Post by auntym on Mar 8, 2014 14:11:40 GMT -6
www.davidhalperin.net/from-superman-to-whitley-strieber-reflections-on-a-super-story/
From Superman to Whitley Strieber – Reflections on a “Super-Story”
by David Halperin
March 6, 2014
“I am not denying the obvious. I am simply suggesting that there is also a ‘secret life’ to Superman that extends far, far beyond his latest incarnation and ‘descent’ (or crash landing) into American pop culture.”
–Jeffrey J. Kripal
It takes a big book to encompass between the same two covers Superman and Spider-Man, Freud and Jung, H.G. Wells and H.P. Blavatsky, plus John Keel and Whitley Strieber of UFO fame. Mutants & Mystics, published in 2011 by Professor Jeffrey Kripal of Rice University, is that kind of a book.
The subtitle declares it to be about “science fiction, superhero comics, and the paranormal.” That listing could be expanded to several times its current length without doing justice to the range of topics touched upon, sometimes discussed in depth, in Mutants & Mystics. Its essential subject is the exploration—reconstruction? evocation?—of the mythology, much of it visible but much hidden or communicated only in code, of contemporary (mostly American) civilization. A complex and ramified mythological system that Kripal calls our “Super-Story.”
Full disclosure: I consider Jeff Kripal a friend, though to date we’ve met only in cyberspace. But even if I hadn’t known the author, I’d have been captivated by Mutants & Mystics. How could I not admire a book of such broad erudition, as sober and witty, playful and grave, as this one is? How could I not love a book in which UFOs hold so central a place?
A large part of the book’s delight is its unanticipated correlations, its eerie coincidences that sometimes (not always) feel like more than coincidence. Did you know, for example, that in 1898–that’s 14 years before the Titanic disaster–one Morgan Robinson published a novella about a super-ship called the Titan, supposedly unsinkable, which went down in the North Atlantic after hitting an iceberg, with tremendous and tragic loss of life? The deaths due, in large measure, to the ship’s not having carried enough lifeboats.
This, I think, really does have to be coincidence. The alternatives are just too implausible. But here’s another correlation, potentially far more significant: that the superhero Spider-Man, with his “classic almond eyes of the alien,” appeared on the scene in 1962—at the same time that the otherworldly abductors of New Hampshire couple Betty and Barney Hill, with their slanted, “wraparound” eyes, were cooking within the Hills’ unconscious. Kripal deftly weaves in the insect/spider theme of UFO fantasies, including a now-forgotten book by Gerald Heard (Is Another World Watching? 1950) which suggested the UFOs are piloted by a species of intelligent extraterrestrial insects.
(I first saw the brilliant faux-Greek portrait of Spider-Man by artist Nicholas Hyde, reproduced above, in an email from Jeff. Initially I didn’t recognize it as Spider-Man. I thought, “UFO alien,” and figured it must be a joke. At least, I was pretty sure it was a joke.)
So far Mutants & Mystics sounds like an intricate and multi-layered work of cultural criticism, which in fact it mostly is. Kripal is a professional historian of religion, and he’s keenly aware of the roots, often very deep, of the “Super-Story’s” themes. I blogged two weeks ago about his insights concerning Met(at)ron, the DC Comics superhero with a pedigree going back to a super-angel of the ancient Jewish “merkabah mysticism.” He’s also a comparativist–I’ll soon be posting about his new textbook Comparing Religions, due to be released in a few weeks–and he finds parallels to the slanted “alien” eye in South Asian religious art, particularly that depicting “the sexually aggressive Tantric goddess Kali.” (Who, as Kripal points out, turns up explicitly in the erotic fantasies of UFO abductee Whitley Strieber.)
But there’s more. And here’s where the book starts to get controversial.
CONTINUE READING: www.davidhalperin.net/from-superman-to-whitley-strieber-reflections-on-a-super-story/
From Superman to Whitley Strieber – Reflections on a “Super-Story”
by David Halperin
March 6, 2014
“I am not denying the obvious. I am simply suggesting that there is also a ‘secret life’ to Superman that extends far, far beyond his latest incarnation and ‘descent’ (or crash landing) into American pop culture.”
–Jeffrey J. Kripal
It takes a big book to encompass between the same two covers Superman and Spider-Man, Freud and Jung, H.G. Wells and H.P. Blavatsky, plus John Keel and Whitley Strieber of UFO fame. Mutants & Mystics, published in 2011 by Professor Jeffrey Kripal of Rice University, is that kind of a book.
The subtitle declares it to be about “science fiction, superhero comics, and the paranormal.” That listing could be expanded to several times its current length without doing justice to the range of topics touched upon, sometimes discussed in depth, in Mutants & Mystics. Its essential subject is the exploration—reconstruction? evocation?—of the mythology, much of it visible but much hidden or communicated only in code, of contemporary (mostly American) civilization. A complex and ramified mythological system that Kripal calls our “Super-Story.”
Full disclosure: I consider Jeff Kripal a friend, though to date we’ve met only in cyberspace. But even if I hadn’t known the author, I’d have been captivated by Mutants & Mystics. How could I not admire a book of such broad erudition, as sober and witty, playful and grave, as this one is? How could I not love a book in which UFOs hold so central a place?
A large part of the book’s delight is its unanticipated correlations, its eerie coincidences that sometimes (not always) feel like more than coincidence. Did you know, for example, that in 1898–that’s 14 years before the Titanic disaster–one Morgan Robinson published a novella about a super-ship called the Titan, supposedly unsinkable, which went down in the North Atlantic after hitting an iceberg, with tremendous and tragic loss of life? The deaths due, in large measure, to the ship’s not having carried enough lifeboats.
This, I think, really does have to be coincidence. The alternatives are just too implausible. But here’s another correlation, potentially far more significant: that the superhero Spider-Man, with his “classic almond eyes of the alien,” appeared on the scene in 1962—at the same time that the otherworldly abductors of New Hampshire couple Betty and Barney Hill, with their slanted, “wraparound” eyes, were cooking within the Hills’ unconscious. Kripal deftly weaves in the insect/spider theme of UFO fantasies, including a now-forgotten book by Gerald Heard (Is Another World Watching? 1950) which suggested the UFOs are piloted by a species of intelligent extraterrestrial insects.
(I first saw the brilliant faux-Greek portrait of Spider-Man by artist Nicholas Hyde, reproduced above, in an email from Jeff. Initially I didn’t recognize it as Spider-Man. I thought, “UFO alien,” and figured it must be a joke. At least, I was pretty sure it was a joke.)
So far Mutants & Mystics sounds like an intricate and multi-layered work of cultural criticism, which in fact it mostly is. Kripal is a professional historian of religion, and he’s keenly aware of the roots, often very deep, of the “Super-Story’s” themes. I blogged two weeks ago about his insights concerning Met(at)ron, the DC Comics superhero with a pedigree going back to a super-angel of the ancient Jewish “merkabah mysticism.” He’s also a comparativist–I’ll soon be posting about his new textbook Comparing Religions, due to be released in a few weeks–and he finds parallels to the slanted “alien” eye in South Asian religious art, particularly that depicting “the sexually aggressive Tantric goddess Kali.” (Who, as Kripal points out, turns up explicitly in the erotic fantasies of UFO abductee Whitley Strieber.)
But there’s more. And here’s where the book starts to get controversial.
CONTINUE READING: www.davidhalperin.net/from-superman-to-whitley-strieber-reflections-on-a-super-story/