4

MUTATION

X-MEN BEFORE THEIR TIME

YOU ARE A MUTANT, KURT. I CAN HELP YOU FIND YOUR TRUE POTENTIAL.

PROFESSOR XAVIER TO KURT WAGNER (NIGHTCRAWLER) IN GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1, 1975

Let’s put the date at 1960. If Einstein’s mathematical demonstration that matter, including the matter of the human body, is really frozen energy and the subsequent dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945 inspired the mytheme of Radiation, it was the appearance of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 and the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA in 1958 by Francis Crick and James Watson around which the mytheme of Mutation was about to develop. It had been a full century since individuals began to realize with the force of a religious revelation that life is transhuman, that the human being as we know it (as we presently are it) is a transitional phenomenon on the way to either extinction or something else. But popular culture still lacked public ways to express this familiar, disturbing, liberating, uncanny truth. That was about to change.

RADIATION TO MUTATION: THE MANHATTAN PROJECT AND THE BIRTH OF PROFESSOR X

In an elegant essay about “Growing Up Mutant,” Lawrence Watt-Evans described how purchasing a copy of X-Men #1 in Bedford, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1963 changed his life. At eight going on nine, he was not particularly fond of Marvel Comics. Indeed, he found them odd, even a bit stupid: “the Hulk and the Thing never did anything clever, they just kept hitting the bad guys until they fell down. . . . Iron Man always seemed to have exactly the gadget he needed, and Dr. Strange didn’t make any sense at all.”¹ Not that the DC standards were much better: “Most superheroes—well, who’d want to be Batman, really?”

4.1   THE COMING OF THE X-MEN

But the X-Men were different. Watt-Evans explains: “These weren’t aliens or super-scientists or magicians. They were mutants. I knew about mutants. I suspected I was a mutant. Seriously, I did. My parents had worked on the Manhattan Project, building atomic bombs, during the Second World War—who could say I wasn’t a mutant?” ²

The kid had a point. After all, in that same X-Men #1 comic book, Professor Xavier, the wheelchair-bound leader of the X-Men, leads his new recruits to make the exact same connection between Radiation and Mutation when he tells his new recruits how he became a mutant: his parents had worked on the first atomic bomb, that is, on the Manhattan Project. He even wonders out loud if he may be the first such radiated mutant, thereby explicitly suggesting a causal link between the earlier mytheme of Radiation and the later one of Mutation. Later, we learn that the Beast, a member of the first X-Men team, possesses a similar Radiation-to-Mutation genesis: his father was “an ordinary laborer” at an atomic site (XM 357). Eventually, the motif became nearly universal, as, for example, when Roy Thomas, who took over the series with issue #20, observed in a recent commentary that all of the parents of the original X-Men had worked on the Manhattan Project.³

Perhaps this notion is a carryover from an earlier mutant story that Stan Lee wrote the year before the X-Men debuted, “The Man in the Sky” (1962). Here Lee could only imagine a mutant superpower (the man could fly) in an atomic scientist who had absorbed small doses of radiation in his work.⁴ We can almost track, then, the process through which the mytheme of Radiation evolved into the mytheme of Mutation.

Such patterns would continue apace. Responding to a generation that feared the possibility of genetic mutations as a result of atomic radiation (or, interestingly enough, LSD), the comic-book writers would eventually revision the X-Men along similar atomic lines. In December of 1975, the X-Men thus became “Children of the atom, students of Charles Xavier, MUTANTS.” Mutation and Radiation were now inseparable parts of the same basic mythos. Which is all to say that the early mutant fantasies of Watt-Evans, the son of two atomic scientists, fit seamlessly into the origins of the new Marvel Universe.

And there was another shared dynamic behind this gradual morphing of Radiation into Mutation. There was eros again. If the mytheme of Radiation was a kind of pop sublimation of the graphic “sex and violence” of the 1950s comics into the respectable radioactive “superpowers” of the 1960s superhero, the mytheme of Mutation carried very similar morphing metaphysical energies, and this in at least three ways.

First, within the X-Men mythology itself, there is the already noted observation that a mutant potential first actualizes around puberty, that is, with the onset of sexual maturity. This is as true in the earliest story arcs as it is in the latest. Hence the rather matter-of-fact observation of geneticist Dr. Kavita Rao in Astonishing X-Men #2 that a “child’s mutant power usually manifests at puberty.” The mutant power and human sexuality are thus explicitly and consistently linked by the standard narrative.

Second, biologically speaking, mutations and the evolutionary process are carried through sex, sex, and more sex. It takes a whole lot of sex for evolution to happen. Mutation, then, whether articulated as such or not, is a thoroughly erotic mytheme. In the New X-Men series, writer Grant Morrison makes this quite explicit in the voice of Angel, whom he has reimagined as a tough but insecure black teenage girl. As Angel is trying to convince another mutant named Beak to have sex with her in the forest, she explains the facts to her unwilling partner: “Even the birds and bees managed to figure this out, you moron . . . it’s genetic evolution. It’s the whole point of the X-Men School!” (NXM 136.7).

Third, the writing itself becomes erotic. In the Morrison story arc, for example, Emma, “the X-Men’s only qualified sex-therapist” (NXM 131.15), controls an entire angry crowd by psychically hitting their “bliss button,” that is, by inducing them to orgasm (never named as such, of course) (NXM 118.11). Morrison also explicitly linked the motif of mutation with that of sexual orientation, and especially homosexuality (this, by the way, is the probable source for the X2 “coming out” scene discussed in our previous chapter). Hence a protest sign proclaiming that “God Hates Mutants” (as opposed to “fags”) appears in one issue (NXM 117.5), and “LEV 20:15” (the biblical passage forbidding men to lay down with men) is sprayed over the sign of Professor Xavier’s school for the gifted in the next (NXM 118.8). The Beast, moreover, will fake being gay simply to attract tabloid attention and make a social point (NXM 131.8, 134.11). Morrison is certainly making his point. Gathered around a campfire, the vaguely Buddhist character of Xorn is teaching his students what it is like to be a mutant: “Like you, my difference made me a target of ignorance and fear.” A student wryly responds: “Different. Hyuk. You mean, like ‘gay,’ right?” (NXM 135.20). Right.

And the erotic themes go on and on. Emma and Scott have a telepathic affair (NXM 136.17), one effect of which will be Jean Grey-Summers, Scott’s wife, manifesting her cosmic alter ego, the Phoenix, out of erotic jealousy (NXM 139.6). Scott castrates a statue of David with an errant blast from his eyes (NXM 118.6). And this is before we even get to a figure like Mystique, who is basically a naked blue woman with, in some versions, a skin-tight covering—is that a covering?—drawn in every possible suggestive pose.

And then there is all the sex and erotic humor behind the scenes, like artist David Cockrum’s advice to future artists attempting to draw Nightcrawler: do not position his devil’s tail in such a way that it emerges between his legs. The results, he warned, will not be productive.⁵

Obviously, then, the X-Men became both sexy and “in”; they were dealing with some of the most potent social issues of the day; and mutation had become an effective fantasy code for social and sexual difference. So why, then, did the series barely survive throughout the 1960s? This is the question to which my chapter title alludes. Why did the basic concept of the X-Men remain a minor one after it was first introduced in 1963, but then become a megahit in 1975, when it was relaunched in Giant Size X-Men #1? Why did a series that never really caught on in its initial version become the very bedrock of the later Marvel Universe?

Watt-Evans has an answer for us, and it is as simple as it is convincing: the X-Men caught on in 1975 and exploded in popularity from there not because the basic concept had changed that much, but because American culture had. Basically, the counterculture of the 1960s and early ’70s had laid a very solid foundation for the mutant mythology to build on—a foundation that simply was not widely available in 1963 when the team first appeared (the counterculture did not definitively begin until around 1964). “The comic book I fell in love with in 1963 had just been a dozen years ahead of its time,” Watt-Evans writes. “The world caught up with it eventually, but X-Men was there first.”⁶

I am in complete agreement with Watt-Evans that it was the American counterculture that laid the social foundation for the plausibility and popularity of the X-Men mythology. I would, however, like to qualify his suggestion that the X-Men were there first. If we stick to the immediate history of comic books, he is correct enough. If, however, we expand our historical view to the larger Super-Story we are telling in these pages, we must conclude that the X-Men were definitely not there first—not even close.

Whatever immediate sources Stan Lee and Jack Kirby drew on in the spring of 1963, they were in fact tapping into a set of Western biological, occult, and psychical research traditions that had already been interacting with each other for almost exactly a century and, moreover, would continue to interact with one another well after the X-Men made their not-so-successful debut. That full X-history extended from the public dawn of evolutionary theory in 1859, with the appearance of Darwin’s Origin of Species; through the countless séance rooms, Spiritualist circles, and highest echelons of European and American intellectual culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; into the birth of the human potential movement and the French, British, and American countercultures in the 1960s and ’70s; and, from there, into the paranormal espionage projects on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Through the complicated, always controversial histories of these latter secret programs, this X-history would even make its way into the inner halls of the Pentagon, Red Square, the KGB, the CIA, Congress, and the White House in the 1970s, ’80s, and early ’90s.

Nightcrawler, the occult X-Man par excellence, was not attacking the president of the United States in his own Oval Office, as we have it in the opening scene of the film X-Men 2, but the superhero “mutants” had indeed come to Washington (and Moscow). Here is how.

THE MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS

It was the morning of the magicians, otherwise known as 1960. Two men, Louis Pauwels, an editor, publisher, and self-confessed mystic, and Jacques Bergier, a chemical engineer, former Resistance fighter, and practicing alchemist, had just published Le Matin des Magiciens in France. The book came out in England as The Dawn of Magic in 1963, and a year later in the U.S. as The Morning of the Magicians.⁷ The result was a veritable occult explosion with echoes that would reverberate for decades through the French, British, and American countercultures. Gary Lachman, who participated in the later 1970s versions of this counterhistory as a founding member of the rock band Blondie, describes the cultural effect of the book in stark and humorous terms:

FRANCE HAD A HISTORY OF INTEREST IN THE OCCULT . . . BUT PARIS IN 1960 WAS THE CAPITAL OF FUTILITY, NIHILISM AND DREARY “AUTHENTICITY.” IT WAS THE PARIS OF JEAN PAUL SARTRE AND ALBERT CAMUS, OF “NAUSEA” AND “THE ABSURD,” OF ALIENATION AND OF BEING ENGAGE, OF BLACK TURTLENECKS AND WAITING FOR GODOT. IN SUCH AN ATMOSPHERE, A BOOK ON MAGIC WOULD BE THE LAST THING ONE WOULD THINK WOULD DO WELL. BUT WITHIN WEEKS OF ITS PUBLICATION, LE MATIN DES MAGICIENS HAD BOTH BANKS OF THE SEINE TALKING ABOUT ALCHEMY, EXTRATERRESTRIALS, LOST CIVILIZATIONS, ESOTERICISM, CHARLES FORT, SECRET SOCIETIES, HIGHER STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS, AND THE HERMETIC ORDER OF THE GOLDEN DAWN. . . . [THE BOOK] HAD THE EFFECT OF A FLYING SAUCER LANDING AT CAFE DEUX MAGOTS.⁸

It was Jacques Bergier’s alchemy and his enthusiasm for quantum physics that made Pauwels finally realize that traditional mystical ideas could be married to modern science, that modern physics is modern magic—in short, the mytheme of Radiation. It was physics again that convinced him that the fantastic was not “out there” in some other transcendent world, but right here, in the very heart of matter and the world as it evolved toward a future superconsciousness and what the two authors called, rather beautifully, “That Infinity Called Man.”

Significantly, The Morning of the Magicians was rooted in the authors’ own mystical experiences of the fantastic as real, or, better, the real as fantastic. Pauwels thus freely confesses that the book would not likely have been written “if Bergier and I had not on more than one occasion had an impression of being in contact—actually, physically—with another world.”⁹ This certainly helps explain their attraction to such impossible ideas as contact with alien intelligences and the existence of parallel universes. This also explains their obvious affection for Charles Fort, science fiction, and Superman allusions. The book positively swims with traditional Fortean, sci-fi, and superheroic themes.

Here are just a few impossible things gleaned from one of those wonderful old-fashioned tables of contents:

• “ALCHEMY AND MODERN PHYSICS”

• “IN WHICH BERGIER BREAKS A SAFE WITH A BLOW-LAMP AND CARRIES OFF A BOTTLE OF URANIUM UNDER HIS ARM” (BERGIER WAS A SECRET AGENT WHO, ACCORDING TO THE BACK COVER FLAP, “WAS INVOLVED IN THE DESTRUCTION OF THE GERMAN ATOMIC PLANT AT PEENEMUNDE”)

• “ATOMIC BOMBARDMENTS AND INTERPLANETARY VESSELS IN ‘SACRED TEXTS’”

• “THE GERMANS AND ATLANTIS”

• “THE ‘UNKNOWN SUPERMAN’”

• “MARTIANS AT NUREMBURG”

• “IT IS DARKER THAN YOU THOUGHT”

• “PARAPSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS”

• “AN INVISIBLE SOCIETY OF MUTANTS?”

The goal here, it seems, was not to believe this or that, but to put everything and anything on the table until the reader’s sense of reality was thoroughly shaken, or deeply offended, or oddly inspired—or all three at once. Read literally, the book is perfectly outrageous. Read fantastically, that is, as an act of imagination in touch with some deeper stream of physical and cultural reality, the book is perfectly prescient.

The book’s last chapter, “Some Reflections on the Mutants,” is especially striking for the way it seems to predict the various evolutionary visions of the countercultures and human potential spiritualities that were about to explode on the scene in such astonishing numbers. Hence Lachman begins his study of “the mystic sixties and the dark side of the Age of Aquarius” in the France of 1960 with this book and these two authors, whom he credits as the central creators of the mutant-myth that would become so central to the hippie movement.

Lachman explicitly invokes The X-Men as an immediate influence here. Its 1963 vision of “mutant teenagers with weird powers who band together for support in a world that won’t accept them” uncannily predicted (or helped produce) the events of 1966, when a large group of teenagers banded together in a place called Haight-Ashbury for very similar reasons. These hippies, as they came to be known, also called themselves mutants. Lachman notes that the San Francisco Oracle for January of 1967 even published a “Manifesto for Mutants,” which went like this:

Mutants! Know now that you exist!

They have hid you in cities

And clothed you in fools clothes

Know now that you are free.¹⁰

The rest is, as we say, history. Whether, of course, one happens to think that this is a history to forget and repress or one to remember and develop further depends largely on whether or not one experiences oneself as such a mutant.

COSMOS, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND COUNTERCULTURE: ESALEN AND THE X-MEN

There were in fact multiple precursors of this mutant myth and both high and low versions of its cultural expression.¹¹ There were Fort’s books, of course, especially his Wild Talents, which reads like a playful but serious study of real-world mutants. There was also the pulp science fiction of the 1940s and ’50s, which through editors and magazines like Ray Palmer’s Amazing Stories and John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction made the theme of paranormal powers, imagined as either evolving buds of our future supernature or as reemerging potentials long lost through the pampering of civilization, a standard of the genre. Indeed, sci-fi writer, science writer, and paranormal theorist Damien Broderick goes so far as to call the theme of evolved paranormal powers a “fetish” of this period.¹²

There were also institutional, cultural, and intellectual experiments along these same “mutant” lines. One of the best known, most influential, and certainly most sophisticated of these found expression at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, just three and a half hours down the coast from the San Francisco Bay Area, where the young mutants would eventually gather at places like Berkeley and at the corner of Haight and Ashbury.

Down in Big Sur, well before the mutant hippies, in the fall of 1962, two young Stanford graduates, Michael Murphy (b. 1930) and Richard Price (1930–86), cofounded a little community of visionaries in a transformed spa motel on a cliff. They soon named their little enterprise the Esalen Institute, after a Native American tribal group (the Esselen) that once populated the area. The place quickly became both the original home of the human potential movement and a countercultural mecca.

Murphy and Price adapted the key idea of “human potential” from the British American writer Aldous Huxley, who had spoken of something he called “human potentialities.” Much indebted to his famous experiments with psychedelics (another keyword that he helped coin and another countercultural subject that was quickly linked to Mutation, in both highly negative and highly positive ways¹³), Huxley used the expression “human potentialities” to argue that human consciousness and the human body possess vast untapped resources of Mind and energy. Consciousness, Huxley thought, is not something produced without remainder by the brain. It is something more likely filtered through and reduced by the brain, much as a television set or radio receives a distant signal that is not really in the box (or the brain). Think Ray Palmer’s storehouse of knowledge or Gopi Krishna’s Cosmic Mind filtering into the brain. Consciousness in its true nature, then, is something to capitalize for Huxley. It is essentially transcendent and ultimately cosmic in nature and scope. He called it Mind at Large.

Drawing on such altered states and altered words (and Frederic Myers), Murphy would go on to suggest that the human potential includes all sorts of extraordinary powers that are “supernormal,” from psychical abilities like clairvoyance and telepathy, to extraordinary physical phenomena like dramatic healings, to, in a few rare cases (like Teresa of Avila, Joseph of Copertino, and Daniel D. Home), apparent levitation or flight. All of these things, of course, have been exaggerated in religious literature, folklore, and modern fantasy as supernatural, but, according to authors like Murphy, they are better understood as foreshadowings or intuitions of the hidden potentials of evolution. Seen in this light, pop-cultural genres are essentially human-potential genres in disguise, genres that “might prefigure luminous knowings and powers that can be realized by the human race,” as Murphy put it in his 1992 magnum opus, The Future of the Body.¹⁴

So, too, Murphy sees modern sports as a kind of paranormal theater in which supernormal capacities and altered states of energy are commonly evoked and experienced “in the zone.” Here he echoes the ancient martial arts traditions of East Asia (tai’ chi, karate, aikido, chi kung, kung fu, etc.), in which sport, subtle energies, and paranormal powers are profoundly linked. These, I must add, played a major role in the various 1970s martial arts titles of the superhero comics, thus constituting yet another line of Orientation. Hence one of my own favorites, the Iron Fist story arc of Roy Thomas and Gil Kane. Some of the stranger moments of sports lore that Murphy has documented in great detail also bear a distant relationship to one of the crazier genres of comic books that I adored as a kid: the occult sports genre.

Much like the martial art masters and the athletes, Murphy most of all wanted a practice to actualize the evolutionary potentials. So too did the institute. Esalen imagined itself from the very beginning as a kind of alternative private academy for this evolving future of the body, that is, as a place where the human potentialities hinted at in psychedelic, psychical, and mystical experiences could be supported, nurtured, and developed further through consistent transformative practices and a stable institutional structure.

Consider, for example, the case of George Leonard, Look journalist, education reformer, and later aikido master who coined the phrase “the human potential movement” with Murphy in 1965. Leonard was well known in the late 1960s for his radical models of education reform. One of the opening scenes of his wildly popular Education and Ecstasy (1968) has Leonard entering a classroom and sensing a young witch whose psychic powers, he realizes, are laced with an obvious and dangerous eroticism. He can feel his skin tingling as he exits the room and wonders about the young girl’s fate in a superficial and uncomprehending world. In Leonard’s model of ecstatic education, the typical American high school classroom is a place where occult talents are first manifested (often around puberty and the appearance of the sexual powers) and then cruelly crushed under the weight of social control, disbelief, and pure neglect.¹⁵ The young woman will forget about her own human potential, about her own magico-erotic superpowers. She must forget them to survive in this particular social world.

4.2   THE MARTIAL ARTS COMIC

4.3   THE OCCULT SPORTS COMIC

If this is beginning to sound like the base mythology of the X-Men, that is, if Esalen sounds more than a little like Professor Xavier’s school for mutants, well, then you have some idea of where this is all going. If you also already know that the language of actualizing human potential is omnipresent in the X-Men stories, as my opening epigraph makes clear, you are even closer. If you imagine, however, that our story goes back to New York City in 1963 with Lee and Kirby, or even to Big Sur in 1962 with Murphy and Price, you are quite mistaken. As we have seen already with the mythemes of Alienation and Radiation, it is my central intention to demonstrate that the mytheme of Mutation possesses a “secret life,” that is, that the superhero mythologies involving mutation are deeply indebted to the earlier Spiritualist, psychical research, and metaphysical traditions.

In terms of the present, one only need point to Michael Murphy’s The Future of the Body, an eight-hundred-page masterwork that is without peer in the history of the literature on the mystical and occult potentials of evolution. Put mythically, this is something that Professor Xavier could have written for his private school for the gifted—a kind of textbook for educating mutants in the theory, history, and practice of their Fortean wild talents. Murphy, however, was hardly the first to propose that evolution may hide within its mysterious processes much more than pure chance and nonmeaning. Indeed, Murphy’s own primary inspiration was none other than the Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher Sri Aurobindo, who, as we noted in chapter 2, developed an elaborate visionary metaphysics pointing toward a highly evolved spiritual Superman in the second decade of the twentieth century. But there were others still.

We have already seen, with respect to both the ancient-astronaut thesis and Carl Sagan (Alienation) and the mystical implications of quantum physics and Niels Bohr (Radiation), how the lines between “popular” and “elite” theories are not always so clear, and how what many assume to be popular or “pseudoscientific” ideas in fact have deep and distinguished prehistories. We can see the same patterns here again in Mutation, and with no less a scientist than Francis Crick, the codiscoverer of the DNA molecule. In 1973, Crick wrote a paper with Leslie Orgel on directed panspermia, “the theory that organisms were deliberately transmitted to the earth by intelligent beings on another planet.” What they actually had in mind here was early life as a kind of “infection” of microorganisms stabilized and carried for millions of years in a “special long-range unmanned spaceship.” After recognizing just how similar this sounds to science fiction, the two authors even cite another scientist who had speculated that “we might have evolved from the microorganisms inadvertently left behind by some previous visitors from another planet (for example, in their garbage).”¹⁶

Now there’s a twist.

Closer to Murphy’s own evolutionary vision was the famous biologist and science activist Julian Huxley, who happened to be both the grandson of T. H. Huxley (who gave us the word “agnosticism”), and the brother of Aldous Huxley (who gave us the word “neurotheologian” and answered his distinguished grandfather’s agnosticism with his own search for a new Gnosticism). In 1942, in his classic Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, Julian encouraged his readers to own their own role in determining the “purpose of the future of man” and to cease putting human responsibilities “on to the shoulders of mythical gods or metaphysical absolutes.” In short, in a stunning example of Authorization, he suggested that we must now evolve ourselves. More radically still, well within the mytheme of Mutation this time, he wrote openly about how “there are other faculties, the bare existence of which is as yet scarcely established: and these too might be developed until they were as commonly distributed as, say, musical or mathematical gifts are today. I refer to telepathy and other extra-sensory activities of mind.”¹⁷

Closer still was the great French philosopher, Henri Bergson. Bergson held a prestigious chair at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, worked with President Woodrow Wilson to help found the League of Nations, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928. During his prime, Bergson was as famous as Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. He was also the president of the London Society for Psychical Research in 1913. Mystics, for the philosopher, were forerunners of human evolution, and psychical powers were hints of what we might all still someday become in the future. Thus, in Creative Evolution (1907), he wrote beautifully of what he called the élan vital, a cosmic evolutionary force that reveals the universe to be, as he put it in 1932 in the very last lines of his very last book, “a machine for the making of gods.”¹⁸

Well before Bergson, the Canadian doctor Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1901) wrote an eccentric and rather erratic tome about evolution as a mystical force creating spiritual, cultural, and literary geniuses just before he died—his 1901 classic, Cosmic Consciousness. Despite its obvious flaws and historical naïveté, the book is just as obviously inspired. Accordingly, it would have a significant impact on later readers, including both of our case studies in chapter 6, fantasy artist Barry Windsor-Smith and sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. Given this, and Bucke’s obvious dissent from the essential randomness of accepted Darwinian biology, it seems wise to spend a bit more time on the author.

By birth, Bucke was a farm boy, by training an accomplished medical doctor and psychologist. The original inspiration for his mysticism was literary and, to be more precise, poetic. In 1867, a visitor read some Walt Whitman to him. He was stunned. Five years later, in the spring of 1872, this poetic inspiration resulted in a dramatic mystical opening in London. Bucke and two friends had just spent the evening reading the Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and, above all, Whitman. On the carriage ride home just after midnight, it happened:

ALL AT ONCE, WITHOUT WARNING OF ANY KIND, HE FOUND HIMSELF WRAPPED AROUND, AS IT WERE, BY A FLAME-COLORED CLOUD. FOR AN INSTANT HE THOUGHT OF FIRE—SOME SUDDEN CONFLAGRATION IN THE GREAT CITY. THE NEXT (INSTANT) HE KNEW THAT THE LIGHT WAS WITHIN HIMSELF. DIRECTLY AFTER THERE CAME UPON HIM A SENSE OF EXULTATION, OF IMMENSE JOYOUSNESS, ACCOMPANIED OR IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWED BY AN INTELLECTUAL ILLUMINATION QUITE IMPOSSIBLE TO DESCRIBE. INTO HIS BRAIN STREAMED ONE MOMENTARY LIGHTNING-FLASH OF THE BRAHMIC SPLENDOR WHICH EVER SINCE LIGHTENED HIS LIFE. UPON HIS HEART FELL ONE DROP OF THE BRAHMIC BLISS, LEAVING THENCEFORWARD FOR ALWAYS AN AFTERTASTE OF HEAVEN.¹⁹

Here we see immediately our mytheme of Orientation (“Brahmic Bliss”) and at least a hint of Radiation (“a flame-colored cloud,” like a “sudden conflagration”). But it was the mytheme of Mutation that would carry the “intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe” for him and finally result in the appearance of Cosmic Consciousness almost thirty years later.

Cosmic Consciousness, as its name implies, is defined as “a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe.” It is not some vague emotional experience. It comes with a definite intellectual enlightenment or illumination—it teaches things, even if these things far exceed the present cognitive development of the brain (hence the “quite impossible to describe” part). Cosmic Consciousness also transforms the human being, whom it wraps in living flame, rendering him or her “almost a member of a new species.” The experience also morally elevates the individual, providing a “sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that he has it already.”²⁰

Bucke is convinced the human race as a whole will eventually evolve into this Cosmic Consciousness, that “this step in evolution is even now being made,” and that such individuals are becoming more and more common (this is where his argument gets really dicey, and statistically wacky).²¹ In any case, he clearly understands studying the history of such experiences as a key component to this awakening, and he approaches the writing of his book as a means to “aid men and women in making the almost infinitely important step” of making conscious contact with this Cosmic Consciousness. Which is all to say that Bucke understands his book as itself a force of mystical mutation: in essence, Cosmic Consciousness can catalyze Cosmic Consciousness.²² And why not? Had Bucke himself not been changed, in an instant, after reading the Romantic poets?

Writing such a book-as-mutation involved hard intellectual labor. Thus Bucke reports how in correspondence with the British writer and interpreter of Hinduism Edward Carpenter (yet another early evolutionary mystic), his speculations were deepened and disciplined until he arrived at his “germinal concept,” namely, the idea “that there exists a family springing from, living among, but scarcely forming a part of ordinary humanity, whose members are spread abroad throughout the advanced races of mankind and throughout the last forty centuries of the world’s history.”²³ In short, the X-Men before the X-Men.

But even Bucke at the turn of the century was hardly the origin point of the mytheme of Mutation. In chapter 1, we looked, for example, at John Uri Lloyd’s 1895 novel Etidorhpa, whose hollow-earth themes, particularly in the mouth of the gray, alienlike guide, are positively filled with references to superhuman powers and latent faculties that “further evolutions” will actualize in the race as telepathy or “mind language,” telekinesis, cosmic spirit, and so on.

We have also already encountered the real historical origins of two absolutely key terms in the X-Men mythology: magnetism and telepathy. It is not much of an exaggeration to suggest that, without these two key concepts, there could be no recognizable X-Men series. These, after all, are the superpowers of the mythology’s main villain (Magneto) and its founding teacher (Professor Xavier), respectively, both of which, moreover, appeared in that very first issue.

As the sensitive reader may now guess, Magneto’s magnetic powers stem back to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century movement of animal magnetism around the figure of Anton Mesmer. The same reader might also now realize that Professor X’s central superpower of telepathy can be definitively traced back to the London Society for Psychical Research (the S.P.R.) and a single man whom we have already met numerous times, Frederic Myers. Recall that Myers coined the term “telepathy” in 1882 and linked it directly to the spiritual forces of evolution, that is, he saw it as evidence of our evolving “extraterrene” supernormal nature.

Attending the first official meeting of the Society for Psychical Research that same winter of 1882 was none other than Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-originator with Charles Darwin of the theory of biological evolution. Fame aside, Wallace cared little for the orthodoxies of religion or science. He attended séances, performed Mesmeric experiments on his students, asserted the postmortem survival of our mental and spiritual natures, and speculated, with his S.P.R. colleagues, that “there yet seems to be evidence of a Power which has guided the action of those [evolutionary] laws in definite directions and for special ends.”²⁴

In other words, the mytheme of Mutation, the idea of mystical mutations that produce various supernormal powers, is not a countercultural invention or some superficial fancy, and it certainly did not begin with the Lee and Kirby’s X-Men in 1963. It has been in the air for 150 years now and has flourished among some of Western culture’s most distinguished intellectuals, philosophers, and scientists. Indeed, it goes back to the very origins, and to one of the two historical founders, of evolutionary biology itself.

THE X-QUESTIONS

If one reads the early issues of The X-Men in light of this secret life of Mutation, one thing becomes patently obvious: there would be no X-Men mythology without the ideas and terminology generated by the British and American psychical research traditions centered at Cambridge and Harvard (the latter around the American psychologist, philosopher, and theorist of mysticism William James) and the later laboratory parapsychology of J. B. Rhine centered at Duke University. Once again, the elite inspired the popular here.

Indeed, the first thirty issues, written by Stan Lee and Roy Thomas, read like a veritable glossary of technical terms taken directly from these academic traditions (it is Professor X, after all). These technical terms include: telepathy (coined, again, by Myers in 1882), telekinesis, teleportation (coined by Fort in 1931), levitation, extrasensory perception or ESP (coined by Rudolf Tischner but popularized by Rhine at Duke), the sixth sense, counterego (what was called a “double personality” in the nineteenth-century literature), trance, and, perhaps most obvious of all, magnetism (from the earlier “animal magnetism”). Indeed, in one delightful X-Men panel, Jean is even seen telekinetically pulling some books on “telekinetic research” off the shelves of Professor Xavier’s library in order to borrow them so that she can “continue to study ways to utilize my mutant power” (XM 555). Here the debt is openly acknowledged.

Lee is clearly still learning the terms himself in the early pages of the first few X-Men issues, even as he is doing his best to teach his young readers some very big words with some even bigger meanings. In the first issue, for example, Lee mistakenly calls Jean Grey’s telekinetic ability to mentally pick up and put back a book “teleportation” (XM 17). He confuses the two terms again in other places (XM 34, 39, 301), but already back in the second issue, he uses “teleportation” correctly, this time for the Vanisher’s ability to “pop” out of one place and into another (XM 43). As Lee gets a handle on his terminology, the storylines explode with a flurry of references to telekinesis or telekinetic powers, often with multiple appearances in each issue.

One can also detect the presence of the nineteenth-century occult traditions that we examined in chapter 1. While Professor X is “in a trance,” for example, he meets Magneto “on a mental plane” (XM 90). Like two Theosophists, Magneto and Professor X both astral travel in a later issue (XM 134–35), during which time Magneto is “guided by the extra-sensory perception of his mutant brain.” Later, we encounter Professor X’s “invisible astral image” (XM 361) and learn of a new skill called “thought projection” (XM 423). We also encounter a European witch by the name of Wanda, who, of course, is now refigured through the paranormal register as a mutant (XM 88).

It is not all Mutation, though. The mytheme of Orientation makes a number of appearances in the X-Men mythology. We learn, for example, that Professor Xavier, “fascinated by tales I had heard of a mysterious walled city in the shadow of the Himalayas,” journeyed to Tibet as a young man. Nor was this some minor pilgrimage or tourist jaunt: “It’s as though my entire life, my ultimate destiny, were somehow bound up behind those grim, grey walls!” (XM 473). It was there that he met the villain Lucifer and lost the use of his legs. But Lucifer, it turns out, is an alien, a menace from the stars, “an agent of some alien, star-spawned race” (XM 493). Orientation to Alienation once again.

4.4   JEAN GREY STUDIES PARAPSYCHOLOGY

Announced early on, the mytheme of Alienation never leaves. It returns again, when a man mistakes a Mayan sun god for “one of them flyin’ saucers” (XM 605), or when Xavier begins to have nightmares of an alien craft and its insectoid pilot (UXM 100), who turns out to be his lover and telepathic partner Lilandra, princess of the Shi’ar space empire. The human species is put in its cosmic place when it is described as “sentient hominid life forms—level 4.7 on the Varakis scale” and a space cruiser detects multiple races now active on the planet: “Kree, Skrull, Badoon, even Celestial activity” (UXM 261). The earth, it turns out, is a “cross-roads planet for half the star-faring races in the Milky Way” (UXM 303). Charles Fort, by the way, had written the same thing.

More complex Orientation themes will also appear much later in the series, when we learn, for example, that Wolverine spent some time in Japan as a boy, speaks fluent Japanese, and practices Zazen or “seated meditation” to calm his nerves and restore his body and mind. Numerous issues show the buffed hairy man in a perfect lotus posture. The later Grant Morrison run will also have Wolverine practicing both “Za Zen sitting meditation” (NXM 117.9) and the martial art of tai chi (NXM 152.10–12). Perhaps most complexly of all, however, Morrison will create a fascinating figure named Xorn, who is supposed to have a star or tiny black hole for a brain (really no head at all) and who ends up, at one point, in Lhasa, in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, where he is being treated as a living Buddha.

I cannot help but think here of On Having No Head, a stunning little manifesto written by a British gentleman named D. E. Harding, who discovered while hiking in the Himalayas that consciousness was not at all the same thing as the brain, and that he had no head. Rather like Xorn. Headlessness is also a common mystical trope in Indo-Tibetan Hindu and Buddhist Tantra, where decapitated heads are pretty much everywhere in the iconography and art. To lose one’s head, that is, to know that one is not one’s brain, is to be enlightened. The Next Age superbody is, once again, a Tantric body.

Professor Xavier’s telepathy, Jean’s telekinetic abilities, Xorn’s apparent headlessness—all of this raises a deep philosophical issue. What, exactly, is consciousness? The different X-Men story arcs offer no single answer, although the question is often central to the paranormal action that grounds the mythology.

In the early issues, Lee seems to be working with a fairly typical materialism that equates consciousness and brain. Hence Lee’s constant references to Professor Xavier’s “mutant brain.” Things would change radically, however, as the mythology developed and the consciousness of the counterculture set in and matured. By the late 1970s, with the beginning of the Chris Claremont Uncanny X-Men run (1975–91), and continuing at the turn of the millennium with Morrison’s New X-Men revisioning, all of that brain talk is gone. Claremont gives his readers the series’ ultimate mystical cipher—Phoenix, a kind of Cosmic Consciousness as goddess. He also drops a hint about his own understanding of the splitting of consciousness through the two hemispheres of the brain: he has the Beast reading Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in issue #134. “Good book,” the Beast quips. “Can’t wait to see the movie” (DP 104). So, too, Morrison informs his readers that Xavier is “the world’s premier super-consciousness” and treats us to any number of stories that only work because the forms of consciousness of the characters are not equated with or restricted by their brains and bodies (NXM 122.12).

Indeed, both Claremont and Morrison’s story arcs depend on various occult forms of consciousness leaving and entering different bodies, “possessing” them, to use an old-fashioned word. Morrison’s famous villainess Nova Cassandra, for example, is described as “a bodiless lifeform” who, when she takes over Charles Xavier’s body, is described as “wearing the professor like a glove” (NXM 125.7–8). Similarly, Emma Frost is described as a “disembodied consciousnesses” or as simply “disembodied” (NXM 140.6, 141.16). And when a young X-Man goes bad and is killed, Professor Xavier gives the following speech at his funeral: “Quentin Quire was liberated from his physical cocoon and born into a higher world at exactly 4:32 this afternoon. I know how ridiculous that sounds, but in this case we believe it to be the literal truth” (NXM 138.14).

I will return to these themes at the end of the chapter, where I discuss the implicit, really explicit, mysticism of the X-Men mythology. For now, it is enough to mention that such scenes and their philosophical implications point to some of the deepest and most consistent questions behind the X-Men mythology: What is the nature of consciousness? How is consciousness related to matter and energy? What are its limits? Are there any limits? As the series has developed over the decades, the answers to these questions have morphed and mutated with the characters themselves. As we move further and further along that story arc, however, we might catch glimpses of three sorts of answers coming into sharper and sharper view: “Consciousness is not the brain,” “Consciousness and Energy are One,” and “There are no limits.”

In other words, Xavier, Magneto, and Phoenix are the answers, and X has become a kind of sign for mind, energy, consciousness, and God, which are more or less (mostly more) interchangeable now. The counterculture has worked its real magic, the culture has mutated as a result, and the X-Men are no longer “before their time.”

THE SECRET LIVES OF THE SUPERPOWERS: REMOTE VIEWING

However fantastic such a mysticism might at first appear, there were some very plausible real-world reasons for exploring it. Perhaps none of these reasons, however, came closer to a true X-scenario than the secret paranormal programs of the Russians and Americans during the Cold War. The secret life of superpowers—literally.

On the American side of things, a number of the military and intelligence branches were funding the training of an elite corps of psychic spies or “remote viewers.”²⁵ The practice of remote viewing involved a small team of carefully selected individuals who were trained to locate and describe targets around the world that were otherwise hidden, secret, or simply unknown (for example, the location of a Soviet bomber crashed in an African jungle), very much like police departments are said to use psychics to help crack particularly difficult cases or locate bodies.

For over two decades, from 1972 to 1995, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the army, and the navy together invested over twenty million dollars in research and development. Most of the work was done at just three locations: (1) a private think tank called SRI (formerly Stanford Research Institute); (2) an army base in Maryland called Fort Meade; and (3) another think tank called Science Applications International in Palo Alto, California. Since many of the files were declassified in 1996 under the Freedom of Information Act, the details of this particular plotline of our Super-Story have been elaborately documented and analyzed from a variety of perspectives, including a number of firsthand accounts from those who took part in the paranormal programs, programs with evocative names like Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sun Streak, and Star Gate.

The American story begins in 1972 with a young laser physicist by the name of Harold Puthoff. Puthoff had just finished some postdoctoral research at Stanford University. He had already also done a stint in the navy as an intelligence officer and had worked as a civilian for the National Security Agency. He was now working in laser research for SRI, California, but his real interest was the interface between quantum and biological processes, or quantum biology. He was especially interested in parapsychological phenomena and how they might throw some much-needed light on the strange interface between physics and consciousness (Radiation again).

As Puthoff was settling into his research at SRI in California, an artist by the name of Ingo Swann was working with some parapsychologists in the Department of Psychology of the City College of New York. They were working with Swann in some highly unusual tasks, like psychically detecting weather patterns in randomly chosen cities. At about this time, a research proposal of Puthoff’s came to Swann’s attention through his City College colleagues. He decided to write the physicist on March 30, 1972, outlining his experiments in the psychology department and suggesting that he may be able to help Puthoff investigate quantum biological effects. Three months later, on June 4, 1972, Swann stepped off the plane in California to meet Puthoff.

What happened two days later, on June 6, is as legendary in the annals of remote viewing as it is controversial outside them. Puthoff and his SRI colleagues were interested in Swann’s alleged psychokinetic powers. More practically (or impractically), they wanted to see if he could manipulate the recorded output of a superconducting magnetometer or quark detector, a kind of supersensitive compass used to register very subtle magnetic fields that was located in a vault below the building under a three-feet-thick concrete floor. Beyond the concrete, the apparatus was also protected by “a mu-metal magnetic shield, an aluminum container, copper shielding, and most important, a superconducting shield.”²⁶ To the great puzzlement of the physicists, Swann successfully and dramatically altered the output of the magnetometer in their presence. He also “saw it,” that is, he described a gold alloy plate that was part of the apparatus. To say that the physicists were impressed would be a gross understatement. According to Swann, one researcher was so freaked out by what he witnessed that, in his haste to get out of there, he walked into an orange support pillar.²⁷

During that same June and soon after the Swann affair with the magnetometer, Puthoff delivered a public lecture at Stanford. Afterward, another laser physicist by the name of Russell Targ, then working for Sylvania, approached Puthoff and proposed that they work together at SRI. Targ was hired on. The collaboration between these two men would last for ten years, from 1972 to 1982. It would also come to define much of the early history of remote viewing.

Shortly after the Stanford lecture, two CIA officials showed up at Puthoff’s door, asking about a privately circulated report that he had written on the Swann magnetometer incident. After speaking to him about the paper, they were sufficiently intrigued to leave the physicist some money in order to get Swann back to Palo Alto to see if they could find a psychical capacity that was replicable and therefore useable. Swann returned in December.

Paul Smith, who would himself become a remote viewer later in the program’s history, explains why Puthoff and Targ were initially interested in psychokinesis: “If PK skills could be developed and controlled, one could use them to manipulate the physical world, including the enemy’s weapons. Using ‘mind over matter’ to melt tank barrels or stop bombers in mid-flight was the stuff of comic books. Far more likely, given the subtlety of typical PK effects, was the possibility of mucking up the intricate guts of military computers, electronic equipment, or missile guidance systems.”²⁸ The “stuff of comic books” indeed. Magneto makes yet another appearance.

Almost, anyway. Alas, after thousands of experiments, the researchers had to conclude that, although they had witnessed some very suggestive evidence for the phenomenon, controlling psychokinesis was not possible or, as they put it in more technical language, “willed perturbation effects appear to be intrinsically spontaneous.”²⁹ In short, the stuff is probably real, but fundamentally unpredictable. Exit Magneto. Enter Professor X.

Swann quickly grew bored with the standard parapsychological tests that followed and suggested that he be allowed to view distant places and objects, anywhere in the world. “There was an awkward silence.”³⁰ Finally, they decided to give in to Swann’s request as a diversionary game, if nothing else. The results were no game, though. On too many occasions to dismiss, the results were simply stunning.

The results of Targ and Puthoff’s experiments with Ingo Swann and another man named Pat Price at SRI were published in the prestigious British science journal Nature. A second essay followed two years later in the Proceedings of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers). A year later, these two technical essays grew into the first published book on remote viewing, Targ and Puthoff’s influential Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability (1977).³¹ Well-known anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote the introduction. Richard Bach, author of the megahit Jonathan Livingston Seagull (which totally confused me as a kid), wrote a foreword and donated forty thousand dollars toward the research behind it. Swann provided the cover art, a striking painting called Salt Flats Vision.

Gradually, Swann and Puthoff developed an elaborate six-stage protocol that used coordinates (at first longitude and latitude and later random numbers) to “locate” the desired target. This mind-bending method (with a random number inexplicably providing a workable coordinate for the viewer to find an object anywhere on the planet) became known as coordinate remote viewing (CRV).³² Intriguingly, the protocol drew intimately on concepts from the British and American psychical research traditions, psychoanalysis, and split-brain research. These included the most basic categories of the preconscious and the unconscious, the “limen” or threshold between the conscious and the unconscious (Frederic Myers again), the notion of analytical overlay or AOL (more or less equivalent to what Freud had called “secondary revision”), and the central role of right-brain processing, that is, intuition, symbol-making, and sketching.

Even more intriguingly, the protocol also drew on something Swann called the Matrix, which was basically a kind of hyperspace containing all of the universe’s information whether from the past, present, or future (something akin to Alan Moore’s Immateria, Ray Palmer’s conviction in “heavenly libraries,” and Gopi Krishna’s “boundless world of knowledge”). In his own technical language, Swann believed that the remote viewer receives a “signal line” from the Matrix through an “aperture” or opening in the subconscious, which is then transmitted through the right brain and “objectified” via the feedback “loops” of sketching “ideograms” and writing descriptors.

Easily the most storied remote viewer out at Fort Meade was a man named Joseph McMoneagle. Known as RV Agent 001, McMoneagle became a remote viewer after a dramatic near-death experience in 1970 convinced him that consciousness was not restricted to the biological boundaries of the skin and skull—not even close. The subtle body McMoneagle used in that out-of-body experience, for example, looks a lot like Superman: McMoneagle describes himself “cruising just above the car, zipping up, down, and through the overhanging telephone and electric wires” as he followed the Volkswagen Beetle that was taking his body to the hospital. And the total experience climaxed in an erotic encounter with God that McMoneagle himself compares to a “sexual peak” or “normal climax” times twelve times ten to the thirty-third power.³³ Now that’s a libido.

And McMoneagle goes further still, describing the human mind as “the ultimate time machine” and writing of what he calls “the Verne effect.” The latter is named after Jules Verne, who appears to have accurately predicted in his novels everything from the submarine to the American lunar shot. In From the Earth to the Moon (1865), for example, Verne “not only anticipated that the launch would take place from Florida, but he also foresaw a three man crew traveling in a capsule with approximately the same dimensions as the Apollo Command Module, and he had already worked out the necessary launch velocity required to escape the earth’s gravity.”³⁴ The Verne effect, then, refers to what McMoneagle suggests is our innate ability to paranormally predict and create—or, in my own terms, author—our own futures.³⁵ Science fiction as prophecy.

McMoneagle would become known for feats like accurately remote viewing the interior of a still experimental, highly secret XM-1 or Abrams tank. Or describing, in great detail, the interior of an immense Soviet naval structure in northern Russia, including a weird submarine that fit no known type. McMoneagle was angered when he learned that the analysts scoffed at his work for many reasons, including the fact that the building was far from the water. McMoneagle had his “I told you so” moment, though. A few months later, American spy satellites showed the never-before-seen Typhoon submarine (560 feet long) being floated out to sea through a channel the Soviets had recently dug from the building to the icy waters.

Fellow remote viewer Paul Smith notes that almost all of the thirty-three real-world assignments performed at Fort Meade by 1984 were the work of McMoneagle. Physicist Edwin May, who worked closely with McMoneagle for years, adds to this already impressive resume by describing his friend and colleague as “the most certified psychic in the country.”³⁶ The intelligence community seems to agree. In 1984, it awarded him its prestigious Legion of Merit for “producing crucial and vital intelligence unavailable from any other source.”³⁷ So much for the nonexistence of paranormal powers.

For our own purposes, it is also important to know that McMoneagle was closely involved with the consciousness laboratory of Robert Monroe, the business entrepreneur who, after he began spontaneously and regularly leaving his body at age forty-two, developed an elaborate “Hemi-Sync” technology (involving interfering sound waves designed to integrate the two sides of the brain) for inducing various altered states of consciousness, from “Focus 10” (the “mind awake, body asleep” state) to full-blown out-of-body experiences and astral-like travels. Monroe wrote three important books on his experiences, including the classic Journeys Out of the Body (1971).

Like the secret life of any superpower, there are competing narratives here, claims and counterclaims, much debate about what actually happened, and even more debate about what whatever happened really means. Consider, for example, a key player in this story, Edwin May. May, an accomplished and published expert on low-energy, experimental nuclear physics, joined the SRI team in 1975. He directed the research program there from 1985 until 1991, after which he shifted his affiliation to another U.S. defense contractor, where he continued his involvement with government-sponsored parapsychology until 1995, when the Star Gate program at Fort Meade was finally shut down. May’s importance is signaled by the fact that he presided over an astonishing 70 percent of the total funding and a full 85 percent of the data collection for the government’s twenty-two-year involvement in parapsychological research.

The key point here with respect to May is that he is extremely dubious about most of the more extreme claims, and he is convinced that at least some of the parapsychological phenomena (particularly those displayed by McMoneagle) are very real. The phenomena, he argues, will eventually be explained through the principles of physics, that is, through the nature and behavior of matter and the structure of space-time. May describes his final conclusions as “materialist,” that is, he is convinced that the final and fundamental nature of reality is matter.

Another physicist, Russell Targ, sees things differently. He is convinced that his former espionage activities hid profound metaphysical truths, and that they essentially constitute scientific proof of what he likes to call “nonlocal mind.” Nonlocal mind is a form of consciousness “that connects us to each other and to the world at large” and “allows us to describe, experience, and influence activities occurring anywhere in space and time.”³⁸ Accordingly, Targ has been deeply drawn to nondual Asian philosophies, like Advaita Vedanta and Tibetan Buddhism (Orientation again). His final conclusions can be described as “idealist,” that is, he is convinced that the final and fundamental nature of reality is mind.

As a civilian with no military or scientific background, I cannot make any claims about the details of the remote-viewing narrative, much less the fundamental principles of quantum physics. So I won’t. However, as a historian of religions who specializes in the interpretation of unusual, extreme, or anomalous states of consciousness in both the West and South Asia, many of which bear a rather obvious relationship to the perennial debates around materialism and idealism, I can make two related observations here.

First, it seems important to point out that any scientific explanation of something like remote viewing must, in principle, remain an abstract, third-order account of what are, in the end, deeply personal, often fantastically meaningful states of consciousness. Yes, there is an objective scientific perspective here, but there is also a subjective human perspective, a perspective, moreover, without which this history could not have taken place. May’s materialism and Targ’s idealism, then, need not be read as mutually exclusive options. Both may capture a key part of the larger picture. Indeed, both may be right, as we will see in a moment via Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s “dyadic” vision of matter and mind.

Second, I am struck by how, if we focus on the deeply personal descriptions of those who actually experienced these things, what we encounter is a rich spectrum of mythical, sci-fi, and superhero allusions. Following Frederic Myers, I would like to call this the imaginal dimension of the remote-viewing history. Such mythical patterns appear to be nearly irresistible.

Consider the following. Science writer Jim Schnabel has described McMoneagle’s psychic abilities to detect radioactive material as green and glowing as “the kinds of talents one might imagine in comic book superheroes.”³⁹ Historically speaking, the superhero allusion is deeper than Schnabel probably realized, since it was McMoneagle’s friend and teacher of the out-of-body experience, Robert Monroe, who produced the early radio shows of The Shadow, a clear and unambiguous precursor of the later superhero comics, as we already noted.⁴⁰ Nor is it an accident that McMoneagle has used expressions like “the Verne effect” and titled one of his books Mind Trek, an obvious allusion to Star Trek. And this is in addition to the fact that in the early years of remote viewing both Puthoff and Swann were members of Scientology, a new religion founded by a very well-known science fiction writer, Ron L. Hubbard. Both men would leave Scientology, but Swann has been quite clear that his early psychical feats would have been impossible “had there been in me an absence of the transcendental structural ideas presented by Hubbard.”⁴¹ In another sci-fi spirit, Washington Post journalist Jack Anderson, once a harsh skeptic but now a self-described “firm believer” (“my initial reports were wide of the mark”), opens his foreword to Paul Smith’s history of remote viewing with the phrases “psychic warfare” and “straight from the pages of pulp-fantasy magazines.”⁴²

Indeed. Smith himself opens up his own story a few pages later by explaining the unofficial but affectionate acronym that he encountered early in his own journey: TZO, or Twilight Zone officer.⁴³ Smith entered the story of remote viewing a little less than halfway through its twenty-two-year run. His initial exposure to what he describes as the army’s “secret paranormal espionage program” involved a certain Major Stubblebine. In early 1983, Major General Albert Stubblebine III was the commanding general of INSCOM, the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command. He had created his own staff agency called the Advanced Human Technology Office, whose chief was a man named John Alexander.

Alexander had a Ph.D. in education, had been a Green Beret, and had a longstanding interest in near-death experiences. Even more significantly, he was the author of “The New Mental Battlefield,” an essay on the possible military uses of psychotronics or bioenenergetics, which, “to the astonishment of many of the Army’s brass,” Smith explains, “became the cover story for the normally staid Military Review, the official journal of Fort Leavenworth’s Command and General Staff College.” The army major who edited the review, it turns out, had had a near-death experience of his own and “as a result was open to possibilities that most of his peers would likely have rejected.”⁴⁴ As with most things mystical, it is ultimately extreme experience that finally convinces. In any case, “Be all that you can be” was probably much more than a catchy army slogan thrown up on hundreds of millions of television screens, posters, and T-shirts. It was also likely a kind of public echo of an early 1980s dream of a “New Age Army,” a human potential special ops team with deep connections to the very paranormal research program that we are tracing here.⁴⁵

Hence the “New Earth Army” of the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009). This humorous, heartfelt film contains numerous allusions to historical figures and events treated here, as well as a manual (which you have to pause the movie in order to read) that sports a comic-book style sketch of a meditating soldier sitting in the lotus posture and listed sections on things like “The Warrior Monk’s Vision,” “Evolutionary Teamwork,” and “First Earth Batallion”—perhaps coded references to the psychic warrior monks discussed in Ron McRae’s Mind Wars.⁴⁶ The film also ends with a little speech of disgust on what the media inevitably does with such a secret life. It distorts and censors these experiences until the story comes out the other end as ridiculous and twisted.

Smith explains how he became a remote viewer. Major Stubblebine was inspecting the intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where he was stationed. Sitting in a gathered crowd, Smith listened to the major as he described how the technological advances in intelligence gathering “cannot compare to the power that lies within our own minds. We only have to learn to tap it.” The major then did something very odd: he threw tangled pieces of clanking silverware into the audience. Weirder still, each fork or spoon was contorted in unfamiliar, seemingly impossible ways. Smith, a trained linguist capable in German, Hebrew, and Arabic, picked up one. “An eerie feeling washed through me, dredging up from somewhere deep in my subconscious the German word unheimlich [usually translated “uncanny”]. What I was holding in my hands was creepy.”⁴⁷ The major explained that these had all been bent and twisted by himself and his staff with nothing but the power of their minds.

Enter the Israeli superpsychic Uri Geller. After a stint in the Israeli military during the Six-Day War, Geller was famous for doing things like bending spoons, fixing watches during television broadcasts, photographing UFOs, and, in one bizarre scene right out of the movie Jumper, spontaneously teleporting from a street in the East Side of Manhattan through the porch screen window of his colleague Andrija Puharich’s house in Ossining, almost an hour away. Good luck with the spoons, the UFOs, and the porch crash. The fixed-watch scene, at least, is a trick, since if you can get hundreds of thousands of people to hold up their “broken” watches in front of their warm television sets, it is extremely likely that many of the watches will suddenly be “fixed” by the movement and heat of the hand and screen.

From the perspective of the SRI scientists, Geller was an artful mixture of stage magician and the real deal—the trick and truth, or tricky truth, again. They studied him at SRI for six weeks toward the end of 1972. He never managed to demonstrate his psychokinetic powers under the controlled laboratory conditions of SRI, but he did produce some fantastic effects outside the lab, including one really weird instance of teleportation with Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell.

As Geller reports the story, the two men were having lunch with Russell Targ in the SRI cafeteria when Geller almost broke a tooth on something in his ice cream. It turned out to be half of a miniature arrowhead. Mitchell thought it looked familiar. Back in the laboratory after lunch, everyone suddenly saw something fall on the carpet. “We picked it up, and it was the rest of the arrow. Together, the two pieces made a tie pin.”⁴⁸ Mitchell was shocked, as he now recognized the arrowhead tie pin for what it was: his tie pin, which he had lost years ago. Somehow it had now returned to him, in two parts, from God only knows where.

A trick? Not at least from Mitchell’s perspective, which differs in a number of details but not in substance. From Mitchell, for example, we learn that that same day the American astronaut had just challenged the Israeli psychic to produce a camera he had left on the moon. Mitchell knew that the camera had its own NASA serial number, which he did not know. So he had a kind of perfect experiment dreamed up here. Except for the fact that, as usual, the psychical event refused to follow the experimental design.

Mitchell also explains that he had lost the tie pin, along with a whole box of pins and cuff links, during one of his frequent trips to and from Cape Kennedy, well before he had even heard of Uri Geller. He also explains that there were actually three pieces, not two, that fell that day, as if out of nowhere: “a silver miniature hunting arrow mounted over the silver image of a longhorn sheep”; a tie bar that fell on a tile hallway floor and perfectly matched the hunting arrow emblem down to the broken solder joint (the two halves of Geller’s story); and, finally, another pearl tie pin that his brother had given him and that he had lost with the same box of jewelry. The astronaut concludes: “Three of Edgar Mitchell’s lost articles recovered telekinetically within the span of thirty minutes. But no camera. Startling phenomena, but accepted science still remained just outside the door.”⁴⁹ As it always would, almost as if the phenomena themselves were keeping it out, intentionally, mischievously.

It was no accident that Mitchell and Geller were together at SRI. Mitchell had helped raise the funds to get him there. Edgar Mitchell became the sixth man in human history to walk on the moon on February 5, 1971. On his trip back home in the Kitty Hawk command module, he became absorbed in a weightless contemplative mood before the beauty of a blue jewel planet suspended in black space and had an overwhelming experience of the universal connectedness of all things within an intelligent, evolving, self-aware universe. This “grand epiphany,” as he described it, led him the following year to found the Institute of Noetic Sciences (the same one featured in Dan Brown’s 2009 novel The Lost Symbol) in order to pursue the study of psychical phenomena and what he would eventually call the “dyadic” relationship between the material and the mystical worlds.

Such a vision is the key to assuring the survival of the species for Mitchell, who envisions a future in almost perfect sync with the humane wisdom of Professor Xavier. After rejecting the usual misplaced trust in “bionic computers” and artificial intelligence, the wise astronaut writes:

I FIND IT MORE PROMISING WERE WE TO ALLOW THE NATURAL PROCESS OF EVOLUTION TO CONTINUE, AIDED AND AUGMENTED BY AN INFORMED, KINDLY, AND INTENTIONAL SCIENCE THAT FULLY UNDERSTANDS THE PROCESSES OF CONSCIOUSNESS. IN A DYADIC SCENARIO, THE BIONIC PROCESSES REMAIN THE ASSISTANT, NOT THE DESTINY. . . . A DYADIC MODEL [WHICH POSITS THE FUNDAMENTAL UNITY OF MIND AND MATTER] PREDICTS THAT EVOLUTION IS ONGOING BUT COMING UNDER CONSCIOUS CONTROL. TO SUGGEST THAT EVOLUTION IS COMING UNDER CONSCIOUS CONTROL ALSO IMPLIES THAT IT HAS BEEN UNDER SUBCONSCIOUS OR UNCONSCIOUS CONTROL . . . THE INDIVIDUAL WHO EXHIBITS STARTLING CONSCIOUS CONTROL WITH MIND-OVER-MATTER PROCESSES REPRESENTS ONLY THE TIP OF AN ICEBERG IN AN AWARE AND INTENTIONAL SEA. THE UNTAPPED POTENTIAL THAT LIES JUST UNDER THE SURFACE IS ALMOST INCOMPREHENSIBLE AT OUR CURRENT STAGE OF EVOLUTION.⁵⁰

What he has in mind here are individuals like Uri Geller and Ted Owens, “the PK Man,” whom we will meet in our next chapter and with whom Mitchell also worked. In other words, what Mitchell has in mind is another evolutionary mysticism—more X-Men.

In the context of our Super-Story, the patterns around Mitchell are quite extraordinary. After all, the astronaut’s Fantastic Four–like initiatory experience in outer space (which he later referred to as his samadhi, a Sanskrit term meaning “yogic union” and, according to our opening epigraph for chapter 1, one of the ancient sources of supernormal powers); his unambiguous openness to the possible reality of UFOs and human-alien encounters; his dyadic or “nondual” universe in which matter and mind are two sides of the same cosmic coin; and his insistence—no doubt based again on his mystical experience in outer space—that evolution is a fundamentally meaningful process that is gradually coming under the control of consciousness are all precise expressions of the mythemes of Orientation, Alienation, Radiation, and Mutation.

These mythical patterns, moreover, are just as bright and just as bold in the figure and writings of Ingo Swann. Jim Schnabel, for example, includes a chapter on Swann with a Star Wars title, “Obi-Swann,” which appropriately quotes the seer to the effect that “the potential is there, just like Obi-Wan Kenobi said it was.” Another author, John Wilhelm, wrote an early book on Swann, Geller, and remote viewer Pat Price with the title The Search for Superman.⁵¹

Swann himself has written extensively about what he calls the “superpowers of the human biomind.” Of his many books, two are especially relevant here: an autobiography focusing on alien-human communication and NASA/moon conspiracy theories entitled Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy (1998), and a beautiful red book about what Swann calls “human energetics,” which focuses on the submerged erotics of the psychical research tradition through autobiographical reflections and intuitive comparisons with Indian Tantra and Chinese Taoism (Orientation again) entitled Psychic Sexuality: The Bio-Psychic “Anatomy” of Sexual Energies (1999). These two books, linked in their contiguous publishing dates, their erotically tinged titles, and their present status as rare collector’s items, deserve a full study. Alas, I can only offer a few paragraphs here.

Penetration begins with some observations about the social mechanisms that have successfully rendered it impossible to acknowledge “the Psi potentials of the human species” and, more to Swann’s point, to develop and train these superpowers in individuals. Such a project, Swann points out in perfect line with the X-Men mythos, would seriously disrupt our social institutions, which rely on all sorts of secrets being kept. “Psi,” after all, “penetrates secrets.”

But there may be more. Although he is very much aware that he is among “those unfortunates who experience what they can’t prove,” Swann suggests that if something like Psi or telepathy exists as a kind of universal language (a common claim in the occult and contactee literature, going back in the latter at least as far as George Adamski), such an ability to penetrate secrets would work both ways.⁵² A space-opera sci-fi scenario immediately develops: “if developed Psi potentials would be an invasive threat to Earthside intelligences, then developed Earthside Psi would also be a threat to Spaceside intelligences.”⁵³ It would thus be in the interests of the Spaceside intelligences to suppress Psi in the human species through all sorts of subliminal and covert means. This, I gather, is the “penetration” of the title. The problem, of course, is that the existence of the Spacesiders cannot be established. Hence Swann’s book, which is clearly designed not so much to prove as to provoke.

Provoke indeed. The book is filled with fantastic stories that read as perfectly sincere accounts that are almost impossible to believe (and Swann is the first to point this out). In one story arc, for example, he is whisked away by some dark government operatives to the Far North, where he is shown an immense UFO hovering over an Alaskan lake (shades of the polar holes again?). A mysterious man named Axelrod then asks Swann to remote view the moon. In another scene, Swann sees two of the same operatives and meets a sensuous female ET wearing purple sunglasses (and very little else) in a Hollywood supermarket. After a wave of electricity shoots through his body, he knows that she is an alien. And this is before we get to the second section of the book, on such things as a hollow-moon theory (the moon as an artificial satellite), lunar lights, and immense dark shadows and glowing UFOs allegedly seen in front of and around the moon by amateur astronomers and silenced NASA scientists and astronauts.

In the third section, we are on more familiar, if still fantastic, ground. Swann speculates here on the mechanisms of telepathy and the ultimate nature of consciousness “as a universal premise and life force.” Put very simply, he suggests that telepathy does not happen between minds or brains but within a shared universal consciousness. Ever the artist, Swann notes that those squiggly lines drawn around telepaths, as if the brain were some kind of radio, sender, or receiver, are almost certainly wrong. We may all be biological islands, but we are all floating in a shared sea of cosmic consciousness.⁵⁴ Including, of course, the aliens.

Swann, like all self-reflexive authors of the fantastic, is of two minds about what he is expressing in a book like Penetration. He presents the material as he experienced it, but he is at the same time clear, particularly with respect to his remote viewing of humanoids and structures on the moon, that, “as with all Psi experiments, there is a 100 per cent chance that I had been viewing my imagination and fantasies.”⁵⁵ Toward the very end of the book, he goes so far as to describe his pages as “a foray into gross speculation.”⁵⁶ In any case, certainly those pages—whether read as psychic ciphers or as spontaneous fantasies—resonate deeply with our mytheme of Alienation and its ancient-astronaut trope. As do Swann’s references to Earthside and Spaceside intelligences. Indeed, if we were to read these latter categories as a coded model of double-brained consciousness rather than as a literal statement about earthly and lunar humanoids, we are back to a familiar pattern: the Human as Two.

Psychic Sexuality, which appeared just a year later, is on the unity of what Swann calls sexual, creative, and power energies. Its basic theme is the intuited conviction that there is a profound (always censored and denied) connection between mystical and erotic experience, and that the subtle but incredibly powerful energies that produce both types of experience are not simply pious “metaphors” or social “discourses” relative to this or that culture, but real forces at work in every human being on the planet. Randolph and Reich were right. Put in Swann’s own unique language, such a force is the morphing basis of all superpowers of the human biomind. The force might explode in an orgasm, a creative work of art, a clairvoyant power-perception, or in a near-death experience and erotically charged encounter with a loving God, but it is always and everywhere the same cosmic Energy. We are back to the mytheme of Radiation.

So what’s my point about the remote-viewing literature, taken as a whole now, instead of as this or that author or book? My point is this: if we are going to understand—and I mean really understand—something like the history of remote viewing and what it tells us about the secret life of the mytheme of Mutation, we need to acknowledge the subjective experiences and belief systems of the remote viewers themselves with as much unblinking honesty as we do the objective science of the physics, the mathematical models, and the laboratory protocols. If the world really is dyadic, we must take the subjective side of the coin as seriously as the objective side. And with respect to the subjective-mental side of the dyad, the imaginal is key. Put more bluntly, the simple truth is that you don’t get Joseph McMoneagle without the supererotic mystical encounter with God, Edgar Mitchell without his samadhi in space, or Ingo Swann without the art, the lunar aliens, and the psychic sexuality. It’s all part of the Super-Story.

Perhaps this is also why sketching and artistic “right-brain” skills are so central here. As Smith puts it with his usual clarity, “there is more art than science to this process.”⁵⁷ And it helps to be an artist. The researchers recognized early on that what the remote viewer sketched through the kinesthetic right-brain wisdom of the hand was often much more accurate than what he or she said through the left-brain’s rational and verbal modes. In essence, sketching became a psychical technique. Much of this seems more than a little relevant to some of the more extraordinary experiences of artists like Jack Kirby and, as we shall dramatically see later, Barry Windsor-Smith, both of whom appear to have accessed metaphysical realities precisely through a “right-brain” sketching practice.

This is certainly not a new insight. A number of writers have traced the origins of remote viewing back to the mysterious and essentially occult processes of artistic creativity and, in particular, to the art of telepathic drawing as it was explored in a 1946 Paris lecture at the Sorbonne—the same text, by the way, with which we began our own list of images.⁵⁸ Here we might also mention Upton Sinclair’s Mental Radio (1930), which describes Sinclair’s telepathic drawing experiments with his wife, Mary Craig. This, by the way, is probably the source of Wonder Woman’s “mental radio.” And on and on we go.

A REAL-WORLD CEREBRO

To return to our superhero patrons of the present chapter, the X-Men, I am struck by how closely this real-world hidden history of remote viewing resembles the central figure of Professor Xavier and his technological creation called Cerebro. Professor X, after all, is basically a remote viewer with added superpsychokinetic gifts. He follows, guides, and instructs his X-Men telepathically, and much of his work involves finding and tracking new mutants around the globe with the help of Cerebro.

For my readers unfamiliar with the mythology, Cerebro is a piece of psychotronics developed by Professor Xavier in order to magnify a person’s innate telepathic powers and so allow him or her to locate and track mutants anywhere in the world. Cerebro made its first appearance in 1964, in X-Men #7, where it appeared as a spider-like, Kirby-esque system of machines and wires that transmitted extrasensory data into Professor Xavier’s private desk in another room. There it was described as “a complex E.S.P. machine” (XM 160).

It would then make multiple central appearances, including one when the X-Men were re-created in 1975 in Giant-Size X-Men #1; there Cerebro senses and locates a supermutant across the globe, which turns out to be a living island named Krakoa (almost certainly modeled on the real-world volcanic island of Krakatoa), whose every organism was transformed and refigured into a sinister community intelligence after the island was used for an atomic bomb test (what else?). By the time of the high-tech X-Men movies of the new millennium, Cerebro has morphed into a futuristic superroom into which Professor Xavier wheels over a bridge in order to don the helmet that would magnify his already extraordinary telepathic powers and project the results onto the skull-like internal walls of the room.

This mythical Cerebro can be seen in turn as a fantastic magnification of what was actually being attempted with government-sponsored human machines in the remote-viewing programs. Paul Smith certainly realized that he and his fellow remote viewers were basically equipment that could be “turned on” and “turned off” by the government.⁵⁹ Similarly, the standard practice and language in the early experiments at SRI involved a scientist or CIA agent traveling somewhere in the Palo Alto radius for the remote viewer to locate and describe, according to the theory that the outbound target acted as a kind of beacon for the remote viewer to home in on.⁶⁰

Since these experiments did not begin until 1972 and the first book describing them in any detail did not appear until 1977 (Targ and Puthoff’s Mind-Reach), it is obvious that the 1964 fantasy preceded the reality. But this hardly excludes the possibility that the historical reality later influenced the superhero fantasy, including the three X-Men movies of the new millennium. I could not help thinking exactly this during the second movie as I watched Storm and Jean Grey look for Nightcrawler in a Boston church where Professor Xavier and Cerebro had homed in on him: “These are the coordinates,” Storm says to Jean.

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. Eventually, with other writers in other decades, we learn that Nightcrawler is the abandoned son of Mystique, the blue, sexy, shape-shifting, skull-wearing archvillainess who looks more than a little like the Hindu Tantric goddess Kali and whose name means, literally, “the Mystical”—as in the French la mystique. The mystical as the erotic again.

But it is another Claremont creation, the figure of Jean Grey become Phoenix, who becomes the fullest embodiment of the X-Men mysticism. Her own Origins story has Jean growing up the daughter of a professor of history at Bard College. When, as a girl, she witnesses a girlfriend struck by a car and watches her soul glow away in her little arms, something within Jean opens, “an agonizing snap within her brain” (DP 228)—trauma as initiation again. Much later, she becomes Marvel Girl, a member of the first X-Men team, and then finally Phoenix. In the latter role, she will become a cosmic goddess figure akin to those found throughout Hindu and Buddhist Asia. Perhaps this is why Claremont and Cockrum sometimes portray her seated in the classic lotus posture of yoga (UXM 729).

But Phoenix is not simply an Asian goddess. She is also a Jewish one. In one of his most striking and complex panels, Claremont imagines the X-Men in the metaphysical categories of Kabbalah, where each X-Man becomes one of the ten sephirot or “aspects of God,” with Phoenix as the sixth central or heart aspect called Tiphareth or Beauty. Here is how Claremont puts it, as Phoenix spiritually unites with her friends to save all of reality from collapsing: “A new pattern forms—shaped like the mystic tree of life—with Xavier its lofty Crown and Colossus its base: each X-Man has a place, each a purpose greater than himself or herself. And the heart of the tree, the catalyst that binds these wayward souls together is Phoenix. Tiphareth. Child of the sun, child of life, the vision of the harmony of things” (UXM 327, DP 125, 200). I am not sure what teenage reader would have picked up on the complex kabbalistic references to the Tree of Life (I certainly would not have), but there it is, as clear as day for the knowing gnostic reader.

A writer like Grant Morrison takes these mystical patterns further still, although he seems to prefer a more Asian, often Buddhist, register, much of it focused on what he dubs “the Manifestation of the Phoenix,” as it is called by the “neuro-mystical surgeons of the Shi’ar space empire” (NXM 128.13). The Manifestation of the Phoenix involves what amounts to the full actualization of an omniscient, omnipotent cosmic “Phoenix potential” in the human body of Jean Grey (NXM 127.15, 139.7). Hence, “if she ever taps into it again, she could become something akin to a god” (NXM 125.10). Indeed. Here is Wolverine counseling Jean about her Phoenix potential: “Last time you lit up like this, the whole universe peed its pants . . . Blind people saw it in Seattle, Jeannie” (NXM 120.22).

One of the most powerful panels expressive of this X-mysticism appears in issue #128 of the Morrison/Quitely New X-Men run. The Phoenix consciousness shines through the humanity of an entranced Jean. Silverware—that strangely quotidian conduit for paranormal powers—levitates around her head as Phoenix snarls a line that makes it very clear where Phoenix stands on the question of the true nature and scope of consciousness: “Jean is only the house where I live, Charles” (NXM 128.14). The explicit eroticism of this particular Manifestation of the Phoenix needs no comment.

4.6   THE MANIFESTATION OF THE PHOENIX

4.7   PHOENIX UNLEASHED

In the end, of course, the full manifestation of divinity in a human person is too much for the fragile ego and the mortal coil. Hence when Jean exposes the villain Jason Wyngarde to a full-blown cosmic experience of “the infinite reaches of space and time,” he is reduced to a babbling, drooling basket case. He is psychologically destroyed (PK 110). Neither is Jean immune to such destructions. She and Professor Xavier may have set up a “series of psychic circuit breakers” in her mind to cut the power back to a level she could endure (DP 87), but these finally blew. In the end, Jean was overwhelmed, and so she allowed herself—a “vessel,” “form,” or “avatar” of the Phoenix Force (DP 183, 218)—to be killed on the Watcher’s alien base on the dark side of the moon. Back to Jack Kirby.

The message is clear enough. Claremont may be working within an evolutionary mysticism that sees the summit of human evolution as equivalent to “gaining in effect the powers and potentials of God,” and Phoenix may have “symbolized the potential of the species,” but we are not yet ready for such a Divinization. No one can be “bound irrevocably to the Divine” and survive, not at least on this plane (DP 206, 276, 207). The filter fries, and the human vessel dies.

Before we close this meditation on the mytheme of Mutation, it seems worth pointing out that in 2008, in order to commemorate the series as it moved to its landmark five hundredth issue, the X-Men moved to the Bay Area of San Francisco, confirming my initial X-intuition in that hot 2006 parking lot about the deep resonances that exist between this originally New York mythology and the California evolutionary mysticisms located largely around the Bay Area: mutants and mystics. One issue, #497, featured the X-Men decked out in classic hippie garb. A later cover from the summer of 2010 would go even further and feature Magneto in a classic lotus posture meditating a powerful electromagnetic field into existence on top of Mount Tamalpais, which overlooks the city from across the Golden Gate Bridge, as he tries to will back an immense missile-bullet shot at the earth by an alien race.

4.8   MAGNETO MEDITATES ON MOUNT TAM

It would be difficult to find a more iconic image of my thesis about the secret life of superpowers. The mutants have become practicing mystics. The X-Men are now living in San Francisco. Orientation (the yogic posture), Alienation (the missile-bullet), Radiation (the electromagnetic field), and Mutation (the X-Men) have become inseparable components of the story. The Super-Story.