THE READING RHEUM: STOP, IN THE NAME OF GOD (2026)

 

In KEEPING VS SHARING, I confessed that I was not well-acquainted with the philosophy of Charlie Kirk at the time of his untimely assassination. Since then, I've listened to assorted podcasts, and I've come to admire his Socrates-like ability to engage total strangers in sustained debate, particularly on college campuses like the one on which a demented trans took Kirk's life. But such forums could not provide a holistic view of Kirk's life-philosophy-- and although the majority of Kirk's books were dominantly political in nature, his devotion to his evangelical organization Turning Point suggests to me that his conservatism was based in his religious views. His last book-- which I will abbreviate as STOP-- concentrates primarily on Kirk's beliefs, centering upon the Judeo-Christian concept of the Sabbath. Kirk declared that since 2021 he had obliged himself to observe the Sabbath as a day of rest, despite his many time-consuming commitments. And as I suspected, in STOP Kirk used his meditations on the Sabbath custom to elucidate his religion in general.

As I've stated elsewhere, I'm an agnostic who admires religion's power to tap humanity's propensity for archetypal concepts. So on one hand I'm somewhat sympathetic to Kirk's religious leanings, though not to his evangelism. Kirk insists that the intertwined faiths of Judaism and Christianity are, or should be, the universal truths for humankind, and I reject that assertion whether it comes from theists or atheists. So I can only value Kirk's formulations in a Jungian fashion, even though Kirk rejects that sort of comparativism.

The short review is that STOP is strongest when Kirk is speaking passionately about the Sabbath as a means of recapturing one's spiritual energies by "tuning out," as the hippies used to say. For instance, since Kirk's God is a being incapable of becoming tired from activity as humans tire, Kirk declares that when God finished creation, his "rest" on the seventh day was not a matter of exhaustion. Rather, he was simply looking upon his creation and deeming it good.  Similarly, for humans the Sabbath is not intended to be just a day to "veg out." Keepers of the Sabbath are supposed to be connecting with the traditions of their faith(s) and recognizing their place in God's creation. 

Since I knew Kirk was not a comparativist, I didn't attach much importance to his statement that the archaic Jews were first to formulate any custom like that of the Sabbath. If corrected on this point, Kirk could have always claimed that even if the Jewish Sabbath wasn't the first custom of its kind, it was still the best because "reasons." This is the sort of special pleading Kirk indulges in during Chapter 1, where he makes the self-aggrandizing claim that for all other religions of the ancient Near East, the gods were purely expressions of natural forces while the Hebrew God was totally outside nature. Kirk holds similar views when speaking of modern polytheism. Also in Chapter 1, he mentions how, as a child, he encountered the many gods of Hinduism and could only think of the lack of "moral order" implied by such a plenitude of competing deities. Yet in a later chapter he's not above quoting Scripture to demonstrate that the Church Fathers possessed a far-sighted tolerance toward individual customs and/or proclivities-- which IMO also explains the early evolution of polytheism:

One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind.-- Romans 14:5-6

Thankfully, Kirk mainly attacks secular movements that compete with Judeo-Christianity. He doesn't devote much space to the most execrable movement seen in his lifetime, that of the so-called "anti-racists," but that's probably because he couldn't make their grievance-happy rhetoric relevant to his theme. More space is given to the influence of modern American atheism, but most of these arguments are funneled from Stephen Meyer's RETURN OF THE GOD HYPOTHESIS, which I found interesting though not compelling, given my Jungian preferences. Kirk only attacks one Marxist for having dumbed-down the academic campuses, Herbert Marcuse. But Marcuse seems a good choice, since one Wiki-author claims that he is "considered among the most influential of the Frankfurt School critical theorists on American culture, due to his studies on student and counter-cultural movements on the 1960s." But though I realize that STOP's subject could not take on a voluminous topic, I'd like to have seen more on that subject here, since Kirk lost his life making his philosophical appeal to an academic audience.

A couple of titles have a self-help ring to them, such as "The Sabbath Improves Your Sleep," though I believe Kirk was sincere, not playing huckster-games. His most egregious special pleading appears in Chapter 8, which takes as its starting-point Exodus 20:8-11, a section emphasizing that the Hebrew Sabbath and its blessing of rest was extended not only to Hebrew believers but also to "livestock" and to slaves of any faith. Kirk labors mightily to sell the notion that the custom of the Jewish Sabbath was an "ontological" change from older cultures' beliefs about the status of the enslaved. Kirk also seeks to distance Hebrew slavery from the "moral abomination" of American chattel slavery. However, this opens Kirk up to a familiar criticism of 19th-century Christianity, which has become notorious for using a particular Scriptural citation in defense of slavery:

24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.-- Genesis 9:24-25

Did 19th-century Christians quote Genesis out of context? Probably, but slavers in both North and South were still practicing Christians. Maybe they were abominable because they didn't keep their version of the Sabbath properly? Also, I tend to doubt that even the most liberal translation could erase the core idea in that passage: that the children of Ham, whoever they were, were destined to serve Hebrews. To a believer, this declaration is as much a part of sacred history as the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy. Since as a comparativist I believe that the anthropological evolution of the slavery custom is far more complex than Kirk represents, I could wish he hadn't gone wading in such deep waters.

STOP offers a good portal into the mind of a celebrity evangelist. Not all of Kirk's justifications hold water, but he was still more dedicated to a vision of human improvement than, say, anyone in the Frankfurt School or any of their exploitative descendants.   

MYTHCOMICS: "ANIMAL CRACKERS" (ARCHIE GIANT SERIES #196, 1972)

 

I didn't have too much luck this month looking for my annual "Xmythcomic" until I just randomly decided to look through some online Archie Giants. I don't usually expect much if any mythicity in Archie stories, having said here that "I might not allow that the characters of ARCHIE function on any conceptual level, that they remain staunchly lateral and thus non-vertical in most of their adventures." Still, since I have found myth-stuff in other teen humor comics, so I thought an Archie mythcomic a mild possibility. I just wouldn't have thought it would be a Christmas comic.

It's also from Al Hartley, an ARCHIE artist who became a born-again Christian in the late 1960s. Supposedly he got into his religious crusade so much that his editors had to tell him to tamp it down. I'd seen a few stories into which Hartley worked Christian polemics, but I wasn't sure if he had the artistic ability to emphasize vision over dogma. Yet I was slightly impressed by a 1972 "near myth" in which Hartley tried to communicate a sacral attitude toward nature and American history.

"Animal Crackers" was printed the same year as the "Bus Fuss" story, and it draws upon a few aspects of Christian faith that I suppose a Christian might not consider "mythic" (except maybe for Jordan Peterson). There's a slight irony that the story is introduced by the character of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. The character debuted in 1962 but only became part of the Archieverse seven years later, first by dint of getting an animated cartoon in 1969 and then graduating to her own title in 1971. This led to Sabrina getting a "giant" collection of stories like this one, though "Crackers" only gives her two panels of a "half-frame" story. Clad in a Santa-outfit, she gives the reader a quickie intro to the idea that animals also celebrate Christmas, and then promptly does a fast fade.  

So here begins the main conceit: it's the regular Archie characters, as animals. Archie, though not exactly a commanding presence in the comics, gets to be the Lion because he's the King of the Archie Universe. Jughead is a kangaroo who envies a pelican for his food storage capacity but doesn't appreciate being able to use his pouch for Xmas presents-- though this really doesn't have anything to do with the main point of the story.

So in quick succession most of the Archie characters get their beasts on: Moose the Gorilla, Reggie the Tiger (because the tiger is the lion's "rival"), Big Ethel the Giraffe, Dilton the Owl, and Veronica the Peacock. Strangely, Hartley leaves out any iteration of Veronica's rival Betty. Maybe it was a bit of conceptual strain to animal-ize any other females, since he doesn't draw Veronica as a female critter, but as a humanoid with a peacock-tail and bird-feet. But aside from some minor sex-jokes-- Big Ethel turns off all the boys while Veronica only has to "flutter her tail" to mesmerize the males-- nobody's doing much of anything, good or bad. So is Dilton going to excoriate the gamboling beast-people for not going to church?

  Yes-- and no. Lion Archie defends whatever games they've all supposedly been playing at the "Christmas party," because "Christmas is a sort of make-believe time." This ought to sound logical to most readers, juvenile and otherwise: isn't Xmas a festive time, to gambol about with friends and family?

However, Dilton does have a point beyond being a spoilsport. In the remaining two pages of the story, he sketches out a time before Christmas, when animals-- and, by extension, the humans they represent-- were ruled by "the law of the jungle." People ruled by that law fought all the time, governed only by the "survival of the fittest." (Not much love for Darwin here...) However, though without explicitly mentioning the birth of Christ, Dilton states that Christmas was responsible for introducing the current state of all creatures, able to appreciate one another despite any differences that might divide them. I hypothesize, though, that since Hartley's editors didn't want him proselytizing in the Archieverse, the artist chose not to invoke "the Prince of Peace" as such. Instead, he employed a cognate principle: that of Isaiah 11:6, in which "the wolf shall dwell with the lamb" (as opposed to the popular "lion and lamb" misquote). And though I'm agnostic (albeit with a Christian background), I have to appreciate the skillful way Hartley managed to communicate his feelings on the millennial nature of his faith with Aesopian version of the Archie cast and a fusion of the Christmas holiday with the vision of Isaiah.

I have to admit, though, that I still haven't found a myth-tale for those immortal kids of Riverdale in their own personas. But if I never find one, this is an adequate substitute.                 

MYTHCOMICS: "NOAH'S ARK" (MIGHTY SAMSON #27, 1975)

 

In my kidhood, I was aware of the Gold Key title MIGHTY SAMSON, but I don't even remember looking at it. I probably was busy emptying my pockets for much of the output of the other companies, so something had to be overlooked. In retrospect, though, MS does have some points of interest. It was probably the most successful Gold Key franchise not owned by some company other than Gold Key and was created by the celebrated Otto Binder in 1964. Binder wrote the first twenty issues, after which other writers pinch-hit on an irregular basis until the series ended in 1975. 

Though Binder had authored a healthy quantity of mythcomics, his main idea with MS seems to have been, "Kids like monsters, so I'll give them lots of monsters." To this end he devised a post-apocalyptic world recovering from long exposure to the radioactive fallout of devastating wars, which had leveled cities and bred all sorts of weird mutations. In fact, the main hero was a mutant as well, born with immense strength, not unlike many of the strongmen Binder had written for other comic books. Samson, accompanied by the scientist Mindor and his hot daughter Sharmaine (implicitly but never literally Samson's main squeeze), wandered the ruined world, seeking to rediscover the lost principles of science for the betterment of all humans. This quest brought the protagonists into conflict with numerous petty tyrants, religious fanatics, and of course, monsters. Binder seemed to take some pleasure in concocting all sorts of freaky combinations of actual animals, with such names as "The Kangorilla" and "The Horned Rhinophant," most of whom Samson slew with his fantastic strength. To be sure, the Biblical Samson wasn't that notable as a beast-killer, being credited only with the slaying of one lion, while his Greek counterpart Heracles racked up many more monsters, including a lion said to be invulnerable to spears. Binder did toss in one element derived from the Biblical strongman, that of blindness. But Archaic Samson was blinded by his captors the Philistines, while in the comic, Mighty Samson loses an eye in his first major creature-battle, with a monster combining aspects of a lion and a bear, a "Liobear."     

 But none of the mighty one's adventures had the density of myth, except this one, written by one Al Moniz, who apparently worked in comics only during the middle seventies, and then mostly for Western/Gold Key. "Noah's Ark" in issue #27 is not precisely the first time in the series any writer evoked the "original apocalypse" of The Deluge, but it's the first time any writer did so with conviction.       

For instance, the opening intro specifies that the mutated "plants and animals now match the monstrosity of man's self-destructiveness in size and horror." Moniz then alludes to Mighty Samson as a heroic counter to the monsters and then wonders if "Noah" may be just as significant.

Naturally the Noah of this story is no more related to his Biblical counterpart than Mighty Samson is to the Nazirite, and Moniz gives his character a significant surname, that of "Caine." In the Bible Cain is the first murderer and so is often viewed as the ancestor of all wickedness-- not least the wickedness that dominates humankind when God sends the flood to wipe out almost all life on Earth. So Moniz eventually answers his own question in the negative.

Samson, Sharmaine and Mindor stumble across a rarity: a fawn, a creature from the era before the great wars. The fawn leads the trio to a devastated zoo, only to discover a laboratory, where Doctor Noah Caine dwells.  
     

Caine explains that he was a zookeeper before the atomic war, and that he anticipated the coming destruction. Though other humans did not take Caine's project seriously, Caine built an ark, stocked it with the animals he loved, and placed them, and himself, into hibernation. Caine arose from his coma and made it to shore. However, he could not free the entire ark from its subsea location thanks to some big mutant critter impeding it, so he asks for Samson's help at monster-dislodging.

Once the colossal critter is vanquished, Caine is able to release the purebred beasts of the pre-apocalyptic age upon that of the mutated world. However, Sharmaine is able to learn, from some long-preserved library, that Noah Caine deliberately banned humans from his ark out of his near-worship of animals. He also hoped that the beasts of his time would "inherit the earth," but it soon becomes evident that the "normie" animals begin transforming into freaks as soon as they breathe the polluted atmosphere.

Caine is even more crazed than before when he realizes that humans alone have (apparently) built up an immunity to mutating radiation, unlike his precious pre-lapsarian animals. He announces plans to unleash his mutated creatures on humans and sets his mutant-fawn Bimbi upon Samson. The strongman himself doesn't win the battle, but the very nature of the fawn's deranged nature works against the animal-master. Bimbi hallucinates that Caine is identical with one of the native mutants of the post-apoc world, and attacks Caine's bully pulpit. Caine perishes, and Mindor decides to send all the "normie" animals back into their ark-hibernation, in the hope that someday the earth will be capable of sustaining their lives again. There's a certain irony in "Ark," since ordinarily one thinks of Biblical Noah as a great preserver of life, while a monster-killer like Biblical Samson is only good insofar as he protects his tribe from predators. But even though Caine is correct in assigning blame for the world's ruination to humans, his unconditional love for the lower beasts makes him just as destructive as any other human-- though his good intentions, at least, will be venerated in some future era, when the earth's actually ready for rebirth.              

KEEPING VS. SHARING PT 2

 In Part 1 of this essay-series, I offered a broad characterization of the two political philosophies, conservatism and liberalism, as overt manifestations of two deeper ethical systems, the Ethos of Keeping for the first and the Ethos of Sharing for the second. I also showed just a few historical examples of how the two systems interwove, but here I'll focus on how they played out in two historical periods, the 1960s "Civil Rights" era and the 21st-century "identity politics" era, and I'll use illustrations taken more from fiction than from history.

I commented in Part 1 that the pietistic religions strongly emphasized the Ethos of Sharing, but there were different degrees of emphasis. Early Christianity did not suggest that all slaveholders should free their slaves-- even though the Jewish custom of Jubilee at least indicated that this was a beneficial act-- but rather enjoined slaveholders to treat their slaves with charity and humanity. Thus the message to conservatives here was "You Should Share." At the same time, Christianity was founded upon the template of the Old Testament, which sometimes put forth the countervailing message, "You Must Share." One can see this illustrated by the Exodus story of Moses and the Pharaoh, in which Pharaoh's desire to "Keep" the Jews as slaves was finally overthrown by God's will that the Jews must be liberated. Pharaoh himself represents the extreme of conservatism, that of "You Must Keep" one's perceived property no matter what. Yet, going back to the slavery-rhetoric from early Christianity, some masters followed a milder version of Keeping, which I'll call the commandment "You Should Keep," unless one sees a good reason not to do so. Within this form of ethical compass, even if one decides to liberate this or that meritorious slave-- as Philemon releases Onesimus in the Epistle of Paul-- that does not mean that the slaveholder releases all his slaves, or renounces the belief that slavery is a perfectly normal societal practice.

Vaulting over centuries to the American Civil Rights era, it's possible to see these commandments on both sides of the liberal/conservatism spectrum manifesting in the political persuasions often called "meliorism" and "radicalism." The radical conservative swears by the commandment "You Must Keep," which resulted (for one example) in banning free Blacks from being educated in any way, for fear that they might have a better chance at escaping a second-class citizen status. The meliorist conservative, swearing by "You Should Keep," by contrast would be okay with allowing Black Americans to be educated in Black schools, but would still want Blacks to stay within certain boundaries. The meliorist and the radical attitudes with respect to liberals have received much more commentary. The meliorist liberal wants to work within the system, to prove that he deserves a seat at the table on the basis of merit-- again, telling conservatives "You Should Share." The radical liberal insists that, on the basis of past treatment, the whole table should be overturned so that only his people (and maybe some fellow travelers) can be seated, telling conservatives that "You Must Share," even to the extent of beggaring oneself.

I'd originally planned to address my fictional examples in this post but now it seems to me that the length of the post will become ungainly, so I'll hold the rest for a Part Three.           

      

NULL-MYTHS: ANGEL AND THE APE VOLUME ONE (1968-69)

 

The best thing about the original run of DC's ANGEL AND THE APE -- lasting just one SHOWCASE issue and six issues of a regular magazine-- was the above house ad.

Now, whenever I first saw this 1968 ad, I had been collecting superhero comics for at least two years. Thanks to an easy-to-reach used bookstore where a lot of kids dumped their comics, I had amassed a substantial collection. (Just as a marker, by the time the first SPIDER-MAN cartoon debuted on TV in September 1967, I had read reprints of all the Spider-stories that the show was kinda-sorta adapting.) I didn't have much interest in DC Comics' comedy features, so I never bought any issues of AATA. 

I would have been at least twelve whenever I saw this ad, so I'm not sure my memory is entirely accurate. But what I seem to remember is wondering if the opposition of the "Angel"-- a lithe-looking young woman-- with the brutish (albeit clothed) "Ape" was supposed to have some weird romantic vibe. I may or may not have seen the 1933 KING KONG by 1968, but I'm sure I had heard that there was at least a one-sided amour fou going on there. And everyone knew, without being able to put into words, that the classic fairy tale BEAUTY AND THE BEAST was all about an angelic human female getting mixed up with a hideous male brute. As it turned out, there were no real romantic vibes between the titular "funny detectives" Angel O'Day and her partner, intelligent gorilla Sam Simeon. However, I still think that the artist who drew the ad had a little salacious intent-- for I now notice something I didn't in 1968. I might have mistaken the shape with the logo, the form separating Angel and Sam for an angel's wing-- but now I realize that angel-wings don't have stems. The object separating angelic female and brutish male is the venerable fig-leaf of Judeo-Christian art.     

Two years before AATA, one of the feature's creators, E. Nelson Bridwell, had been responsible for another DC humor-title, THE INFERIOR FIVE. But though both IF and AATA boasted roughly the same sort of cornball comedy, IF at least had a rationale for its parody of superheroes. AATA was a detective parody in which a martially-trained human girl and an intelligent gorilla went around solving mysteries. The creators-- which seems like a committee of three or four guys throwing crap at the wall-- don't supply even a minor rationale as to why the two of them run a detective agency, which kind of conflicts with Sam Simeon's regular job, that of drawing comic books. (He sometimes used Angel as his model.) 

Given the short duration of the original title, I gather most readers weren't even slightly curious about the feature. It didn't help that most of the time the stories wandered about from one comic schtick to another with no rhyme or reason, as if the creators thought the fans would simply go ape over a funny gorilla-- or, in a different fashion, over the toothsome hottie Angel, ably rendered by artist Bob Oskner. Probably those Silver Age fans who remember AATA at all recall that it was one of the first times any comic satirized the figure of Marvel editor Stan Lee, in the form of Sam's wacky editor Stan Bragg. However, Stan himself had already produced better self-satires than anything in this comic.

The only story that stays on point in spoofing detective cliches is issue #3. In "The Curse of the Avarice Clan," Bridwell produces a decent sendup of the "old dark house" subgenre, in which some mystery killer seeks to murder all the heirs to a fabulous will. But how many kids in 1968 even knew what an "old dark house mystery" was? 

The last story in the last issue was the only one in which there was a very minor suggestion of gorilla romance. In it, Angel goes on a date with a handsome rich guy, and Sam spies on their date, allegedly because he doesn't think the judo-savvy lady detective can defend herself against a masher. The main schtick of the story is that Sam repeatedly masquerades as human beings like waiters and cabbies, and that only Angel can see through his transparent disguises. It wasn't much of a story, but it's the only one in which there's a little conflict between the two principals-- and though the jealousy angle is only potentially present, it would finally get some development (albeit not much better executed) in the 1991 ANGEL AND THE APE reboot, to be discussed in a future post.     

ADDENDUM: I posted the house ad on CHFB and another poster thought the "leaf" was a bunch of bananas. If any of the serrations along the edge of the shape were rounded, I would agree that this was a good possibility, since banana jokes were frequent in AATA. At the same time, I admit that the shape dividing the characters doesn't look like a real fig leaf-- and in both canonical and pop art, most fig leaves need to have those compound blades in order to cover all the unmentionables.  My revised theory is that the house-ad artist knew he needed to leave room for the letterer to place the logo on the shape, so what he produced is more like a standardized serrated leaf-- and there's no reason to associate leaves with angels and apes unless you're thinking about primeval angel-ape encounters.

SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES, AGAIN PT. 3

   "I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you."-- God to Eve, Genesis 3:16.  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                          This familiar Biblical phrase testifies to the ease with which many men and women in traditional cultures validated the discrepancy of power between male and female. Genesis never states that men should rule over women because men have more physical power, or even that men should rule because they're the ones who sally forth to defend home and family from dinos and dragons and the like. Eve allowed the serpent to beguile her, and Adam transgressed as well because of her. Only for that reason must all of Eve's female children defer to their husbands, while all the male offspring will labor to "till the soil." After that the question of male and female power is dropped to get into the Cain story in Genesis 4. We don't read about any particular "contrary desires" on the part of wives-- who function mostly to breed-- until Genesis 21:10. There Sarah more or less orders her husband Abraham to kick out the bondswoman Hagar and her son by Abraham, so that Sarah's child will occupy the catbird seat. So Sarah takes primacy as the first post-Eden female to master the Power of the Nag.                                                                                       

                                                                                                               Of course, there will be various other conflicts of "contrary desires" in various parts of the Bible, and I think it a fair generalization to say that a lot of them come about because of the conflict between "men of violence" and "women of sex," for which the narrative of Samson and Delilah stands as an archetypal example. On occasion, as with the tale of Jael and Sisera, the woman is able to use sex to once more beguile the violent male into lowering his guard. So at long last, I'm making the claims that from these "contrary desires" are the source of "the blues" I see rising from the exigencies of sexual dimorphism.                                                                               

  Even for those with a strong religious belief, the dimorphism of the sexes must seem a very arbitrary decree by God, especially since said decree is not expressly recorded in the Bible. It's even more so from the POV of the evolutionist, who can only argue that in their archaic development into homo sapiens, women remained smaller and less able to defend themselves because (say) their function of raising children remained paramount. Either way, archaic or modern, the physical inequity remains a foundational fact of life. This leads to psychological inequities rooted in compensation, with the woman being a nag to the man and the man being a bully to the woman. And yet, the history of religions does indicate-- as I argued in the SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE series-- that human beings have sometimes been able to invert the expected roles, imagining the archetypes I termed "the Barbarous Woman" and "the Compassionate Man." I don't have any solution to any of the grievances that arise from the embodied inequities of the two sexes. But I will repeat, just to be clear, that mere representation and opposition to the "status quo" often functions more to exacerbate the suffering than to alleviate it.                                                        

THE READING RHEUM: LIGHT IN AUGUST (1932)

So they looked at the fire with that same dull and static amaze which they had brought down from the old fetid caves where knowing began, as though, like death, they had never seen fire before.

LIGHT IN AUGUST is definitely the most singular "Christmas" story I've reviewed on this blog, being that it's a highly ironic parody of the story of Jesus Christ set in the rural American South of the 1930s. Despite the fact that the novel is entirely isophenomenal, Faulkner constantly refers to interior states of mind that, like the quote above, suggest some primeval ethos that predates not only the racial matrices of the South but of organized religion as such. LIGHT is also a mystery loosely in the vein of the detective fiction that was becoming a major American genre in the 1930s, but the "mystery" Faulkner aspires to solve relates to the nature of human identity, more in keeping with the "mystery plays" of medieval European Christianity.    

The narratives of three principal characters intertwine to give LIGHT its mythopoeic structure, though many of the supporting characters are no less mythic. One is defrocked Christian minister Gail Hightower, who resides in the small town of Jefferson, Mississippi and who lives a lonely existence isolated from the other citizens, aside from one confidante. The other two main figures are relative newcomers to Jefferson. One is the very pregnant hillbilly girl Lena Grove, who has hitchhiked from her home in Alabama, looking for Lucas Burch, the man who knocked her up. The other is the main target of Faulkner's Christological parody, petty criminal Joe Christmas (note the initials), who is also the vehicle of the author's views on the simmering racial matrix of American culture, mostly that of the South though not without some trenchant commentary on the Northern states as well.     

In a use of coincidence that most genre-mysteries would scorn, Lena finds her way to Jefferson by asking passersby if anyone has encountered her not-yet-husband Lucas Burch. Someone tells her to seek a "Burch" working in Jefferson, but the speaker is thinking of a man with a similar last name, Byron Bunch (the minister's one Jefferson confidante), who in most ways is the ethical opposite of Lucas Burch. The coincidental part is that Lucas Burch truly is working in Jefferson as well, but under the assumed name of Joe Brown, possibly to avoid Lena or anyone tracking him down. During Burch/Brown's time in Jefferson, he enters into a partnership with Joe Christmas, who runs a covert bootlegging operation there.  

Whereas the Jesus Christ of scripture was always sure of his divine parentage no matter what any mortal thought, Joe Christmas was raised an orphan and accused of being half-Black. The reasons behind this accusation constitute a secondary mystery, but the main mystery concerns the apparent murder of a Jefferson citizen, rich Joanna Burden, the spinster daughter of a Yankee abolitionist family. Burden allows Christmas and Brown to dwell on her land because she's carrying on a secret affair with Christmas. When she's killed and her house burned, Brown makes public the rumors of Christmas's racial heritage, the better to enflame the public against the fugitive-- less for his having killed a rich abolitionist than for having slept with a white woman. Then, in the last third of the novel, supporting character Epheus Hines reveals his part in the evolution of Christmas' situation, in a development so entangled as to make GREAT EXPECTATIONS seem straightforward.

There are far too many symbolic complexities in LIGHT to explore in a blogpost, far more than one would ever find in a simple novel about racial justice. Faulkner compares Southern Whites' constant persecution of the Negro race with the sufferings of the Christian savior, even though the likeness is ironic given that Joe Christmas is anything but saintly. For Faulkner it's only a small step between societal scapegoat and sacrificial lamb, and Christmas-- whose mixed heritage is never definitively proven-- suffers a martrydom that deeply impresses those who lynch him, as Christmas "seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever." And yet, as noted earlier Faulkner sees the same scapegoating process in the Christianity of the allegedly more liberal North. One of Joanna Burden's ancestors speaks the following convoluted rant about the intertwined destiny of Whites and Blacks in the New World:

The curse of the black race is God's curse. But the curse of the white race is the black man who will be forever God's chosen because He once cursed Him.

Faulkner leaves this skein tangled, probably because he believes that it represented the confusion of sentiments in American religion. Is the speaker comparing American Blacks to the Bible's "chosen people," the eternally persecuted Jews? Or is "the black man" of the passage comparable to the name Puritan settlers used for Satan, also "The Black Man"-- and if so, is the curse of God (the first "He") the curse that hurled "Him" (Satan/Lucifer) into perdition? Or does the speaker have in mind some muddled notion of the Biblical Curse of Ham by God's prophet Noah, a curse which originally had nothing to do with African Blacks but which was used to justify the subjugation of Black slaves?

And this fraction of Faulknerian analysis doesn't even touch on the author's view of the multitudinous conflicts of male and female natures, which could engender a separate post or two by itself. I'm also skipping most of the details on Gail Hightower and Lena Groves, though as one might expect, nativity myths are implicitly invoked with respect to Lena, with naive Byron Bunch standing in for "cuckolded" Joseph.      

Of the many mythopoeic prose novels out there, literary or otherwise, LIGHT IN AUGUST is one of the densest and most rewarding. It doesn't beat out the champion, Melville's MOBY DICK, but even Herman's own BILLY BUDD looks rather simple next to this Faulkner masterpiece.

                 

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 4

While I guess I could follow up my meditations on the phase shifts of Lois Lane with an essay on, say, Jimmy Olsen, I'll take a 180-degree turn here (however brief) into a similar dynamic I found in a pop-fiction take on a venerable myth from the Hebrew Old Testament.

I won't go into the plot of the 1952 QUEEN OF SHEBA, since I adequately summarized the movie in my review. What makes it relevant to the phase shift I described is that the original texts from the Old Testament, principally "Kings," Solomon is the Prime while the Queen of Sheba-- later given the proper name "Balkis" by Islamic commentary-- is a Sub. So is Rehoboam, son of Solomon. But in the 1952 movie, both of them are Primes, while Solomon becomes a Sub who barely impacts the narrative. But there is no crossover-vibe at all in the movie. Even though Balkis and Rehoboam have absolutely no interaction in the Old Testament, they are both aligned to the "Solomon cosmos." Thus, when the movie centers upon these two characters and relegates Solomon to Sub status, the phase shift involved follows the same pattern as Lois Lane assuming Prime status and demoting Superman.

In contrast, the 2004 film NOAH is a valid crossover of two disparate figures in the Old Testament. There are no associations there between Noah and Tubal-Cain in scripture, except in the generic sense that both are incredibly long-lived figures. For that reason, the movie supposes that Tubal-Cain slew Noah's father Lamech, despite the fact that scripture does not reference Lamech's death in any way. Since Tubal-Cain does not sustain his own narrative, I suppose I would deem him a Sub within the story of his progenitor Cain, so making him a Sub within a pop-fiction version of Noah's narrative is only a minor shift in his Sub-alignment. 

MYTHCOMICS: ["THE SWORD AND THE SERPENT"] (ARAK #35-36, ARAK ANNUAL #1, 1984)

[This time, since none of the interior titles of this three-part tale provide me with a good umbrella-cognomen, I'm using the faux-title taken from the cover of ARAK SON OF THUNDER #36.]

In my breakdown of the overall series I noted that its star "Arak Red-Hand" was a full-grown Native American man with his own belief-system when he was tossed into the matrix of Dark Ages Europe. Thus he does not at any time subscribe to the pagan mythos of the Vikings he first encounters or to the Christian beliefs of the friends he makes in the court of Charlemagne. But in addition to making the main character non-committal about others' gods, author Roy Thomas usually avoids showing evidence of supernatural manifestations belonging to the so-called "Peoples of the Book," i.e., Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Arak certainly meets several members of each faith during his travels, but the only named character who suggests some miraculous nature is an old man named Josephus, who may be the legendary Wandering Jew. 

"Serpent," however, places the Arak character in a site where it is possible for him to correlate his own "Old Enemy," the Serpent-God of the Quontauka tribe, with the "serpent in the garden" common to Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions. The desire to provide such a correlation may be why Arak, accompanied by the satyr Satyricus and Syrian travelers Alsind and Sharizad, visit the city of Syrian Damascus, which was said to have built over the remnants of Eden itself. 

To be sure, there's a proximate plot-rationale for Alsind and his female cousin to guide Arak and his comic relief to that city. Alsind claims to be the son of a deposed emir, and thus the true heir of the rulership in that city. In exchange for his help, Alsind promises to help Arak secure a ship for his ongoing quest to find his people.

A further wrinkle is that Arak himself is a testimony to the existence of his own "pagan" religion, since he's revealed to be the literal offspring of the Quontauka thunder-god. This heritage means that he displays some roughly-defined shamanistic skills. One such attribute is demonstrated when he and his allies approach Damascus, and Arak sees a specter hanging over the city, one that no one else sees-- the image of a giant fiery sword.

Later that issue, Arak and friends get some backstory, in part from that recrudescent wanderer Josephus. According to legend, the angel Gabriel expelled Adam and Eve from Eden with a flaming sword, and this "Firesword" still exists somewhere in Damascus. Josephus fears that evil hands seek the sword's power to control all Peoples of the Book, and this fear is soon justified. While Arak and friends attend a welcoming feast at the home of Alsind's uncle, the guests are attacked by masked assassins-- who, when slain, turn out to be serpent-headed humanoids.

Arak employs his "shaman-sense" to guide his allies to a certain spot in Damascus, and Alsind informs them that the area once harbored the palace of the Ummayad line to which he belongs, a palace razed out of existence by the rival clan of the Abassi. The uncle's servants dig up the area, finding a skeleton. (Arak vaguely compares the skeleton to Adam, not remembering that Adam was supposed to have been driven out of Eden-- though Thomas may have been thinking of a legend that was spun out of Genesis 3:15, to the effect that Adam himself had "crushed the head of the serpent" at some point.) When the diggers flee the site, Arak takes over, and opens the way into a subterranean chamber defined by two visual aspects. First, the walls of the chamber are dominated by huge roots-- roots which Alsind's uncle compares to "the Holy Tree of Knowledge," though with no specific justification. Second, in the center of the chamber floats the Firesword, but this time the same size as an ordinary weapon. When Arak seizes the sword with his shaman-strength, a half-human, half-snake entity bursts through a wall and tries to wrest the sword from the hero. During the fight the snake-man confirms that the deity he worships is the same Old Enemy of Arak's thunder-father, but this only fires up Arak to slay the serpent with the sword. However, the snake-man is only the tool of a mortal servant of the serpent-god, the Lord of Serpents, and since he can't take the blade from Arak, the Lord uses his magic to spirit Alsing and Sharizad away, as ransom for the weapon.

Arak, hoping to rescue his friends without surrendering the great weapon, journeys with Satyricus into the desert-land adjoining Damascus, again using his shaman-sense to seek his enemy. A brief conversation establishes that Arak finds it difficult to control the Firesword, for its energies seem to want to return to Heaven. (Why they were held in place in the root-chamber, Thomas does not discuss.) A sandstorm separates the hero from his buddy, and for several pages, each of them experiences phantasias of the villain's creation. Satyricus finds himself in Hades, meeting his dead friend Khiron the Centaur again, and the satyr briefly fantasizes about gathering together all the denizens of the underworld to bring back the glories of Hellas to Greece. Arak is briefly seduced by a vision in which he rejoins his Quontauka people, but he soon discerns that it's an illusion. He dispels the vision and finds Satyricus, at which point they find themselves back in the desert.

The stone head of a serpent, the conduit to the magician's lair, pokes out of the sand. In the throneroom of the Lord, Arak gives up the sword to liberate Alsind and Sharizad, but then he assaults the evildoer, trying to regain control of the weapon. The warrior then uses his own skills to pull the flames off the physical sword in the hand of the magician, creating a separate sword of pure fire. With this fire-blade Arak stabs his foe, and then releases the power back to Heaven, so that only an ordinary metal blade remains on Earth. The serpent-lair conveniently collapses, but all four good guys escape. Though there's evidence that the mortal Lord also escaped despite his wound, he's never seen again as a primary antagonist. Thus, "Sword and the Serpent" is the first and last hurrah for both the Sword of Gabriel and the Lord of the Serpents.

ADDENDA: For the sake of exposition-clarity I left out one small point. Among the exploratory party is Dinar-Zad, sister of Alsind's uncle and mother to Alsind, though she's not seen her son in many years because of Alsind's exile. However, Dinar-Zad betrays both Alsind and Sharizad by pushing them into the clutches of the Lord. It turns out that at some point Dinar-Zad became the tool of the Serpent-God, having also helped the assassins gain egress to the palace. Thomas certainly chose the name Dinar-Zad because it's an alternate name for the ARABIAN NIGHTS name usually translated as "Dunyazad." In the NIGHTS Dunyazad is the loyal sister of Scheherezade. But Dinar-Zad's significance is not that of betraying her son and her niece, but that of being a woman who betrays humanity-- an even more obvious symbol-reference to that other deceptive female, Eve.

NEAR MYTHS: THE ARAK SAGA (1981-85)

There''s the germ of a really good sword-and-sorcery concept in the eighties DC series ARAK OF SON OF THUNDER, created by writer Roy Thomas and artist Ernie (RICHIE RICH) Colon. In the eighth century CE, a Native American man is shipwrecked off the coast of Norway and found by Vikings. The Scandinavians dub the strange red man "Eric," though he pronounces this new name "Arak." His memories of his past life are hazy so as to not get in the way of the first step in his heroic destiny, which begins with his seeking vengeance on an evil sorceress who kills his Viking friends. This mission, and many like it, propel Arak throughout many of the historical hotspots of 8th-century Europe and even parts of Asia. 

Given the peripatetic nature of the feature, there can't be any serious doubt that Roy Thomas sought to duplicate in ARAK his success with the Marvel feature CONAN. Thomas had not only encouraged the company to purchase adaptation rights to the Robert E. Howard barbarian, he wrote the rough-hewn hero's adventures for the better part of the seventies prior to leaving Marvel and accepting employment with DC. Like Conan, Arak is a barbaric fish out of water as he passes through domains of relatively greater sophistication. Like Conan, Arak never spends much time in any locale, always finding some reason to move on and sample the challenges of other lands, usually represented by more wizards, beasts, and demons.

In my view the "germ" of greater potential suggested by ARAK would be the fun of cultural contrasts, of having a barbaric hero, with all of his own cultural preferences, bouncing off the priorities of French knights-in-armor, Muslim traders, and the like. But Thomas does not do this. Despite the fact that his scripts (whether on his own or with collaborators) are among the wordiest he ever produced, there's never room for interesting meditations on deeper subjects. To some extent this was the way Thomas wrote his last five years of CONAN, so maybe he figured lightning would strike twice if he followed the same course. However, CONAN had two things ARAK never had. First, skilled workhouse John Buscema provided the visual look of the main title, and to some extent followed a visual template for other artists to follow-- whereas Arak was cursed with the less "cinematic" art-styles of Colon, Tony deZuniga and others. Second, whereas Conan was a rough fellow who was often unpredictable, Arak was a very dull upright heroic type. This resulted in most of the stories ranging from poor to merely average in their appeal. There's one good myth-sequence I'll analyze separately, but otherwise, in this essay I'll just touch on points of interest.

"The Devil Takes a Bride," #2-- Arak gets mixed up with a maiden named Corrina, who's confined to a castle because her mother had congress with a demon. Or--maybe she's her own mother--? The hero picks up the first of his long-running support-cast, the aged good magician Malagigi, who serves the court of Charlemagne.

"Sword of the Iron Maiden," #3-- Arak gets his second support-character, the female knight Valda, given the rather fey cognomen "the Iron Maiden," and who is the daughter of the legendary lady knight Bradamante. Valda becomes Arak's first romantic interest in the series. Issue #7 contains an amusing reversal of a similar scene in the first encounter of Conan and Red Sonja. In the earlier story, Red Sonja prompts Conan to go skinny-dipping with her in order to make him dumb with lust for her. Valda joins Arak in a mutual bath, but her purpose is clearly to get him to show interest in her so that she can shut him down, proving to herself that he wants her and to Arak that she ain't no easy lay.

"The Last Centaur," #10-12-- Arak ends up in Greece, where all the gods have apparently died, though this leads the warrior to a revelation about his own possibly divine paternity. He meets the last centaur, who dies, and the last satyr, one Satyricus, who pledges to go along with Arak on his various quests and provide comedy relief. In #12 Valda gets the first of a handful of backup strips about her early days.

"The Slayer from the Wine-Dark Sea," #15-- Despite the title's Homeric reference the main focus is medieval Byzantium, where the majority of the series' stories transpire. As seen on the cover, Arak gets a Mohawk for a while in response to having found he's half thunder-god, but the hairstyle won't last long. 

"At Last, Albracca," #21-- There wasn't been a lot of "sense of wonder" in the ARAK title up to this point, or much past it, precisely because Thomas kept his scripting at a very pedestrian level. But, after not having read this story in some thirty years, I was struck by one wonder: that of Arak and his allies traveling over a "sea of moving stones." At the end of this arc Valda and Malagigi decide they must return to France, while Arak and Satyricus undertake a new quest: that of finding a way to locate Arak's lost people in the Americas. But before Valda leaves, she and Arak finally do the deed.

"To Your Sky Born Father Go," #33-- After the end of a rambling arc involving the Golden Bough and Arak growing his hair out again, Arak "dies," ascends to commune with his thunder-god father, and then returns to life. It's at this point that Thomas belatedly decides to give Arak an overarching adversary, a "serpent-god" who's also the enemy of Arak's dad and all life on Earth. Arak and Satyricus pick up two new cast-members, a pair of Syrian cousins named Alsind and Sharizad, who will later be revealed to be cognates of the famed characters Sinbad and Scheherezade. This arc is followed by Arak's first meaningful battle against the serpent god, which as I said I'll consider separately.

"Once Upon a Unicorn," #37-- This stand-alone, Valda-centric story may not be mythic but it is, unlike all the other stories, fun. The issue features the only Colon art job that isn't trying to be John Buscema, and his fine, slightly cartoony linework is well suited to the story's humorous tone. When Valda returns to the court of Charlemagne, she finds that her king wants her to perform an unusual duty. She's expected to tame a unicorn with her virgin nature-- which she ain't got no more.

"Dragon Slayers for Hire," #48-- Though Arak has a few more encounters with serpent-creatures, Thomas does not really bring the snake-god back as such. The writer does bring Valda and Malagigi back to accompany Arak, Satyricus, and Alsind for the remainder of the issues from #38 on, though "Scheherezade" gets married off in an earlier issue. "Slayers" is a pretty lame story, though it sports the curious art-team of DeZuniga and Carmine Infantino, and it gets rid of the tiresome Alsind by pairing him up with a jeune fille. There's also some curiosity-value in that Thomas takes the trouble of taking his heroes all the way to China and introducing them to his version of Mulan, about thirteen years before the Disney movie made the legendary Chinese heroine famous the world over. And after all that, Mulan barely does anything! Still, she is given a certain amount of heroic charisma, which is more than I can say for "Sinbad," so in my book this is the only real "charisma-crossover" in the series.

"The Road to the Rising Sun," #50-- Arak and company end up in Japan, and after a battle with a nasty oni, Arak sets sail with Satyricus in search of the Americas, while Valda and Malagigi determine to hike back to France again. I suppose the "hero sailing into the sunset" is as good a way as any to conclude things, since the feature never found a strong voice anyway. In the letter columns Thomas talked about a VALDA mini-series that was to be drawn by Todd MacFarlane, which patently never came to pass. Thomas also mentioned the possibility doing another ARAK adventure as a book, which I suspect would not have found much demand even if DC had permitted it. To date there have been a couple of "in name only" iterations of the Arak character, but no actual continuations of the Arak Saga.

METAPHYSICAL EVIDENCE

 Materialists and their opponents, whom I will call "idealists" for convenience, have both written a great deal of irrelevant nonsense about the purpose and meaning of religion. But on one aspect of religion they are on the same page. Both believe that religion depends on human interpretation of the universe. That page then gets torn in half from the groups' respective valuations of that interpretation. Materialists believe that human interpretation not based in physical evidence amounts to no more than projection, wishful thinking, and that therefore gods cannot exist if there is no physical evidence for them. Idealists believe that human interpretation is absolutely necessary for humans to understand their position in the universe, and that to extol physical evidence above human intentionality is what Georges Bataille termed "the worship of dead matter."

While materialists are almost all on the exact same page with respect to physical evidence, idealists may have varying opinions on what constitutes "metaphysical evidence," that is, evidence of anything that transcends the physical, which can include anything from Plato's Forms to the Christian creator-god to the entire panoply of the Greek pantheon. Since there are so many multivalent rationales, I won't attempt to cover them all here, but instead will just discuss two forms of metaphysical evidence that do not depend on the materialist's fetish for dead-matter evidence.

The first is the rationale of PARALLEL EVOLUTION of religious concepts, which suggest a continuity of concepts used by worshipers who are not in direct contact with one another. 

For instance, the 19th through the 21st centuries made available to modern analysts the many Indian variations on the practice of yoga. Of particular interest is the discipline of kundalini, in its current form a synthesis of assorted yogic schools, and whose essential concept is that through breathing techniques a practitioner can summon up energies that manifest upon the spinal column like a rising cobra.

To a dogmatic materialist, this is just an airy fantasy, at most a self-deception brought on by derangement of the senses. But to an idealist it means something if an entirely separate culture evolves a parallel metaphysics utilizing similar imagery. I'm far from the only person who's noticed parallel imagery between that of the Indian yogis and the god-imagery of Dynastic Egypt from about 2500 BCE. Here's one such online comparison:

I'm interested in the possibility that Egyptian religious
ideas were transmitted to India and eventually became the
source or a contributing source for what we now call kundalini
yoga. I know there has been some vague New Age and
Theosophical speculation along these lines, but now I'm
beginning to wonder if it might just possibly be an actual
historical fact.

The associations would be between (1) the forehead uraeus
and the brow (ajna) chakra, and (2) the Egyptian solar disk
above a figure's head and the crown (Sahasrara) chakra.

This is obviously not the sort of evidence a materialist wants, because one can't subject either an Egyptian worshiper of Ra or a 6th century yogi to close analysis. But to a comparative idealist, the recurrence of imagery is relevant to what Mircea Eliade called the magician's "techniques of ecstacy." To the comparativist, it's unimportant as to whether the magician/yogi/worshiper actually contacts a god, or whether any of them manifest supernatural powers (Sansrkit siddhi). Parallel mythopoeic concepts of this kind, such as a magician's power manifesting as a serpent cresting upon the magus's skull, are not explicable by the sort of aimless fantasizing that materialists attribute to all religion.

The second rationale is that of WIDESPREAD AFFIRMATION. Materialists like to claim that archaic religious experiences were fantasies thought up by clever con-men who tricked the rank and file into believing their wish-dreams of benevolent gods. This facile condemnation, though, is a little harder to sell in modern times, when the scientific theories beloved by materialists have gained so much persuasive power. The results of a 2002 Gallup poll show a wide dispersion of American citizens-- 1,509 in all, contacted via telephone interviews and thus not restricted to one area-- testifying as to religious experiences.

In a June 2002 Gallup survey*, Gallup asked respondents to rate the statement, " I have had a profound religious experience or awakening that changed the direction of my life," on a scale from 0 to 5, with 0 standing for "does not apply at all" and 5 for "applies completely." Forty-one percent of Americans -- which projects to about 80 million adults nationwide -- said the statement completely applies to them.

In the latest survey, as in previous surveys on the topic, women and people without a college degree were somewhat more likely than others to give ratings of ‘5', but there was little difference by age. Religious experiences are not tied solely to those with formal religious involvement. For example, even 25% of people with no religious preference said the statement completely applied to them, as did 27% of people who said they rarely or never attend religious services.

Gallup first polled on this topic in 1962, when 20% responded, "yes," when asked, "Would you say that you have ever had a ‘religious or mystical experience,' that is, a moment of sudden religious insight or awakening?" In subsequent measurements of this question over the last four decades, the percentage has hovered near the one-third mark.

Why should there be, according to Gallup, an increase in such experiences in comparison to a similar Gallup poll in 1962? Given the familiar claim that Americans aren't going to church very much in the 21st century, why should there be any increase in testimonies of religious experience? Again, this is a form of "metaphysical evidence" that the materialist cannot countenance, because there is no way to prove it with the tools of the laboratory. To materialists, if you cannot place a phenomenon under a microscope, it must not exist-- and of course, their fancied "evidence" for this posture remains entirely tautological.