Mutants and Mystics: A Book Excerpt

November 01, 2011 by Jeffrey J. Kripal

Continued from Page 3

Whatever we make of the ultimate iconic origins of the alien's eyes, we can well posit that the influence eventually went the other way, that is, from the alien abduction experiences to the representations of Spider-Man, since some of the later artistic renditions of Spider-Man look more and more like an alien. This later "Ultimate Spider-Man" (created by artist Mark Bagley at the turn of the millennium, in 2000) approaches an almost archetypal or spiritualized form, as it moves further and further away from the human body of Peter Parker to the lithe, thin, huge-eyed, "subtle body" of the classic alien Gray.

Or Black. Consider also Spidey's famous black suit, which first appears in 1984 in Secret Wars #8. Not only does this black suit appear at the height of the abduction narratives, and not only does it make the wall-crawler look even more like an alien, but we quickly learn that the black suit is an alien, that is, a sentient alien symbiote that can take on and exaggerate, inevitably in violent and aggressive ways, the personality features of anyone with whom it bonds (read: abducts). In the film Spider-Man 3, the alien symbiote even bonds to Peter in a manner eerily similar to the classic alien abduction experience, that is, in bed while Peter is sleeping on his back. This, I must add, is the classic physical posture and scenario of what folklorist David Hufford has called the "old hag" or "supernatural assault" tradition and tracked around the world, including through the modern American folklore of the alien and the physiology of "sleep paralysis." Such universal experiences coded in local forms, Hufford shows, are usually terrifying experiences but also, strangely, sometimes possess ecstatic or spiritual dimensions.[viii] Rather like the blue and black Spideys.

There is also the further complication that there is one more very solid historical precedent for the modern almond eyes of the alien and the blue and black Spider-Man, and it has nothing to do with bad B-movies. That precedent is South Asian Tantric art. We are back, already, to Orientation. The slanted "alien" eye, after all, has been a standard feature of sacred art in South Asia for centuries, where it can easily be traced in any number of goddesses, including the sexually aggressive Tantric goddess Kali, one of whose classic poses (standing on her prostrate husband, Shiva, who is variously portrayed as a corpse, in ecstasy, sexually aroused, or asleep, but always on his back) renders her a remarkably apt South Asian embodiment of Hufford's sleep paralysis traditions. The black almond-eyed Kali—known for her violent and redemptive ways, mounting a sleeping Shiva, and "bonding" with her devotees through mystical union—more than resembles the black alien suit taking on the physical form of a sleeping Peter Parker.

And it gets weirder still. That Kali is usually portrayed with six limbs makes her look more than a little like a spider (okay, which has eight). Moreover, in West Bengal, where the Kali traditions are especially active, there are actually two major forms of Kali: a blue, gentle, motherly form and a black, aggressive, "sinister" form. Sound familiar?

Certainly there are numerous historical reference points here that render my speculations—really, personal confusions—more than simply suggestive. Aliens, after all, have often been described as "Oriental." Flying discs have also been called "mandala machines," and at least one very famous Western intellectual, C. G. Jung, even speculated that the flying saucers are mandalas—that is, Tantric circular diagrams designed to aid meditation and engender psychical wholeness—in the sky.

It is probably also relevant here that the origins of the UFO contactee cults in the 1950s were clearly linked to Theosophy and its "ascended masters," indeed so much so that Christopher Partridge has suggested that in the UFO religions the "ascended masters" of Theosophy have been transformed into the "descended masters" of the UFO religions.[ix] Hence the first and most famous contactee, George Adamski, founded the Royal Order of Tibet in the Los Angeles of the 1930s before he claimed a sighting, on October 9, 1946, of an immense cigar-shaped UFO on Mount Palomar and became a spokesman for Orthon of Venus, appropriately (or inappropriately) just below one of America's most famous telescopes.[x] Which is all to say that Alienation easily slides back into Orientation, just as Orientation once easily slid into Alienation.

Superman and Spider-Man are by no means the only coded aliens among the superheroes. The simple truth is that, of all of my proposed mythemes, Alienation is probably the most central to both the science fiction and superhero genres. Even a series that seemingly has nothing to do with aliens, like Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith's Conan the Barbarian, set between the sinking of Atlantis and Lemuria and the dawn of human history, is filled with things like a magical star-stone (C 1.25), a Hindu-looking space-being mistakenly worshipped as a deity (C 1.93), a star-gate (C 2.64, 69), and a space-toad that manifests through a portal set up by two black monoliths (C 2.176). Indeed, I would go so far as to say that without the mytheme of Alienation, there could be no science fiction and no superhero comics. It is that foundational. This mytheme, however, is also extremely complex—historically, conceptually, and spiritually.

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11/1/2011 4:00:00 AM

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