HAS IT BEEN duly noted how powerfully symbolic Batman’s villains really are? J. Michael Straczynski was on the right track when he noted, in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man, that so many of Peter Parker’s adversaries were adversarial totems; rivals for the affections of the beast powers, those animistic and secret chiefs of the Earth. Animal spirits as bestowers of gifts far beyond the ken of average men — this is an ancient notion, and often played. Campbell floated the notion that the first real giver of myth was the animal master, the organizer and herder of sacred game, shepherd of the stock of the field, who commanded the creatures that were both prey and predator to early man. Spider-man, seen this way, is one more example of the atavistic sink backing up…until poetaster-as-plumber like yours truly comes along to explain whichwhere the pipes are going to…
No wonder, say the various mouthpieces of JMS’ conceit, that you fight the Scorpion/Rhino/Goblin/Venom/Doctor Octopus twice a week and thrice on Sundays…you’re a neon bulge of totemic endowal, old chum; upon your shoulders, Mr. Parker, has fallen Responsibility, and not just of the I-killed-my-uncle-through- inaction-and-must-atone kind. Of the cosmic, animistic kind. Life’s idiot savant as spider-messiah, bumbling teen as sacred chalice. It’s like something out of Wagner — Parsifal, to be precise:
Parsifal: (vor grossen Schmerz sich aufbäumend) Und ich, ich bin’s, der all’ dies Elend schuf! Ha! Welcher Sünden, welches [welcher] Frevels Schuld muss dieses Toren Haupt seit Ewigkeit belasten, da keine Busse, keine Sühne der Blindheit mich entwindet, zur Rettung selbst ich auserkoren, in Irrnis wild verloren der Rettung letzter Pfad mir schwindet!
Parsifal: (writhing in great pain) And I, I am the one who caused all this misery! Ah! What sins, what offending guilt must this fool’s head bear from all eternity; then no penance, no atonement, can excuse my blindness to the mission for which I was chosen, lost in wandering the last path of deliverance escapes me!
Parsifal, or Percival, or Parzival — whatever spelling you prefer, there are so very many — is “”By compassion made wise, the pure fool,” raised innocent in a forest, knowing neither good nor evil. Peter Parker was raised by his Aunt in Forest Hills…ah, but that’s another story for another time…
Now, Marvel Editorship has been a bit leery of picking up this particular gauntlet, and no wonder, because it’s deep rooting as far as Joey Q is concerned and JMS tends to botch things badly at the end, Loki-at-Ragnarok type missteps. Imagine Dick Cheney trying to mount his twentieth tween prostitute of the week and failing at the critical moment of orgasm, and you the entire history of the scribe of Babylon 5’s art. Rapid ascension up the neurosexual ladder in the full flush of the hunt, blood risen to the cheeks and other extremities — then a moment’s stall, and now we’re doubting, but surely it’s a moment’s interruption — yes, here we are, climbing higher, higher — excitement, ah ah…and then…sloooooow descent into incontinence, and frustration, and grumbling from all other parties engaged. Read “Rising Stars” and weep.
But as foul a spoiler of dramatic humours he may be, however consistent he is in screwing up his own finely-crafted machinery of plot, it must be said that whatever morbid principle infects his judgment in his arrangement does not carry over to his invention, his insight, at least in the early stages. The understanding the author brings to the character is almost always ingenious, and at the very least, never boring. He possesses an insight into the essential archetype of a character — in its own way similar to what Alexander Pope called, in Shakespeare’s case, “a talent very peculiar — something between Penetration and Felicity…”
And so he “discovered,” or claimed to have uncovered, very cleverly, for our modern readership, a long-hidden secret, like Pompeii under the ashes of Vesuvius. But like the Piltdown man, these gems — which always seem to be brought to light at the beginning of a new writer’s arc — are forgeries; retcons, as they’re called. It’s like the Donation of Constantine; every year some new bit of historical trivia seems to turn up verifying that conspiracies, plots, repressed memories, old meetings, secret agends, forbidden loves, and hidden friendships took place in some dusty, heretofore unrevealed corner of the past. Perhaps that’s because comic book superheroes are so hit and miss — like monarchial lines or revolutionary governments, they come into this world not trailing clouds of glory but the barest bones of a concept, maybe a fragment or a cigarette-butt of a notion (”A wolverine? Hm. He should have claws”) or a small midden of notions (DaVinci’s flying machine, Zorro, The Shadow, The Phantom, Sherlock Holmes, Dick Tracy, Jimmie Dale, The Green Hornet, Spring Heeled Jack, The Bat, Dracula all melt into one and become Batman). Sometimes real discoveries are made that come from that forgotten country, the past, (Frank Miller remembers what Finger and Kane’s Batman was *actually* like and writes “The Dark Knight Returns”) and then “rebirth,” like the overused term “renaissance,” is more appropriate than the old nostrum of “reinvention.” Is it not as the Florentine humanist Marsilio Ficino said, in a letter to Paul of Middelburg. In 1492 Ficino was in this state of mind:
What the poets once sang of the four ages, lead, iron, silver and gold, our Plato in The Republic transferred to the four talents of men, assigning to some talents a certain leaden quality implanted in them by nature, to others iron, to others silver and to still others gold. If then we are to call any age golden, it is beyond doubt that age which brings forth golden talents in different places. That such is true of our age he who wishes to consider the illustrious discoveries of this century will hardly doubt. For if we are to call any age golden, it is beyond doubt that age which brings forth golden talents in different places. That such is true of this our age [no one] will hardly doubt. For this century, like a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, the ancient singing of songs to the Orphic lyre, and all this in Florence. Achieving what had been honored among the ancients, but almost forgotten since, the age has joined wisdom with eloquence, and prudence with the military art. . . . This century appears to have perfected astronomy, in Florence it has recalled the Platonic teaching from darkness into light . . . and in Germany . . . [there] have been invented the instruments for printing books….
Three eras: Iron Age Hut, The Silver Age of Comics, and The Golden Age of Ficino’s Florence.
Printing books, eh? We still have wits of our own age that engage in that traffic — often estranged from the men who buy the ink by barrel, but that, too, is another detour.
JMS didn’t pull something out of the recesses of Spider-history, because, to my knowledge, Lee and Ditko and the rest of the Webfathers never explored the notion that Spider-Man’s rivals were anything more than intervals of bad luck and the bane of Pete’s harem (sorry, Gwen), to say nothing of even acknowledging the possibility that the Vulture, Scorpion, Tarantula, Goblin, Octopus, et al., were challengers to some sort of archetypal Lord -of-the-Flies Animal Throne. God, far from it. How can you be King of the Forest and Animal Master Ordinary and Extraordinary when you’re fretting over J. Jonah Jameson’s distempers?
The main theme in ritual is the linking of the individual to a larger morphological structure than that of his own physical body. Man lives by killing, and there is a sense of guilt connected with that. Burials suggest that my friend has died, and he survives. The animals that I have killed must also survive. Early hunters usually had a kind of animal divinity — the technical name would be animal master, the animal who is the master animal. The animal master sends the flocks to be killed. The need to be part of someting larger than one, it seems, is a constant theme throughout humanity… even in the prehistoric times. There’s always been a need for an afterlife (to my knowledge, through most of written history, it seems, anyway), to believe that there’s more than the short time we spend on earth. I could see the guilt thing, I suppose. We don’t want to die, so why should our food? I can see the logic in the animal divinity, too. Usually, the afterlife belief comes with divinity. If the divine wants you to kill to live, it only makes sense that the divine version of the animal you kill would send your prey in your direction. And, of course, it makes sense that they would have rituals thanking the animal divinity for a successful hunt.
– Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
Spider-Man, of course, keeps murdering his rivals. I mean this metaphorically, of course. Either he sends them back to the symbolic underworld of the the prison — or, sometimes, they accidentally die during battle with the Spider, through no fault of the hero’s own.
What could be plainer? Spider-Man kills his enemies. And they return. Over and over and over again.
And like his namesake, the spider lives from the blood of his animi. Apart from their role in demarcating his identity and providing a reason for his existence, through their sacrifice, the Spider is renewed, made stronger, better.
We still worship Arachne, the spider-godddess, as Protectress of our Society. Think about that the next time you browse “the web” or engage in what they call “networking” — as if the sort of men who mint phrases like these could comprehend or imagine the ancestry and complexity of the spinnings they fetishize in language, but don’t bother to understand in fact. We’re never more than a yard away from a spider, none of us. Not so much your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, as your friendly corner and closet and pillow and bedsheet and wall and fixture and rug and cupboard and desk and table and tool and shed and anywhere else you can think of Spider-Man. And sure, let’s go by the relatively conservative estimate of 250,000 spiders per acre of arable land on earth, reckoned in accordance with the 12 million acres of farmable stead currently worldwide. That’s 3 trillian spiders, 12 trillion if you’re willing to go at the numbers like a drunk logothete and grant the somewhat liberal estimate of 2 million per acre. That’s 96 trillion legs shuttling around in the dark, eating more weight in insect carcasses, per year, than the entire weight of the human population on earth. Makes you feel warm, doesn’t it?
And: during the average human life, eight spiders are eaten during sleep.
Your sleep.
You’re already taking holy communion. Eating the sacred flesh. Drinking the sacred venom. Threading your insides with digested fragments of the True Silk. Why not go one step further?
So why not a Spider-God?
When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider’s nature. It’s instinctinve beauty. Of course it’s beautiful. It’s the first thing that I notice with every fresh web I see. And, I tell you, back in Florida, we’d see enormous ones. But the second thought that I would have is that it’s a beautiful, elaboate trap designed to capture prey. Beauty in nature typically occurs with a purpose.
– Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
As to re: Where does Batman fit into all of this? Why all this talk of totems? Sure, we get that Spider-Man is an animal god trying to beat back the hordes who want to claim his powers and legitimacy for their own. Understood. Crystal. We’re done with that. But when are you getting to the point? Batman and Spider- man: true eaters of parasites both. “Well done, thou good and faithful servant. But what have they to do with the other?” Good question.
Next time. All to be revealed in time….
