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

Author:Jeffrey J. Kripal
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2011-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

4.5 MIND-REACH (1977) TO “PSI-WAR!” (1978)

To take another, more personal example, when I invited both Rusell Targ and Roy Thomas out to Esalen for a 2008 symposium on the topic of this book, Thomas realized that he had in fact been familiar with Mind-Reach when he was working on a 1984 movie script for an X-Men film project.61 The same is no doubt true of X-Men #117, which features on its January 1978 cover the phrase “Psi-War.” Mind-Reach had appeared a few months earlier.

On a weirder note, it is also worth remembering that Cerebro has sometimes accidentally picked up mutant aliens. It is a difficult, and often happily overlooked, fact that UFOs and alien-human contact appear repeatedly in the remote-viewing story. Geller, for example, attributed his powers to a childhood UFO encounter in a Tel Aviv walled garden. Later in life, he would repeatedly speak of this Origins event. He would even grab a levitating camera on a Lufthansa jet to snap, seemingly without reason, a photo of an empty sky outside his cabin window only to discover, when the film was developed, three perfect flying discs.62 Ingo Swann, as we have already seen, has written an entire book on alien-human communication and, according to Paul Smith, remote viewer Ed Dames was fascinated with the same subject and was constantly speaking of aliens and UFOs. The truth is that such subjects were constantly floating and spinning through the remote-viewing programs. Acknowledged or not, seen or not, they were, like the discs in Geller’s photo, still there.

MYSTICAL MUTATIONS AND A SAN FRANCISCO EPILOGUE

As I have already noted, explicit metaphysical themes have long been part of the X-Men story arc. One might even argue that these are the story arc. A brief study of just a few of the numerous appearances and mutations of the adjective “mystical” is especially instructive here. These patterns start off as very minor riffs and passing references in the original Lee and Roy series and gradually enter the very heart of the story arcs in the Claremont and Morrison runs, primarily through the two (or three) characters of Professor Charles Xavier and Jean Grey and her cosmic alter ego, the Phoenix, but also through the blue figures of Nightcrawler and Mystique.

The first occurrence of the term “mystical” appears in issue #9, where Lee uses it in its adverbial form in order to refer to, of all things, Lucifer’s atomic bomb (another clear example of the metaphysical energies of Radiation), whose fuse Professor Xavier is trying to telepathically locate so that Cyclops can zap it: “Then, suddenly, the bomb begins to throb, as though mystically endowed with a life of its own” (XM 221). Radiation again.

Chris Claremont, who was responsible for reimagining the team in the mid- and late 1970s, turns to the mystical in a much more explicit way. For example, he gives his Russian hero, Colossus, a surname with blatant occult connotations: Peter Rasputin. He also introduces the demonlike character of Nightcrawler, a pious German Catholic mystic named Kurt Wagner.

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