A New Gnosis: The Comic Book as Mythical Text

A New Gnosis: The Comic Book as Mythical Text Copyright © 2023. Springer International Publishing AG. All rights reserved. David M. Odorisio Abstract Comic book authors and illustrators frequently incorporate mythical – and mystical – elements into their narratives and onto their pages, redefining the boundaries of what a comic book might convey and enhancing the medium’s potential for transmitting certain revelatory or “gnostic” truths. The inclusion of such material recrafts the comic book as a gateway for readers’ own possible “non-ordinary” mythical encounters. This introductory essay frames the volume as a whole from within mythological and depth psychological traditions and traces the origins and intersections of these rich comparative fields, including their potential for mining “hidden knowledge” (gnosis) in the graphic medium of comic books. Keywords Mythology • Depth psychology • Comic books • Gnosis • Freud • Jung D. M. Odorisio (*) Mythological Studies, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. M. Odorisio (ed.), A New Gnosis, Contemporary Religion and Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1_1 1 A New Gnosis : Comic Books, Comparative Mythology, and Depth Psychology, edited by David M. Odorisio, Springer International Publishing AG, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?docID=7165799. Created from pacgradins-ebooks on 2023-01-09 17:43:50. 2 D. M. ODORISIO Copyright © 2023. Springer International Publishing AG. All rights reserved. Why are we still making myths? Why do we need new myths? And what sort of stories attain this stature? —Philip Ball (2021, 3) For the past several years I have taught a graduate seminar on the topic of “Comic Books as Modern Mythology,” focusing on the contemporary resurgence of mythic motifs in popular culture, with an emphasis on the comic book medium. Throughout the course, students are encouraged to think both imaginatively and critically (alongside Jeffrey Kripal [2011], whose Mutants and Mystics serves as the required reading), on the historical, cultural, and religious significance of this modern graphic renaissance. Following Christopher Knowles (2007), I encourage students to ask, “Do our gods wear spandex?” And if so, what might the (often humorous) implications of this grand enactment convey? Following Kripal (2011), are we moderns unconsciously caught in a Feuerbachian loop of selfreflexivity – projecting our own idealized selves, or even “human potential,” onto caped crusaders? Or, do comic books and popular “occulture” (Partridge 2004), serve as a form of “cultural mourning,” akin to Homans’ (1989) portrayal of the origins of psychoanalysis, where acknowledgment of cultural or spiritual loss leads to a form of personal or social renewal. Perhaps the (old) gods are dead. But if so, comic books deftly – and defiantly – proclaim, “Long live the (new) gods!” As Knowles (2007) boldly states, “American religion seems unable to provide a viable salvation myth in this time of crisis…. It should not surprise us, then, when Harry Potter, Star Wars, and The X-Men step in to fill the void” (218). Nietzsche’s claim (in the mouth of Zarathustra) that “God is dead,” created (or at least articulated) a spiritual vacuum that reverberated throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lingering perhaps even to this day. Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung’s own response to the spiritual vacancy of post-World War I Europe was entitled, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933). For Jung, it involves a secular religiosity (or religious secularism) that is ultimately a psychologized form of religious expression – and experimentation. Particularly in his essays, “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man” and “Psychotherapists or the Clergy,” Jung’s (1933) impassioned reply to the increasing despondency of postWar materialism and the dominance of scientific rationalism is a return to interiority – the “search for soul.” Homans (1989), in a similar-but-different key, traces the work of Freud, Jung, and the early psychoanalytic circle, and argues that the A New Gnosis : Comic Books, Comparative Mythology, and Depth Psychology, edited by David M. Odorisio, Springer International Publishing AG, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?docID=7165799. Created from pacgradins-ebooks on 2023-01-09 17:43:50. Copyright © 2023. Springer International Publishing AG. All rights reserved. A NEW GNOSIS: THE COMIC BOOK AS MYTHICAL TEXT 3 origins of psychoanalysis can be interpreted as a response to such cultural, religious, and spiritual “loss.” The resultant interiority and introspection upon which psychoanalysis establishes itself fosters the “ability to mourn” – individually and collectively – and is followed by a reconstituted or renewed sense of self-identity – “individuation” in the case of Jung; for Freud, the wider psychoanalytic project of culture-formation (see, e.g., Obeyesekere 1990). And yet – whence myth? Parallel, yet foundational, to the cultural and meaning-making projects of early depth psychology lies the work that many, especially Freud and Jung, would stake their widest (and most controversial) claims. The rapid emergence of a field of “comparative mythology,” made possible by centuries of colonialist expansion and European fixation upon, and idealization of, non-Western cultures, would make possible the anthropological and early comparative work of E.B. Tylor (1832-1917), J.G. Frazer (1854-1941), and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939). Not without their modern-day critics (see, e.g., King 2017), these formative comparativists would initiate several disciplines upon which Freud and Jung would theorize their universalizing psychological claims. As part of their cultural mourning, pioneering depth psychologists such as Freud (1899), Otto Rank (1909), Jung (1911-12/1956), and their psychoanalytic-anthropologist counterparts, Géza Róheim (1992) and Bruno Bettelheim (1976), would “return” to “primitive” (often romanticized) wells of comparative mythology as universal, trans-historical sources of theory-making – what Daniel Merkur (2005) refers to as the shift “from mythology into meta-psychology” (1; see also Downing 1975, and Segal 2020). The contemporary (i.e., mid-late 20th and early 21st c.) situation which birthed the monumental rise of the comic book genre and superhero “mythology” in general is not that different from the early 20th c. postWar existential vacuum. If anything, the situation has only become exacerbated via the continued decline of organized “institutional” religion, and the general existential malaise of late capitalist U.S. culture as a whole. And yet this is not – and has not – been the complete (super)story. At an accelerated pace, “Spiritual But Not Religious” (see, e.g., Parsons 2018) and emerging new religious movements (Urban 2015), such as neopaganism, have quickly – and vastly – populated American and European horizons. To me, it is no surprise that many of these emergent movements, beginning with 1960s counter-cultural ideas, have been – and continue to be – reflected in the multi-paneled pages of comic book A New Gnosis : Comic Books, Comparative Mythology, and Depth Psychology, edited by David M. Odorisio, Springer International Publishing AG, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?docID=7165799. Created from pacgradins-ebooks on 2023-01-09 17:43:50. 4 D. M. ODORISIO Copyright © 2023. Springer International Publishing AG. All rights reserved. phenomena. Following American sci-fi futurist, Philip K. Dick, the current (and future) god(s) are found, not in an ‘above-ground’ mainstream, but in the “trash stratum” (Davis 2019, 369) – often composed of, and including, one’s own popular “occulture” (Partridge 2004). The notion of “gnosis” (Hanegraaff 2016) – a hidden (“occult”) and revelatory form of direct, experiential knowing – is not far removed (indeed, it is akin), to Dick’s (1981) “VALIS,” a consciousness-zapping, gnoseologically-informed extraterrestrial satellite, capable of spiritually illuminating or mentally modifying its recipient. As Kripal (2011) amplifies, the notion of transformation by being “zapped” or radiated – whether scientifically or cosmically – is a key “mytheme” of his own reading of an American and British comic book “super-story” – as well as foundational to his own lived “mystical hermeneutics” (Kripal 2001, 3-5), and evidenced in several first-person accounts of his own gnosis-encoded “zapping” (Kripal 2001, 2011, 2017). St. Francis – Zapped (Francis, Brother of the Universe. 1980. Marvel Comics. Used with permission) A New Gnosis : Comic Books, Comparative Mythology, and Depth Psychology, edited by David M. Odorisio, Springer International Publishing AG, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?docID=7165799. Created from pacgradins-ebooks on 2023-01-09 17:43:50. Copyright © 2023. Springer International Publishing AG. All rights reserved. A NEW GNOSIS: THE COMIC BOOK AS MYTHICAL TEXT 5 To Kripal, the gnostic dimension of comic books and superhero narratives enters into his postulation of mutants as mystics (2007, 2011). For Kripal (2007), a living “comparative mystics” (93-6) takes into account the “Real X-Men” (146-52) that populate the literature of the anomalous and the mystical. In other words, the fields of Comics Studies and Comparative Mysticism (and Mythology) have much to offer – and learn – from one another, because to Kripal, they are in all actuality profoundly (inter)related. The “Real X-Men” that he announces, whether Teresa of Ávila and Joseph of Copertino in their mystic flights of levitation; the various (and infamous) mediums of the psychical research tradition (e.g., Leonora Piper, Eusapia Palladino, Helene Preiswerk, and their principal investigators, William James, Frederic Myers, and C.G. Jung, respectively); Freud’s interest (and ultimately evidentiary belief) in telepathy (a term coined by Myers), which he theorized as “unconscious communication”; or the more contemporary Michael Murphy, founder of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA (whom Kripal compares to fictional X-Man Prof. Charles Xavier, with Murphy’s founding of a school for “human potential” akin to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, i.e. mutants) – in each of these examples, “real life” mystics (or mediums) reflect back the superpowered realities that would mythically (re)emerge from the pages of esoterically-encoded contemporary comic books as forms of gnosis (see also DeConick 2016). In other words, the comic book as both mythical and mystical text. The essays in this volume are certainly not the first to suggest that comic books serve as a form of “modern mythology,” or even as gnostic or esoterically-encoded mythical, mystical texts. Far from it. Following in the lineage and legacy of Schechter (1980), Reynolds (1992), Knowles (2007), Kripal (2007, 2011), Morrison (2012), and Ball (2021), this volume offers an inter-disciplinary approach to comic books through the dual lens of comparative mythology and depth psychology. This often ‘unholy union’ is itself not without precedent as well. As highlighted above, Freud, Jung, Rank, and others, built their depth psychological enterprises upon a comparative mythology that, to them, “storied” and symbolically portrayed the otherwise inarticulate unconscious dynamics of modern persons’ fragmented psyches. Freud’s “Oedipus,” Jung’s (1911-12/1956) “mana personality,” and later, his concepts of “individuation,” “archetype,” and the controversial notion of a “collective unconscious,” all attempt a theoretical claim on the “mythic origins” of the unconscious. Perhaps most popularly influential of them all (at least in contemporary A New Gnosis : Comic Books, Comparative Mythology, and Depth Psychology, edited by David M. Odorisio, Springer International Publishing AG, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?docID=7165799. Created from pacgradins-ebooks on 2023-01-09 17:43:50. Copyright © 2023. Springer International Publishing AG. All rights reserved. 6 D. M. ODORISIO film and cinema) is Joseph Campbell’s (1949) psychoanalytically-inflected (male) “hero,” who (following Jung 1911-12/1956), battles for “deliverance from the Mother,” only to reach apotheosis through “the Father.” The essays offered here, while not all commenting directly on this comparative mythological and depth psychological “genealogy,” are certainly indebted to it, with several authors having dedicated their scholarly vocations to undoing more than a few sins of the past (often sins of omission), in critically re-thinking from feminist, gender-queer, or Black critical perspectives, what a “modern mythology” can or should look like, and how comic books in particular might assist to “dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress” (Jung 1959, para. 271). The essays in this volume fall under two main headings. Part I focuses on the function of comic books as “modern mythologies,” and includes both archaeological investigations from comics’ storied past, as well as critical revisionings for (and from) the future. Part II underscores the “archetypal” nature of comic book phenomena, focusing on recurrent characters, myththemes, motifs, and the interconnectivity between Jungian depth psychological hermeneutics and the study and practice of comparative mythology. Craig Chalquist’s essay opens Part I by further articulating Jung’s injunction to “dream the myth onwards” through a critical glance at the contemporary legacy of a “comparative mythology,” particularly through a creative re-thinking of Joseph Campbell’s “mythogenic zone.” Chalquist notes current examples of how authors of comics draw upon mythic material from their own diverse cultural backgrounds to weave tales of fantasy and magic relevant for our time. Chalquist argues that a valid “loreway” – a network of storied performances rich with transformative ideas – has more allure today than any project to reconstitute yesterday’s fragmented myths. Yvonne Chireau’s exceptional essay, “From Horror to Heroes: Mythologies of Graphic Voodoo,” examines the mythos of Voodoo in comics from the early twentieth century to the present day. Unlike Vodun, an indigenous tradition of West Africa, or Vodou, an African diasporic religion in Haiti, Voodoo is a trope of imagined racial and religious otherness. Comics Voodoo, or what Chireau calls “Graphic Voodoo,” comes to the fore in its envisioning of Black religion and spirituality as the loci of spectacular figurations of horror and supernaturalism, and ultimately as an origin source of the Black Superhero as Africana deity. For Chireau, Graphic Voodoo simultaneously reflects and exaggerates fears of the Black A New Gnosis : Comic Books, Comparative Mythology, and Depth Psychology, edited by David M. Odorisio, Springer International Publishing AG, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?docID=7165799. Created from pacgradins-ebooks on 2023-01-09 17:43:50. Copyright © 2023. Springer International Publishing AG. All rights reserved. A NEW GNOSIS: THE COMIC BOOK AS MYTHICAL TEXT 7 Sacred through the use of sensational narratives and visual illustrations of Africana religions as savage, violent, and demonic. Erik Davis’ single-author study of California’s Rick Griffin offers a deep dive into arguably the greatest artist to emerge from the maelstrom of psychedelic visual culture in San Francisco’s late 1960s. An early and influential underground “comix” creator, Griffin was additionally known for his rock poster art and album covers. Griffin was also a genuine seeker, drawing concepts as well as images from esoteric sources and fusing these with psychedelia, humor, and dread, typified by his legendary “flying eyeballs” vision. Taking Griffin’s esotericism seriously, Davis’ chapter shows how Griffin’s art intertwined with his concerns regarding the occult, carnality, judgment, and the soul, and how tensions visible in his work led to his conversion to Christianity in the early 1970s, at the peak of the countercultural “Jesus Movement.” Following and furthering Davis’ jaunt with the Jesus Movement is Amy Slonaker’s “Christian Hippie Comics of the 1970s.” Slonaker examines comics aimed at the “Jesus People movement” as it emerged in southern California between the late 1960s through the late 1970s. Her focus on Christian Hippie Comics includes Al Hartley’s Spire Christian Comics, and True Komix, the official comic book of The Children of God, a Christianbased cult born of the Hippie era. Following Jeffrey Kripal, Slonaker’s analysis unearths a libidinal structure to Christian Hippie Comics in their conjoining of the numinous and the erotic. She posits that such “tantric” elements in Christian comics may be surprising given Christianity’s traditionally repressive attitude toward forms of sexuality; however, as Slonaker suggests, these tantric motifs reflect the Asian influences of the hippie culture which these comics targeted for conversion to Christianity. The resulting comic style includes elements of a tantric revisioning of the Gospel aimed at the hippie youth of the day. Evans Lansing Smith’s “Graphic Mythologies” rounds out the first part of the book in his exploration of the mythologies of the Egyptian Books of the Dead, Navajo Sand Paintings, and C.G. Jung’s Red Book, with a focus on the journey to the “otherworld.” For Smith, such texts form the archetypal ground for the contemporary (re)emergence of graphic media, such as comic books, animated film, and video games, often with overt influence from mythic materials and traditions from past cultures. Part II, “Archetypal Amplifications,” leads with Jungian analyst Jeffrey Kiehl’s rich “Archetypal Dimensions of Comic Books.” Kiehl’s personal opening affords an overview of the Silver Age of comics, with its more A New Gnosis : Comic Books, Comparative Mythology, and Depth Psychology, edited by David M. Odorisio, Springer International Publishing AG, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?docID=7165799. Created from pacgradins-ebooks on 2023-01-09 17:43:50. Copyright © 2023. Springer International Publishing AG. All rights reserved. 8 D. M. ODORISIO complex and multidimensional characters, focusing on their psychological depth and nuanced nature. Writing as a psychologist, Kiehl interprets the long-standing popularity of comic books as resting upon comics’ connectedness to an archetypal dimension of the unconscious. From a depth psychological perspective, these characters serve as personified forms of archetypal energies operating within Jung’s “collective unconscious.” Kiehl focuses his analysis on archetypal patterns and dynamics within the Fantastic Four stories published during the Silver Age, followed by a parallel analysis of Alan Moore’s more contemporary comics series Promethea. He concludes by considering how each of these comic book series illustrates a “religious function” within the psyche. Maile Kaku’s compelling “All-Female Teams: In Quest of the Missing Archetype,” critiques long-standing narratives of all-male heroic teams. To Kaku, such all-male teams have inspired not only comic-book characters but real-life exemplars of comradeship and adventure among “brothers-in-arms.” Conversely, Kaku notes, nothing comparable has existed for the opposite sex, with no mythological female-identified archetypes in the narrative landscape. Kaku then sets out in search of the “missing archetype,” asking, “If men have their celebrated Brotherhood archetype, why do women lack an analogous Sisterhood archetype?” The archetypal images that emerge of all-female teams resembles what Kaku calls “Furyhood,” rather than Sisterhood. The Furies, Maenads, and Amazons of ancient mythologies resurface in the guise of male-bashing superheroine teams and female-ruled planets in the narratives of modernday comics. Surprising as it may seem, Kaku discovers that stories of female bonding are a relatively recent innovation in the history of comics and in Western narratives as a whole. John Bucher’s “Infirm Relatives and Boy Kings” explores the Green Man archetype in Alan Moore’s celebrated Swamp Thing. Tracking the archetype of the Green Man, Bucher draws historical connections from this mythic figure’s origins to his triumphant 1984 reemergence in the popular imagination via Moore’s Swamp Thing. Bucher reads Swamp Thing as one of the most expansive explorations of the Green Man archetype – even though the mythological figure is never referenced directly. While Bucher’s exploration is not the first to suggest that Moore’s execution of Swamp Thing may be an amplification of the Green Man archetype, his unique approach demonstrates connections beyond the ecological and Dionysian, and instead embraces a lens that magnifies wounding in the representation and narrative of the creature. A New Gnosis : Comic Books, Comparative Mythology, and Depth Psychology, edited by David M. Odorisio, Springer International Publishing AG, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?docID=7165799. Created from pacgradins-ebooks on 2023-01-09 17:43:50. Copyright © 2023. Springer International Publishing AG. All rights reserved. A NEW GNOSIS: THE COMIC BOOK AS MYTHICAL TEXT 9 John Todd’s “The Shadow of the Bat” explores the shamanic archetypal underpinnings of the Batman legacy. Tracing notions of the bat throughout history, Todd investigates changing attitudes of this reveredreviled and fascinating creature. Despite the bat’s clear benefit to human and planetary ecology in general, Western culture has demonized it, which begs the question, “Why has so much negative shadow material has been projected onto the bat?” And further, despite such fear of the bat, why has contemporary culture so thoroughly embraced a “Bat-man”? Through interpreting Batman as “psychopomp,” Todd explores the redemptive imagery of the bat and what it symbolically contains for modern Westerners. Jennifer Tronti’s “Ritual and Reclamation in Little Bird” examines the recent Eisner Award-winning series, Little Bird: The Fight for Elder’s Hope. Little Bird presents a “postapocalyptic vision which pits an obscenely corrupt totalitarian religious regime against an indigenously-inspired rebel community.” To Tronti, the comic book offers a picture of archetypal contrasts: institution and individual, other and self, death and life, real and imagined, and story and experience. Through subtle psychological and spiritual depths, and utilizing the hermeneutic landscape of Ritual Theory, Tronti underlies the graphic spectacle of blood and violence in Little Bird, giving voice and shape to the myriad ambiguities and ambivalences of the human condition. Graphic mythologist Li Sumpter’s Epilogue on “Worldbuilding and Soul Survival” concludes the volume. Sumpter’s work as a community activist-educator as well as artist-mythmaker underscores and spotlights the future-forward direction of worldbuilding amidst fantasies (and realities) of apocalypticism in contemporary urban America. Sumpter imagines new worlds “where black and brown people, women, and all humans not only survive, but emerge more resilient and self-reliant, so they can thrive through whatever comes next.” As a whole, this volume celebrates the plurality, diversity, and richness of over a century of sustained comparative reflection. Utilizing historicalcritical, mythological, and depth psychological tools, comic books come to life through a spectrum of hermeneutic horizons – vividly and boldly exemplifying the “new gnosis” that first appeared in the early American “super-story” (Kripal 2011), only to spread rapidly across the Atlantic, and around the globe. While Knowles’ (2007) claim that superhero comics provide a “viable salvation myth” in times of crisis might prove difficult to demonstrate empirically, the essays in this volume certainly support, or at least point towards, the gnoseological significance of comic books in A New Gnosis : Comic Books, Comparative Mythology, and Depth Psychology, edited by David M. Odorisio, Springer International Publishing AG, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?docID=7165799. Created from pacgradins-ebooks on 2023-01-09 17:43:50. 10 D. M. ODORISIO and for contemporary culture. A “new gnosis” crash-landed in Smallville in 1938 and U.S. and British – and perhaps the world’s – popular culture (and consciousness) has never been the same. Copyright © 2023. Springer International Publishing AG. All rights reserved. REFERENCES Ball, Philip. 2021. The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bettelheim, Bruno. 1976. The Uses of Enchantment. New York: Thames & Hudson. Campbell, Joseph. 1949. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Davis, Erik. 2019. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DeConick, April. 2016. The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today. New York: Columbia University Press. Dick, Philip K. 1981. VALIS. New York: Bantam. Downing, Christine. 1975. Sigmund Freud and the Greek Mythological Tradition. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43 (1): 3–14. Freud, Sigmund. 1899/1913. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Macmillan. Hanegraaff, Wouter. 2016. Gnosis. In The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism, ed. G. Magee, 381–392. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Homans, Peter. 1989. The Ability to Mourn: Disillusionment and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jung, C.G. 1911-12/1956. Symbols of Transformation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1933. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. London: Kegan Paul. ———. 1959. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton: Princeton University Press. King, Richard. 2017. Religion, Theory, Critique: Classic and Contemporary Approaches and Methodologies. New York: Columbia University Press. Knowles, Christopher. 2007. Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes. San Francisco: Weiser, Ltd. Kripal, Jeffrey J. 2001. Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2007. The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2011. Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. A New Gnosis : Comic Books, Comparative Mythology, and Depth Psychology, edited by David M. Odorisio, Springer International Publishing AG, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?docID=7165799. Created from pacgradins-ebooks on 2023-01-09 17:43:50. A NEW GNOSIS: THE COMIC BOOK AS MYTHICAL TEXT 11 Copyright © 2023. Springer International Publishing AG. All rights reserved. ———. 2017. Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merkur, Daniel. 2005. Psychoanalytic Approaches to Myth. New York: Routledge. Morrison, Grant. 2012. Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human. New York: Spiegel & Grau. Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1990. The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parsons, William, ed. 2018. Being Spiritual But Not Religious: Past, Present, Future(s). New York: Routledge. Partridge, Christopher. 2004. The Re-Enchantment of the West, Vol. 1: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture. New York: T & T Clark. Rank, Otto. 1909/2004. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Reynolds, Richard. 1992. Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Róheim, Géza. 1992. Fire in the Dragon and Other Psychoanalytic Essays on Folklore. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Segal, Robert. 2020. Myth Analyzed. New York: Routledge. Schechter, Harold. 1980. The New Gods: Psyche and Symbol in Popular Art. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press. Urban, Hugh. 2015. New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements: Alternative Spirituality in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press. A New Gnosis : Comic Books, Comparative Mythology, and Depth Psychology, edited by David M. Odorisio, Springer International Publishing AG, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pacgradins-ebooks/detail.action?docID=7165799. Created from pacgradins-ebooks on 2023-01-09 17:43:50.