leading to madness.
At times, the antihero’s actions may be antithetical to their goals, a theme
that resonates with Mephistopheles (Kaufman 1963) who says to Faust
that he is “part of that force which would do evil evermore, and yet creates
the good” (159). Clearly, the development of comic books in the 1960s
led to antiheros who are more nuanced and ambivalent.
Another feature of the Silver Age superhero is how they exhibit internal
and interpersonal flaws. Psychologically, it is now possible to see the shad-
ows of the superhero and how these darker aspects affect their ability to
fight an antihero. Often a villain appears who carries the shadow of the
hero and uses this knowledge to thwart the hero. With Silver Age comics,
we enter the realm of paradox representative of the collective unconscious.
Infighting among superheroes often risks everything. Superheroes can
become inflated with their specialness and behave intolerably towards
their colleagues, including the mere mortals around them. They may even
fail at their mission, or display humor amidst tremendous turmoil. Simply
stated, Silver Age superheroes are more human than their Golden Age
counterparts, thus making them more relatable.

The Fantastic Four

Historically, the creation of the Fantastic Four arose from a competition
between Marvel and DC comics. In response to the popular DC comic
series Justice League, the head of Marvel asked Stan Lee to create a comic
book that would best the DC comic. Encouraged by his wife to let go of
conventions and follow his instincts, Lee came up with the Fantastic Four.
Lee took his idea and storyline to his colleague Jack Kirby, who was an
accomplished illustrator. Interviews with those who worked with Kirby
describe how he would sit with a drawing board and large sheet of paper
148 J. T. KIEHL

and, starting at the top left corner of the paper, with nonstop motion,
work his way down to the bottom right corner of the sheet. Thus, images
and storyline literally flowed out onto the paper with no hesitation. The
only prompts he had for the page were textual fragments provided by Lee.
Kirby told people that he never knew beforehand what he would draw, but
once his pencil touched the paper images and story flowed out onto the
blank sheet before him. He was comfortable with people sitting beside
him to witness this spontaneous creative process (Kirby Continuum
2016). Clearly the comic book images were not generated consciously,
but through unconscious processes. Jung (1956/1990) notes that:

We have … two kinds of thinking: directed thinking, and dreaming or

fantasy-­thinking. The former operates with speech elements for the purpose
of communication, and is difficult and exhausting; the latter is effortless,
working as it were spontaneously, with the contents ready to hand, and
guided by unconscious motives. The one produces innovations and adapta-
tion, copies reality, and tries to act upon it; the other turns away from reality,
sets free subjective tendencies. (18)

Interestingly, Lee and Kirby’s collaboration brought together these

two kinds of ‘thinking.’ Lee’s narratives depended on his ability to weave
linear storylines together that would communicate to the reader both
action and purpose, while Kirby’s colorful images spontaneously arose
from his unconscious and were universally praised for their ability to grab
the reader’s imagination. The combination of directed and fantasy think-
ing insured their stories included personal and archetypal images. For
example, Ben Grimm of the Fantastic Four often refers to the rough guys
from Yancy Street and how they are out to get him. Kirby grew up on
Delancy Street in the Lower East side of New York City, a rough and
tumble neighborhood, and as a young boy he was often bullied by the
Delancy street gang (Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center 2012).
In the first Fantastic Four issue published in 1961, readers learn that
the superheroes obtained their powers by accident. In an effort to beat the
Soviets into space, genius scientist Reed Richards convinces three of his
friends to join him on a spaceship journey into outer space. While in space,
the four humans are exposed to high intensity cosmic radiation which
transmutes the travelers into superhuman beings. Three of the members
preserve their human form, while Ben Grimm’s body is transformed into
a massive, orange rock-like form. Jeffrey Kripal (2011, 121-172) argues
 ARCHETYPAL DIMENSIONS OF COMIC BOOKS 149

that human transformation in comic books occurs commonly through

accidental exposure to radiation. Given that many of these stories began in
the late 1950s and early ‘60s, it is not surprising radiation would play a
critical role in superhero transmutation. Anna Peppard (2017) writes that:

The Fantastic Four and the Marvel Age’s other atomic-spawned superhe-
roes are products of this science of transmutation; arriving in the wake of
not only the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also the nuclear tests
at Bikini Atoll, the first nuclear power plant, and the first nuclear submarine,
the Fantastic Four and their brethren explicitly react to, reflect, and embody
a world in which the vast productive and destructive capabilities of atomic
energy were truly enacted and spectacularly displayed for the first time.
Significantly, atomic energy had often been perceived as monstrous to the
extent that it seems to disrupt the natural order. (65)

At this time, the Cold War was in full swing fueled by an out-of-control
nuclear arms race. Testimony to this public awareness are the many science
fiction films from this era filled with monsters created by radiation expo-
sure. The ambivalent message from these stories is that radiation is a dan-
gerous energy that can lead to tremendous destruction, but also the
creation of superheroes.
The Fantastic Four comic book contained some novel twists compared
to previous comics. For example, members of the Fantastic Four did not
hide their identities behind masks, they chose to be less invested in a per-
sona. In most episodes readers see the members of the Fantastic Four
walking down the streets of New York City mingling with the public.
Furthermore, the team members revealed not only their superpowers, but
also their frailties. We see them questioning each other’s decisions, we wit-
ness Reed’s guilt of exposing his friends to deadly cosmic radiation, and,
particularly, his guilt about Ben’s transformation into a monstrous nonhu-
man form. We witness constant bickering, teasing and emotional battles
among the team. Despite their superhero powers, the Fantastic Four expe-
rience fear, guilt, jealousy, and shame. Most of all, the Fantastic Four are a
family, unlike any other superhero series at the time. The team members
live together, work together, and care deeply for one another and willingly
risk their lives and the lives of others to protect each other.
Beyond the more personal, psychological aspects of a superhero, lies its
archetypal dimension. Archetypes are universal lenses through which we
perceive the world; lenses that represent particular patterns of perception
150 J. T. KIEHL

common to all beings. The specific imagistic form we perceive is modified

by the culture and times we live in, but the underlying pattern is universal.
Importantly, the perception of the pattern evokes within us affect and
numinosity. When we engage with an archetypal image, we are moved in
deep ways. Jung (1959/1977) states that archetypes, “can rearise sponta-
neously, at any time, at any place, and without any outside influence” (79).
The number of patterns perceived is very diverse, but certain patterns
seem quite prevalent in our lives, including: shadow, soul figures, mother,
father, magician, hero, savior, and wise old woman. Jung further notes
that an “archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in meta-
phors” (157). Metaphors arise from the second kind of ‘thinking,’ and, as
such, are imaginal, fluid, and often transrational. Essential to the idea of
archetypes is that they have polarity, which for comic books is the hero-­
antihero dyad. A comic book series, like The Fantastic Four contains all of
these archetypal ingredients, thus capturing the hearts and imaginations of
the public.
The superheroes of the Fantastic Four include Dr Reed Richards, Sue
Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm. Reed Richards, Mr Fantastic, is
the unquestioned leader of the foursome who possesses superior intelli-
gence and constantly invents new machines to explore the micro- and
macro- universe. Reed is always extending his intellect into new discover-
ies, new theories to benefit mankind. His superpower due to radiation
exposure is an ability to reshape his body in fluid ways. Peppard (2017,
59) notes that Reed represents the element of water due to this fluidity.
Psychologically, Reed is a thinking type who analyzes and reasons his way
through problems, which implies his most difficult function to access is
feeling, which is reflected in how often Reed does not immediately per-
ceive the relative value of a situation. His thinking can lead to placing
himself and his friends in difficult situations. Archetypally, Reed is the
quintessential modern magician. Jung (1959/1977) notes that the magi-
cian, “pierces the chaotic darkness of brute life with the light of meaning.
He is the enlightener, the master and teacher, a psychopomp…. Like all
archetypes, it has a positive and a negative aspect” (37). Moore and
Gillette (1990) further state that collectively, “Ours … is … the age of the
Magician, because it is a technological age” (102).
Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl, can become invisible and create force
fields of various shapes. She is the peacemaker within the team and intui-
tively recognizes when things are going wrong, which indicates a domi-
nant typology of intuition implying an inferior sensation function, which
 ARCHETYPAL DIMENSIONS OF COMIC BOOKS 151

reflects her superpower of invisibility. Peppard (2017, 59) associates Sue’s

superpower with the element of air. Archetypally, Sue carries both heroine
and wisdom archetypal energy. She is a strong anima figure for Reed, who
is in love with her, as she is with him. The motif of invisibility appears in
many myths and fairy tales, including the more recent popular story of
Harry Potter with his cloak of invisibility. Often stories about invisibility
convey a temptation to use this power for ill purposes. Thus, despite the
transparent nature of the power, it comes with a great shadow quality.
Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, is Sue’s brother. He carries the puer
energy within the group. His superpower is the ability to become a human
flame, thus his element is fire. He is someone who cares deeply about the
other members of the Fantastic Four. Johnny being the youngest team
member is impulsive and often leaps into the fray before Reed can discern
the best strategy to defeat the antihero. Johnny’s power of becoming a
human torch reflects his volatile, sulfuric nature. He is constantly thinking
about girls, which is another reflection of his youthful, burning, passionate
nature. Given how strongly Johnny values his team members his dominant
function is feeling. His foil is Ben Grimm, who he constantly pushes until
Ben explodes in anger. Johnny’s inferior function is thinking for he is con-
stantly acting before thinking. Archetypally, Johnny is not only the puer,
but also a trickster. His use of fire as a special power represents intense
psychic energy, which he can direct for creative and destructive purposes.
Ben Grimm, The Thing, Reed’s old college roommate, is all muscle.
His superpower is tremendous strength, but with this power comes a
monstrous physical appearance. As such, Ben is unique for he is the only
member who lost his human form in the radiation accident. His very
appearance terrifies people, coupled with irritability, he is not a pleasant
person to be around. He resents Reed for turning him into a monster and
is jealous of Sue’s attraction to Reed. Yet, beneath Ben’s rough exterior
lies a man who has deep feelings for others. He is committed to using his
strength to help the weak. Ben’s dominant function is sensation for he is
the most down to earth member of the team and represents the element
of earth. He has a tough exterior, but a heart of gold and is willing to risk
his life for his friend’s. Ben’s power of extreme strength is a direct reflec-
tion of his pre-superhero self.
Just as early Greek science and alchemy believed that all things arise
from the combination of Earth, Water, Air and Fire, the combination of
the four superpowers of the Fantastic Four insure near invincibility against
the antiheros they constantly encounter. As a totality they form a
152 J. T. KIEHL

quintessence which transcends a simple sum of their individual powers,

indicating how the hero archetype unifies varied archetypes for as Jung
(1956/1990) states, “The hero symbolizes a man’s unconscious self, and
this manifests itself empirically as the sum total of all archetypes” (333).
As noted, a central motif in any comic book storyline is the antihero, or
archnemesis. Without an antihero there would be no dynamic tension
required to generate psychic energy. Jung (1997) states, “you have to
admit that the spirit of life will at times take on an aspect of evil. Life con-
sists of night and day, and the night is just as long as the day; so evil and
good are pairs of opposites without which there is no energy and no life”
(140). Thus, the antihero is necessary for life to be lived fully. Imagine a
superhero story without an evil nemesis! For the Fantastic Four, one of
their most persistent and challenging archenemies is Dr Victor von Doom,
a scientist gone mad. Doom is the shadow magician to Mr Fantastic. He
attended the same university as Reed and during this time von Doom car-
ried out a tragically flawed experiment leading to the disfigurement of his
face. Although the scar was minor, von Doom’s vanity drove him to
becoming power hungry. He blamed Reed for the accident which is the
source of his many attempts to destroy the Fantastic Four. As a symbol of
his loss of feeling for others, Doom creates a metallic suit covering his
body. His superpower is superior intelligence and vast wealth, which he
uses to invent machines of destruction. He is the archetype of the modern
technocrat gone mad. Doom’s character provides an example of how
archetypes can take over a person’s life for if one identifies too closely with
an archetype, they become possessed by it. The archetype literally seizes
them. Victor von Doom through vanity and hubris has fallen under the
archetype of power, which reflects Jung’s (1953/1977) statement that,
“Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power
is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other”
(53). Thus, Doom’s hateful actions towards the world, and especially the
Fantastic Four, are a direct manifestation of such possession, while the
opposite of this alienation and separation appears in the characteristic of
deep caring held by the Fantastic Four.
Before leaving the Fantastic Four, it is important to consider how cul-
tural complexes of the late 1950s and early ‘60s appeared in comic books.
Reed’s scientific knowhow and ability to extend himself beyond normal
bounds are emblematic of the United States’ focus on scientific excellence
and inventiveness at the height of the Cold War. Funding for scientific
research continued to grow over this time and employment in the sciences
 ARCHETYPAL DIMENSIONS OF COMIC BOOKS 153

and engineering boomed. The number of films and TV shows during this
period increased and science fiction was a very popular genre for these
media. Sue’s invisibility reflects the rise of the spy culture in both the
political sphere and the world of film and television. All of this was a direct
result of the perceived need to infiltrate and know what the ‘enemy’ was
thinking and doing. At this time, the CIA was carrying out remote view-
ing research again reflecting the cloak of invisibility in order to spy on the
Soviet Union. Johnny’s flammable powers capture the youthful mood of
the country in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. This was the time when rock
and roll was ‘born in the USA.’ A form of music rooted in the burning
passions of the hearts of young Americans. Ben’s power of overwhelming
strength clearly reflects the notion that America was the strongest, mighti-
est nation on Earth. The arms race of the late 1950s and ‘60s was a very
visible display of United States might. Thus, the Fantastic Four comics
contain many aspects ascendant in the culture of the United States in the
late 1950s and early ‘60s. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were keen representa-
tives of this culture. They both fought in World War II and participated in
the overcoming of collective evil. They both witnessed the transition from
the poverty of the Great Recession to a post war economic boom fueled
by scientific and technological innovation. Like most of this generation
they must have witnessed how science could be used to build the most
destructive weapon known to mankind. All these political and social forces
were at play in the culture of the times and hence in their psyches when
they created the Fantastic Four and other Marvel superhero stories.

Promethea
Promethea is a comic book series that appeared from 1999 to 2005. It was
written by Alan Moore, illustrated by J.H. Williams III, and inked by Mick
Gray and consists of thirty-two issues, which have been reissued as a three-­
volume set (Moore et al 2019–2020). Promethea has been heralded as one
of the most innovative, spiritual, and consciousness-shifting comics of all
times. Moore is known for his imaginative storytelling in the comic series,
including: Watchmen, V is for Vendetta, From Hell, and The League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen. Moore’s works are immersed in esoterica,
including the tarot, kabbala, and magic and gnosis (Kraemer and Winslade
2010; Hanegraaff 2016). The story of Promethea is a portal to directly
experience transcendence, which makes reading this comic series extremely
innovative. An essential aspect of Moore’s work is that he views the play of
154 J. T. KIEHL

the imagination as central to the transformation of consciousness, a belief

supported Jung (1971/1990) who states;

…we know that every good idea and all creative work are the offspring of
the imagination …every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is great-
est in his life to fantasy. The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a character-
istic also of the child…without this playing with fantasy no creative work has
ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incal-
culable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky
or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth. It must not be forgotten
that it is just in the imagination that a man’s highest value may lie. (63)

It is impossible to give a detailed description of the Promethea series for

it is an expansive, multi-layered tale. Each issue contains rich, colorful
complex images with equally detailed text. Suffice it to say that I had never
seen a comic book like Promethea before first encountering it. The full-­
page layouts of multidimensionality with poetic text were clearly created
to provide more than mere entertainment for the reader. When readers
immerse themselves in an issue of Promethea they enter the wild imagina-
tions of Moore and Williams and are on the road to a direct connection
with gnosis. Archetypally, Promethea is a story of the Kore, the maiden.
Jung (1959/1977) states, “The figure of the Kore … when observed in a
man [belongs] to the anima type; and when observed in a woman to the
type of supraordinate personality” (183). By supraordinate personality,
Jung means the Self, the archetype of wholeness. So, we must recognize
that in reading Promethea we are seeing both the animas of the male cre-
ators and the archetype of the feminine in various manifestations.
On the surface, the comic book is about a young college student,
Sophie Bangs, who is writing a term paper on a fictional character named
Promethea. Sophie’s research has uncovered a long history of Promethea
figures beginning with a little girl from 411 AD who lived in Egypt. The
girl’s father, a gnostic, sends his daughter into the desert to escape a mur-
derous group of Christian zealots. There she is met by the gods Thoth and
Hermes who take her to the realm of Immateria, a place where imagined
ideas are alive. Jung states that, “the Kore often appears in woman as an
unknown young girl,” and that, “the maiden’s helplessness exposes her to
all sorts of dangers” (184). The girl learns she can leave Immateria and
reenter the physical world if someone evokes Promethea’s image from the
physical, earthly world. The first manifestation of Promethea in this world
 ARCHETYPAL DIMENSIONS OF COMIC BOOKS 155

occurs in the eighteenth century when a writer imagines Promethea in a

work of poetry. Over the following two centuries Promethea appears in
the physical world in various forms through fiction being turned into real-
ity. According to Jung (1959/1977) for a woman there is:

… the feeling that her life is spread out over generations—the first step
towards the immediate experience and conviction of being outside time,
which brings with it a feeling of immortality. The individual’s life is elevated
into a type, indeed it becomes the archetype of woman’s fate in general. This
leads to a restoration or apocatastasis of the lives of her ancestors, who now,
through the bridge of the momentary individual, pass down into the gen-
erations of the future. An experience of this kind gives the individual a place
and a meaning in the life of the generations, so that all unnecessary obstacles
are cleared out of the way of the life-stream that is to flow through her. At
the same time the individual is rescued from her isolation and restored to
wholeness. All ritual preoccupation with archetypes ultimately has this aim
and this result. (188)

On the personal level, Promethea is the story of a young woman living

in New York City with her emotionally damaged mother, while attending
college. We get the sense that although Sophie has relationships, some-
thing is missing in her life. Like so many people she is living a provisional
life, a life with little meaning. Such a life finds one doing what is expected
by family, peers, and culture; living according to what others say. Sophie is
sufficiently awake to realize there must be something more to life than
doing what is expected of her by others. Her work on the term paper
sparks something within, which is apparent from the passion with which
she pursues the involved story of Promethea. The term paper has seized
her in ways she cannot understand, she intuitively knows she must find out
who Promethea really is. From a Jungian perspective Sophie Bangs is
being called (vocatus) from a deeper place within her psyche to find out
more about the archetype, the Kore or Promethea. Ultimately, a call like
this originates with the archetype of wholeness, the Self, and those who
hear such a call are well advised to heed it.
On the archetypal level, Sophie’s journey places her in touch with the
Immateria realm in which imagination rules supreme. Psychologically,
this is the realm of the collective unconscious where image and metaphor
predominate. It is in this realm where space and time can exist and not
exist, where one can transcend the spatial and temporal dimensions of
materiality. The drawings of J.H. Williams III magically capture this realm
156 J. T. KIEHL

in astounding ways. Clearly, Williams was accessing the depths of his own
psyche when creating such vivid imagery for the series.
On yet another level, the action taking place in Promethea explores the
intersection of the material world and that of the Immateria. Jung called
the intersect where psyche and matter meet psychoidal, where synchronici-
ties occur. Interestingly, the way Sophie transmutes to embody Promethea
is through the composition of poetry, which contains image and meta-
phor. What better way to enter a state of reverie opening the door to the
Immateria? As the reader works through the whole series, one realizes
Moore’s message is that, in our own way, anyone of us can connect to this
imagistic realm.
Another important theme of the story are the varied forms of evil. As
noted, the story begins with Promethea’s father being killed by Christian
zealots. Interestingly, the father is using a mind manipulation technique (a
la Obi-Wan Kenobi) to focus the anger of the crowd on himself leading to
his death, thus giving his daughter time to flee into the desert and to
safety. In the present time of 1999, we learn that someone has hired hit-
men from the Immateria to kill Sophie before she can transform into a
new embodied Promethea. The people who hired the hitmen are religious
fundamentalists and direct descendants of the fifth century zealots. They
fear the appearance of a new Promethea and want to protect their children
from her pagan ways. Here Moore cleverly uses the storyline to explore
the dark, paranoic side of fundamentalism and its fear of the feminine.
There are other shadow elements to the story involving a government
agent trying to capture Promethea and incarcerate her for scientific study,
again rooted in the fear of the power of the feminine. What Moore makes
clear in the story and in interviews is how we need to acknowledge the
existence of darkness and realize it too is a part of the imaginal realm.
Psychologically, this refers to how the collective unconscious holds both
light and darkness, good and evil, which are archetypal forces that appear
personally and collectively. If we create a system that one-sidedly believes
it is pure goodness, then evil falls into the unconscious leading to isola-
tion, paranoia, and destructiveness. Moore and Jung agree that we must
consciously recognize the reality of both good and evil. This does not
mean we act out evil; indeed, it minimizes the potential for us doing evil if
we are in conscious relationship with it. The comic book provides an
excellent example of how to work with these forces. In Promethea, it is
through engaging with the Immateria; from a Jungian perspective, it is
using active imagination to work with unconscious forces.
 ARCHETYPAL DIMENSIONS OF COMIC BOOKS 157

One of the most meaningful dimensions of Sophie’s journey is her

experience with the Kabbala Tree of Life, in which she and a previous
incarnation of Promethea travel along twenty-three paths through the ten
sephiroth. Moore provides the reader with an experience of what it is like
to work with the Tree and how each sephiroth provides an opportunity for
conscious transformation. William’s imagery is equally evocative. Theirs is
not an intellectual teaching on the Kabbala, but a deep experiential immer-
sion into the energies present in this esoteric path. By the time we enter
this journey with Sophie we realize that we have left the traditional genre
of comics behind and have entered a whole new way of reading Moore’s
phantasmagoria. Jung was very knowledgeable about the Kabbala. He
viewed it, with other esoteric ways, as a symbolic representation of our
psychological development to wholeness, for it asks us to go inward to
discover and work with archetypal energies present in the collective
unconscious.
Unlike most comic book series which are never ending, Promethea
actually comes to an end for there is a telos built into the story line from
the beginning. We learn from a previous incarnation of Promethea that
Sophie as the new Promethea is to bring about ‘the end of the world.’
Sophie is shocked by this message, but by the end of the series she realizes
what is meant by this, for the ‘end of the world’ is not a physical, apoca-
lyptic destruction of Earth, but a radical shift in consciousness for all
humanity. It is the pronouncement that anyone of us can access the realm
of imagination and see the sacred, numinosity of the everyday world. We
need no intermediaries to open us to this realization. It is a global gnosis
and each one of us has this ability to see the world as it truly is. There is
no need for a special superhero to free us from our ignorance of the world.
Again, unlike traditional comic series, we transcend the need for a unique,
exterior savior. Psychologically, this demonstrates the individuation pro-
cess par excellence.

Conclusion
This exploration of comics from the Silver Age to the present reveals two
ways of looking at the polarity of good and evil; both views are present in
the current “Spirit of the Times” (Jung 2009). One way, that of The Silver
Age of comics reinforces a national myth of ‘Truth, Justice & the American
Way,’ in which America is a nation of good, while other nations form an
axis of evil, a way resulting in collective splitting and projection. The
158 J. T. KIEHL

Fantastic Four’s powers arose from the space race, and they chose to use
their superpowers to battle evil, an evil initially in the comic series associ-
ated with communism. With the Promethea comic series a new way is
proposed with the message that good cannot exist without evil and, even
more radical, that evil originates from the same psychic realm as good, i.e.
the Immateria. Promethea’s cosmology implicitly holds opposites. Early in
the series, Sophie lives in the split, dualistic view of the American mythos,
but after her Promethea initiation she opens herself to a cosmology tran-
scending dualism. From a Jungian perspective, Sophie’s individuation
process leads her to the experience of the archetype of wholeness. She
realizes her enemies are just as important to her telos as are her friends,
perhaps best exemplified in the mercurial figure of Jack Faust, a sleezy
looking magician who engages in ‘sex magic’ with Sophie so that they
both may reach a new level of conscious realization. Faust is both light and
dark and Sophie intuitively knows this. With Promethea we leave behind a
naïve, exclusionary view of evil in the world and move into the realization
of how good and evil coexist as an unbroken polarity.
Promethea’s mission to bring about the ‘end of the world’ opens peo-
ple’s consciousness to a comprehensive, inclusionary cosmology of trans-
formation which is mirrored in Jung’s essay Answer to Job. For Jung, one
of our greatest challenges is to realize that God is both good and evil,
which psychologically means that the archetype of wholeness holds both
good and evil in us. Perhaps this is why the Fantastic Four series can never
end for it cannot hold the opposites but must split and project evil onto an
outer antihero. By projecting the evil onto a separate entity, it relieves us
of the responsibility of dealing with true evil. It is a pharmakon applied
outwardly that cannot heal our inner split. It entertains us and creates the
fantasy that evil can be destroyed by someone else, the superhero, the
savior, but not by us. However, we can never destroy this outer evil and so
we need one more Marvel comic story to assuage our inability to inwardly
awaken to wholeness. We prefer entertainment as opposed to transforma-
tion for the inner work is just too difficult. Moore’s Promethea series pro-
vides a more psychologically mature answer to this dilemma. We can dive
deep and journey with the eternal feminine form of Promethea and learn
how to integrate this primal polarity, and thus reach a gnosis of supraordi-
nate transformation. Such is the archetypal power of comic books.
 ARCHETYPAL DIMENSIONS OF COMIC BOOKS 159

References
Dauber, Jeremy. 2022. American Comics: A History. New York: W.W. Norton
& Company.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J. 2016. Alan Moore’s Promethea: Countercultural Gnosis
and the End of the World. Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies 1: 234–258.
Howe, Sean. 2012. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. New York: Harper Perennial.
Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center. 2012. Jack Kirby Interview: 1990.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCoA1yoxino.
Jung, C.G. 1950/1989. The Symbolic Life, Vol. 18. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
———. 1953/1977. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Vol. 7. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
———. 1954/1977. The Practice of Psychotherapy, Vol. 16. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
———. 1956/1990. Symbols of Transformation, Vol. 5. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
———. 1958/1989. Psychology and Religion: West and East, Vol. 11. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
———. 1959/1977. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Vol. 9i.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 1971/1990. Psychological Types, Vol. 6. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
———. 1997. In Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934, ed. Claire
Douglas. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 2009. The Red Book: Liber Novus. New York: Norton.
Kaufman, Walter (trans.). 1963. Goethe’s Faust. New York: Anchor Books.
Kirby Continuum. 2016. Jack Kirby: Story Teller. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=XoXeiEXJrgc.
Kraemer, Christine Hoff, and J. Lawton Winslade. 2010. “The Magic Circus of
the Mind”: Alan Moore’s Promethea and the Transformation of Consciousness
through Comics. In Graven Images: Religion in Comics and Graphic Novels, ed.
A. David Lewis and Christine Hoff Kraemer, 274–291. New York: Continuum.
Kripal, Jeffrey J. 2011. Mutants & Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and
the Paranormal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Moore, Robert L., and Douglas Gillette. 1990. King, Warrior, Magician, Lover:
Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. New York: Harper Collins.
Moore, Alan, J.H. Williams III, and Mick Gray. 2019. Promethea: Books 1-3, 20th
Anniversary Deluxe Edition. Burbank: DC Comics.
Peppard, Anna F. 2017. Reading the Superhuman, Embodiments of Multiplicity in
Marvel Comics. University of Toronto Doctoral Dissertation.
Thomas, Roy. 2020. The Marvel Age of Comics 1961-1978. Cologne: Taschen.
Wolk, Douglas. 2021. All of the Marvels. New York: Penguin Press.
 All-Female Teams: In Quest of the Missing
Archetype

Jennifer Maile Kaku

Abstract Tales of men setting off on quests, fighting battles, accomplish-

ing great deeds together, have been part of the narrative landscape for
thousands of years. Conversely, nothing comparable has existed for the
opposite sex. The aim of the present inquiry is to set out in quest of the
missing archetype. I begin by investigating the reasons behind this extraor-
dinary dichotomy: If men have their celebrated Brotherhood archetype,
why do women lack an analogous Sisterhood archetype? Stories of coop-
eration or even of friendship between women are rare, and the few that do
exist depict such alliances as diabolical and destructive. The archetypal
image of women teaming up resembles what I call “Furyhood,” based on
the mythical Furies of ancient Greece, rather than Sisterhood. The Furies,
Maenads and Amazons of ancient myth resurface in the guise of male-­
bashing superheroine teams and female-ruled planets in the narratives of
modern-day comics. Surprising as it may seem, stories of female bonding
and collaboration are a very recent innovation in the history of comics and

J. M. Kaku (*)
Mythological Studies, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 161

Switzerland AG 2023
D. M. Odorisio (ed.), A New Gnosis, Contemporary Religion and
Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1_8
162 J. M. KAKU

indeed in the Western narrative tradition as a whole. The rising trend in

all-female superhero teams represents a paradigm shift that may finally be
sowing the seeds of sisterhood in the pop-culture genre of the twenty-first
century.

Keywords Archetype • Women • Gender • Comic books • Furyhood

The commitment of women to women is represented

as intolerable to men; that it might be represented
as succeeding—even in myth—is therefore impermissible.
—Christine Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love

The world of comics abounds in futuristic environments, ultra-high-­

tech paraphernalia, heroes with sophisticated superpowers, but in spite of
such visionary settings, props and characters, the underlying and some-
times not-so-subtle subtext can be dismally retrograde. This is especially
true with regard to the depictions of women and female characters, which,
as has been abundantly demonstrated, have almost always tended to be
disappointingly conventional if not downright sexist. There is, however, a
recent phenomenon that may be blasting the world of comics into the ter-
restrial twenty-first century: the rising trend in all-female superhero teams.
Surprising as it may seem, such stories of female bonding and collabora-
tion are a very recent innovation in the history of comics and indeed in the
Western narrative tradition as a whole.
Glorious tales of men setting off on quests, fighting battles or accom-
plishing great deeds together have always stirred the imagination. In Our
Gods Wear Spandex, Christopher Knowles (2007) links the popular super-
hero teams in the comic books of today to famous “brotherhoods” that
date back to the myths of Antiquity: “The Brotherhood archetype has its
roots in ancient mythology, most notably the pagan pantheons of Egypt,
Greece, and Rome. In addition, Jason had his Argonauts; Buddha had his
twelve disciples; Christ had his twelve apostles; King Arthur had his
Knights of the Round Table” (170). All-male teams have, in other words,
been part of the narrative landscape for thousands of years. And thus, for
just as many years, they have inspired not only comic-book characters but
real boys and men as positive models of comradeship, of pulling together
for the common good, of valiance or beneficence or just plain old
 ALL-FEMALE TEAMS: IN QUEST OF THE MISSING ARCHETYPE 163

adventure among brothers-in-arms. Conversely, for thousands of years,

nothing comparable existed for the opposite sex. No models of valiant,
beneficent or adventurous female comradeship are provided by the tradi-
tion. No ancient mythological archetype for women and girls shines forth
in the narrative landscape of the Western world.
The aim of the present inquiry is to set out in quest of the missing
archetype. I begin by investigating the reasons behind this extraordinary
dichotomy: If men have their celebrated Brotherhood archetype, why do
women lack an analogous Sisterhood archetype? Stories of cooperation or
even of friendship between women are rare, and the few that do exist
depict such alliances as diabolical and destructive. In other words, the
archetypal image of women teaming up is one of “Furyhood” rather than
of Sisterhood. The brothers-in-arms motif sanctifies male bonding from
the myths of Antiquity to modern-day comics. How is female bonding
portrayed in the classical myths that have irrigated and shaped the Western
imagination? How do those mythological images persist in contemporary
comics and how, after two thousand years, are they evolving? The land-
scape seems to be changing. The development of all-female superhero
teams may finally be sowing the seeds of sisterhood in the pop-culture
genre of the twenty-first century.
Astonishingly, the missing archetype went unnoticed for thousands of
years. Virginia Woolf ([1929]1957) may have been the first to report on
it at a lecture in 1928. Observing that female characters in literature do
not generally like each other, she remarks, “I tried to remember any case
in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends….
But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men”
(86). Woolf imagines a hypothetical female novelist who might, in daring
to write about a friendship between two working women, “light a torch in
that vast chamber where nobody has yet been” (88). In other words, less
than a century ago, the subject of female bonding and collaboration was
as yet an unexplored frontier. Woolf attributes its absence to the fact that
“until Jane Austen’s day,” women were portrayed in writing exclusively by
men (86).
Woolf provides us with a first clue to the enigma of the missing arche-
type. If, in contrast to the abundance of strong, heroic male partnerships
celebrated by bards and writers throughout history, there is an extraordi-
nary paucity of analogous partnerships when it comes to women, one of
the reasons can be ascribed to the sex of the poet. The bards and writers
throughout history have been men: men lauding the powers of men, and
164 J. M. KAKU

men imagining—or failing to imagine—the powers of women. For over

three millennia,1 women had no voice, no models, no archetypes of their
own. They were instead, as Jeffrey Kripal (2011) puts it, “being written,
and zapped and screwed with” (224). Although Kripal, in Mutants and
Mystics, is speaking about paranormal experiences, his image of being
“written” by alien forces endowed with special powers that entangle us
without our consent “in a story (or stories) that we did not write and that
we may not even like” (51) quite aptly describes the situation of women
in a society in which, through the “special power” of writing, the produc-
tion of narratives is monopolized by men. The one-sidedness of the arche-
typal dichotomy is thus the result of a Cyclopean perspective in which the
hegemonic texts and images that have shaped the Western landscape have
been articulated from an exclusively masculine point of view.
A classic example of what men opine about female relationships can be
found in a letter addressed to a young bride by Jonathan Swift. In the
eighteenth century, when women were beginning to form social circles
and ladies’ clubs of their own, Swift—who, like many men, did not look
favorably upon this development—was of a mind to write, “To speak the
truth, I never yet knew a tolerable woman to be fond of her own sex….
But a knot of ladies, got together by themselves, is a very school of imper-
tinence and detraction, and it is well if those be the worst” (1803, 86).
Admonishing the young lady to avoid the company of other women since
they will only lead her astray, he concludes: “[T]he grand affair of your life
will be to gain and preserve the friendship and esteem of your husband”
(87). Here, the author of Gulliver’s Travels quite neatly sums up the three
main reasons why women have been kept from bonding under the pen of
male writers for thousands of years: Women don’t team up (because a
woman only teams up with her man); women can’t team up (because they
instinctively abhor each other); however, if women do team up… beware!
The first two reasons simply exclude the possibility of intragender
friendships or cooperation between women. Women’s roles in stories tend
to orbit primarily around men—as mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, lov-
ers, whores, etc. If another woman (not of the same family) enters into the
picture, she is typically set up as a rival. More often than not, the two
female characters compete for the favors of a man and, more often than

1
The earliest writings of the Hebrew Bible are thought to date from the fifteenth century
BCE. The only depiction of female friendship is the story of Ruth and Naomi (Yalom
2015, 17).
 ALL-FEMALE TEAMS: IN QUEST OF THE MISSING ARCHETYPE 165

not, as Woolf observed, they dislike each other. As a result, even a tale of
two women ends up being triangular and androcentric: a man inevitably
comes between them and ultimately keeps them apart.
The image of women as being incapable of forging strong and lasting
ties has a long history. In The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship,
Marilyn Yalom (2015) explains that in ancient Greece, “Male authors
extolled friendship as a male enterprise, necessary not only for personal
happiness but also for civic and military solidarity” (3). Women, however,
were considered “constitutionally unsuited for friendship at the highest
level” (3). This stereotype continues to plague us today even though
women as well as men know by experience that this is simply untrue. In
Girl Squads, published in 2018, Sam Maggs describes a feeling that is
commonly evoked in discussions and articles about the portrayal of women
in popular culture.

Female friendship is a thing. So why does TV portray women as catty, com-

petitive, and constantly looking for opportunities to undercut each other? …
And why doesn’t the world recognize the amazing power that comes when
girls and women team up, bond, and respect one another?
For starters, until very recently, it was the men doing all the writing—
men who either didn’t think women’s stories mattered or, worse, were
invested in keeping women in their ‘place,’ which meant ‘apart from one
another.’ (11)

Traditionally, women have been portrayed in relationships that are

obsessively heterosexual (turned toward men) and divisively heterosocial
(turned away from women). These two age-old scripts depicting them as
primarily devoted to (even when conspiring against) the opposite sex, and,
by the same token, as indifferent or inimical to their own sex convey the
message that cooperation between women is inconceivable. Women, it
implies, are “constitutionally” incapable of what men call “brotherhood.”
There is a third script to which Maggs and Swift both allude, albeit
from antithetical points of view. This third narrative in fact provides the
one archetypal image of all-female bonding that stands out in the Western
narrative landscape. It is not, however, the all-male model of courageous
questing or pulling together for the common good. On the contrary,
rather than constructive and beneficent, the all-female alliance is portrayed
as diabolical and destructive, as sowing chaos and disorder. It is animated
not by the heroic desire to combat evil or achieve great deeds, but by the
166 J. M. KAKU

wild and uncontrollable emotions of anger and vengeance. Above all, it is

perceived as threatening to men. When women join forces, their collabo-
ration is fantasized as dangerous to the reigning order, which, in most
cases, is unabashedly masculine. Rather than Sisterhood, we might call this
the “Furyhood” archetype.
Among the all-female alliances found in classical mythology, the most
notorious are: (1) the Erinyes, known as the Furies; (2) the Greek Maenads
or Roman Bacchantes; (3) the Sirens; (4) the Amazons. The Furies are a
sinister team of avenging goddesses who defend the rights of mothers.
They appear in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, written in 458 BCE, like figures out
of a chthonic horror story. Dark, bloody, fetid-smelling creatures, they
pursue Apollo’s protégé, Orestes, to avenge his matricide. “In the primi-
tive portrayal of the Furies,” observes Froma Zeitlin (1996), “there is a
regression to the deepest fantasies of buried masculine terrors” (97). The
Furies oppose the young male god, Apollo, who champions the masculine
interests of his father Zeus. The “Angry Ones,” as they are also known, are
presented as embodying the last vestiges of a matriarchal past that is fanta-
sized as brutal and chaotic in contrast to the civilized patriarchal order
represented by Zeus, and his offspring, Apollo and Athena.
 ALL-FEMALE TEAMS: IN QUEST OF THE MISSING ARCHETYPE 167

Orestes Pursued by the Furies. John Singer Sargent. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
(Wikimedia Commons)

The Maenads are not technically an all-female team since their “team
leader” is a male deity.2 The mythical image of the Maenads is nevertheless

2
For all his phallic maleness, however, Dionysus—who was raised as a girl and was known
to “cross-dress”—had an androgynous aspect to him. Downing (2006) suggests that
Dionysus’ worship “invited [women] (at least temporarily) to throw off the bonds imposed
by patriarchy and discover their own power…” (163).
168 J. M. KAKU

one of an all-female band travelling together without the presence of any

man, and indeed opposing any masculine intrusion into their midst.3
Leaving their husbands and homes, the Maenads rove the countryside in
inebriated bands, dancing wildly, and occasionally ripping animals to
pieces. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid (2000) describes them as “fierce” and
“frenzied,” fueled by rage and wearing animal skins. They pursue and
attack Orpheus, “Apollo’s poet,” drowning out his beautiful music with
their “breast-beating and howls” to finally tear him limb from limb with
their bloody hands (11.1-66). Here, the civilized male, representing the
Apollonian virtues of order and harmony, is overpowered by the violence
of a bestial mob of women.

3
Speaking of the Dionysian ritual of female initiation, Downing suggests, in agreement
with Nor Hall, that the god represents “not husbands or male lovers but the woman’s own
inspiration, energy, capacity for a nonprocreative generativity…” (194).
 ALL-FEMALE TEAMS: IN QUEST OF THE MISSING ARCHETYPE 169

The Death of Orpheus. Émile Bin. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Sirens are female creatures with the upper body of a woman and
the wings and feet of a bird. The superpowers of this diabolical choir of
female mutants lie in their voices. They swoop in and lure men to their
death with the power and beauty of their songs. In the Odyssey, Circe
describes them as living on an island surrounded by a “large heap of bones
170 J. M. KAKU

/ Of men rotting” (Homer 1993, 12:44-46). On her advice, Odysseus

famously has his crew lash him to the mast of the ship so that he can safely
hear their singing. In this case, it is not the women who are dangerously
out of control, but the men who are in danger of losing control.
As a remarkable society of women warriors united by an ethos of sister-
hood (Downing 2006, 192), the Amazons come closest to what might be
considered an illustrious all-female team—perhaps the only one in three
thousand years of narrative history. They indeed have all the makings of a
superhero team—except for one thing: they are all women. It is this aspect
of their reputation that makes them problematic since “all-female” is inev-
itably interpreted as “anti-male.” Regardless of their extraordinary accom-
plishments, their excellence in warfare, their skilled horsemanship, their
ideal of sisterhood, the Amazons’ raison d’être is simply reduced to a
hatred of men. According to Downing (2006), “The Greeks imagined the
Amazons as a society composed entirely of women who threaten men and
engage in war against them” (190).
Known as androktones, “man-killers,” in ancient Greece (Mayor 2014,
25), the Amazons were not portrayed as fabulous superheroes to be cele-
brated and esteemed but as powerful villainesses to be vanquished and
destroyed. Defeating an Amazon was in fact a symbol of male superiority.
The stories of heroes such as Herakles, Bellerophon, Theseus and Achilles
conquering an Amazon were among the most popular “illustrated” sub-
jects of the day in Greek art (Cartwright 2019)—the renowned potteries
serving perhaps as the “superhero comic strips” of the ancient world.
According to Downing, these stories are about “heroes seducing
[Amazons], abducting them, raping them, stealing the belt that represents
their virginity, their independence of men. To master them sexually is an
essential part of challenging what is deemed their monstrous claim to live
as self-sufficient women” (191). Regarded as wild barbarians (that is, for-
eigners) inhabiting the outskirts of the civilized world, the Amazons were
mythologized as a threat to masculine hegemony and feared above all for
their alternative and radical ideal of sisterhood. Winning the war against
the androktones was a way of consolidating the patriarchy (Downing 190).
The Furies, the Maenads, the Sirens, the Amazons are sisterhoods, but
sisterhoods interpreted with a sinister twist that turns them into Furyhoods.
These mythical all-female teams of Antiquity have one thing in common:
they are terrifying to men. They are portrayed as threatening in one way
or another to masculine control or to male dominance. When women
team up, they gang up—that is, they become Furies—and they do so
 ALL-FEMALE TEAMS: IN QUEST OF THE MISSING ARCHETYPE 171

expressly against men.4 This too distinguishes all-male from all-female alli-
ances: while brotherhoods (those, for example, cited by Knowles) are not
imagined as necessarily misogynist (even though they may very well be),
their all-female counterparts are always imagined as misandrist, as if the
only reason women collaborate is to conspire against men. One senses an
underlying fear that women want revenge, that they want, like the “Angry
Ones,” to reclaim a more archaic power that is fantasized (from the male
perspective) as savage and matriarchal in opposition to a more civilized
patriarchal order. There is a corresponding sense of male vulnerability, a
suspicion that when women join forces, they can overpower men. As in
Aeschylus’ Eumenides, these narratives reflect an anxiety about the return
of the repressed. And the Furies would indeed return, over two millennia
later, in the guise of man-hating superheroines.
Let us now fast-forward from Antiquity to the twentieth century, from
ancient mythology to the invention of the comic book. It may come as a
surprise to find that, in over two thousand years, there has been no signifi-
cant change in the basic narrative: the landscape has remained as inhospi-
table as ever to female bonding and collaboration. Jonathan Swift, we will
recall, wrote his “Letter to a Very Young Lady” in the eighteenth century.
In 1928, the hypothetical novelist whom Woolf imagines might begin to
explore the unexplored terrain of female friendship was still just that:
hypothetical. Emerging during the first half of the century, the world of
comics can in fact be viewed as a microcosm of the entire Western tradi-
tion. It condenses thousands of years of heroic all-male teams and inexis-
tent or negative all-female teams into its eighty years of history and
introduces a Sisterhood concept into the landscape only at the tail end of
that history. It reproduces the same Cyclopean perspective, the same
obsessively heterosexual and divisively heterosocial scripts, the same mas-
culine fears and fantasies about Furyhood and female collaboration. In
other words, in the world of comics, women were still being “written,
zapped and screwed.”
During the Golden and Silver Ages, female figures in comics continued
to be confined to the two age-old “anti-collaborative” scripts. The token
woman was usually a romantic interest for the male hero or, if two women
were featured, they were inevitably rivals vying with each over their lovers

4
Other ancient stories about “groups of women acting together against male domination”
are the myths of the Danaïdes and the Lemnian women (Downing 2006, 188); we might
include those of Actaeon, Diana and the nymphs, Lysistrata, and the Gorgons.
172 J. M. KAKU

and/or their looks. One prominent example is the rivalry between Lois
Lane and Lana Lang for Superman’s affections in the DC series Superman's
Girl Friend, Lois Lane (Coleman 1959). The two women are working
journalists who even gain a few superpowers of their own, but in spite of
these twentieth-century advances nothing else has changed: although they
are supposed to be friends, they are (naturally) jealous of each other and
(naturally) driven to compete for the favors of a man. It is the same old
story of two women being kept apart by a man and thus “constitutionally”
incapable of true friendship. The only difference is that the man is now a
Superman.
As real women began to join forces in the women’s liberation move-
ment of the 1960s, some of the first stories featuring all-female superhero
teams would be written as parodies of feminism. In doing so, their alarm-
ing depictions of “liberated” women would beam the Fury archetype up
into the Space Age. Published in 1964, “The Revolt of the Girl
Legionnaires!” (Adventure Comics #326) has been described as a reaction
to Betty Friedan’s 1963 bestseller The Feminine Mystique.5 In the highly-­
advanced thirtieth century, the female members of the Legion of Super-­
Heroes team up to eliminate the male legionnaires with the cry, “Down
with boy super-heroes! Here’s to the Legion of Super-Heroines!!” (3).
Looking much like enraged Furies in Legion costumes, we see them mali-
ciously bashing statuettes of the male heroes they will later seduce and
destroy. After carrying out what the episode calls “the most treacherous
conspiracy in all legion history” (3), the girls are shown dancing ecstati-
cally—much like their Maenad sisters did 3,500 years earlier—in “a scene
of wild jubilation” (5). The revolt is then revealed to be the result of an
“evil command” (16) by the Queen of “Femnaz,” a matriarchal planet of
man-loathing Amazons, who had hypnotized the girls into destroying the
boys in order to take over the Legion for themselves. But after her planet’s
broken moon is repaired by a pair of superheroes, the Queen repents: “I
realize that we Amazons were wrong in trying to harm Boy Legionnaires.

5
See, for example, Wilson’s blog on this episode (2018): “Around this time in popular
entertainment, the battle of the sexes was fair game for a good story. Betty Friedan had just
published The Feminine Mystique, Gloria Steinham had just donned bunny ears to do an
expose of the Playboy Club, and second wave feminism had been born.” And this comment
from Siskoid (2018): “I think this story was a reaction on Jerry Siegel’s and editor Mort
Weisinger’s parts to the publication of Betty Friedan’s 1963 best-selling book “The Feminine
Mystique”, which questioned the vapidity of traditional roles for women in postwar American
society.”
 ALL-FEMALE TEAMS: IN QUEST OF THE MISSING ARCHETYPE 173

If not for male super-heroes our world would have suffered a terrible
disaster” (7). The futuristic female alliances depicted in “The Revolt of the
Girl Legionnaires!” are shown to be the cause of chaos in the cosmos;
whether among good-girl superheroines or galactic Amazons, feminine
collaboration is branded as being both diabolical and delusional. In the
end, the women regret their misandrous deeds and welcome the men back
with open arms. The all-female threat is thus eliminated and order is
restored.
The feminist revolt in the real world of the twentieth century, however,
continued to grow. In 1968, DC’s Adventure Comics #368 came out with
a blatantly similar story. In “The Mutiny of the Super-Heroines!” the
female Legionnaires, bewitched by a man-hating ambassador from another
matriarchal planet, team up once again to conspire against the males and
turn Earth into a female-dominated planet. They are eventually liberated
from their illusion of perpetrating “a world revolution of women” (Shooter
1968, 30), but this time the consequences for the original misandrists are
much harsher: the “she-devil” ambassador is killed and the matriarchy on
her planet is overthrown.
The third example of Furyhood in the world of comics is emblematic
because it indicates a turning point, a long-awaited change in the narrative
landscape. Called the Lady Liberators, this all-female team invented in
1970 as yet another mock “women’s libber” alliance would morph into a
proto-feminist super-squad in 2008. In other words, from one millennium
to the next, the team would undergo a metamorphosis from Furyhood to
the beginnings of Sisterhood. In the ‘70s version of the Lady Liberators, we
find the familiar storyline: a group of superheroines joins forces to plot the
ruin of their male colleagues (Avengers #83). Taking up the war cry “Up
against the wall, male chauvinist pigs!” (Thomas 1970, 17), they decide to
take revenge for the unequal treatment they feel they have received. As it
turns out (once again), they are being mind-controlled by a maleficent,
man-hating Enchantress. In the end, the Lady Liberators are liberated from
the evil spell, the Enchantress is destroyed, and order is duly restored.
In these three examples of all-female teams, the ancient Fury archetype,
which associates female alliances with anger and vengeance, chaos and
destruction, with a desire to gang up on men and overthrow the patriar-
chal order, resurfaces in the guise of rebellious superheroine androktones.
Women joining together in the form of twentieth-century feminism is
interpreted in popular comics as Furyhood rather than Sisterhood. Such
narratives clearly served a cathartic purpose. The group of mutinous
174 J. M. KAKU

females is shown in each case to be under a sinister spell. Once they are
freed from their collective illusion and “brought back to their senses,” the
status quo—to the great relief of all—is reestablished.
The original Lady Liberators appeared in a single issue in 1970 and
were subsequently retired from service. Thirty-eight years later, in 2008,
Marvel Comics decided to revive and revamp the team. In the new itera-
tion, some of Marvel’s most powerful superheroines join forces with She-­
Hulk to combat and temporarily defeat an outrageously chauvinist Red
Hulk in Hulk #7-9 (Loeb 2008a, b, c). In spite of the consciously anti-
sexist storyline, however, the females still exemplify the Fury archetype for
two reasons: (1) they rally together in order to gang up on a man; (2) they
are motivated by anti-male ire and revenge. And yet there is a major shift
in perspective with regard to the representation of good and evil, of hero
and villain. For thousands of years, as we have seen, female collaboration
has been portrayed as misandrous, as diabolical and detrimental to the
reigning masculine order. With the new Lady Liberators, however, the
poles are dramatically inverted: it is a misogynist male who is the diabolical
villain and an all-female alliance that is commended for its deeds. In other
words, the response constructed by the narrative is—for the first time ever
perhaps—to root for the Furies.
 ALL-FEMALE TEAMS: IN QUEST OF THE MISSING ARCHETYPE 175

Lady Liberators. Avengers (1963) #83, Marvel Comics. (Used with Permission)
176 J. M. KAKU

Lady Liberators. Hulk (2008) #9, Marvel Comics. (Used with Permission)
 ALL-FEMALE TEAMS: IN QUEST OF THE MISSING ARCHETYPE 177

The evolution of Marvel’s Lady Liberators between 1970 and 2008 is

significant because it illustrates a paradigm shift in the characterization of
all-female teams. While their one raison d’être is still limited to thrashing
the other sex, they are no longer depicted as mind-controlled or “out of
control.” On the contrary, they are shown to be supremely in control and
conscious of their motivations. Revamped and rewritten for the twenty-­
first century, the Lady Liberators might, to a certain extent, be seen as
harbingers of a new era, as hovering on the cusp between traditional
Furyhood and ground-breaking Sisterhood.
All-female superhero teams were still relatively rare in 2008. Knowles
published his book on “The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes” in
2007. His chapter on superhero teams is called “The Brotherhood” and it
does not mention a single all-female team. And yet there were, quite sur-
prisingly, two very early exceptions to the rule: Wonder Woman’s team of
sorority students called the Holliday Girls and Pat Parker’s Girl
Commandos. Both of these intrepid all-female teams were created in the
year 1942, the former by William Marston and the latter by Barbara Hall.
They were radically ahead of their time, and although they did not survive
the Golden Age, they remain two of the best examples of sisterhood in
comics even today. Another pioneering example of superhero sisterhood
that did not make it into Knowles’ book was Birds of Prey, which became
a full-fledged team in 2003. As Mike Madrid (2016) observes in The
Supergirls: Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines,
“When writer Gail Simone took over Birds of Prey in 2003, she accom-
plished the seemingly impossible—she created an all-female superhero
team…. Working together these heroines helped each other to grow into
the women they were meant to be” (313-4).
In the last few years, along with the growing number of female writers
in the historically male-dominated world of comics, there has been a rising
trend in all-female superhero teams. As Maggs remarks, “Fortunately, the
tide is turning. Everyone is all about the girl squad. Which is awesome….
Believing in the strength of women and girls banding together is a shift in
consciousness” (11). One aspect that is underscored in female teams is a
sense of sisterhood based on mutual solidarity, mentorship and empower-
ment. According to Madrid, “Two common themes in comic books of the
twenty-first century are women helping each other to grow, and the pas-
sage of knowledge from one generation of females to another” (319).
Jennifer K. Stuller (2010) finds that Simone’s Birds of Prey “presents sis-
terhood without getting bogged down in rhetoric about sisterhood;” and
178 J. M. KAKU

even though Simone says she does not write specifically “female” charac-
ters, there is “an emphasis on deep and meaningful female friendships”
(147). As Stuller observes:

[S]uperwomen have also revolutionized depictions of collaboration in con-

temporary heroic narrative for women and for men.
Generally, teams of male heroes are brought together by chance (The
A-Team) or because of convenience (The Justice League of America). They
participate in missions together, simply because it's pragmatic to combine
their skills. But women's desire for companionship (as with Xena and
Gabrielle) and tendency to support and nourish the skills of those around
them (as with Buffy) has raised the status of cohorts, teammates, and
side-­kicks. (8)

Whereas male teams focus on pulling together to accomplish a deed,

female teams focus on pulling together to accomplish a deed. Moreover, as
Stuller suggests, burgeoning stories of Sisterhood may even be rewriting
the much more ancient concept of Brotherhood.
At one time or another, in one way or another, we may find ourselves
entangled, embroiled, entrapped in an alien story that, as Jeffrey Kripal
puts it, we did not write and we may not even like. There is, however, an
exit. The one way to stop being “written, zapped and screwed with” is to
rewrite the story. Kripal calls this act of self-liberation “authorization:”
“Authorization begins when we decide to step out of the script we now
know ourselves to be caught in and begin to write ourselves anew” (Ch.
6). It was indeed only when women at last began to write themselves that
they were able to begin (re)writing themselves. They were able to fill in
the blanks and, above all, to pen their own vision of themselves as women
from the previously missing perspective of women. At that point, the nar-
rative landscape began to change. “[T]owards the end of the eighteenth
century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history,” Woolf
remarks, “I should describe more fully and think of greater importance
than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman
began to write” (69). This change is being driven by women’s voices and
women’s writing. In the world of comics, female creators are on the rise
and female geeks are becoming more outspoken, demanding less sexism
and more sisterhood in the narratives. However, even now, two decades
into the twenty-first century, there is still a long way to go. Although some
of the stories may cater to feminist concerns, much of the art is still
 ALL-FEMALE TEAMS: IN QUEST OF THE MISSING ARCHETYPE 179

sexualized eye candy, as if the writing were aimed at women and the images
were aimed at men. Nevertheless, positive images of female bonding and
collaboration are being planted in the narrative landscape. After thousands
of years of absence, a Sisterhood archetype is perhaps taking root and
beginning to grow.

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 Infirm Relatives and Boy Kings: The Green
Man Archetype in Alan Moore’s The Saga
of The Swamp Thing

John Bucher

Abstract Traces of the archetypal Green Man date back to the second half
of the first century C.E. Despite his lingering presence, agreement on
details about who he was and what he represented remained largely elusive
when compared to other mythological figures. While it has been argued
that the Green Man reflects our oneness with the earth, the psychological
possibilities behind such a commonly reappearing archetype remain some-
what unexplored, especially as they intersect with modern visual culture.
In 1984, the Green Man made a triumphant return to the popular imagi-
nation in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. His 42-issue run of Swamp Thing
should be read as one of the most expansive explorations of the Green
Man archetype, though the mythological figure is never referenced
directly. Encompassing concepts ranging from the shadow and the ego to
animal symbolism and lunar motifs, Moore’s detailed textual approach

J. Bucher (*)
Joseph Campbell Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 181

Switzerland AG 2023
D. M. Odorisio (ed.), A New Gnosis, Contemporary Religion and
Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1_9
182 J. BUCHER

and direction of images combine to form a mythopoetic and psychological

observation of an archetype that has historically been often seen but rarely
understood. The intent here is to demonstrate connections beyond the
ecological and Dionysian, and instead embrace a lens that magnifies
wounding in the representation and narrative of the creature.

Keywords Alan Moore • Swamp Thing • Green Man • Ecology •

Wounding • Grail legend

Creators of fictional narratives have had varying degrees of limitation

placed on their endeavors. From the child that constructs a boundary-less
world from her own imagination in a sandbox, to a new writer on an
established and successful streaming television show on Netflix, the craft-
ing of story may require an army of editors, producers, and gatekeepers or
nary a soul beyond the creator. When Alan Moore was asked to begin tell-
ing the story of Swamp Thing, a few non-negotiable factors were in place.
The world and characters within the comic had long ago been established.
Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson had created and introduced the character
more than a decade before Moore’s involvement. First appearing in House
of Secrets #92, released in July of 1971, the tale of Swamp Thing was a
stand-alone horror story. From the beginning, the idea of an anthropo-
morphic pile of vegetation seemed an unlikely success at best. The pub-
lisher of House of Secrets, DC Comics, rarely invested resources in
intellectual property that did not rely on their familiar superhero staples
that had endured for decades, namely Batman, Superman, and Wonder
Woman. A horror story about a vegetable monster didn’t fit cleanly within
that pantheon.
Additionally, Swamp Thing’s origin story didn’t align well with what
had been largely sustainable for DC in the past. Marvel had built an empire
on human characters that would be endowed with superhuman abilities,
largely because of scientific mishaps – think Spider-Man, The Hulk, and
Iron Man. DC, in contrast, had built their stable with characters that were
born superhuman – think Superman and Wonder Woman. The exception,
of course, was Batman, who had no superhuman abilities either from birth
or that were endowed. Like with Marvel’s framework, Swamp Thing, in
his origin story from Wein and Wrightson, was a human transformed into
a monster. Moore, upon taking creative control of the character in 1984,
sought (and eventually received) permission to alter the character’s origin
 INFIRM RELATIVES AND BOY KINGS: THE GREEN MAN ARCHETYPE IN ALAN… 183

story, making him a true monster. Moore unburdened the serialized nar-
rative of the supporting characters and arc that had been established in the
comic’s reinvention and shifted the story in an entirely new thematic
direction. The direction that Moore forged for Swamp Thing aligned with
his own interests as an occultist, ceremonial magician, and anarchist
(MacDonald 2005, par. 8).
Martin Pasko, writer for the first nineteen issues of the 1984 run, had
written Swamp Thing with the background that Wein and Wrightson had
established, as a human being named Alec Holland that was transformed
into a “plant man.” Moore reimagined the character as an actual plant-­
based entity that had absorbed Holland’s consciousness upon Holland’s
death. Moore described Swamp Thing as “a plant that thought it was Alec
Holland, a plant that was trying its level best to be Alec Holland” (Moore
et al. 2012, 49). While the difference could seem arbitrary, the psychologi-
cal basis for the character changes significantly, which Moore has acknowl-
edged in interviews (Lee 2020, 4). Moore further suggested a shift in the
character’s psyche by writing in a temporary psychological break for
Swamp Thing, when the revelation of his true origin is divulged. It is
unclear if it was intentional on Moore’s part, but the shift also evolved
Swamp Thing into a true DC character, fully able to work within the realm
of the ancient magic that separated the scientific natural world from that
of the supernatural. This creative choice shifted Swamp Thing away from
his early Marvel-like underpinnings and allowed for an expansion of the
mythological framework of Swamp Thing’s world, evidenced with the
introduction of characters such as John Constantine, Cain, and Abel. The
latter two characters appear in the narrative as reincarnations of the duo
from Judeo-Christian mythology, caught in a never-ending loop of death
and rebirth.
Moore would later work almost entirely within the realm of his own
world-creating talents. It became undesirable and financially unnecessary
for him to breathe life into the characters and worlds crafted by other cre-
ators. This transition began during his run of Swamp Thing. Moore’s take
on the character eventually overshadowed that of the original creators and
narrative to the point where it is not uncommon in comics circles for fans
to need to be reminded that it was Wein and Wrightson that created the
character and world, not Moore. However, while Wein and Wrightson had
created a narrative container for the character of Swamp Thing, it was
Moore that housed the creature in an ancient universal container,
184 J. BUCHER

described by Carl Jung as an archetype (Jung 1977, 4-5). The archetype

that Moore employed is known as the Green Man.

The Green Man

On an archetypal level, the Green Man has been an artistic and iconic
representation in architecture, stained glass, sculpture, painting, mythol-
ogy, literature, and folklore, that often emerges in times of upheaval
(Araneo 2008, 43). The emergence of the archetype during seasons of
conflict is germane to Moore’s use in 1984, as the Cold War was at its
height and political disruption, as evidenced by events such as the assassi-
nation of Indira Gandhi, was causing significant threats of global cultural
turmoil. Primarily an artifact of Western civilization’s collective conscious-
ness, the Green Man’s surfacing that year came at a moment when Western
culture was journeying through self-reflection around George Orwell’s
dystopian novel, 1984, which had been written in 1949 but loomed large
as a potential warning of what the future could look like. Since 1984 – the
year, not the novel – had arrived, many were considering the ways that
Orwell had been prophetic as well as the ways he had been short sighted.
Had we become the society that Orwell had warned us about? Were we
moving towards or away from becoming that culture? Were we the “good
guys” or the “bad guys”?1 Everything seemed open to examination,
including ideas of masculinity and femininity. Scholars have suggested that
there is a historical correlation between the materialization of the Green
Man archetype and the reinforcement of Patriarchal norms, which will be
evidenced in Ronald Reagan’s 1984 presidential re-election campaign
later in this discussion (13).
Moving from the archetypal to the historical, the image of the Green
Man has usually been represented as a human-appearing male head either
with hair of vegetation or a leaf mask (Anderson and Hicks 1998, 34.)
While its origins may be much earlier, the image began appearing in
Roman art during the second half of the first century C.E. and rose to
popularity in the second century C.E. (Basford 2004, 9). The images
appear on temples dedicated to a variety of different deities and can also
be seen on Roman burial containers. Images that share similarities with

1
In 1984, use of the term “guys” indicated all gender expressions, including non-gen-
dered expressions of humanity. A more accurate articulation of the question would have
been, “are we good or bad people?”
 INFIRM RELATIVES AND BOY KINGS: THE GREEN MAN ARCHETYPE IN ALAN… 185

Green Man motifs are also seen in early Celtic art, which could explain the
Roman appearances, where the images may have been encountered in the
conquest of Gaul around 56 B.C.E. The Celtic motif, as well as the
Roman, if not derived from the Celts, shares similarities to descriptions
and depictions of the ancient Greek god of vegetation, Dionysus. The
Green Man also initially appears in Roman art in the context of the
Dionysian mysteries, further suggesting Dionysus as a possible precursor
to the Green Man (Anderson and Hicks 1998, 34).
A great deal of research and literature has been created on archetypal
associations with Dionysus, little of which will be explored in this exami-
nation. However, the Green Man motif has also established itself as an
evolving archetypal image, recrafting itself with each local and cultural
expression, while continuing to maintain its universal archetypal qualities.
Alan Moore aligned with this evolution, connecting the original Swamp
Thing found in Wein and Wrightson’s House of Secrets story to the Swamp
Thing he envisioned, suggesting that there had been dozens, perhaps
hundreds of Swamp Things since the dawn of humanity (Silverman
2009, 1:13).2

Mythic Wounds
In the concluding remarks of her chapter titled “Ecomasculinity,
Ecomasculinism, and the Superhero Genre: Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing,”
Victoria Addis states that “Moore’s Swamp Thing presents, through its
protagonist, a positive vision of masculinity based on a sense of deep inter-
connection with the natural world” (Addis 2021, 431). Addis goes on to
suggest that Moore’s representation of the relationships between mascu-
linities and ecologies across his run of the comic evidences a commitment
to exploring new and better ways of existing as a man in the world. Addis’s
work strongly supports this argument. However, the ecological point that
Addis makes would draw even greater support from the mythological, as
it is through this lens that we can see a new framework for the masculine
navigation of ego-based pitfalls and other stumbling blocks in Moore’s

2
Moore briefly alludes to this idea throughout a series of interviews titled DC Presents A
Chat With Alan Moore, which he gave in 1985. Readers interested in the entire series of inter-
views can view them here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJlZUpgXQJI https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze3rCvyiISA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Emi-
TqzF80 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpYPOfv08F8 https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=_gIrDgIKpas.
186 J. BUCHER

narrative. While Addis states that the ecological attitudes of the protago-
nist reveal “softer” and “tempered” attributes that point to a positive
vision of masculinity, the mythological, which will be unpacked below,
reveals a psychological chess match between the light and shadow side of
the same ancient archetype, The Green Man. The mythological is most
clearly explored through the interactions and subsequent battle between
Swamp Thing and a creature referred to as Woodrue in issue 24 of
the comic.3
To fully understand the context of the battle between Swamp Thing
and Woodrue, one must return to a previous issue. The opening lines of
The Saga of Swamp Thing #21 are: “It’s raining in Washington tonight.
Plump, warm summer rain that covers the sidewalks with leopard spots.
Downtown, elderly ladies carry their houseplants out to set them on the
fire escapes, as if they were infirm relatives or boy kings” (Moore et al.
2012, 38). As often is the case with Moore’s style, he takes no occasion to
further expand on or articulate what the poetic description might infer,
either in the story or in the larger scope of human understanding. The
surface level interpretation that would suggest that the elderly women are
simply carrying the vegetation with loving care is to ignore Moore’s estab-
lished thematic style, where poetic descriptions are used as reverse-rube
Goldberg machines, wherein simple processes, or in this case simple poetic
turns of phrase, are used to construct extremely complex ideas.
First, the opening image of “elderly ladies” being the caretakers of the
green life-giving vegetation frames an allusion to the importance of the
ancient feminine acting as an underlying vessel for and support system
around the movement of whatever the vegetation may unfold to represent
over the course of the story. Continuing, the use of the words “infirm”
and “boy kings” in the same phrase conjure mythological images of the
Fisher King motif from Arthurian legends. While specific narratives vary
from myth to myth, the archetypal Fisher King is a maimed king, usually
wounded in the thigh or groin. The wound is often a punishment for phi-
landering, leaving him only able to fish in the wasteland he rules over. In
many of the narratives, he must wait for a visitor who can ask a specific
question that would bring forth his own supernatural healing and often
the healing of his land. Numerous works explore this motif, however
Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval, the Story of the Grail from the late twelfth

3
Woodrue is actually Dr. Jason Woodrue, a villain in the Swamp Thing narrative that also
goes by the name Floronic Man and is a plant-human hybrid, like Swamp Thing.
 INFIRM RELATIVES AND BOY KINGS: THE GREEN MAN ARCHETYPE IN ALAN… 187

century is the first known appearance of a wounded king involved with a

Grail quest. It is worth noting, however, that Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex also
features a wounded king, ruling over a cursed land, and a riddle that must
be solved correctly, not unlike a question that must be asked correctly.
While there is no direct link that connects Oedipus Rex and the later Celtic
stories of Fisher Kings, the similarities suggest the motif may have arche-
typal or at least have had ancient roots.
There is no direct mention of the Green Man in Arthurian legends,
however there is the mention of a Green Knight, whose depiction does
resemble descriptions and images of the Green Man. The fourteenth cen-
tury poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, was penned by an unknown
author, who described the knight as “monstrous” and “green from head
to toe” (O'Donoghue 2021, 7). The poem goes on to say that the knight
had hair that wrapped around his shoulders and a huge beard, like a bush.
Finally, the text states that the knight held in one hand a bough of holly
(8). Numerous images featured in the photography of Clive Hicks, in a
text called The Green Man that he created with William Anderson, favor
these descriptions. The photos capture a multitude of Green Man images,
created chiefly in architecture throughout history and varied geographic
locations (47, 96, 114, 145)

The Wounded Masculine

Moore’s subtle invocation of the mythological Fisher King/Green Knight
image also works thematically with his execution of Swamp Thing in his
run of the comic. While some critics have suggested that the wounded
vegetation-based creature is a metaphor for human inflicted ecological
damage, this perspective ignores another possible interpretation – that of
the wounded masculine (Beineke 2010, 1). While the ecological interpre-
tation of Moore’s Swamp Thing run is well supported, it should not be
viewed as the only valid interpretation (Banks and Wein 1998, 5). Both
myth and comic book characters have a deep feminine character pool to
draw from, but the Green Man and Swamp Thing have both always been
portrayed as masculine. While the archetypal container has not always
been filled by a gendered man, the exceptions are few and the energy of
the archetype usually reflects the masculine. With this historical, mytho-
logical, and archetypal context, we can now further explore the masculine
wounding divulged in the battle between Swamp Thing and Woodrue.
188 J. BUCHER

Issue 24 of Swamp Thing, titled “Roots,” was released in May of 1984.

Aside from the previously mentioned interest in George Orwell’s 1984,
cultural interests around traditional concepts of good versus evil were sig-
nificant in the United States that month for another reason. The Soviet
Union had announced that they would boycott the 1984 Summer
Olympics in Los Angeles. The battle between Swamp Thing and Woodrue
likely read to many as a motif where Swamp Thing embodied Western ide-
als inherently displayed as good. Woodrue, on the other hand, employed
the mischievous, underhanded methods ascribed to Russia in that Cold
War era. The cover of issue 24 has Woodrue attacking Swamp Thing with
a chainsaw on a giant television monitor as the Justice League of America
watches in horror. Superman restrains The Flash, who lunges at the screen.
Wonder Woman buries her face in her hands in defeat. Green Arrow snaps
one of his arrows in half, disgusted by the treacherous depths Woodrue is
willing to sink to in order to snatch victory from Swamp Thing. Much of
the issue focuses on the battle between Swamp Thing and Woodrue, who
resembles traditional images of the Green Man popularly seen in European
architecture more so than Swamp Thing, while the Justice League watches
from far away, dropping in commentary as the epic battle progresses
(Anderson and Hicks 1998, 67, 72, 81).
Despite the emphasis on ecology by scholars that have examined the
narrative, in the clash between the two characters, we do not see two
aspects of ecology in conflict. Instead, we see two aspects of masculinity at
odds. While both characters are personified ecological vegetation and
symbolically green in color, their worldviews are polarized and their
wounds, and the sources of those wounds differ. Framing the two oppos-
ing masculine expressions is the juxtaposition between Swamp Thing’s
support by the collective Justice League and Woodrue’s lone ego. At the
root of Woodrue’s anger, and subsequently his masculine wound, is the
isolation he experiences, especially in the light of the united support from
the Justice League that he sees Swamp Thing enjoying.
In one passage, Woodrue tells Swamp Thing, “I am the pain and the
bitterness of the woods,” later insisting, “For I am the regret and anger of
the forests…” (Moore et al. 2012, 107-108). In the narrative, the woods
are an isolated place of quiet stillness, as opposed to the swamp, which is
full of creatures, noise, and activity. Woodrue’s statement is that he is the
pain and bitterness of the woods, not the pain and bitterness caused by the
woods. This is significant as it communicates that his very being is the
image of this pain and bitterness. He says that he is regret and anger, not
 INFIRM RELATIVES AND BOY KINGS: THE GREEN MAN ARCHETYPE IN ALAN… 189

that he is the product of regret and anger. The regret that Woodrue alludes
to is seen through the expression in his eyes, articulated through the art
and color of Stephen Bissette, John Totleben, and Tatjana Wood. The
word regret also suggests that a choice was made in favor of one decision
when another choice might have been more beneficial to the chooser.
Woodrue doesn’t suggest he made a bad decision. He states that he is the
bad decision.
This declaration of identity tells us that Woodrue symbolizes an idea, a
worldview, a system. He is isolated and angry masculinity. “I am one with
the wilderness…Its will works through me,” he seethes (107). “I am
Wood-Rue, grief and rage of the wilderness,” he states later in the issue
(112).4 A few pages after making these statements, we see Woodrue begin
to act on his rage. He traps Swamp Thing in a thicket of vines. Swamp
Thing demands to be set free, stating, “You are afraid…To fight…As a
man fights…,” challenging Woodrue’s expression of masculinity and
reminding him that he is not a man, not human. Woodrue retorts, “I’m
not a man. Neither are you, in fact…You’re not anything.”5 The italicized
emphasis that Moore places within Woodrue’s dialogue communicates a
juvenile masculinity, suggesting that the anger and isolation that Woodrue
has fumed forth for several pages has resulted in a regressive maturity. The
reader half-expects Woodrue to next taunt, “I know you are, but what am
I?” At this moment, when it seems as though Woodrue’s destructive vision
of masculinity has defeated Swamp Thing’s attempts at a more measured
masculine response, calling out Woodrue’s fear, Moore brings us back to
the collective observation of the Justice League. Superman peers into
space and states, “There’s always hope.” He then begins coordinating
with other members of the League to communicate with Swamp Thing
and Woodrue. It is of note that the collective does not strategize over how
to help reconcile the situation, but rather how to communicate with these
masculine creatures. This detail is a recognition that solving the difficulties
of male wounding cannot even begin to occur until a successful solution is

4
Moore often writes Woodrue’s name as “Wood-Rue” when it is spoken aloud. This is
likely to suggest the way that characters, including Woodrue himself, are pronouncing his
name. It is also a play on the two words “wood” and “rue.” While the use of “wood” is likely
obvious to the reader, “rue” can mean either an actual type of plant or refer to bitter regret.
5
This exchange between Swamp Thing and Woodrue resembles another mythological
battle narrative found in the Christian text, The Gospel of Matthew 4:1-11, where Satan makes
similar taunts at Christ, who also offers back clever responses.
190 J. BUCHER

found that allows effective communication with the wounded, in essence

speaking to them in a way they can actually hear.
While the collective strategizes, Swamp Thing’s consort that eventually
becomes his spouse, Abby Cable, and an elderly African American man
confront Woodrue directly. Abby attempts to appeal to Woodrue’s human-
ity, which he viciously rejects, stating that this is who he has always been.
The elderly Black man wields a chainsaw attempting to stop the green
creature but is quickly thwarted. Woodrue concludes the episode with a
small rant about the real villain being the entertainment industry as he
grabs the chainsaw and edges toward Abby. While only a quick moment of
dialogue, Moore is specifically referencing the intersection of masculinity
and politics here. In 1984, Ronald Reagan was running to be re-elected
President of the United States and his Republican party had been building
their platform on economic prosperity grounded in “traditional family val-
ues.” The platform explicitly stated that sex and violence in entertainment
media, which included the comics that Moore was presently working in,
were to blame not only for moral degradation in the country, but namely
the physical and sexual abuse of children (Peters and Woodlley 1984, par.
331). Reagan, who had been an actor before turning to politics, had made
a career playing roles that reinforced hyper and sometimes violent mascu-
linity, ranging from cowboys to football players. Moore’s brief reference
to the entertainment industry being to blame for violence is likely a
pointed commentary on the perceived hypocrisy of Reagan’s recent
change of heart on violent media after building a film career participating
in the creation of such content, which he then parlayed into a politi-
cal empire.
A final note for consideration about a relevant issue in the Republican
platform of 1984 that intersects with the Green Man archetype. The plat-
form has several planks lamenting and discussing the proliferation of por-
nography in the United States at the time of the platform’s creation.
Images of the Green Man are sometimes depicted with a female compan-
ion. Depending on the mythic tradition embraced by the culture where
the duo appears, female figures such as mermaids are common. However,
in several contexts, the Sheela Na Gig is the companion to the Green Man.
This is especially common in architectural images. The Sheela Na Gig is a
mythic figure and archetypal energy, possibly derived from the earlier
mythic archetype of Baubo, represented as a naked woman displaying an
exaggerated vulva. Marija Gimbutas inferred, in the forward to Winifred
Milius Lubell’s book on cultural appearances of Baubo-related images,
 INFIRM RELATIVES AND BOY KINGS: THE GREEN MAN ARCHETYPE IN ALAN… 191

that while cultures often will see these depictions as pornographic, there is
actually a different framework behind the occurrence of such imagery
(Lubell 1997, xiii). The pornography of concern in the Republican plat-
form of 1984 was notably primarily in the medium of print, as video por-
nography was not yet as widespread as it later would be. The pornography
in print magazines was always posed and never improvised, due to the
costs involved with technical production of such media. Many poses in
these magazines resemble images historically seen in representations of the
Sheela Na Gig (Trinks 2013, 163). These explicit feminine images, some-
times seen by culture as pornographic, and the Green Man archetype often
arise in culture at the same time.

Masculine Victimization
Just before Woodrue uses his chainsaw to dismember Abby, Swamp Thing
manages to untangle himself and stop the violent event. Woodrue then
quickly pivots to his own victimization, shifting the focus from the vio-
lence he was just about to commit to his own pain and ill-treatment. He
begins to make a scene about his arm being injured by Swamp Thing, who
had simply knocked the chainsaw from his hands. Woodrue questions,
“Why do you keep coming back and hurting me” (Moore et al. 2012,
122)? The moment is significant for three reasons. First, the angry, iso-
lated, wounded masculine figure effectively changes the narrative from the
destruction he was causing to the destruction that has been visited on
him – a motif that remains common in current expressions of masculine
wounding. Next, Woodrue has placed the blame for his pain on Swamp
Thing, rather than himself or the isolation he has spent a great deal of time
describing earlier in the scene. Swamp Thing is befuddled by Woodrue’s
question, but manages to articulate, “Because you…Are Hurting…The
Green” (Moore et al. 2012, 122). While several possibilities could be
explored as to what “The Green” symbolizes both in this scene and in the
larger narrative, one possibility that is thematically consistent is that The
Green symbolizes life.6 In essence, Swamp Thing is suggesting that
Woodrue’s wounded actions are preventing everyone in the swamp from

6
“The Green” is worthy of its own mythological exploration in the Swamp Thing narra-
tive. However, in this context, another interpretation would be that Swamp Thing is suggest-
ing that Woodrue is hurting the collective with his actions.
192 J. BUCHER

thriving lives. Third, and finally, Woodrue’s wounded arm now also aligns
him with the mythic Fisher King motif discussed earlier.
Woodrue appears shocked by Swamp Thing’s suggestion. He immedi-
ately denies there being any truth to the accusation and begins making a
case for how impossible the statement sounds. Swamp Thing stops him
and points to the destruction all around them. He states, “Look at
all…THIS! This…is not…the way…of the wilderness. This…is the
way…of man” (Moore et al. 2012, 123). Within the narrative, Moore’s
use of the word “man” is likely meant to draw a juxtaposition between the
floral creatures of the swamp and human beings. However, looking at the
use of the term within the context of a discussion around the masculine,
the word “man” can be interpreted as also referring to the masculine itself.
In other words, Swamp Thing is telling Woodrue that the destruction sur-
rounding them is the result of the “brand” of masculinity that he embod-
ies. Abby reinforces the idea, telling Woodrue, “You are ill…Woodrue…and
you poison The Green…with your desires.” Though the term was not in
popular use in 1984, the accusation resembles modern ideas about what is
now called “toxic masculinity.”
Woodrue still cannot accept any of what he is being told and retreats
with a final justification to Swamp Thing that his actions are the only way
to save the world from “those other creatures.” The rationalization which
is directed only to Swamp Thing and not to Abby, who is also standing
there, insinuates that his “brand” of masculinity is the only way to save
both he and Swamp Thing, creatures embodying two opposing types of
masculinity, from “the others.” Michael Smith has effectively made the
case that the “wildness of the wilderness” in Swamp Thing is an expression
of Dionysus energy (Smith 2015, 370). However, the energy that Woodrue
embodies, and thus the “brand” of masculinity he appears to represent,
amplifies beyond the bounds of the Dionysian. As Woodrue scampers
away, tears roll down his face. He stops for a moment and speaks to a
single flower growing from the earth saying, “…”It’s so very lonely…”
(Moore et al. 2012, 125). Moments later, Woodrue disappears and is swal-
lowed up into the destruction. In a classic reunification with the feminine,
Abby stands by Swamp Thing and asks him, “What happened to him?” He
replies, “He…Fell…From Grace…With the World. He was … uprooted.
It’s over” (126). Like in most comics, however, no character is ever really
gone. Woodrue appears again later, still complaining about his
wounded arm.
 INFIRM RELATIVES AND BOY KINGS: THE GREEN MAN ARCHETYPE IN ALAN… 193

The Return to Elysium

In issue 27 of Moore’s run, the motif of wounded arms, a symbol of mas-
culine strength and power, returns to the narrative. Swamp Thing loses his
arm in a battle with a demon monkey king. The event echoes Woodrue’s
wounding earlier in the narrative. Stories of lost limbs are found in several
mythological traditions from Nuada in Celt mythology to the Norse god
of war, Tyr, who loses his right hand when the gods need to bind the wolf,
Fenrir. Tyr voluntarily puts his arm in Fenrir’s mouth, knowing what the
outcome will be. He willingly sacrifices for the safety of Asgard. Moore
continues, throughout the run of the series, to present Swamp Thing as an
expression of the masculine seen in other mythological figures such as
Tyr – willing to sacrifice for the greater good of all. This presentation sub-
tly suggests a different “brand” of masculinity is being offered than that
previously presented by Woodrue. Swamp Thing’s masculinity is demon-
strated with empathy and an owning of responsibility. Swamp Thing’s
wounding is greater than Woodrue’s simple inconvenience. Woodrue only
had his arm injured. Swamp Thing’s arm is severed completely. In many
respects, over the course of Moore’s run, we see Swamp Thing fully
become the infirmed king that Moore alludes to early on in issue 21.
Woodrue remains a self-interested boy king with a slight wound, but pri-
marily hurt feelings. Swamp Thing becomes a wounded healer that holds
both the interest and potential for healing not only himself, but his
land – the swamp. He evolves psychically from survivalist plant matter to
a creature that reaches to embrace his full masculinity and humanity. It is
notable, as well, the loss of Swamp Thing’s arm comes at the hands of a
demon monkey king – a character that we might see as symbolizing a self-­
serving monkey-brained patriarch. Unlike Woodrue, who spends his days
complaining about his wounding, Swamp Thing takes responsibility for
his own healing. He reattaches his own arm and allows the green vegeta-
tion to grow back into place, making him whole again.
After the battle with Woodrue, Swamp Thing agrees to take a young
autistic boy named Paul back home, at the request of Abby.7 The boy asks
him if he was afraid when he had to fight the monkey king. Swamp Thing
admits that he was. Paul tells him that knowing that makes him feel better

7
Paul acts as a complex symbol of the developing young masculine that Moore was
encountering in 1984 but also transcends that period by embodying a universal archetypal
version of maturing masculinity, not bound by time.
194 J. BUCHER

and that if monsters get scared sometimes, maybe it isn’t so bad to be

afraid.8 At the conclusion of the issue, when the two finally arrive back at
Paul’s home, we learn it is a residential school called Elysium Lawns
(Moore et al. 2012, 204). Elysium was the mythic place that Greeks hoped
to journey to in the afterlife. It was believed to be a place of peace and
happiness. In Moore’s narrative, Elysium is a stop on Swamp Thing’s jour-
ney, not the final destination. True to the mythic nature of the story, Alan
Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing is a cyclical journey of death and rebirth.
It is the loss and destruction of one form of the masculine and the rise of
another – only to have that new form later wounded and in need of rein-
tegration as well. It is a journey of masculinity never complete, but always
in process. It is the emergence of an ancient archetype, needed for a sea-
son, and then returning below the surface, back into the swamp – waiting
only to later rise in the zeitgeist when cultural consciousness calls it forth.

References
Addis, Victoria. 2021. Ecomasculinity, Ecomasculinism, and the Superhero Genre:
Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. In Men, Masculinities, and Earth, ed. P.M. Pulé
and M. Hultman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Anderson, William, and Clive Hicks. 1998. Green Man: The Archetype of Our
Oneness with the Earth. London: Compass Books.
Araneo, Phyllis. 2008. The Archetypal, Twenty First Century Resurrection of the
Ancient Image of the Green Man. Journal of Futures Studies 13 (1): 43–64.
Banks, Amanda Carson, and Elizabeth E. Wein. 1998. Folklore and the Comic
Book: The Tradition Meets the Popular. New Directions in Folklore 2: 1–2.
Basford, Kathleen. 2004. The Green Man. New York: D.S. Brewer, and imprint of
Boydell & Brewer.
Beineke, Colin. 2010. ‘Her Guardiner’: Alan Moore's Swamp Thing as the Green
Man. Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 5 (4): 1–17.
Hillman, James. 2005. Senex & Puer, ed. Glen Slater. Putnam, CT: Spring
Publications.
Jung, C. G. 1977. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Trans. R.F.C. Hull,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

8
The conversation between Paul and Swamp Thing offers a subtext that can be read
through a variety of mythological lenses. James Hillman’s (2005, 27-28) discussion of the
senex and the puer, as well as a juxtaposition between innocence and the monstruous, would
be two of the possible lenses.
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Lee, Wendi. 2020. Interview with Alan Moore. Simon Carless. November 26.
https://www.simoncarless.com/2018/07/longread-­the-­lost-­alan-­moore-­
interview/.
Lubell, Winifred Milius. 1997. The Metamorphosis of Baubo: Myths of Woman's
Sexual Energy. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
MacDonald, Heidi. 2005. A FOR ALAN, Pt. 1: The Alan Moore Interview. Mile
High Comics. November 8. https://web.archive.org/web/20060505034142/
http://www.comicon.com/thebeat/2006/03/a_for_alan_pt_1_the_alan_
moore.html.
Moore, Alan, Rick Veitch, and John Totleben. 2012. Saga of the Swamp Thing.
Burbank: Vertigo Comics.
O’Donoghue, Bernard. 2021. The Green Knight. New York: Penguin Books.
Peters, Gerhard, and John T Woodlley. 1984. Republican Party Platform of 1984.
Republican Party Platform of 1984 | The American Presidency Project. UC
Santa Barbara, August 20. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/
republican-­party-­platform-­1984.
Silverman, A. David. 2009. Alan Moore – Swamp Thing Interview Pt. 2 – 1985.
DC Comics. Published on October 31. YouTube, 1:13. https://www.you-
tube.com/watch?v=FJlZUpgXQJI.
Smith, Michael. 2015. Embracing Dionysius in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing.
Studies in the Novel 47 (3): 365–380.
Trinks, Stefan. 2013. Sheela-na-gig Again: The Birth of a New Style from the
Spirit of Pornography. In Pornographic Art and the Aesthetics of Pornography,
ed. H. Maes. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
 The Shadow of the Bat: Batman
as Archetypal Shaman

John Todd

Abstract Most early human cultures revered the bat. Not only was the
bat held sacred for the essential role they play in our ecosystem as pollina-
tors, seed dispersers, and natural insect control, they were also appreciated
for their uniqueness. Bats are the only mammals that possess the ability for
sustained flight, they nurse their young, and even share brainwave patterns
common with those of primates. And yet, they mostly live underground in
caves, sleep upside down, have the ability to see in the dark, and are noc-
turnal. Despite their clear benefit to humans and our ecology in general,
Western culture has demonized the bat and therefore one is forced won-
der why so much negative shadow material has been projected on the bat.
What does the image of the bat hold for the Western psyche? What aspects
of ourselves have been deemed demonic that are essential to our own
inner ecosystems? And why, despite this fear of the bat, have we as a cul-
ture embraced Batman, a man dressed as a bat? A deeper exploration of
the image of the bat as not only holding negative shadow material, but
also holding that of the light bringer or psychopomp reveals a great deal

J. Todd (*)
C.G. Jung Institute of Colorado, Denver, CO, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 197

Switzerland AG 2023
D. M. Odorisio (ed.), A New Gnosis, Contemporary Religion and
Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1_10
198 J. TODD

about the human condition in the modern Western world. This chapter
explores the image of the bat, Batman, and what it holds for the modern
Westerner.

Keywords Batman • Bat • Shaman • C.G. Jung • Archetype • Ecology

Much like the human relationship to the literal bat, the human relation-
ship to the image of the bat has swung dramatically from positive to nega-
tive throughout history. Many early civilizations saw the bat as a guide,
savior, and protector of the divine; however, as more patriarchal traditions
rose to prominence the bat was maligned and became associated with evil,
vampirism, and disease. Like all symbols, the symbol of the bat is polyva-
lent and therefore holds both positive and negative aspects, including
everything in between. The pendulum, however, has swung so far to the
negative that it warrants reflecting on why this might be, and what it
might say about our culture.
Bats have always presented a problem for those who like to divide
things into clearly delineated, unequivocal categories. Not only are they
nocturnal, but they also reverse what appears to be the normal order in
other ways. They are mammals that can fly; they have hands that are actu-
ally wings; they hang upside down; their flight appears chaotic; they see in
the dark when humans cannot. The people of ancient cultures often vener-
ated and held sacred creatures often seen today as symbolizing anomaly
and transformation. The bat is one of these creatures. For many cultures,
it was, and continues to be, an intermediary to the gods, because of its
unique ability to hold opposites, to penetrate darkness, and because of its
clear harmony with – and service to – the environment. Some ancient
cultures, such as the Navajo, saw bats as guardians of Mother Earth –
nature’s own gargoyles (Renfro 1988).
There is one further paradox worth mentioning here, regarding a story
that I will examine in depth later in this chapter, and that is: Why, given
the general repugnance for bats, has a Bat-man (a man dressed as a bat)
captured imaginations since 1939? The modern-day bat myth defies all of
the projections placed on the animal. The story of Batman resurrects the
savior bat of ancient civilizations, and praises the hero of the night. Before
delving into the story of the modern Batman, however, I will first explore
the Bat-men that have come before him.
 THE SHADOW OF THE BAT: BATMAN AS ARCHETYPAL SHAMAN 199

Bat-men: Bat-Man Images in Early Cultures

In contrast to the negative projections placed on the bat by modern
Western culture, many early cultures projected positive qualities onto the
bat (Renfro 1988). They often held bats in high esteem and represented
them in their mythology as intermediaries between divine and human
worlds. Some cultures held bats in even higher regard, speaking of them
as light-bringers who led humans toward the light (Renfro 1988). This
might be interpreted from a contemporary psychological perspective as a
movement towards consciousness. The modern Jungian term for the psy-
chological factor that functions in a similar way is the “psychopomp.”
According to Sharp (1991), the psychopomp “mediates unconscious con-
tents to consciousness, often personified in the image of a wise old man or
woman, and sometimes as a helpful animal” (108). As I continue this
exploration of the bat’s role as psychopomp, I will focus on the mytholo-
gies, folklore, and stories in which a human-bat figure is personified. In
these stories, the relationship between human and bat manifests in a range
of images from godlike to demonic. This shift from the image of an animal
as the carrier of this projection (as psychopomp) to the image of an animal-­
human hybrid suggests a movement toward integration.
The indigenous people of Matangi Island, located near Fiji, revered
bats. There are many ancient tales about the deity Toba Fu, who was the
island's very first leader. Toba Fu was a hero bat, or bat-man, who taught
people what they needed to know about being human, and also brought
them fire. The Matangi natives regarded the bat as a carrier of prosperity,
good fortune, long life, health, and happiness (McCracken 1993, 57).
When interpreted from a Jungian perspective, the theme of psychopomp
or light-bringer, as the carrier of consciousness, is clearly present. Toba Fu
not only brings to his people literal light (in the form of fire), but also
brings the “light” of consciousness to them in teaching them how to be
human. Viewed symbolically, the “light” that Toba Fu brings lifts the
community out of a purely instinctual existence, and into a more con-
scious way of being.
Central and South American peoples found bats fascinating as well.
They are a significant motif in many styles of Pre-Columbian art, as well as
a frequent theme in Indigenous folklore (Benson 1991, 7). A story from
the Gran Chaco region of northern Argentina tells of a leader of the very
first people, a bat-man who taught the people what they needed to know
as human beings (Benson 1991, 8). From the Ge in Brazil comes a tale of
200 J. TODD

a tribe that moved through the night led by a bat who looked to guide
them toward light (Benson 1991, 8). In Kogi (a Colombian tribe still in
existence today) mythology, bats are the first animal of creation, and in at
least one myth, the bat is considered to be the son of the sun (Benson
1991, 6). Here again, the image of the bat – particularly the bat-man as
psychopomp – is present.
Some Meso-American tribes saw “bat medicine” as being connected
with transformation, rebirth, and the shaman. This belief has been attrib-
uted to the bat’s being “reborn” out of the belly of Mother Earth (i.e.,
caves) each night, as well as their ability to see when others cannot, just as
shamans are called to see into the spirit world and guide and protect those
who cannot make the journey themselves. According to Matthews (2004),
shamans:

were lorekeepers, healers, prophets, diviners, and ceremonialists, and ambas-

sadors to and interpreters of the gods.... [T]hey were walkers between the
worlds, people whose attunement to tribal consciousness and the spirits was
so fine that they could slip between the hidden parallels of life and death,
between the worlds, and report to the tribe what they saw there. (9)

As an image associated with the shaman, the bat continues to reflect the
ability to go where others cannot and to see what others cannot see. The
role of the shaman is similar to Jung’s understanding of the psychopomp.
According to Samuels et al. (1986) the psychopomp is:

The figure which guides the soul in times of initiation and transition; a func-
tion traditionally ascribed to Hermes in Greek Myth for he accompanied the
souls of the dead and was able to pass through the polarities (not only death
and life, but night and day, heaven and earth). In the human world the
priest, shaman, medicine man, and doctor are some who have been recog-
nized as fulfilling the need for spiritual guidance and mediation between
sacred and secular worlds. (122-123)

This particular association to the bat not only connects it again with the
psychopomp, but with initiation as well. Some ancient initiation rituals
included a bat figure as a potentially fearful presence (Benson 1991, 9). In
the initiatory role, the bat functions as a paradoxical figure, with both
positive and negative connotations, depending upon the differing aims of
the initiation process.
 THE SHADOW OF THE BAT: BATMAN AS ARCHETYPAL SHAMAN 201

Comparison: The Centaur

The human-animal hybrid is of such importance in the development of bat
lore, that it is pertinent to offer a comparison with another mythological
hybrid – the centaur. In Greek mythology, Chiron, a human-horse hybrid
with the upper half of a human and lower half of a horse, was known for
being a learned doctor who often tutored heroes. He was an expert on
medicine, music, ethics, hunting, and martial arts. While Chiron was
clearly trusted and revered, centaurs in general were feared and distrusted.
They were known as monstrous creatures who lived in forests, ate raw
meat, and often kidnapped women from their homes (Grimal 1951,
94-100).
When interpreted symbolically, the Centaur can be viewed as an inter-
face between the human and instinctual realms. Within Greek mythology
there appears to be great ambivalence regarding the relationship between
the two. On one hand, the image of Chiron can be seen as presenting the
wisdom and knowledge that comes from a relationship between human
culture and the instincts. On the other, the image of the centaur in general
appears to reflect the brutality and lack of awareness that can also come
with such an interface. Such ambivalence remains to this day, and is reflec-
tive of the relationship that many contemporary humans have with their
instinctual natures. The connection can lead to wisdom, but one can also
be overcome by one’s beast-like nature.
These two manifestations of the centaur provide a very clear distinction
between two possible outcomes of a union of consciousness with the
unknown regions where the instincts dwell. Applying this comparative
mythological observation to the study of the bat, one can see the same
fears and lofty possibilities expressed. There are dark and sinister images
that have been associated with the bat, and there are also images of growth
and transformation. Will the bat transform those who encounter it into a
vampire, or will it transform them into Toba Fu or Batman?

The Chinese Bat-Man

The depiction of bat creatures in Chinese folklore differs from the treat-
ment of the image in Central and South American folklore. In China, the
bat-man is less terrifying, but no less fearsome. The bat has played a sig-
nificant role in the mythologies and folklore of Chinese culture through-
out its history. According to Kern (1988):
202 J. TODD

Chinese admiration for bats began thousands of years before Christ. The
Oriental world was viewed as an eternal interplay between active (male) and
passive (female) forces. Bats were thought to embody the male principle—
flowers and fruits, the female. The bat commonly was pictured with the
peach, a popular female fertility symbol. We now know that the pairing of
peaches and bats portrays an ecological as well as mystical relationship.
Peaches (one of man's most popular fruits) were first cultivated in China
approximately 5,000 years ago. Before that, peaches relied on bats for dis-
persal of their seeds. (39)

In the Chinese imagination, their deities dwelled deep within the earth,
and bats became associated with – even identified as – incarnations of
them. This could be attributed to the natural habitat of bats (the cave) and
to their longevity, which is greater than most mammals their size.
The Chinese word for bat, fu, is also a homophone for the word happi-
ness. There is an abundance of Chinese art depicting bats with images and
words related to happiness, good health, and prosperity. The happy
Buddha is often pictured with a bat, and Emperors and Empresses wore
beautiful gowns adorned with bats (Von Glahn 2004, 122-128). And,
similar to the Indigenous cultures mentioned above, the Chinese also had
their own bat-man (Kern 1988, 39).
According to Chinese folklore, Zhong Kui (Fig. 1) was the god that
drove away evil, captured demons, and brought good luck and happiness.
Zhong Kui is depicted in traditional Chinese New Year pictures as being
led by bats on his quest to drive away the evil spirits that threaten his
people. In these images, he wields a sword and is accompanied by bats,
suggesting that he is a god of formidable power (Von Glahn 2004,
122-128).

The Christian Bat-Man

In contrast to the positive associations that many early peoples had to the
bat, the Christian tradition has often associated the bat with evil. In fact,
the Devil himself has often been portrayed with bat wings. While the ori-
gins of the Devil within the Christian tradition are varied, the story that is
often told is that Lucifer was God’s most radiant and devout angel (Fig. 2).
However, while God was creating man in the Garden of Eden, Lucifer,
who was seated at God’s left hand, became restless and wondered why he
could not have the same powers as God. Thus Sin, Lucifer’s first daughter,
 THE SHADOW OF THE BAT: BATMAN AS ARCHETYPAL SHAMAN 203

Fig. 1 Zhong Kui

(Source: Wikipedia)

was born from his head. When God returned to find Lucifer sitting on his
throne, he became so angry that he cast him out. Before being sent to the
center of the earth, Lucifer rallied a group of rebellious angels who accom-
panied him on his descent to Hell (Morgan 1996).
204 J. TODD

Fig. 2 Guillaume
Geefs, “Le génie du
mal,” or “The Lucifer of
Liège,” 1848. (Source:
Wikipedia)

The name Lucifer means “light-bringer” or “morning star.” Given his

name, Lucifer can be seen symbolically as a bringer of consciousness. In
this story, Lucifer’s first daughter, Sin, is born from the same head that
begins to wonder if he too can possess the powers of God. The juxtaposi-
tion of sin and consciousness, or the desire for it, is highly significant. The
theme of Lucifer as light-bringer is reminiscent of earlier stories of bat-­
gods as responsible for showing early peoples how to be human and even
make their own light in the form of fire. There is certainly a visual connec-
tion, as Lucifer is often depicted with the wings of a bat, but there remains
a connection with the Titan hero, Prometheus, from the Greek pantheon.
 THE SHADOW OF THE BAT: BATMAN AS ARCHETYPAL SHAMAN 205

Prometheus steals fire from Zeus, king of the gods, and gives it to
humans, therefore bringing them light. Prometheus was then cast out of
Olympus and eternally bound to a rock, where an eagle ate his liver every
day. Prometheus, whose name means “forethinker,” has been interpreted
as the bringer of the “fire” of consciousness, and therefore is seen as the
impetus for the formation of human civilization and science.
A Russian myth incorporates a similar dynamic, with the bat now play-
ing the role of thief. According to McCracken (1993):

A Russian legend…relates that Satan wished to create a man, and after fash-
ioning a human form from mud, could not give it life. Satan then enlisted
the aid of the bat to fly to heaven and steal God's sacred "towel," which
would give Satan's creation a divine nature. The bat complied, and accord-
ing to the legend this is why God owns man's soul and Satan his body. God
punished the bat for helping Satan by taking away its wings (presumably its
feathers), making its tail naked, and fashioning its feet like those of
Satan. (57)

There is a comparative pattern within more patriarchal, “sky god”-ori-

ented religions and cultures, that considers it hubris, and therefore, dis-
obedient, to think for one’s self, or to defy the god’s expectations, and
that doing so will result in being “cast out.” Symbolically, this pattern
represents a psychological movement from a dependent and unconscious
state, into cognition and self-awareness, which often involves much suffer-
ing and difficulty, and can be experienced by the ego as “punishment.”
Often, in similar mythologies, to remain unconscious is narrated as remain-
ing in a state of “innocence” or “paradise,” where everything is provided.
Once the fire is “stolen,” however, it necessitates becoming responsible
for one’s own fate, and the imperative to carry the resulting burden.
Judeo-Christian traditions often emphasize compliance with what is
considered the “Word of God.” From this viewpoint, wisdom that emerges
from within the psyche is suspect. According to Zimmer (1948):

Archaic man regarded himself as part of the animal world of nature and
identified himself with the traits and powers of the more impressive among
his surrounding animal neighbors.... If the animal within is killed by an over
resolute morality, or even only chilled into hibernation by a perfect social
routine, the conscious personality will never be vivified by the hidden forces
that underlie and obscurely sustain it. The interior animal asks to be
accepted, permitted to live with us, as the somewhat queer, often puzzling
206 J. TODD

companion. Though mute and obstinate, never the less it knows better than
our conscious personalities, and would be known to know better if we
would learn to listen to its barely audible voice. (128-129)

When that voice is ignored, silenced, or demonized, there is little room

for a light-bringer; therefore, the relationship with unconscious and
instinctual selves, which often manifests in dreams, intuitions, and the
body, becomes split off. Mercurius is ignored, Lucifer is cast out, the bat
is demonized, and the wisdom that the feminine principle has to offer falls
on deaf ears.

The Alchemical Bat-Man

Despite the trend towards the negative end of this archetypal pole within
Christian culture, there is an underlying tradition in Western culture in
which the image of the bat and the bat-man fared much better. While
alchemy had been practiced in other parts of the world for hundreds of
years, it began to surface in the West around the same time as the rise of
Christianity. Within this tradition, the wings of the bat that have since
become synonymous with evil in the Christian tradition, become symbolic
of what the alchemists’ considered perfection. Commenting on the above
image from the sixteenth century alchemical treatise, The Rosarium
Philosophorum, Cwik (2006) writes:

The figure [above] is darker and therefore more complete. It is titled ‘The
Demonstration of Perfection.’ It is symbolic of the capacity to be and live in
a fully human manner, the vir unus. The Rebis of the White Stone, while
reflecting a very difficult integration, lacks a relationship to shadow’s black-
ness and death. These darker aspects are alluded to in the bat wings, now
capable of traversing spiritual darkness, and the figures stand on a mound of
earth with three dragons devouring themselves. This is a reference to the
triadic unity of Mercurius…. This is “the chthonic, lower, or even infernal
counterpart of the Heavenly Trinity, just as Dante’s devil is three-headed”
so ‘Mercurius is often shown as a three-headed serpent.’ (206) (Fig. 3).

The “darker aspects” symbolize the ability to navigate unknown regions

of the psyche, and relate to the ability to remain grounded in the chthonic
 THE SHADOW OF THE BAT: BATMAN AS ARCHETYPAL SHAMAN 207

Fig. 3 The Rebis, from The Rosarium Philosophorum (16th c.). (Archive for
Research in Archetypal Symbolism [ARAS])

wisdom of the body, and matter in general. The alchemists symbolically

represent this ability by pairing the human with the wings of bats. This
image also reflects the role of the psychopomp as it symbolizes the ability
to navigate within the darkness of the unconscious.
208 J. TODD

An image from the fifteenth century alchemical text, Aurora Consurgens

depicts an earlier stage of the alchemical process where the masculine and
feminine elements are beginning to comingle (Fig. 4). Each side brings
something to the union: he holds a rabbit and she holds a bat.
Once more we see the bat associated with the feminine principle as it is
in many cultures. Jung saw alchemy as compensating for the “one-­
sidedness” of Christianity, much as the unconscious compensates for what
is lacking in the consciousness of the individual. According to Jung (1993):

Fig. 4 Hermaphrodite,
from Aurora Consurgens
(15th c.). (Archive for
Research in Archetypal
Symbolism [ARAS])
 THE SHADOW OF THE BAT: BATMAN AS ARCHETYPAL SHAMAN 209

[A]lchemy is rather like an undercurrent to Christianity [which] ruled on

the surface. It is so to this surface as the dream is to consciousness, and just
as the dream compensates the conflicts of the conscious mind, so alchemy
endeavors to fill the gaps left open by the Christian tension of opposites....
The historical shift of the world’s consciousness towards the masculine is
compensated at first by the chthonic femininity of the unconscious...the
higher, the spiritual, the masculine inclines to the lower, the earthly, the
feminine; and accordingly, the mother, who was anterior to the world of the
father, accommodates herself to the masculine principle and, with the aid of
the human spirit (alchemy or “the philosophy”) produces a son – not the
antithesis of Christ but rather his chthonic counterpart, not a divine man
but a fabulous being conforming to the nature of the primordial mother.
(para. 26)

Again, the bat is associated with the psychopomp, the earthly, the
unconscious, and the feminine, and as Western culture began to shift away
from these energies, the bat too was cast out.

The Bat as Guardian of the Sacred

Images of bats and bat-men also depict them as guardians of the Sacred –
what is considered divine or spiritually important within the culture, or to
the individual. For example, in the traditional Navajo sand painting below
(Fig. 5), Father Sky and Mother Earth are pictured holding hands, the
eternal union of heaven and earth creating new life. This image represents
both the sky and earth, as well as the mind and the body (Moon 1997,
203-205). The bat, as sacred messenger of the divine, guards Mother
Earth from the East. The yellow patch on the bat’s back was given by the
Great Spirit as a reward for defeating a harmful spirit. From the belly of
Mother Earth sprouts all the essential crops of the Navajo people.
Ecologically, the bat served to pollinate plants and eat the insects that
threatened the crops that they depended on and held sacred. The bat was
held in high esteem by the Navajo and was seen as a guardian of Mother
Earth. The bat protected the crops that sprouted forth from “her belly.”
While Mother Earth, as well as the feminine principle in general, can have
both life-giving and life-devouring qualities, it appears that the Navajo
experienced the bat in service to the fecund, life giving, and sustaining
aspect of the feminine principle.
As Neumann (1954) writes:
210 J. TODD

Fig. 5 Navajo Sand Painting (Archive for Research in Archetypal

Symbolism [ARAS])

At this stage, food symbolism and organs co-ordinated with it are of prime
importance. This explains why Mother Goddess cultures and mythologies
are so closely connected with fertility and growth, and particularly agricul-
ture, hence with the sphere of food, which is the material and bodily sphere.
The stage of the maternal uroboros is characterized by the child’s relation to
the mother, who yields nourishment, but at the same time it is an historical
period in which man’s dependence on the earth and nature is at its greatest.
Connected with both aspects is the dependence of the ego and conscious-
ness on the unconscious. The dependence of the sequence “child-man-ego-­
conscious” on the sequence “mother-earth-nature-unconscious” illustrates
the relation of the personal to the transpersonal and the reliance of the one
upon the other. (43)

From a psychological perspective, this Navajo image can be seen as

reflecting the relationship between the ego and the unconscious. The
 THE SHADOW OF THE BAT: BATMAN AS ARCHETYPAL SHAMAN 211

psychopomp (bat as divine messenger) is in service of the unconscious

(The Great Mother) and ensures that the ego can receive “her” nourish-
ment. Symbolically, this image can additionally be interpreted as present-
ing the divine elements of Heaven (Great Father), and Earth (Great
Mother), whose union brings about human consciousness. Within the
image, the bat is depicted as messenger and guardian of the feminine
aspect of the divine. Thus, the bat ensures that the nourishment that
comes from Mother Earth is received by all.
For the Navajo, the role of the shaman is similar to that of the bat, but
in the spiritual world. As mentioned above, the shaman is often seen as
possessing “bat medicine”; therefore, possessing the qualities of the bat.
The shaman thus serves as an intermediary between the two worlds, and
works with negative entities that pose a threat to the health and general
well-being of the tribe. Much like the bat in the Navajo belief system, the
shaman also functions in service to the life-giving, positive aspects of the
feminine principle. This can also be said of figures such as the bats and
bat-men who are light-bringers from many of the myths of native and
Indigenous peoples. These figures foster the development of conscious-
ness (“light”) from within the unconscious, which is often portrayed via
feminine qualities that can either nurture the life of the ego or devour it.
The modern Batman narrative portrays a similar theme of the bat as guard-
ian of the Sacred.

The Modern Bat-Man

Aside from Dracula, there are no modern images of bat-men except
Batman. The significant difference between the two figures being that
Dracula uses his bat-like qualities to prey on others, whereas Batman uses
his in service of others. One additional primary difference is that one fig-
ure serves in the role of villain, while the other figure is a hero. I will now
examine this dynamic further within the Batman story.
Given the general fear and disdain that Western culture appears to hold
for the bat, both literally and figuratively, it is fascinating to consider the
popularity and longevity of the modern fictional character Batman, a man
dressed as a bat. Therein lies a concrete example of the psychological mys-
tery in the relationship between Western culture and the bat. The image
of this animal simultaneously repels and draws one in. Are certain people
repelled by the image of the bat as reflecting something purely instinctual;
yet drawn to the idea of a human who has integrated that instinct? This
212 J. TODD

dynamic continues to reflect back the conscious attitude that contempo-

rary American culture has with the dark mysteries of the unconscious.
Images of animals that show up in dreams, myth, or literature may often
reflect such instinctual aspects of the psyche. The bat – and subsequently,
Batman – can therefore be interpreted symbolically as an image of integra-
tion. From this perspective, Batman symbolizes a conscious relationship
with the instincts embodied in the image of the bat: the ability to “see”
what others cannot, the ability to navigate in dark (i.e., “unconscious”)
realms where others might fear to travel. It is equally important that
Batman is able to be in relationship with the “bat” and not “go batty,” or
be overwhelmed by the contents of the unconscious. Therefore, Batman
can be seen as one who has dealt with both positive and negative poten-
tials contained within the archetypal image of the bat. However, to fully
grasp what the image of Batman holds for Western culture, it will be
important to explore the narrative and its history.
While Batman’s “origin story” has been told with differing inflections,
the core of the story has remained essentially the same. As a young boy,
Bruce Wayne returns home with his parents from a night at the movies
when they are confronted by a thief who murders his parents in front of
him. He is orphaned and raised by the family’s butler, Alfred Pennyworth.
He spends much of his young adulthood preparing his mind and body to
redeem the deaths of his parents by protecting the city’s citizens from
crime. While his oft-stated goal is to avenge the death of his parents, he is
also clearly avenging, or perhaps saving, the boy who lost his innocence,
his childhood, and his feeling of safety, the night that his parents were
murdered before his eyes (Daniels 1999, 34-35).
From the beginning, Batman has been a liminal figure who often holds
the opposites, much like the bat he symbolically wears on his chest. The
first Batman comic introduced him on the cover as being “cowled like a
monk but possessing the powers of a Satan” (Daniels 1999, 27). A cowl is
a garment worn by monks, given to them when they take their monastic
vows. With this reference, Batman was presented as a dark figure with the
powers of those who live in the darkness and in service to something
greater than themselves. Similar to gargoyle statues, which are placed on
churches, for example, to ward off evil, Batman also possesses a dark and
often demonic appearance; yet they each serve to protect people from evil.
Batman is often even depicted perched atop gargoyles surveying the
city below.
 THE SHADOW OF THE BAT: BATMAN AS ARCHETYPAL SHAMAN 213

What does Batman serve? It could be said that he lives in service to his
trauma by his perpetual meditation on how to exhibit power and control
over perpetrators of trauma; therefore, potentially escaping his own sense
of powerlessness. Batman often states that he lives in service of the city of
Gotham, which he occasionally refers to with a feminine gender. It could
also be said that Batman lives in service of life in that his thoughts and
actions are focused on preserving the life of the people of Gotham. Life
often appears as so sacred to him that he will not even take the lives of
criminals who have themselves taken lives. While the answer is most likely
a combination of the above, the latter would echo similar motifs of the
“bat-men” of other cultures, many of whom also stood in service of life,
or symbolically in service of a Great Goddess or Great Mother image.
The story of Batman, interpreted through a Jungian lens, portrays a
confluence of vocation and trauma that gives shape and meaning to the
young Bruce Wayne’s life, which he spends preparing to avenge the death
of his parents. Wayne prepares himself both mentally and physically for
this task, but he is puzzled about how to manifest his idea. As he is pon-
dering how to go about protecting the city, a bat flies in his window inspir-
ing him to take on the identity of Batman. He subsequently fantasizes that
criminals will be fearful of such a menacing and dark figure. While Bruce’s
conscious reasoning is understandable, it is important to ask what deeper
meaning lies behind the bat as a chosen symbol to represent his crime-­
fighting alter ego? Why the bat?
At this point in his origin story, it could be said that Bruce Wayne has
found his totem animal, or that his totem animal has found him. The
belief in a totem or totem animal comes from the traditions of many
Indigenous tribes (Hirschfelder and Molin 2001). The totem was often
seen as a guiding and protective spirit that was connected with the tribe or
the individual. In most traditions, the totem was viewed as an apical ances-
tor of the tribe or significant individual. Tribes who worshiped the bat
often saw themselves as descendants of the bat: “In North America, there
is a certain feeling of affinity between a kin group or clan and its totem.
There are taboos against killing clan animals, as humans are kin to the
animals whose totems they represent” (Hirschfelder and Molin 2001,
307). In some cases, totem spirits are clan protectors and the site of reli-
gious activity. In many of these traditions the totem animal chooses the
tribe or individual through a special encounter with the animal in their
inner or outer lives, much like the bat flying through the window of Bruce
Wayne’s study. The totem is said to reflect qualities of the tribe or the
214 J. TODD

individual, and gives them instruction on how to live their lives in accord
with nature (Hirschfelder and Molin 2001).
If the bat is Bruce Wayne’s totem, then what qualities does he possess
that are reflected in the image of the bat? To many Indigenous peoples,
the bat was seen as a sacred animal for several reasons. Tribal communities
recognized how bats “serve” nature and themselves by eating the insects
that plagued their crops, and by pollinating or reseeding the plants that
their lives revolved around. Likewise, Batman works to stop criminals who
prey on the innocents of Gotham, much like harmful insects prey on crops.
The bat also reflects the traits of the shaman. Like the bat, the shaman
has the unique ability to move between two worlds, as well as the special
gift of seeing and hearing what others cannot. Bruce Wayne lives and
moves between two worlds as he runs his family business by day and fights
crime as Batman by night. The similarity to the shaman is also reflected in
Batman fighting the criminals who Gotham’s police force is unable to stop
on their own, much like the shaman is consulted to address issues that
cannot be addressed by other members of the tribe. Like the psychopomp,
the shaman is the intermediary or messenger between the human and
spirit worlds who has the ability to bring healing and balance to the tribe
or the individual plagued by malevolent spirits.
According to Pratt (2007):

The costumes of Anglo-Saxon shamen often contained the energy of his or

her helping spirits. These energies were often embodied in the costume by
the application of feathers, stones, and other magical objects, which con-
tained the energy of the helping spirits. To don the costume was to engage
in the process of embodying one’s helping spirit, and thus gain its
powers. (25)

These helping spirits come to the shaman in animal form and possess
the power of the entire species of that animal. They guide the shaman in
healing work and in some way represent his or her identity in the spirit
world. The proper relationship to the spirit animal is essential, for this is
the source of the shaman’s power. To the shaman, the animals are mani-
festations of a power far greater and wiser than themselves, and therefore,
do not belong to them, nor do they control these animals. As the shaman
merges with the animal spirit, he or she receives knowledge and the power
to bring healing to others (Eliade 1972). In shamanic fashion, Batman has
taken on the life-affirming qualities of the bat. These qualities were
 THE SHADOW OF THE BAT: BATMAN AS ARCHETYPAL SHAMAN 215

experienced and revered by many early peoples. Bruce Wayne has come
into relationship with the bat by heeding its call and donning its costume,
thereby transforming from Bruce Wayne into Batman.
From a Jungian perspective, Bruce Wayne’s transformation into Batman
can additionally be interpreted as the individual assuming the form of a
“mana personality.”
As Jung (1977) writes:

The mana-personality is a dominant of the collective unconscious, the well-­

known archetype of the mighty man in the form of hero, chief, magician,
medicine-man, saint, the ruler of men and spirits, the friend of God.
(para. 377)

Historically, the mana-personality evolves into the hero and the godlike
being, whose earthly form is the priest. How very much the doctor is still
mana is the whole plaint of the analyst! (para. 389)

When Bruce Wayne becomes Batman, he enters an inflated state in

which he gathers the power inherent in the archetype of the hero, poten-
tially acting under the mistaken impression that it is his own power. Such
inflation and identification with an archetype is typically unhealthy and
inevitably unsustainable. However, the potentially positive side of this
dynamic is when an individual consciously steps into the role of a mana
personality out of necessity, and then consciously leaves it behind when it
is no longer appropriate, such as when doctors, priests, or analysts per-
form – and complete – their duties.
Why does Gotham need a Batman-as-shaman? Gotham has a police
force to combat criminal activity and protect its citizens. However, the
Gotham City Police Department is not equipped to deal with the extent
of the crime that plagues its city. Batman usually takes on the crime that is
beyond the scope of the Gotham City police department. When the
defenses that would normally serve to protect the city fail, Batman steps
in. His typical foes can be seen more as embodiments of archetypes of
negative forces in the world than literal people, or at least as individuals
who are possessed by these archetypes. Much like the shaman, Batman
enters the night to bring balance, healing, and hope to his tribe, the citi-
zens of Gotham. The figure of Batman also functions as a carrier of this
healing and hopeful energy in the psyche for his readers and viewers. As
psychopomp, he offers psychological balance, facilitating the
216 J. TODD

re-­establishment of the connection between consciousness and the uncon-

scious. The Batman figure and its popularity also provide balance to the
Western rejection of the bat’s potential for transformation (the vampire
who sucks and drains, but cannot transform), much as alchemy provided
balance to the one-sided nature of Christianity in medieval times
(Jung 1993).
Bruce Wayne is also depicted as a survivor of childhood trauma. The
typical experience of the childhood trauma survivor is one in which affect
and the complexes that surface from the unconscious tend to be much
further from consciousness, and therefore may be experienced as less per-
sonal in nature (archetypal). The nature of these early wounds, and the
child’s inability to metabolize or experience the trauma, also lends to this
dynamic. Therefore, the defenses of the average person (the Gotham
Police) are not equipped to handle such powerful affect or “complex”
forces. The Gotham Police Department can be seen as a reflection of a
psychological intermediary (a kind of psychopomp) between conscious-
ness and the unconscious, which serves to mediate the contents of the
unconscious. From a psychological perspective, a well-developed and high
functioning “police department” might employ appropriate defenses that
result in emotional self-regulation; however, a “police department” that is
either underdeveloped or overwhelmed by the contents of the uncon-
scious, will often employ more pathological defenses, such as splitting,
dissociation, and acting out, in order to cope. Many of Batman’s enemies
employ these pathological defense mechanisms. The story continues to
reflect the struggle to maintain a healthy connection and relationship
between consciousness and the unconscious.
Thus, it seems that despite the fear and disdain in Western culture for
one bat-man (Lucifer), it has embraced another in Batman. While there
could be many interpretations of this acceptance, I believe that it is in part
a manifestation of a collective cultural need for a psychopomp. Much like
the Matangi tribe needed Toba Fu to guide them, and the Chinese needed
Zhong Qui to battle the demons, contemporary culture is in need of a
light-bringer to lead people out of the darkness of the unconscious in
order to connect more fully with their whole selves.
 THE SHADOW OF THE BAT: BATMAN AS ARCHETYPAL SHAMAN 217

Conclusion
Human psychological experience tends to split into polarities, such as
right and wrong, black and white, or good and evil. That which is experi-
enced as “evil” is often relegated to the shadow and is projected onto
animals, persons, and ideologies (among other things) that appear most
alien or least unacceptable. The projection serves the vital function of giv-
ing us an opportunity to come into relationship with these aspects of our-
selves. The repugnance of the bat (both literal and figurative) observed in
Western culture, and simultaneous fascination with Batman, is a modern
expression of a collective struggle with this tension of the opposites. There
is a similar dynamic in the compensatory relationship between Lucifer and
the Christian tradition, and the alchemical bat-man. By projecting one’s
darker psychological aspects onto bats, one has an opportunity to discover
the darker, more vampiric elements of the psyche.
However, as Jung (1993) writes:

If the repressed tendencies, the shadow as I call them, were obviously evil,
there would be no problem whatever. But, the shadow is merely somewhat
inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even con-
tains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embel-
lish human existence, but – convention forbids! (para. 134)

In order for a potential relationship with “shadow” aspects to be fruit-

ful one, one must first become conscious of the projection, withdraw it,
and begin to integrate that which has been cast out. In doing so, one often
finds that which has been deemed “evil” actually has some “good” quali-
ties as well. This allows consciousness to begin to shift from the tendency
to split into polarities, and develop more of a capacity to hold the oppo-
sites contained both within itself, as well as in the outer world.
To project only “good” or “bad” qualities onto an archetypal image or
experience deprives one of a fuller experience of the archetype (and of the
human experience that it leads to), and almost assures one that they will
eventually encounter the shadow side of the archetype when least expected.
The archetypal bat has been experienced in Western culture as a vampire
that takes one’s blood as well as one’s will. As demonstrated here, how-
ever, through a cross-cultural exploration of comparative mythology
involving bats, this vampire lore is only one of many aspects of the uncon-
scious that bats open up. The mythic bat has the capacity to bring light to
the people, leading them out of darkness; it protects the feminine
218 J. TODD

principle, as well as the Sacred. In these roles, the bat functions as psycho-
pomp, a powerful psychic figure who mediates unconscious contents to
consciousness, often imaged as a wise old man or woman and sometimes
as a helpful animal (Sharp 1991, 108).
To allow the psychological development Jung (1977) termed individu-
ation to unfold, it is essential that one stands in good relationship with
that “helpful animal.” The ancient Chinese figure, Zhong Qui, is led by
the bats, which infers that he is in “right” relationship with them. The
Batman story presents us with an image of one who has faced his fear of
the unknown, symbolized in the story by the bat, and has thus formed a
working relationship with the unconscious. Like Zhong Qui, he “follows”
his bats. This relationship allows him to enter into the realm of the uncon-
scious without giving into his fear. In facing his negative projections onto
the bat, he has paradoxically opened himself up to the positive side of the
archetype. That which was once his greatest fear, has now become his ally.
In donning his cape, cowl, and the bat emblem, Batman becomes an
embodiment of the psychopomp, and the guardian of the Sacred.
Jung (1990) describes the psychopomp and the wise old man in the
following way:

He is, like the anima, an immortal daemon that pierces the chaotic darkness
of brute life with the light of meaning. He is the enlightener, the master and
teacher, a psychopomp…. Modern man, in experiencing this archetype,
comes to that most ancient form of thinking as an autonomous activity
whose object he is. Hermes Trismegistus or the Thoth of Hermetic litera-
ture, Orpheus, the Poimandres (shepherd of men) and his near relation the
Poimen of Hermes, are the formulations of the same experience. If the name
“Lucifer” were not prejudicial it would be a very suitable one for this arche-
type. (paras. 77-79)

Not only is this an apt description of the role Batman plays, it also
addresses the polarized thinking mentioned above. Modern culture is
attracted to Batman because “he” holds something that contemporary
culture dearly needs to integrate. The attraction in Western culture to
Batman simultaneously reflects the need for a relationship with the uncon-
scious side of life (i.e., an “inner bat,” or psychopomp), and the need for
a relationship with those figures in the outer world who once fulfilled this
role for us, such as the shaman, “medicine man,” or modern day profes-
sionals who are attuned to the unconscious, and the archetypal world in
general.
 THE SHADOW OF THE BAT: BATMAN AS ARCHETYPAL SHAMAN 219

In Trauma and the Soul (2013), Jungian psychoanalyst Donald

Kalsched, offers an image of an Inuit whale bone carving titled “The
Storyteller” (6). It is a human face with one eye open and the other closed.
Kalsched explains that this image is reflective of the ability to keep one
“eye” on the outer world and another on the inner world (the uncon-
scious), simultaneously. He states that in order for trauma to be under-
stood fully, both “eyes” must be honored. Kalsched writes:

We are all accustomed to the familiar world that comes into view through
the onward looking eye of this mask. Visible through this eye is the sensate
material world of outer reality – the ordinary temporal world…. The world
we see through the inward looking eye is less familiar – invisible to outer-­
sight and yet no less real – more mysterious perhaps and sometimes, because
of this very mystery, uncomfortable for modern men and women. (6-7)

He goes on to state that while this is a strange notion for most modern
people, it was not for certain Indigenous peoples who called on the sha-
man to be able to travel between the two worlds.
While this may indeed be a strange notion for the modern person on a
conscious level, it seems related to our culture’s attraction to the shaman-­
like image of Batman and repugnance of the bat. Images of the psycho-
pomp, such as the mythic bat-men explored here, the modern-day Batman,
and the shaman, are potential antidotes for the inner conflict that cultural
“repugnance” reveals. They are possible guides who might aid in trans-
forming one’s relationship to the unconscious. The analyst in modern
times, like the shaman, is called on to assist in the awakening of the “inner
bat,” or psychopomp, within analysands, and thus to aid in their develop-
ment of an ability to mediate the contents of the unconscious, thus “travel
between the two worlds” on their own. At some point in the analytic
process this will entail the analysand facing his own deepest and darkest
fears. For all of us, it is in the process of facing our fears both internally and
externally that we have the opportunity to find the inner “bat.”

References
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Eliade, M. 1972. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton

University Press.
Grimal, P. 1951. The Dictionary of Classical Mythology. London: Blackwell.
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Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Vol. 7). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 1990. The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. Trans. R.F.C. Hull, The
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———. 1993. Psychology and Alchemy. Trans. R.F.C. Hull, The Collected Works
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Kern, S. 1988. Bats in Chinese Art, Bats: Bat Conservation International (6.4).
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Morgan, G. 1996. The Devil. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books.
Neumann, E. 1954. The Origin and History of Consciousness. New York:
Pantheon Books.
Pratt, C. 2007. An Encyclopedia of Shamanism. New York: Rosen Publishing.
Renfro, S. 1988. The Bat in Navajo Lore, Bats: Bat Conservation International (6.1).
Samuels, A., B. Shorter, and F. Plaut. 1986. A Critical Dictionary of Jungian
Analysis. New York: Routledge.
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Religious Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Zimmer, C. 1948. The King and the Corpse. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
 “To Survive and Still Dream”: Ritual
and Reclamation in Little Bird

Jennifer Tronti

Abstract Winner of the Eisner Award for Best Limited Series (2020),
Little Bird: The Fight for Elder’s Hope presents readers with a postapocalyp-
tic vision which pits an obscenely corrupt totalitarian religious regime
against an indigenously inspired rebel community. In pages steeped in
rich, lushly saturated hues of red, aqua, and violet, writer Darcy Van
Poelgeest and artist Ian Bertram’s eponymous character Little Bird swoops
into each comic panel – deftly fierce and gravely vulnerable. The comic is
a picture of archetypal contrasts: between institution and individual,
between other and self, between death and life, between real and imag-
ined, between story and experience.

Keywords Little Bird • Ritual theory • Postapocalyptic • Indigenous

land • Theocracy

J. Tronti (*)
Modern Languages and Literature, California Baptist University,
Riverside, CA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 221

Switzerland AG 2023
D. M. Odorisio (ed.), A New Gnosis, Contemporary Religion and
Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1_11
222 J. TRONTI

Winner of the Eisner Award for Best Limited Series (2020), Little Bird:
The Fight for Elder’s Hope presents readers with a postapocalyptic vision
which pits an obscenely corrupt totalitarian religious regime against an
indigenously inspired rebel community. In pages steeped in rich, lushly
saturated hues of red, aqua, and violet, writer Darcy Van Poelgeest and
artist Ian Bertram’s eponymous character Little Bird swoops into each
comic panel – deftly fierce and gravely vulnerable. The comic is a picture
of archetypal contrasts: between institution and individual, between other
and self, between death and life, between real and imagined, between
story and experience.
Through subtle psychological and spiritual depths underlying a graphic
spectacle of blood and violence, Van Poelgeest and Bertram’s Little Bird
gives voice and shape to the myriad ambiguities and ambivalences of the
human condition. “I want to leap off the edge and fly,” Little Bird tells us,
“But the world – It calls my name” (Van Poelgeest and Bertram 2019). It
should be noted here that in the image panels which contain these words
Little Bird has been pierced by her biological father’s sword. Bishop, her
father, who is also the fanatic leader of the comic’s violent religious regime,
holds the skewered body of his daughter aloft while the tableau is mir-
rored in a stark shadow. Little Bird’s discovery of who she is and concomi-
tant navigation of who she chooses to be dominates the narrative. Her
process of discovery and becoming is represented as a textual negotiation.
What only becomes clear in the final issue of the series is that what has
seemed to be the inclusion of Little Bird’s internal dialogue throughout
the narrative has all along been entries in her written account of her expe-
riences. In discovery and reflection, Little Bird is written out and into –
both the text itself and the reader’s imagination.
In the context of this discussion, “writing” can also be used to encom-
pass drawing or other forms of creation (e.g., poiesis) so that writing and
becoming are inextricably linked in the comic Little Bird (Van Poelgeest
and Bertram 2019), not only for Little Bird’s diegesis but also for readers’
nondiegetic position. In the context of comics, “writing” can arguably be
viewed as a conflagration of word and image – a textual performance for
the reader which demands the reader’s participation in order to be mean-
ingfully enacted or “read.” In Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction,
Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, Jeffrey Kripal (2011) remarks:

Authorization begins when we decide to step out of the script we now know
ourselves to be caught in and begin to write ourselves anew. If Realization is
 “TO SURVIVE AND STILL DREAM”: RITUAL AND RECLAMATION… 223

the insight that we are being written, Authorization is the decision to do

something about it. If Realization involves the act of reading the paranormal
writing us, Authorization involves the act of writing the paranormal writ-
ing us. (254)

In his comments above, Kripal describes a reflexive textuality to the

individual’s as well as the culture’s process of becoming aware and operat-
ing with agency. Kripal makes deliberate use of the textual metaphor as a
means for interpreting personal and cultural awareness and development,
and Kripal’s comments can apply as much to the comic book genre as they
can apply to a spiritual and cultural understanding of ourselves in relation
to our many layered environments.
Kripal (2011) delineates the overarching endeavor of Mutants and
Mystics to demonstrate “how these modern mythologies can be fruitfully
read as cultural transformations of real-life paranormal experiences, and
how there is no way to disentangle the very public pop-culture products
from the very private paranormal experiences” (2). Kripal’s exploration of
comics does not shy away from the religious dimension; instead, employ-
ing his expertise as a historian of religions, his text wholeheartedly engages
the religious dimension of the comic genre’s content and creation. In this
view, the textual experience created by comics, a complex genre-­
amalgamation of words and images, may best be interpreted through the
performative and participatory features of ritual theory.
Classic definitions of ritual often revolve around initiation processes
(Arnold Van Gennep’s Rites of Passage 1960), societal patterns (Victor
Turner’s The Ritual Process 1995), or religious distinctions (Mircea
Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane 1987). Historically, ritual theory has
relied upon a variety of disciplines from religious studies to anthropology
and art to literature and theater to sociology and psychology. Ritual theo-
ry’s interdisciplinary nature has demanded an equally interdisciplinary
approach, an interdisciplinarity which is echoed in comics. Longstanding
critical proponent of the genre, Scott McCloud (1994) defines “comics”
as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended
to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the
viewer” (9). The simultaneous relationship between comic text and reader
is dynamic. Not unlike theories of ritual, McCloud’s definition emphasizes
the comic’s participatory and performative nature. Interdisciplinary and
experiential: comics and ritual share much in common.
224 J. TRONTI

In pragmatic terms, Theodore Jennings (1995) describes ritual as both

“a pattern of action” and “a way of knowing” (325). Jennings’s simple yet
affective summation discloses ritual’s, and I would add here comic’s, tex-
tuality as an enacted work (text) and a methodology of embodiment (poei-
sis). McCloud (1994) concludes his creative treatise Understanding
Comics by propounding reflexively and religiously, “Comics…offers range
and versatility with all the potential imagery of film and painting plus the
intimacy of the written word and all that’s needed is the desire to be
heard – the will to learn – and the ability to see” (212-213). McCloud’s
language here is revelatory, echoing Biblical references to the multifaceted
nuances between capacity and application of the physical and spiritual
senses (Ezek. 12:2; Mark 8:18). In Our Gods Wear Spandex, Christopher
Knowles (2007) declares, “Comics are a profoundly intimate form of sto-
rytelling” (213). Knowles also insists upon the material, substantive car-
nality of comics, affirming that “they are something you can hold,
something you can possess, something that speaks only to you” (213).
While Knowles comments on the more “intimate” nature of comics, he
employs a similarly revelatory, albeit idiosyncratic, description to that of
McCloud’s.
Yet again, within a similar vein, Kripal’s (2011) critical focus of Mutants
and Mystics is not only upon the religious dimension of comics but also
upon the cross-cultural nature of comics represented by “popular culture
[that] is suffused with …mythemes…which are forming a kind of Super-­
Story, a modern living mythology…[which] are completely indebted to
other cultures, even as they profoundly transform that which they adopt
and embrace from these other sources” (330). Kripal’s language speaks of
“forming,” “living,” and “transform[ing]” qualities of comics. Surely,
these active descriptors speak in the language of ritual, the language of
affirming and becoming so integral to the nature of ritualizing.
“Forming,” “living,” and “transform[ing]” – each of Kripal’s words
reflects ritual’s propensity for embodiment and enactment. This language
emphasizes the nature of ritual to make manifest boundaries. Mircea
Eliade (1987) has famously explained that “every sacred space implies a
hierophany, an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory
from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different”
(26). Later in his text, Eliade describes the hierophanic experience as one
in which “the real unveils itself” (63). In his TED Talk, “The Visual Magic
of Comics,” Scott McCloud (2005) describes “media” in the form of
comics as a “way back,” as a means for “re-entering the world.” And once
 “TO SURVIVE AND STILL DREAM”: RITUAL AND RECLAMATION… 225

again, in Understanding Comics, McCloud (1994) argues that the comic’s

“creator and reader are partners in the invisible” (205). Considered in this
light, the comic text as a whole as well as each individual panel of images
within Van Poelgeest and Bertram’s Little Bird (2019) can be viewed
through the lens of a hierophanic moment.
The “profoundly intimate form” (Knowles 2007, 213) of comics – a
textual form that Knowles also contends has “a special magic that affects
the brain in ways prose does not” (213) – is tempered by the comic’s spec-
tacular propensity for melodrama and violence. Exaggerated gestures,
sweeping and sinuous swaths of blood, mantra-esque refrains, and alter-
nating rhythms of close and far, serene and chaotic – Little Bird’s textual
orchestration of words, images, and concepts lends itself to readers’ active,
participatory experience. There are several elements within Little Bird’s
narrative which lend themselves to a ritual studies approach, namely: the
creators’ use of a postapocalyptic and indigenous-inspired cosmology,
Little Bird’s identification with particular animals, the text’s integral meta-
phor of blood, and Little Bird’s own textual reflexivity.
The narrative events of Little Bird range between an imagined indige-
nous community located within the natural environs of the Canadian
Rocky Mountains to the tightly controlled urban space of the perverse
religious regime of the New Vatican of the United Nations of America.
Despite writer Van Poelgeest’s initial attempts to downplay “confusion
from readers and reviewers that [he’s] writing about the Musqueam peo-
ple” (Johnson 2019) in an interview for bookseller Barnes and Noble’s
Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog, it is more than just the comic’s “land acknowledg-
ment” that is aligned with and indebted to an indigenous perspective. The
very first page of the comic opens with a close up of Little Bird’s mother
Tantoo in what appears to be some form of traditional face paint. Tantoo,
Little Bird, and the community are dressed in earthily organic, animal
inspired dress, clearly relying upon iconic and culturally traditional indig-
enous clothing.
In the next panel, Tantoo addresses her people from atop the vantage
point of a tall, totemic pillar. Tantoo’s speech illustrates depths from which
Little Bird’s community values its land, its ancestors, and its children. In
her rallying cry for battle, Tantoo declares, “This doesn’t end here. Not
like this. We’ve protected this land with our own blood for thousands of
years, so if it’s the land they want, it’s blood they’ll pay to get it! Let their
screams be the song to which we fight! Their passing be the silence in
which we dream!” (Van Poelgeest and Bertram 2019). Tantoo’s
226 J. TRONTI

identification of the “dream” will be repeated through the comic, reminis-

cent of the Australian Aboriginal’s notion of the “‘Dreaming,’ that is,
within the mythical time of the ancestors” (Smith 3). This “dream”
becomes a mythic sense of space and being with which Little Bird’s com-
munity coexists, and her community’s notion of the “dream” as both a
literal and metaphysical temporal and spatial construct will contrast with
the New Vatican’s dogmatic, destructive, and subjugating approach to
the world.
According to Kali Simmons (2019), “Scholars such as Kim Tall Bear,
Grace Dillon, and Kyle Powys White have argued that indigenous peoples
are already postapocalyptic. That is, indigenous peoples have already faced
catastrophic violence, the loss of relationships, and the fundamental altera-
tion of their ways of life to survive in spaces that are physically, emotion-
ally, and spiritually toxic” (175). In a recent article for The Nation on the
American and Indigenous responses to COVID-19, Julian Brave
NoiseCat (2020) identifies himself as a “postapocalyptic indigenous” (31)
person; NoiseCat further identifies his postapocalyptic vision not only
within his cultural worldview but down to his culture’s language itself.
NoiseCat comments that “the traditional way to say ‘good morning’ is
tsecwínucw-k, pronounced ‘chook-we-nook’… It literally translates to
‘you survived the night’” (31). Survival is a significant concept for both
the indigenous postapocalyptic perspective as well as Van Poelgeest and
Bertram’s comic cosmology within Little Bird.
Little Bird’s survival symbolizes not only the continuance of her famil-
ial lineage – however complicated it might be – but also her survival sym-
bolizes the continuity of her entire community and its notion of the world
itself. Throughout the five issues comprising Book One: The Fight for
Elder’s Hope, Little Bird repeats her mother’s plan: “Free the Axe. Save the
people. Free the north. Save the world. (Van Poelgeest and Bertram
2019). Broken into four semantic declarations, this plan’s language is sim-
ple, directional, and ritualistic. Saving Axe, a Canadian hero imprisoned
within one of the New Vatican’s technological facilities, represents a hori-
zontal move within the comic’s diegetic landscape. Freeing the north,
shorthand for her ancestral peoples and their implied ecological harmony,
represents a vertical move in which Little Bird must make contact with the
mythical realm of her ancestors, a realm at once subterranean and ephem-
eral, an interior realm of interior psychological depth, a transcendent
realm of hope. “Free the Axe. Save the people. Free the north. Save the
world”: these words represent a ritual boundary marking, establishing the
 “TO SURVIVE AND STILL DREAM”: RITUAL AND RECLAMATION… 227

intersection, the crossing, between one realm and the next, between a
people and a land, between profane and sacred. “Free” and “save” are
words that operate as declarative demands for redemptive action.
“Survivance,” according to Kristina Baudemann (2016), “is Gerald
Vizenor’s term for the active survival of Indigenous peoples and stories
through creative resistance. Rather than a specific theme or trope, surviv-
ance is a strategy that creates ‘a native sense of presence’” (126). While
Baudemann’s essay argues that this is a concept and methodology
employed by Indigenous artists themselves, it is not too much of a stretch
to see similar vestiges of “survivance” within Van Poelgeest and Bertram’s
Little Bird, despite its creators’ nonindigenous identities.
Speaking to this point, Van Poelgeest remarks, “I certainly didn’t set
out to tell a uniquely indigenous story…But as I began imagining this
world, and the mechanics that drive it, it became more and more difficult
to not see the protagonist as being connected to the indigenous commu-
nity” (Johnson 2019). Within the context of identity politics and cultural
appropriation, Little Bird’s use of the Indigenous could be fraught with
controversy, but the creators’ obvious warmth for the character and her
Indigenous-inspired perspectives as well as the comic’s positive identifica-
tion of an Indigenous-inspired worldview in direct contrast with the colo-
nizing totalitarianism of a perverse religious state, perhaps, mitigates
strident negative critiques. In recognition of the personal nature of the
creative process, Van Poelgeest notes that, “Ian [Bertram] has pointed out
on more than one occasion that Little Bird looks a lot like my daughter
(who is mixed Black, white, Chinese and Indigenous)” (Johnson 2019).
Little Bird, a young girl of mixed heritage (the white Canadian cultural
hero Axe is her grandfather and the twisted religious tyrant of the New
Vatican Bishop is her father), is raised within the Indigenous community
of her mother. She is reared upon an Indigenous sense of survival that is
attuned to a cyclical rather than linear sensibility. This cyclical sensibility
moves and speaks in ritual rhythms.
Little Bird’s individual identity and her psychological empowerment
are infused with a steely post-apocalypticism. A postapocalyptic perspec-
tive can, in part, be defined by the aforementioned Indigenous under-
standing of survival in the midst of oppression and hardship. However, a
postapocalyptic perspective may, also, be defined by inversions of expecta-
tions and polarizing tensions. In an essay titled, “Reorientations; or, An
Indigenous Feminist Reflection on the Anthropocene,” Kali Simmons
(2019) argues that “apocalypse…exemplifies a dystopian impulse defined
228 J. TRONTI

by destruction and catastrophe and a utopian impulse that fuels the rebirth
of new hope or a new world rising from the ashes” (180). Simmons’s
explanation articulates post-apocalypticism’s inclusion of the opposites.
Destruction and creation, life and death’s impulses, are integrally inter-
twined within the postapocalyptic genre, for this genre emphasizes the
generative nature of the aftermath (postapocalyptic). The postapocalyptic
genre and ritual alike take the substance of the aftermath in order to con-
secrate memory and to create anew; this requires the religious engage-
ment of ritual movements.
Simmons’s explanation of the apocalyptic, like Little Bird herself, reso-
nates with imagery reminiscent of the phoenix. While Jean-Pierre Darmon
(1992) delineates birds themselves as representative “intermediaries
between high and low” (131), Luc Brisson (1992), more specifically, des-
ignates the phoenix as “the mythic bird in which all opposites coincide”
(172). While Little Bird’s name evokes a diminutive fragility, Little Bird
the person embraces the visceral violence upon which she is called to
engage. Her appearance is often masked by a feathery cape and mask with
large, rounded goggles and pointedly beaked nose guard so that her
appearance conjoins the human and the animal.
Michael Chaney (2011) argues that “concerns with being in-between
are themselves articulated at a boundary of identity and representation”
(133), a boundary such as the distinction between human and animal.
Chaney argues further, “That paradox is best expressed in the way comics
routinely problematize the human by blurring the ontological boundary
between humans and animals according to the same logic that fuses and
separates words and pictures” (133). Little Bird’s identification with ani-
mals, both the lofty owl and the grounded wolf, ironically allows her to
distinguish herself from the dehumanizing figures of the religious regime.
And her animal identification facilitates the development of agency for
herself as well as for her community. Issue two of Little Bird begins with
her initiation into her own genetic composition. After being shot and
dying, she discovers that like her mother and grandfather her body con-
tains the “resurrection gene.” Certainly emblematic of the phoenix, the
“resurrection gene” allows Little Bird to die and to be reborn for an inde-
terminant number of times. Little Bird is not immortal, but she is geneti-
cally predisposed for survival.
In an interview for Image Comics’s website, artist Ian Bertram (“Little
Bird” 2018) describes a shared creative “interest” with writer Darcy Van
Poelgeest in “untold stories” and “how to show the ‘soul’ of a character.”
 “TO SURVIVE AND STILL DREAM”: RITUAL AND RECLAMATION… 229

Bertram also confesses to an “[obsession] with the subconscious and its

manifestations.” In Little Bird, Bertram and Van Poelgeest’s interests in
realm of the “soul,” the sub/unconscious is accessed not only by Little
Bird’s repeated interior journeys courtesy of the “resurrection” process,
but it is also accessed by consciously-driven engagement with the liminal
features of ritual. In To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual, Jonathan
Z. Smith (1987) identifies “ritual [as] a relationship of difference between
‘nows’ – the now of everyday life and the now of ritual place; the simulta-
neity, but not the coexistence, of ‘here’ and ‘there.’ Here (in the world)
blood is a major source of impurity. Here (in the ritual space) blood
removes impurity” (110). Because Little Bird exists within a postapocalyp-
tic cosmology, the ritual boundaries between Smith’s “here” and “there,”
or Eliade’s “profane” and “sacred,” have themselves been blurred and
inverted. In a postapocalyptic perspective, not only does the entire dys-
topic landscape represents liminal space, the body and its blood, too, may
become a liminal site, a site upon and through which redemption and
reclamation may be engaged and enacted.
By distorting our complacent perceptions of the “real,” Little Bird’s
postapocalyptic milieu simultaneously affirms and transforms our vision –
not unlike the nature of ritual itself. In Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of
Viewing Religion, William Paden (2003) observes that “for [Emile]
Durkheim the most important function of ritual time was to renew the
foundations of society itself, to regenerate the ‘life’ of its own beliefs”
(34). Conversely, Paden intimates that “ritual can also provide a space in
which individuals transcend fixed social roles and experience a sense of
equality” (35). As Paden’s comments illustrate, ritual can both renew and
transcend its cosmological perspectives.
At times, ritual may mirror the movements of the phoenix, a quintes-
sentially postapocalyptic creature. As Little Bird will write, “More than
anything – [her story is] about the all-consuming nature of fire. And the
dreams we make of ash” (Van Poelgeest and Bertram 2019). While the
phoenix itself is never named, Van Poelgeest and Bertram coalesce the
turbulently regenerative qualities of the phoenix into a creative reclama-
tion of story, word, and image. Little Bird writes her own story. Her jour-
nal entries speak in the personal first person, but they also make use of the
second person “we.” In fact, her mother Tantoo’s first lines, “This doesn’t
end here. Not like this,” will be echoed at the end of the comic. In a series
of panels that demonstrate Little Bird’s burgeoning control through an
ability to enter the ritual ancestral “Dream” space, an obviously more
230 J. TRONTI

mature Little Bird declares, “The child has arrived. It doesn’t end here.
Not like this.” Little Bird stands firmly within her Indigenous communi-
ty’s sacred space when she grabs hold of bloody tentacles within her fist to
proclaim, “Not like this.” It is a declaration of agency. It is a promise of
transformative renewal. It is a visual and verbal marking of boundaries. It
is a ritual move. While a sense of individual identity is significant, ritual
emphasizes the integration of the personal with the communal. For Little
Bird, the comic, and Little Bird, the character, ritual perspective revolves
around the individual “I” negotiating with the communal “we” in pat-
terns that inscribe, dismantle, and consecrate in body, blood, and book.

References
Baudemann, Kristina. 2016. Indigenous Futurisms in North American Indigenous
Art: The Transforming Visions of Ryan Singer, Daniel McCoy, Topaz Jones,
Marla Allison, and Debra Yepa-Pappan. Extrapolation 57 (1–2): 117–150.
Brisson, Luc. 1992. Eros. In Greek and Egyptian Mythologies, ed. Yves Bonnefoy,
164–172. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chaney, Michael A. 2011. Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel. College Literature
38 (3): 129–149.
Darmon, Jean-Pierre. 1992. The Classical Greek Bestiary. In Greek and Egyptian
Mythologies, ed. Yves Bonnefoy, 131–133. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Eliade, Mircea. 1987. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans.
W.R. Trask. New York: Harvest.
Jennings, Theodore W., Jr. 1995. On Ritual Knowledge. In Readings in Ritual
Studies, ed. Ronald L. Grimes, 324–334. Prentice Hall.
Johnson, Ross. 2019. Hope Exists: Darcy Van Poelgeest and Ian Bertram Discuss
Their Comics Saga Little Bird. B & N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog. 14 Nov. https://
www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-­f i-­f antasy/hope-­e xists-­d arcy-­v an-­
poelgeest-­and-­ian-­bertram-­on-­little-­bird/.
Little Bird. 2018. Little Bird’s Darcy Van Poelgeest and Ian Bertram Craft a Fever
Dream About Resistance and Identity. Image Comics. 21 Dec. 2018, https://
imagecomics.com/features/little-­birds-­darcy-­van-­poelgeest-­and-­ian-­bertram-­
craft-­a-­fever-­dream-­about-­resistance-­and-­identity.
Knowles, Christopher. 2007. Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic
Book Heroes. Weiser Books.
Kripal, Jeffrey J. 2011. Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and
the Paranormal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. William Morrow.
———. 2005. The Visual Magic of Comics. TED. ted.com/talks/scott_mccloud_
on_comics?language=en.
 “TO SURVIVE AND STILL DREAM”: RITUAL AND RECLAMATION… 231

NoiseCat, Julian Brave. 2020. Indian Country: A Postapocalyptic People: What It

Means to Survive and Dream. The Nation. June 15/22: 30–33.
Paden, William E. 2003. Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Simmons, Kali. 2019. Reorientations; or, An Indigenous Feminist Reflection on
the Anthropocene. JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58
(2): 174–179.
Smith, Jonathan Z. 1987. To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Turner, Victor. 1995. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York:
Routledge.
Van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Trans. Monika B. Vizedom and
Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Van Poelgeest, Darcy, and Ian Bertram. 2019. Little Bird: Book One: The Fight for
Elder’s Hope. Image Comics.
Graffiti in the Grass: Worldbuilding and Soul
Survival Through Image, Immersive Myth,
and the Metaxis

Li Sumpter

Abstract Mythmakers are worldbuilders. We are living in a time when the

world, as we know it, feels painfully unrecognizable, and increasingly dan-
gerous. War and violence are raging all around us, pandemics claim the
lives of millions, and the planet is burning. Ancient future visions of apoca-
lypse permeate the visual landscape and the stories we tell—from the real-
ity of our everyday experience to our wildest dreams and imaginary worlds.
It is times like these—End Times—when the archetypes of religion reso-
nate deeply and paths to salvation are eagerly sought after by the human
race, by any means necessary. From mythic and ecological perspectives,
apocalypse is not the ultimate end but a timeless process of change. It is a
recurring pattern of transformation inherent to the phenomenology of life
itself. It is a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that nature, the cosmos, and
all existence are fated to face time and time again.

L. Sumpter (*)
MythMedia Studios and the Escape Artist Initiative, Philadelphia, PA, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 233

Switzerland AG 2023
D. M. Odorisio (ed.), A New Gnosis, Contemporary Religion and
Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1_12
234 L. SUMPTER

Keywords Afrofuture • Worldbuilding • Apocalypse • Immsersive

storytelling • Image and soul • Survival

Mythmakers are worldbuilders.

We are living in a time when the world, as we know it, feels painfully
unrecognizable, and increasingly dangerous. War and violence are raging
all around us, pandemics claim the lives of millions, and the planet is burn-
ing. Ancient future visions of apocalypse permeate the visual landscape
and the stories we tell—from the reality of our everyday experience to our
wildest dreams and imaginary worlds. It is times like these—End Times—
when the archetypes of religion resonate deeply and paths to salvation are
eagerly sought after by the human race, by any means necessary. From
mythic and ecological perspectives, apocalypse is not the ultimate end but
a timeless process of change. It is a recurring pattern of transformation
inherent to the phenomenology of life itself. It is a cycle of birth, death,
and rebirth that nature, the cosmos, and all existence are fated to face time
and time again.
From a religious perspective, each new age and the evolution of human-
ity brings the death of old gods and the birth of new ones. James Hillman
(1974) claimed, “Psychologically, the Gods are never dead; and archetypal
psychology’s concern is not with the revival of religion, but with the sur-
vival of soul” (119). In The New Gnosis, Roberts Avens (1984) proposes,
for the human soul to survive, humans must acquire Gnostic knowledge,
salvational knowledge, “a recollection, a remembering of a worldly soul
and of an ensouled world” (9). In apocalyptic times, we are called to recol-
lect, re-member and radically re-imagine reality, as we know it, so we can
rise from the ashes and build again.
As a human of this planet, I hold deep concerns for the future and the
soul survival of all peoples and life on Earth that transcends cultural, polit-
ical, and religious divides. As an African American woman with ancestral
ties to the Lenni Lenape of the Delaware Valley and the Gullah-Geechie
peoples of South Carolina, I stand in solidarity with black, brown, and
indigenous communities who fight for land sovereignty, self-­determination,
and safe spaces to live and dream brighter, blacker futures. The communi-
ties and causes I am connected to continue to shape and deepen my prac-
tice as a mythologist and multidisciplinary artist while providing fuel for
the fire of my creative resistance against all threats to my body, mind, and
soul and the anima mundi—the soul of the world.
 GRAFFITI IN THE GRASS: WORLDBUILDING AND SOUL SURVIVAL… 235

As a child of the ’80s growing up under global threats of the Cold War
and nuclear apocalypse, I was haunted by the question, “What If?” What
if we go to war? What if Russia drops a bomb on us? These fears were fed
by the nightly news, TV shows, and popular movies from War Games to
Red Dawn. The world of film and visual culture is where my imagination
around the art of survival ran wild. But it is my first-hand experience with
survival that continues to ground my art and mythmaking in the realities
of life’s dangers and fragility.
Ecological disaster and the coronavirus pandemic have revealed glaring
disparities in the distribution of resources and emergency aid to BIPOC
communities often overlooked and underserved, particularly in times of
crises. With this imbalance in mind, the messaging and aesthetics of my
myth-based work focus on amplifying the voices and illuminating the sur-
vival stories of black and brown peoples and the places they call Home.
Philadelphia is home to me. It is a deeply historical and mythical place
where I was born and raised, and it is the epicenter of the Graffiti in the
Grass multiverse.
Graffiti in the Grass is an afro-apocalyptic myth set in future Philly circa
2045. It is an immersive story of speculative fiction designed to be experi-
enced on the page and on stage, on large and small screens, as a live action
game, and through augmented reality. The story follows Roxi RedMoon,
a legendary graffiti writer and local escape artist of African and indigenous
descent on a desperate race through the multiverse to find her missing
sister on the eve of Earth’s imminent cosmic destruction. Octavia
E. Butler’s prophetic novel Parable of the Sower (1993) set in our current
time—the 2020’s—has been a source of inspiration and speculative insight
into the power of apocalyptic transformation that also drives Graffiti in the
Grass. Like Butler’s heroine Lauren Olamina, Roxi RedMoon’s personal
gifts and journey of self-discovery are tied to the future trajectory of her
community and the fate of the planet. Butler brought her observations
and feelings about the world around her into her story world and onto the
page of Parable. Through the imaginal freedom of her fiction, she con-
jured a new God, a new path to salvation, a tool for soul survival for her
characters and readers alike:

All that you touch

You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
236 L. SUMPTER

The only lasting truth

is Change.
God
is Change.
—Earthseed, The Book of the Living (Butler 1993, 3).

These times of uncertainty and change can cultivate new perspectives

and clarity of vision, perhaps even birth new religions, new realities, and
ways of being better humans. The world of speculative fiction can offer
hope and possibility in times of great loss and suffering. The speculative
world of Graffiti in the Grass is born from that same question that inspired
writers like Octavia and once conjured unimaginable horror in my youth—
"What if?” This simple yet limitless question no longer haunts me but has
become the heart and soul of my mythmaking and worldbuilding practice
I call the art of survival:

What if art was used as a tool of readiness and resilience against real-life
threats to our well-being? What if the power of story was used to engage com-
munities in the collective re-imagining of a better world of our own design?

I created the Graffiti in the Grass transmedia narrative and related mul-
tidisciplinary projects to put this inquiry into action. Graffiti is an epic
Quantum Quest, a Heroine’s Journey told across multiple platforms
including a mobile app, Tarot card deck, escape room, and graphic novel
allowing multiple entry points into the participatory narrative. Through
identification with the challenges of the protagonist, Roxi RedMoon, and
the set and setting, readers/players are offered dynamic access to this story
world and the opportunity to cultivate their own approach to the “art of
survival.” Graffiti in the Grass aims to create deeper connections to story
and the power of myth while cultivating eco-awareness and survival skill
sets that have practical application in real-world environments and emer-
gency scenarios. It is a story designed as a tool of soul survival in urgent
times as well as a future artifact intended to re-collect, re-member, and
re-imagine, the soul of the world.
Mythmakers are time travelers.
To create an immersive myth like Graffiti in the Grass, readers/players
must be effectively connected across multiple dimensions and fields of
experience – the story world, the real world, and the archetypal field of
 GRAFFITI IN THE GRASS: WORLDBUILDING AND SOUL SURVIVAL… 237

apocalypse activated through image and symbol. When discussing imagi-

nation and reality and bridges between these worlds, the concept of syn-
chronicity is always a fascinating, almost magical explanation. Synchronicity
is a phenomenon that links acausal events and the dimensions of psyche
and matter through the power and image of archetype. Jung introduced
and developed the concept as contemporary culture has come to know it.
Moreover, he was the first to seriously consider its theoretical impact on
reality and the quantum dynamic of synchronicities:

Jung speculated that psyche and matter are simply two different aspects of
the same thing. Consequently, he explained synchronistic events, which are
temporally related but casually distinct, as being connected by a common
archetype. This view of the indivisibility of psyche and matter takes us into
what Jung described as the psychoid realm. In many respects, this notion of
the psychoid and its bridging of matter and psyche is the concept that allows
for the confluence of Jungian psychology and the new sciences, since each
speaks to an underlying, generative realm from which psyche and matter
arise. (Conforti 1999, 50-51)

Here, in the context of synchronicity, the common denominator

between psyche and matter is archetype. To create an effective immersive
transmedia narrative, Graffiti in the Grass employs the tools of myth- and
meaning-making. Through the alignment of archetype, symbol, time, and
place synchronicity becomes a portal between the psychic and physical
dimensions, between the speculative world of Roxi RedMoon and living
reality of the reader. What appears in the dimension of the psyche can, in
turn, manifest in the phenomenological world in one symbolic form or
another.
Roberts Avens (1984) describes this place of in-between as, “the
ghostly region of metaxis or liminality—the place and time of soul-­making,
the dimension that permeates and transforms the profane duration in all
its phases of past, present, and future” (56). This metaxis—the site of soul-­
making, and the multidimensionality of immersive, transmedia storytell-
ing, aligns most fittingly with the reality of the psyche understood through
the frame of today’s apocalyptic worldview. In the paradigm specific to
analytical psychology, Hillman (1975) explains the psychic nature of the
polytheistic structure as it defies clean cut boundaries of space and time
and distinctions between the sacred and the profane:
238 L. SUMPTER

Polytheistic thinking shifts all our habitual categories and divisions. These
are no longer between transcendent God and secular world, between theol-
ogy and psychology, divine and human. Rather, polytheistic distinctions are
among the Gods as modes of psychological existence operating always and
everywhere. There is no place without Gods and no activity that does not
enact them. (168)

According to Hillman’s perspective, Gods exist among us every day and

in every aspect of life. Contemporary visual and media culture is how
twenty-first century society documents most aspects of human activity. If
such activity effectually enacts the Gods, how does art and media we cre-
ate play a role in enacting the new Gods/Goddesses of our own soul sur-
vival? It is this relationship to and representation of the psychic realm via
the modern image that makes art and cultural imagery the most powerful
tool of myth and media makers of today’s living generations.
Mythmakers are soul-makers.
My art is fueled by existential and metaphysical questions: What hap-
pens to souls of black folx who lack the hope to dream? How can feelings
of danger and safety impact visions of our possible futures? If art truly does
imitate life and myth gives rise to reality, can visual culture and the stories
we tell manifest our collective destiny?
I use symbols of love, light, revolution, and rebirth to cultivate a lexi-
con of hope and healing that can be easily read, communicated, and repli-
cated by fellow escape artists and everyday people. Through Graffiti in the
Grass and other MythMedia projects, I invite my community to imagine
new worlds where black and brown people, women, and all humans not
only survive, but emerge more resilient and self-reliant, so they can thrive
through whatever comes next. When popular art and aesthetics align with
the images and aesthetics of the cultural complex, contemporary media,
and platforms for storytelling from movies and games to comic books and
graphic novels become more than significant. These myth-based media
become profoundly transformative and even, life-saving. For me, engag-
ing with the art and mythic language of these cultural forms becomes an
act of ritual, soul-making and ultimately, soul survival.
 GRAFFITI IN THE GRASS: WORLDBUILDING AND SOUL SURVIVAL… 239

Graffiti in the Grass: Triptych Trailer Concept Art. Artists: Ron Ackins in collabo-
ration with Li Sumpter for MythMedia Studios
240 L. SUMPTER

Graffiti in the Grass: Triptych Trailer Concept Art. Artists: Ron Ackins in collabo-
ration with Li Sumpter for MythMedia Studios
 GRAFFITI IN THE GRASS: WORLDBUILDING AND SOUL SURVIVAL… 241

References
Avens, Roberts. 1984. The New Gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman, and Angels. Dallas,
TX: Spring Publications.
Butler, Octavia E. 1993. Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing.
Conforti, Michael. 1999. Field, Form and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, and
Psyche. Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications.
Hillman, James. 1974. Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic. In The New
Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses. New York: Harper & Row.
———. 1975. Revisioning Psychology. New York: Harper & Row.
 Afterword: Comics and Gnostics

Jeffrey J. Kripal

The genre of the afterword is one of appreciation and, where appropriate,

thoughtful response. Please allow me a few autobiographical reflections. I
do not mean to be narcissistic. It is my long experience that these actually
help place and illuminate the ideas. They also set the life-context for what
follows, namely, a response to a few of the essays that engage my work in
some way.
The fundamental take-away of that work, crystallized in Mutants and
Mystics, is this: superhero comics and science fiction more generally can
and do function as transmission sites for what David Odorisio has called
the “new gnosis.”1 Superpowers are real. So are the altered states of know-
ing and excessively weird paranormal phenomena or “special effects” in
the physical environment that often lie behind the conception and within
the very artistic execution of these genres on the page, on screen, and in

Jeffrey J. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Superhero Comics, Science Fiction, and the
1

Paranormal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). See also Kripal, “Can Superhero
Comics Really Transmit Esoteric Knowledge?” in Wouter Hanegraaff, Peter Forshaw, Marco
Pasi, eds., Hermes Explains: Thirty-One Questions about Western Esotericism (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2019). The question of the latter title is rhetorical. The answer
is “Yes.”

J. J. Kripal
Department of Religion, Rice University, Houston, TX USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 243

Switzerland AG 2023
D. M. Odorisio (ed.), A New Gnosis, Contemporary Religion and
Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1
244 AFTERWORD: COMICS AND GNOSTICS

life. This is, by far, the most important resonance between that book and
this book—the gnostic transmission. I would immediately add that the
vast, vast majority of such psi-fi gnostics will never be known as such. They
exist silently in the margins of the culture, which, paradoxically, is also
somehow the center.
Those, anyway, were the conclusions of Mutants and Mystics in 2011.
But there are other things to say, particularly now, eleven years later, in
2022. The simple confessed truth is that there are many things that I have
wanted to say about comics, science fiction, folklore, and, yes, religion
since writing the book. I have occasionally said them in public or print.2
And I have said them again in a much more theorized form in a recent
monograph.3 But this is a very good place to say them in a briefer format.
I admit that I am tempted to focus on all the new expressions in the pres-
ent pages—especially “unfuckwithable,” “freak esoterica,” and “racist sub-
liminalities.” The new gnosis, it turns out, needs new expressions, which are
new forms of consciousness coded in an emerging culture. But I will resist
that and say other things. I want to thank David and his colleagues for
allowing me to speak in these pages (the present text started as a brief blurb,
which then became a longer foreword, which then became a fuller response
or afterword). An author does not always get to talk to those who take up a
work. I feel extremely fortunate to be able to do so here.

Superpowers and Historiography

If I have learned anything over the last decade or so, it is that taking super-
powers as real should change how we imagine and so write history and
subsequently study everything in that history, from literature to embodi-
ment to religion to art to mind. To take the simplest and bluntest of
2
I am a bit embarrassed to realize that “occasionally” is an understatement. I seem to be
obsessed. For a few pieces that may fly under the radar and deal explicitly with the new gnos-
tic themes of the present volume, consider Jeffrey J. Kripal, “How We Got to Super: Grant
Morrison’s Visionary Gnosticism,” Religion Dispatches, 18 August 2011; “The Future
Human: Mircea Eliade and the Fantastic Mutant,” for Norman Girardot and Bryan Rennie,
eds., special issue on “Remembering, Reimagining, Revalorizing Mircea Eliade,” Archaevs.
Studies in History of Religions 15 (2011); “Reading as Mutation,” a Foreword to Whitley
Strieber’s What Is to Come (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2011); “Receive the Hero,”
Foreword to Paul Selig, The Book of Mastery (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2015); “The
Most Cosmic Superhero of All!” Forward for Jeff Carreira, Higher Self Expression: How to
Become an Artist of Possibility (Philadelphia: Emergence Education Press, 2021); and “Super
Duper,” a commentary on a Superman LSD blotter for Erik Davis, ed., Blotter: The Art and
Design of an LSD Medium (MIT Press, forthcoming).
3
Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New
Realities (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022).
 AFTERWORD: COMICS AND GNOSTICS 245

examples, if an individual routinely dreams the actual future, then, obvi-

ously, that future has already happened, and “history” is flowing back-
wards in time into the dreaming subject. “History,” “literature,”
“embodiment,” “art,” “religion”—none of it is what we thought in these
time-traveling moments. But then we knew that. Newton’s empty three-
dimensional space is not Einstein’s relative space-time, after all. So why do
we continue to imagine and write historiography in the former Newtonian
pseudo-reality and not in the fuller Einsteinian reality? Why do we pretend
that we do not know better?
My own story of coming to this goes something like this. I had just
finished a big book on the history of the human potential movement in
northern California and the counterculture.4 As I finished that book, a
strange conviction overtook me, possessed me, would not let me go. It
struck me that the basic narrative of the human potential movement bore
an uncanny similarity to a particular sidebar of my youth, the pop-mythol-
ogy of the X-Men—both, after all, were about the cultivation and devel-
opment of anomalous abilities that are understood to be evolutionary
buds of a future human supernature. The two stories even appeared in
their present forms at the exact same time—in the California of 1962 and
New York City of 1963, respectively.
I always try to honor such ideas, particularly when they are accompa-
nied by obvious synchronicities in space-time and grow to obsessive
bounds, as if they are seeking or just demanding my attention. This one
had all the marks. So I paid attention. And I acted. In particular, Michael
Murphy and I hosted a four-year cycle on the paranormal and popular
culture between 2008 and 2011 as I wrote what would become not one,
but two books.5 The titles of the symposia seem relevant now: “Esoteric
Esalen: Altered States of History and the Human Potential Movement”
(2011), “Plato’s Theater: Mystical Realism and the Maturing of
Metaphysical Film” (2010), “The Paranormal in History, Science, and
Popular Culture” (2009), and “On the Supernormal and the Superpower”

4
Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007).
5
I thought I was writing Mutants and Mystics. What actually came out first was its theoreti-
cal prolegomenon, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010). So much for conscious human agency or control.
246 AFTERWORD: COMICS AND GNOSTICS

(2008).6 We invited experiencers, intellectuals, artists, authors, film-mak-

ers, and special-effects professionals.
I do not know which year it was, but I remember asking some
Hollywood professionals a single question. It went something like this:
“Can you make a movie that is not fictional, one that engages the paranor-
mal as an actual feature of human experience but does not involve span-
dex, fistfights, and things blowing up?” I was basically asking for public
provocation, a calling of the question. I wanted historical biographies and
documentaries. And if we had to tell fictions, I wanted them to be true
fictions. I wanted what Michael Murphy calls “mystical realism,” a kind of
story-telling that stays very close to the phenomenology of actual experi-
ence, that tells it like it really is. I wanted the film-makers, in effect, to
corner the viewers, not give them an easy way out: “Oh, this is only enter-
tainment. None of this can happen.”
The immediate response to my question went something like this:
“No, we can’t.”
“But why?”
“Because we have no idea if this will make money. We know what
works, so we do that and not this.”
Fair enough. They pointed out that most of the big box-office hits
today are produced through elaborate and ever-more sophisticated CGI
(Computer-Generated Imagery) techniques. This might seem cool. It is.
But it also very, very expensive. In some cases, it costs literally hundreds of
millions of dollars. Have you ever watched the credits to one of those
movies? They just go on and on, and on. There must be over a thousand
people (and salaries) involved in a blockbuster. The end result is that the
studios will not take chances on films that move past the proven genres
and so represent real financial risks. They want to stay in the groove.
Dang.
I certainly had other ideas. I wanted to put the film-makers in contact
with the historians and philosophers, the people who actually know some-
thing about real-world paranormal experiences and powers. I wanted the
studios to hire these colleagues as consultants and tell new, truly new sto-
ries. (Okay, I also wanted them to hire me.)
That was the idea. It didn’t work. No go.

6
For a playful report I wrote on the first symposium for Roy Thomas, in a comic-book
fanzine no less, see Jeffrey J. Kripal “Esalen and the X-Men: The Human Potential Movement
and Superhero Comics,” Alter Ego 84 (spring 2009).
 AFTERWORD: COMICS AND GNOSTICS 247

But that was then. This is now. Things are a’changing. Film is easier to
make now. What once cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars
in camera equipment can now be done with the cheapest of technology,
including the smart-phone in your pocket.

Superhumans Among Us
The scholarship on folklore, mythology, art, and religion is also becoming
increasingly sophisticated, bolder, more imaginative, and well, just more
super. Witness, as a single example, Anya Foxen’s recent Biography of a
Yogi, an in-depth study of Paramahansa Yogananda and his über-influen-
tial An Autobiography of a Yogi—you know, the orange book with the
Indian yogi on the cover and all the miracle stories inside that played such
an influential role in shaping the American reception and transformation
of yoga in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
One of the many things that struck me so about Foxen’s book is her
argument for the translation of the miracle stories or Hindu yogic siddhis.
The latter powers have often been translated as “perfections.” That is
technically correct, since the word is related in turn to the siddha, the
“perfected being” of Hindu and Buddhist Tantric lore. But it is not at all
clear what “perfection” means (it sounds vaguely moral and upstanding to
the American ear). And the technical translation of siddhi as “perfection”
certainly suppresses the actual wild folklore and sheer excitement around
such figures and phenomena in India. The Hindu or Buddhist siddha is no
righteous citizen. Quite the opposite. The siddhas are, in effect, flying
superbeings, with very sophisticated doctrines, rituals, psychosomatic
techniques, iconographies, and institutions wrapped around their aston-
ishing feats and persons.
Much better, then, Foxen argues, to use the pop-cultural references
that we know so well. Hence the yogis possess not perfections, but “super-
powers.” And Yogananda himself was teaching a “superhumanity,” in
effect how to become an actual “superhuman.”7 In his own words,
Yogananda was after “Mastering the Subconscious by Superconsciousness,”
“Your Super Powers Revealed,” and “Quickening Human Evolution.” He

7
Anya P. Foxen, Biography of a Yogi: Paramahansa Yogananda & the Origins of Modern
Yoga (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 11-12.
248 AFTERWORD: COMICS AND GNOSTICS

would even speak of “Using Super Electrons for Your Higher Success.”8
The word “super” is everywhere.
The skeptic or critic can sneer at such language, but it is immediately
recognizable by those who know the comics and science fiction. And it
means something. It carries a charge or jolt. It transmits. That is one rea-
son that Yogananda’s book sold so many copies and had such a profound
and lasting influence on the culture, or counterculture. It transmitted
something beside and beyond itself, like a lightning bolt from the blue (or
orange). People did not just want to read about these superpowers. They
wanted those superpowers. Indeed, they had them, they were them, which
is to say that they had experienced them, and they knew it. And now they
had a big orange book to affirm and make some cultural sense of them. It
was not perfect. It never is. But it was something. It was really something.
Foxen’s move seems exactly right to me. I have made the same argu-
ment about Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous Übermensch. Some scholars have
resisted the original American translation of “Superman,” not because it is
technically incorrect (it is), but because of its association with the Jewish-
looking guy in blue tights and the red cape.
“No,” I want to answer back, “that is exactly why we should sometimes
use this particular translation. Superman is an alien-immigrant. Superman
is cool. Fuck your academic uptightness.” Okay, I don’t say the last sen-
tence. But I feel it (and I just wrote it.)
Moreover, the superheroic associations run much deeper still in this
founding figure of the modern humanities. The fact that Nietzsche saw
the coming superhumans (a much better translation still) as a speciation
event, and that he firmly believed that the superhumans would exist along-
side the regular or “last” humans renders the pop-associations even more
relevant as a source of potential insight and serious reflection.9 This, after
all, is very close to the mythology of the X-Men franchise. It turns out,
then, that the pop-mythology of the evolving superhumans—which is at
the base of both the Marvel Universe and the California human potential
movement—is rooted in the history of the humanities and philosophy, in

8
Ibid., 150-1.
9
The translation is indeed technically incorrect, as the German Mensch does not mean
“man” but “human.” Paul S. Loeb and David F. Tinsley have argued persuasively that
Übermensch should be translated as “superhumans.” See “Translator’s Afterword,” in Paul
S. Loeb and David F. Tinsley, trans., Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (Summer 1882—Winter 1883/84), vol. 14 of The Complete Works of Friedrich
Nietzsche (Stanford University Press, 2019).
 AFTERWORD: COMICS AND GNOSTICS   249

this case in Nietzsche himself. Indeed, it could well be argued that an

X-Men figure like Magneto is Friedrich Nietzsche. But this is all very late
to the game. As I wrote in Mutants and Mystics, the nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century philosophers, scientists, and mystical writers—includ-
ing and especially Nietzsche—laid the foundations for all of this. They are
the real “X-Men before their time.”
It would be tempting to pass this all off on the madness of Nietzsche
(people love simplistic reductions). And that would be wrong. Historical
and contemporary practicing artists, it turns out, know and say much the
same (or just the same). They know that artistic creativity is not what it
seems, that there are often occult and paranormal processes involved—
superhumans in disguise. I really cannot count the times now that a cura-
tor or art historian has contacted me because they need advice on how to
think about an artist who takes ghosts or UFOs seriously, practices clair-
voyance, experiences possession, sees the future, or believes in evolving
superpowers. I find these moments especially powerful. I love artists. I
think religion is art that does not know it is art. Or maybe art is religion
that has not yet become religion. Same thing.

Sex and Race in the Super Story

I sometimes worry that my enthusiasms for the Super Story mislead. I take
responsibility for this, but I can also assure the reader that I have never
intended this misunderstanding. I have never wanted this. Quite the exact
opposite, really. I think that the Super Story is always reflecting back on
itself and criticizing itself, partly through the scholarship that we ourselves
perform. These very discussions, in these very pages, in this very book are part
of the Super Story. Through these authors and essays, the Super Story is
correcting itself, righting itself in the stormy winds and waters of contem-
porary culture and new public knowledge.
Let me be more specific and less poetic. Let me get real. I sometimes
worry that colleagues and readers come away with the impression that I
think the Super Story is somehow always just and good, that it is always,
well, super. I certainly do not think that. I think those who participate in
the formation of this emergent mythology are often very wrong, or better
put, that their thoughts too often hurt, maim, scar, even kill people. This
is one reason I spent some time in the book on a figure like Fredric
Wertham. His psychoanalytic thoughts of the 1950s were dramatically and
consistently homophobic. Such thoughts were indeed progressive on
250 AFTERWORD: COMICS AND GNOSTICS

issues of gender and race, but they were no such thing on sexual orienta-
tion. For example, in Wertham’s hermeneutic, Wonder Woman was likely
a lesbian, and Batman and Robin were probably a gay couple. Maybe so,
but these were very bad things in Wertham’s 1950s values. These were
horrific role models that were corrupting the American youth and causing
juvenile deliquency.
It is important to admit that I reacted so in my book to this kind of
homophobic reading because of my own personal history. After all, I had
earlier found my own religious tradition, Roman Catholicism, similarly
stupid and cruel in the 1980s. Young (gay) men were killing themselves,
dramatically and violently, partly because of the teachings about homo-
sexuality that were coming out of Rome in that decade. These were official
teachings that equated homosexuality with psychopathology, with sick-
ness. I saw this stupidity up close and personal. Three young men in my
immediate religious orbit tried to kill themselves in the first half of the
1980s: with a gun, with a rope in a barn, and with a bottle of sleeping pills.
The first two succeeded. People died because of this idiocy.
I will never forget that. I cannot forget that.
I ultimately left the religious life mostly over these moral crises, with
the accompanying conclusion that the obvious and infamous misogyny of
the Church was similarly constructed and appalling. I also could not shake
the intuition that, paradoxically, this long Catholic misogyny is somehow
related to the profound male homoerotic privileges and celibate structures
of the Church, the secret psychosexual results of which were in direct con-
tradiction to the public-facing homophobic teachings of the same Church
(the tradition was dangerously homophobic on the outside but obviously
homoerotic on the inside). Put too simply, I worried (and still worry) that
closeted (or churched) gay men do not need or love women. In this worry,
at least, the Catholic issue of male homosexuality is related in complex
historical and institutional ways to the Catholic issue of religious misog-
yny. In short, there are moral contradictions: some of the Church’s teach-
ings lead to affirmation, playfulness, embodiment or incarnation, and a
particular joy in the image and ritual performance; others lead to unneces-
sary guilt, self-inflicted violence, and death; and often the very same peo-
ple (the churched and closeted gay men in power) are responsible for
both. It is a moving complicated mess.
All of this moral complexity in turn leads directly into what I call the
Super Story and how it gets taken up by different communities and indi-
viduals. I am thinking in particular of the essays of Amy Slonaker and
 AFTERWORD: COMICS AND GNOSTICS   251

Yvonne Chireau. Since both scholars engage my work on the Super Story
in some fairly significant ways, it seems worthwhile to reflect on those
engagements here in the context explained above.
Slonaker, for example, engages the topics of sexuality and gender, par-
ticularly female sexuality and gender, in what she calls the Christian Hippie
Comics. Such Christian hippies, it turns out, used women for “bait,” to
lure other men into their charismatic religious fold. Yvonne Chireau
explores the category of race and Blackness in what she calls “Graphic
Voodoo.” Such an aesthetic was born of the European Gothic imagina-
tion, the very real challenges to colonial whiteness that a revolutionary
country like Haiti represented, and the terrible histories of chattel slavery
and anti-Black racism in the Americas, which are apparent everywhere in
the comic culture, from Donald Duck to the Marvel superheroes.
Each colleague points, gently and generously, to what are basically real
weaknesses or deafening silences in my treatment of the Super Story, but
they also—and this is so important—participate in the correction and
deepening of that very emerging mythology in their scholarship and this
discussion. I love this. I love them. This is why I so believe in scholarship,
in the humanities, in the colleges and universities. We can correct and
redirect one another and, by so doing, our cultures.
There have in fact been two main regrets over the last decade or so
since writing Mutants and Mystics. Both are well represented by Slonaker
and Chireau. One regret involves the relative silence around women and
female sexuality in the book. The other involves my silence around race
and Blackness. Neither, I should add, were intentional or planned, and
both were functions of my own training and interests of the time.
Nevertheless, both are especially obvious and telling today in 2022 and
deserve some comment. Let me try. Allow me to respond.
Mostly because of my experience in the Roman Catholic Church, the
first half of my career involved a long meditation on three related topics:
male sexual orientation, the psychosexual and social production of male
sanctity, and the relationship of all of this to ecstatic religious experience
and vision. I came into the field in the late 1980s, when feminist critiques
were especially apparent and sophisticated. I was perfectly aware of them
and, indeed, read widely in these very literatures. But I also learned, very
early on, that men should not speak for women.
I was, and remain, a man, and a white heterosexual man at that. I
agreed with the feminist conclusion that men should not speak for women.
Accordingly, I concluded that I could best contribute to the study of
252 AFTERWORD: COMICS AND GNOSTICS

religion by studying male sexual orientation. So that is what I did. I did

not talk about the women (for that would be speaking for them). I talked
about the men.
Nevertheless, I got into a lot of trouble by talking about my own reli-
gious tradition, but also by venturing out into other cultures and reli-
gions, male gender identities, and male sexual orientations. Indeed, I
became a kind of poster-boy of the harassed and threatened scholar of
religion in the 1990s and remained so well into the millennium. I know
what it is to be targeted by right-wing ideologues and their blatant lies. All
too well.
I think many readers underestimate just how terrifying and real these
threats were. I mean, I am talking about a debate in India’s Parliament,
two national ban movements, cover-stories throughout India, consistent
scapegoating or misinformation techniques on the early Internet, and, for
my second book now, a strong request by the American bishops to retract
what I thought and wrote about Catholic celibacy and homoeroticism.
Concerned Hindu readers and colleagues, whom I did not know, would
write me and beg me to be careful. They were hearing even worse. I
listened.
I took the lessons learned here and applied them to the feminist cri-
tique as well. I consciously and specifically avoided female figures and top-
ics, because I was convinced, and I remain convinced, that I lack sufficient
insight and, frankly, existential interest (and I was already in enough trou-
ble studying and writing about the men). One can call this decision not to
talk about the women a fault, I suppose, but I also see it as a moral posi-
tion and a particular finitude borne of a particular existential situation
(read: my body). Honestly, it was all I could handle just to be me. It was
that bad. Indeed, it got so unbearable that I was treated for PTSD, twice,
and I eventually left the field of my decade-and-a-half linguistic and cul-
tural training
Accordingly, when I studied comics and science fiction later, I am sure
I did this because these are, historically, overwhelmingly male genres, and
I felt like I had something to say, and something that I could say. There are
female, queer, and transgendered people, for sure, in these literatures, but
they tend to inhabit and work as themselves in periods later than the
1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, which were the decades on which I focused. I
am thinking of Octavia Butler (a female Black writer) in science fiction and
D.W. Pasulka or Jenny Randles in ufology (the latter a transgender woman).
 AFTERWORD: COMICS AND GNOSTICS   253

The same observations are true of the category of race. When I wrote
Mutants and Mystics, I simply was not working or thinking about race and
religion. My colleagues were. I worked (and still work) in a department
with gifted intellectuals who had given their lives to these very subjects:
particularly Elias Bongmba and Anthony Pinn. I saw no reason to repeat
their thoughts, and no doubt badly so. I did not know this critical litera-
ture, and I did not want to pretend that I did. I admired it, did everything
I could to support it as an administrator, but it was not me. I wanted to
honor that, admit it.
This is all to say that when a colleague like Amy Slonaker focuses in on
the misogyny of the Christian Hippie Comics, or Yvonne Chireau writes
of the racist and white terror horrors of Graphic Voodoo, I only feel col-
legial gratitude and a kind of deep cultural mourning. I am relieved. I am
thankful. I say, “Yes,” and with an exclamation point.
I also remember in these moments that scholarship since I wrote
Mutants and Mystics has focused on precisely these very feminist and racial
topics. I am thinking of Adilufu Nama’s Super Black and Ramzi Fawaz’s
The New Mutants, two texts that I have also taught and from which I have
learned a great deal, or, in a different mode now, Jon Woodon’s To Make
a New Race, which focuses on the Harlem Renaissance and the Black writ-
ers’ commitments to the sci-fi evolutionary vision and spiritual elitism of
G.I. Gurdjieff.10
Nama is especially generous about how an Afrofuturist character like the
Black Panther was created by two white men (Stan Lee and Jack Kirby) but
then was taken up by Black creators and readers in complex, contradictory,
but also positive and affirmative ways. Fawaz writes some very insightful
things about queerness, sexual orientation, race, poverty, drugs, and social
marginality, in comics for adolescents no less. I laughed many times reading
his work, remembering my own boyhood and my strange, inexplicable
attractions—erotic, no doubt—to the aching bodies, arching forms, and
barely dressed bodies of the Marvel pantheon. Such comics were clearly the
origin-point of my own literary and intellectual imagination (not to men-
tion my sexuality), which I hope is as radical as Fawaz wants it to be.

10
Adilifu Nama, Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2011); Ramzi Fawaz, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the
Radical Imagination of American Comics (New York: New York University Press, 2016);
and Jon Woodson, To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance
(University Press of Mississippi, 1999).
254 AFTERWORD: COMICS AND GNOSTICS

Super Social Justice

I should finally add that, even with the evolutionary esoteric currents that
are so central to the Super Story, colleagues often miss or are not aware of
the profound anti-colonial, non-white, and proto-feminist origins of the
Super Story. These are hardly the only origin-points or currents, but they
are origin-points and currents. I have written of all of this before, but it is
perhaps worth summarizing here at the end of my comments.
No figure, after all, is probably more central in the story that I tell than
the Bengali activist, intellectual, and guru Aurobindo Ghose. In his youth,
Ghose was a freedom fighter, a “terrorist” by British standards, who spent
time in jail and who spent the rest of his life in a French colony in eastern
India, Pondicherrry, in order to avoid the British spies who surrounded
the place and watched his every move. When Aurobindo turned from poli-
tics to spiritual writing, became a guru, and wrote of the coming
“Superman” or descending “Supermind” (and he did), or when he wrote
of his own practice and experience of the endless paranormal powers of the
siddhis (and he did), he was not advancing a white nationalism or yet
another racist evolutionary vision. He was advancing a fusion of Indian
philosophy and European science. In his own mind, he was speaking of
the species, not of any single nation or race. We can disagree with him, of
course, but it is simply not possible to avoid the radically anti-­colonial and
profoundly non-white nature of his person and evolutionary esoteric vision.
And this is before we get to a figure like the French philosopher Henri
Bergson, who wrote of the evolutionary force of mystical experience and
parapsychological experience. Readers do not generally know that Bergson
died of pneumonia after he stood in the rain for hours to register against
the Nazi occupation of France. He had every opportunity to accept the
Nazi affirmation of his obvious public prominence, indeed fame, as an
“Honorable Aryan.” He rejected that racist title. And he died for that
rejection.
We can also invoke the life-story of the Victorian researcher who lies
behind both Aurobindo and Bergson—Frederic Myers. It is seldom
pointed out, but this coiner of terms like “telepathy,” “supernormal,” and
the “imaginal” (no, it was not Henry Corbin), spent his public life as a
reformer of education in England. More specifically, he argued and worked
for the education of women. Frederic Myers, the psychical researcher par
excellence, was a proto-feminist.
 AFTERWORD: COMICS AND GNOSTICS   255

Something similar again is true of the famous perennialism of the

British-American writer Aldous Huxley, which in turn played such an
important role in the same emergent mythologies of the Super Story.
Scholars like to poke holes in perennialism, but they miss, usually entirely,
the anti-war context and critical nature of Huxley’s own. Aldous Huxley,
after all, turned to perennialism partly, or largely, because of his famous
pacifism, the devastations of World War II, and the religious ideation that
helped produce the deaths of tens of millions of people (including the
Nazi holocaust). In short, Huxley’s perennalism was a moral protest, not
a naïve affirmation of the religions or the nation-states, against which he
firmly and famously stood. He also wrote quite explicitly that some reli-
gious beliefs and orientations prevent the perennialist revelation of Mind
at Large, and that, oh by the way, psychedelics can reveal it. He was no naif.
Finally, the same is true yet again of the most immediate intellectual
architect of the human potential movement, the Stanford professor of
comparative religion Frederic Spiegelberg. Spiegelberg fled Nazi Germany
for his and his family’s lives. And when he wrote out of his own mystical
experience around the middle of the last century, he did not write to affirm
any particular religious tradition or nation, including his own Christian
culture. He in fact wrote of a “religion of no religion.” The phrase is com-
plicated, paradoxical, and finally apophatic, as, I would argue, should our
thought be here. The accent lands on the no.

That is probably enough for now.

Or too much.
Which means it is just right.
May the Super Story be told anew.
 Index1

A Brotherhoods, 8, 86, 162, 163, 165,

Africa, 26, 27, 27n4, 29, 34–36, 40, 171, 177, 178
46–48, 136
African American, 26, 29, 38, 39, 48,
190, 234 C
Afrofuturism, 20 Campbell, Joseph, 6, 16–17, 21, 22,
Alchemy, 90, 130, 151, 206–209, 216 118–122, 124, 127, 134, 136
All-female teams, 8, 162–179 Caricatures, 29, 30, 37–39, 38n25, 44
Amazons, 8, 166, 170, 172, 173 The Children of God (COG),
Apocalypse, 227, 234, 235, 237 7, 60–79
Archetype, 5, 8, 16, 87, 92, 96, 114, Cold War, 44, 144, 149, 152, 184,
162–179, 182–194, 215, 217, 188, 235
218, 234, 237 Collective unconscious, 5, 8, 146,
147, 155–157, 215
Comic books, 2–10, 16–23, 29, 30n9,
B 32, 33, 35, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46,
Batman, 9, 182, 198–219, 250 60, 61, 63–65, 70, 71, 73, 75, 78,
Black Elk, 121 79, 97, 113, 114, 136, 142–158,
Black Panther, 253 162, 171, 177, 187, 223, 238

1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 257

Switzerland AG 2023
D. M. Odorisio (ed.), A New Gnosis, Contemporary Religion and
Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1
258 INDEX

Comix, 7 G
Cosmic humanism, 62 Gender, 37n23, 117n4,
Cultural complex, 152, 238 184n1, 250–252
Culture, 2, 3, 7, 9, 10, 21, 27, 29, 32, Gnosis, 2–10, 95, 96, 153, 154, 157,
33n17, 34, 38n26, 39n27, 40, 158, 243, 244
41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 60–62, Graham, Billy, 66, 67, 70, 86
65–68, 73, 79, 124, 136, 143, Grateful Dead, 87, 99–101, 104
144, 150, 153, 155, 198–202, Graphic Voodoo, 6, 251, 253
205, 206, 208–213, 216–219, Green Man, 8, 182–194
223, 224, 226, 235, 237, 238, Griffin, Rick, 7, 84–105
244, 248, 249, 251, 252, 255

H
D Haitian Vodou, 26, 28, 42, 43, 45, 46
DC Comics, 21, 147, 182 Hero, 6, 16, 65, 124–127, 131, 132,
Depth psychology, 3, 5 135, 146, 147, 150, 152, 162,
Dick, Philip K., 4 170–172, 198, 199, 201, 204,
211, 215, 226, 227
Hierophany, 224
E Hippies, 7, 60–79, 86, 88–90,
Ecology, 9, 37, 90, 185, 188 89n7, 251
Egyptian Books of the Dead, 7, Hollywood Free Paper, 68, 73
113–120, 123, 129, 133, Horror-fantasy, 45
135, 136
Eroticism, 65
Esalen Institute, 5 I
Esotericism, 7 Indigenous, 26, 29, 38n26, 42, 48,
EXPLO ’72, 67 225–227, 230, 234, 235
Individuation, 3, 5, 21, 157, 158

F
Fantastic Four, 8, 142, 143, J
146–153, 158 Jesus Movement, 7, 84, 93, 94
Feminine, 132, 154, 156, 158, 173, Jesus People, 7, 60, 66, 67,
186, 187, 191, 192, 206, 208, 93, 94, 102
209, 211, 213, 217 Jung, C.G., 2–3, 5–8, 16, 17, 21, 143,
Flying eyeball, 7, 84–105 145–148, 150, 152, 154–158,
Freud, Sigmund, 2, 3, 5 184, 200, 208, 215–218, 237
Furies, 8, 166, 170–174 Jungian Psychology, 237
 INDEX 259

K Mytheme, 4, 32, 33, 33n16, 36, 45,

Kabbala, 153, 157 46, 48, 49, 61–66, 78, 224
King, Jeff, 120, 127 Mythology, 16–23, 26–49, 61,
Kirby, Jack, 142, 147, 148, 153, 253 113–136, 162, 166, 171, 183,
Kripal, Jeffrey J., 19, 32, 33, 36, 184, 193, 199–201, 205, 210,
42n33, 43, 43n37, 45, 46, 49, 217, 223, 224, 247–249,
60–66, 70, 71, 78, 79, 148, 164, 251, 255
178, 222–224 Mythology, comparative, 3, 5, 6, 114,
120, 136, 217
Myths, 211
L
Lady Liberators, 173–177
Lee, Stan, 63–65, 142, 147, 148, 153, N
183, 253 Navajo Sandpaintings, 113, 114, 120,
Liminal, 212, 229 209, 210
Little Bird, 9, 222–230 Nekyia, 114–116, 114n1, 119, 124,
Lois Lane, 172 129–131, 133–136
LSD, 85, 87, 93, 94

O
M Oakes, Maud, 120, 121, 123
Mad Magazine, 85
Maenads, 8, 167, 168, 170, 172
Marvel Comics, 4, 44, 63, 143, 144, P
144n1, 174–176 Poiesis, 117, 222
Masculine, 164, 166, 168, 170, 171, Popular culture, 2, 10, 21, 27, 41, 43,
174, 185, 187–194, 193n7, 60, 61, 136, 165, 224, 245
208, 209 Popular occulture, 2, 4
Michelangelo (Last Postapocalyptic, 9, 222, 225–229
Judgment), 89, 117 Promethea, 8, 143, 153–158
Momaday, Scott, 123 Psyche, 5, 8, 16, 31, 32, 127, 133,
Moore, Alan, 46, 150, 153, 154, 143, 146, 153, 155, 156, 183,
156–158, 182–194 205, 206, 212, 215, 217, 237
Mysticism, 78 Psychoanalysis, 2, 3
Mystico-erotic, 60–79 Psychoid, 237
Myth, 2, 3, 6, 9, 16–23, 31–33,
32n15, 34n19, 120, 129, 132,
133, 151, 157, 162, 163, 171n4, R
186, 187, 198, 200, 205, Radiation, 148–151
212, 234–238 Red Book, The, 7, 113, 128–136
260 INDEX

Religion, race, 32–35, 37, 41, 47, Surfing, 85, 93, 103, 104
48n45, 49, 253 Survival, 9, 226–228
Ritual, 22, 27, 31, 35n20, 36, 38, Swamp Thing, 8, 46, 182–194
38n26, 42, 43, 46, 122, 123, Swift, Jonathan, 164, 165, 171
155, 168n3, 200, 222–230, 238,
247, 250
Ritual process, 223 T
Tantra, 64
Transmedia, 236, 237
S True Komix, 7, 61, 75, 75n1, 76
Shaman, 198–219 Turner, Victor, 223
Shamdasani, Sonu, 131, 134, 135
Silver Age, 7, 8, 65, 143–147, 171
Sirens, 166, 169, 170 U
Sisterhoods, 8, 163, 166, 170, 171, Unconscious, 5, 8, 17, 31, 32, 32n14,
173, 177–179 71, 143, 146–148, 152, 155–157,
Soul, 2, 7, 70, 78, 114–122, 127, 199, 205–212, 216–219, 229
128, 130, 132, 133, 145, 146,
150, 182, 200, 205, 228,
229, 234–238 V
Speculative fiction, 33, 235, 236 Voodoo, 6, 26–49
Superhero, 3, 5, 9, 19, 29, 33, 45,
45n42, 46, 60–79, 95, 99,
143–145, 147–150, 152, 153, W
157, 158, 162, 163, 170, 172, Where the Two Came to Their Father,
173, 177, 182, 243, 251 120, 127
Superheroes, black, 6, 45, 46 Woolf, Virginia, 163, 165, 171, 178
Super-story, 4, 9, 32, 61–66, 73, 78, Worldbuilding, 9, 234–238
79, 224, 249–255 Wound, 100, 185–191, 193, 216