Gods and Goddesses

In his 1971 essay “Theagenesis: The Birth of the Goddess,” in which he lays out his belief that the Planet Earth is a unified living organism that is evolving into a divine being he calls Gaea, Neo-Pagan philosopher Oberon Zell quotes Alley Oop, the Stone-Age protagonist of V.T. Hamlin’s popular newspaper comic strip. Attributed to the wisecracking caveman is the observation “Gods are only as strong as those who believe in them think they are.” This idea was echoed about a decade later in another comic, Marvel’s The Mighty Thor, by Mark Gruenwald, a writer and editor at that company throughout the 1980s who was interested in exploring, developing, and quantifying the more cosmic aspects of the Marvel Universe. With his writing partner, Ralph Macchio, Gruenwald finally introduced Thor’s birth mother, the primeval earth goddess Gaea (known in Norse mythology by the name Jord) as part of the storyline for the milestone 300th issue. In Thor #301 (November 1980), Gaea tells her son, “Gods are manifestations of a world’s spiritual life-force, given shape and sustenance by the collective consciousness of its highest physical life-form. A god’s power stems from the ethereal energy of the human mind.”

Ever since Thor first fought Hercules in the summer of 1965, Marvel had maintained that the various pantheons of world mythology had some kind of physical existence in their comic book universe. Egyptian, Babylonian, Celtic, and other gods would eventually follow—along with numerous invented deities and mystical entities—before Gruenwald decided to address the issue directly. Furthermore, not wanting to offend readers’ religious sensibilities, Marvel’s editors discouraged their writers from treating the Judeo-Christian tradition in the same manner. In fact, in the mid-1970s, editor Jim Shooter shut down an attempt to make Jesus Christ a supporting character in the series Ghost Rider. The effect of all this was to give the Marvel Universe a distinctly Pagan sensibility. Perhaps influenced by the Goddess Movement of the time, which promoted the idea of a near-universal prehistoric worship of a single Great Goddess, Gruenwald asserted in Thor #301 that Marvel’s Gaea character, who had previously made a few shadowy appearances, was in fact such a pantheistic figure. She explains to Thor, “I have been called many things over the eons of my existence… every pantheon of gods that has ever lived has had its own name for me: Gaea… Nertha… Aditi… Coatlique… Rangi… All these forms I have assumed… and more. Most know me simply as Mother Earth, the nature-spirit of all life on this fertile sphere.”

Gruenwald also introduces his own sort of pre-human mythology, meant to underlie all the pantheons of Earth, which serves as Gaea’s origin story. (Because you can’t very well have a comic book character without an origin story.) Gaea reveals, “I am the last of the Elder Gods whose existence predates that of all other gods and men. My kind was the first of all life forms spawned by the potent spiritual force of this planet. It was we who shaped the very face of the world. When my kinsmen were driven from this plane as if demons, I remained behind, my essence infused in all living things.” Perhaps inevitably, Gruenwald elaborated on these ideas in the 1982 Thor Annual issue, for which he developed the story with scriptwriter Alan Zelenetz and supervised as the book’s editor. A five-page introductory sequence depicts this origin story, showing the emergence of Earth’s first intelligent being, the Demiurge, “the sentient life-force of Earth’s biosphere,” and its creation of Gaea’s generation of “Elder Gods.” In addition to Gaea herself, we see Chthon and Set, two demonic villain characters familiar to Marvel’s readers at that time. Gaea then watches in horror as her kinsmen overrun the planet and threaten the evolving lifeforms in the oceans with their constant warfare. She then mates with the Demiurge to produce the first second-generation god, Atum, who becomes the original superhero, very much in the mold of Marvel’s headline characters. To battle evil and save the world, Atum must assume a monstrous form, not unlike the Hulk or the Thing. When the threat is at last ended, Atum resumes his original identity, “seeding the heavens with godstuff,” and flies off into the sunset (or, in this case, into the sun itself).

At this point, Zelenetz reiterates Gruenwald’s idea that the gods were created in humanity’s image: “Eons passed, and Earth’s highest physical life form—man—came into being. Touched with the spirit of divinity itself, man beheld the wonders of the sky with awe and mystery… His nascent consciousness tapped the godstuff bequeathed the world by Atum and behold, new gods were born in man’s image. And thus came to be all the gods of earthly legend—great pantheons of diverse divinity given substance by the Demiurge, given form by the mind of man.” It bears repeating that the Demiurge represents not some universal monotheistic deity, but itself arose out of the Planet Earth. Gruenwald went on to develop and refine these ideas over the next few years as the head writer and editor responsible for The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, an encyclopedic reference guide for Marvel’s writers, artists, and fans. It is interesting to see him (along with his head researcher and co-writer Peter Sanderson) grapple with explaining the difference between “evil gods” and “demons,” as well as differentiating Gaea from a character such as Ego, the Living Planet.

So, the “god” characters in Marvel Comics, drawn from real-life polytheistic traditions, were defined in the 1980s as manifestations of the Earth’s spiritual energies. They could all be traced back to a common source—a creative consciousness that emerged from the planet itself and seeded the world with its own divinity, which in turn infused itself into all living things, giving rise (eventually) to the human race with its sense of wonder about the divine. The Demiurge, Gaea, Thor, and humanity—all part of the same closed system with no need for the intervention of extraterrestrial entities or cosmic deities. It is a self-contained, self-perpetuating, reciprocal, even circulatory system for a living, unified planetary organism that is its own deity—exactly the sort of organism that Oberon Zell calls Gaea.

The gods and goddesses of the world’s ancient polytheistic traditions are not limited to use as comic book characters, of course, but can appear in the rituals with which Pagans celebrate the progress of the year. Scientific Paganism does not view such figures as superior beings to be served or placated but as a means to conceptualize the nature of human experience within the universe. Invoking them does not presuppose that they have any sort of physical or quasi-physical existence; it is a way to make abstractions a bit more tangible and therefore easier to relate to. Thus, one should feel free to choose any that seem to resonate with one’s mood or situation or that have any personal significance—they are all aspects of Gaea, our living world.