Popular culture is a mirror of the collective
unconscious. My interest lies in super-heroes—in
Superman and Superwoman. My imagination
longs for transcendence, sensing the intoxicating lure of the beyond. In traditional societies, we find tales
of the heroic and supernatural, the cult of heroes, the veneration of saints, the
honoring of gurus and prophets—all people alleged, in some way, to transcend—to escape the limits of
ordinary physical and mental reality.
So how did we get from living tradition to Hollywood and
comic book ideas of superhumanity?
It’s a long story, but science and its materialist assumptions have come
to possess the mind of our economically advanced societies. Besides turning us into consumers, the
official truth dispensers frown upon anything that smells of the supernatural, the
supernormal, or the superphysical. Sympathy or credence regarding such claims is forbidden. Dissed by reductive science, the
repressed ideas of super-humanity return through the outlets of popular
culture.