Faith
Roman state polytheism became inadequate
when the city ruled an empire. One world empire needed one omnipresent god, to
replace local deities, and one perfect sacrifice, to replace local rituals.
Judaism provided one god and several executed Messianic claimants. The Romans
accepted the Jewish god as their god and one executed Messianic claimant as the
perfect sacrificial victim. Saul of Tarsus, a Jewish Roman citizen, Romanized
Judaism as “Christianity."
A minimal Christian creed would have
been, “I believe in one god who accepts a recent death as a universal
sacrifice.” The sacrifice had to be seen as a new revelation superseding ancient
rituals so the death had to be a recent historical event, not just a
reinterpreted myth. However, this particular death came to Saul’s (Paul’s)
attention because the Messianic claimant’s disciples had already proclaimed his
Resurrection. Therefore, the Resurrection also came to be regarded as
historical. The minimal creed became, essentially, “I believe in one god who
accepts a recent death as a universal sacrifice and resurrected the victim.”
Thus, the Christian historical synthesis
incorporated both the barbaric belief in blood sacrifice and the perennial myth
of death and resurrection, the former of necessity, the latter possibly by
accident. Paul needed a sacrificial death. Peter provided a resurrection from
death. Paul accepted the resurrection but interpreted the death as sacrificial.
Sacrifice and resurrection are not
necessarily connected. Most victims do not rise. All rising gods were not
victims. They were connected in Christianity because the sacrifice atoned for
sin which had caused death so atonement for sin entailed resurrection from
death, but who now believes that sin caused death? Our experience is that gods,
if they exist, do not require blood whereas death and renewal are perennial.
Therefore, we need to consign blood sacrifice to the barbaric past but death and
resurrection to the realm of myths, meaningful stories present in consciousness.
Some Christians acknowledge that the
Resurrection is a “myth” in this sense while also believing that it was a
historical event. When God became man, myth became history, although to say this
is to invoke the further myth of incarnation. Thus, the minimal creed became
that the one god accepts a sacrifice and resurrected the victim who was himself
incarnate. This in turn led to a distinction between the persons performing the
divine functions so that the formal creeds incorporated the Trinity: one
tri-personal god who as the father accepts a sacrifice and resurrected the
victim who was the son incarnate… The creeds also identify the father as the
creator but this came straight from Genesis so did not need to be
imported. Complicated, but synthesizing several pre-existing ideas.
Resurrection was historicized because
Paul joined the Jesus movement, not the cult of any other historical figure.
Despite its Roman origin, Christianity has adapted. The perceived need for blood
sacrifice remains meaningful to Evangelicals because it fantastically reflects
our common experience of alienation.
Graphic Fiction
The death and resurrection myth,
instantiated in other gods before Jesus, is now instantiated in fictitious
characters. In “cliff-hanger” cinema serials, the hero seemed to die at the end
of each episode except the last. In one comic book adaptation, Flash Gordon is
suffocated in a giant hour glass publicly displayed by Ming of Mongo. Flash’s
friends cannot rescue him from the closely watched and guarded hour glass but do
retrieve and revive his body later. Thus, in this case, there is a real death
and resurrection.
Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Superman
and others have all fallen off the cliff, literally or metaphorically, at the
end of one volume but have returned in subsequent volumes and were last seen
alive. A fantasy character’s death can be literal. Superman’s soul entered the
hereafter but his foster father, during a near death experience, persuaded him
to return. In this case, the editors and authors had planned an extended series
about the supporting characters while the hero was dead but had always intended
to restore him although by a roundabout route, with none of the four pretenders
turning out to be the real steel deal although we were misdirected into thinking
that one of them was so that it became necessary to re-read in order to check
when we had been seeing the revived Kal-El and when we had instead been seeing a
Kryptonian artificial intelligence that mistakenly thought itself to be Kal-El.
In a different version of this story,
such an intelligence might have sufficed as the resurrected Superman. If an
organism cannot survive indefinitely, might its memories and sense of identity
be transmitted into a different medium? (St Paul claimed that the resurrected
spiritual body differs qualitatively from the buried physical body.)
Lex Luthor, dying of radiation
poisoning, convinced both characters and readers that he had killed himself by
crashing a plane and had been replaced, a year later, by his illegitimate and
previously unknown son, only to reveal that the “son” was Luthor’s preserved
brain with a new body grown around it. Another way to handle this scenario would
have been for a genuine son, Lex II, to become “Luthor.”
Between John Byrne’s revamp of the
character in 1986 and Superman’s return from death in 1993, the Superman titles
were worth reading although they never realized their full potential and
deteriorated drastically later, quantity overcoming quality, the industry
destroying the medium. I expected to collect the second fifty years, 1988-2038,
which would have generated storage problems, but continuing the collection
became a pointless waste of money and paper, although the character remains
capable of innovative treatment, for example in the Smallville TV series
and novels based on it.
When a character is published
indefinitely for decades, his story not only risks deterioration but also
necessarily branches into different “continuities.” For example, the Superman of
the 1940’s fought in World War II whereas the current Superman did not. Earlier
versions of the character, regarded as inhabiting parallel universes, can also
be regarded as having died by now. Thus, we know that one character, in
different versions, has died yet is always currently active.
The one-off “imaginary stories,” not
obliged to conform to continuity, include one in which Superman was killed and
did not return although his cousin faked his resurrection when arresting his
murderer, Luthor. Alan Moore’s imaginary story, “Whatever Happened To The Man Of
Tomorrow?,” written to conclude the post-War, pre-Byrne continuity, convinces
the reader that Superman has died, then reveals that he has survived under a
changed name without his powers but with a son who inherits the powers.
Once, Superman prosecuted and the Batman
defended Lana Lang for the murder of Lois Lane. Lois looked dead but I did not
find Part II which would either have shown her return or explained why she had
not died after all. If a resurrected Lois really had died, then perhaps a murder
charge could be made to stick although it would be difficult to prove in the
presence of a living body. Lois cannot die permanently. She has married Clark in
four comics continuities and one TV series.
When Moore took over writing the minor
horror title, Swamp Thing, he had the character apparently killed by a
military attack only to show that bullets and shells can stun but not kill a
vegetable body. Later, Swampy’s body died from radiation poisoning but he grew
another. Surviving as a disembodied consciousness in a vegetable dimension
called “the Green,” he was able not only to control vegetation and to grow new
bodies of different sizes and shapes but also to enter the hereafter, rescue his
lover’s soul from Hell, where it had been unjustly imprisoned, and return it to
her still living but unconscious body.
An Alan Moore story begins with Superman
expecting to die from a Kryptonian fever but Swampy helps him through it. Luthor,
an expert in the attempted destruction of an invulnerable being, advises a
secret government agency on how to kill the Swamp Thing. Consequently, Swampy is
apparently dead for two issues, while there is mourning and a memorial service
on Earth, but he is really adrift in space, bouncing between inhabited planets,
and returns to kill the covert team that had tried to kill him. After Moore’s
run on the title, Swampy learns of Luthor’s involvement and pursues him as well
but Lex, like every Metropolitan, is protected by Superman so Swampy backs off.
Lex is a continuing character who cannot
die permanently, except in an imaginary story or “Elseworld,” but he has over
time become a different character. He was a wanted criminal and frequent convict
but now has “always been” a respectable though crooked
billionaire-philanthropist who even became US President. The nature and extent
of Superman’s powers has changed more than once and his character changes with
his powers. Each distinct version of a character has a limited life-span but we
usually see one version morphing into his successor rather than one ending and
the next beginning. Even when Moore concluded one Superman continuity and Byrne
initiated its successor, the pre-Byrne Superman appeared anachronistically after
the cosmos-altering “Crisis” which was supposed to have effected a smooth
transition between continuities.
Also under Moore’s successor, an attack
from space apparently killed the Swamp Thing only to send him backwards in time.
He interacted with historical figures (including Jesus as a powerful white
magician but the publishers refused to publish this episode), met himself
returning to the twentieth century, founded the line of plant elementals of
which he is a member and returned to the twentieth century, meeting himself
traveling backwards and arriving a few months after his departure, thus unable
to help oppose the invading aliens that had tried to kill him.
This summary shows the death and
resurrection theme recurring several times for just two characters, Superman and
the Swamp Thing.
Prose Fiction
A realistic character’s “death” can only
be apparent but can also be convincing. Doyle’s attempts to end the Holmes
series included a literal death. Watson married and left Baker St at the end of
the second novel. The married Watson stayed in touch with Holmes but then Holmes
died at the end of a second collection. Two further novels recorded earlier
cases. In a third collection, Holmes returned from apparent death but then
retired. In the fourth collection, Holmes returned from retirement but only
temporarily. A final collection recorded earlier cases and one during the
retirement but then Doyle, the omnipotent author, said, “This must cease,”
although he did not resort to another death. Appropriately, we last see Holmes
still active in Baker St. As Holmes returned from Reichenbach, so might
Moriarty. Both John Gardner and Alan Moore have made this assumption.
Bond seems to the reader, and was
originally intended by the author, to be dead at the end of his fifth novel, is
believed by other characters to be dead at the end of his eleventh novel and is
shot in the stomach, so would have died unless rescued in time, near the end of
his twelfth and last novel. His “Obituary,” near the end of the eleventh novel,
You Only Live Twice, reduces his life by more than a decade so that he
remains not only alive but also active longer than expected. “Obit:”
rationalizes its contradiction of dates as given in the first novel by
relegating the entire series up to that point to the status of fictionalized
accounts written by a former colleague. Retroactively, previous volumes become,
in dramatic terms, “plays within the play” or, in scriptural terms, Apocrypha.
Fleming’s subtle rewriting of the
character’s career established in popular consciousness the myth of a
perennially active hero, a myth perpetuated to absurdity by post-Fleming novels
and additionally vulgarized by endless slapstick films. Since we are discussing
myths as they appear either in religious belief or in popular fiction, the
artistic contrast between Fleming’s Bond novels and the post-Fleming Bond films
parallels the religious contrast between mystical subtlety and Evangelical
vulgarity.
Both Doyle and Fleming had intended an
irrevocable death but the logic of series fiction is that a popular character
either does not die or returns, his “death” becoming not an ending but a major
turning point. The Ministry of Defence switchboard receives calls from imposters
after Bond’s publicly announced death. When he does return, initially mistaken
for another imposter, he is not himself and does not regain his former status
within the Secret Service until the end of this last book. The film, You Only
Live Twice, with a different agenda and an unrelated script, shows an
apparent death and naval burial at sea, then immediately shows how these were
faked so that Bond could pursue his enemies without their knowledge. In the
following film, Blofeld, evading a vengeful Bond, fakes his death at Bond’s
hands by employing a double.
Doyle recorded earlier cases before
resorting to The Return…, complete with a “man on the road to Emmaus”
scene, whereas Fleming, writing each novel as a direct sequel to its
predecessor, had to explain Bond’s survival early in the sixth novel but, even
then, Chapter I, describing familiar characters in a familiar setting, avoids
reference to Bond as if the world were continuing without him.
Raffles pulled a “road to Emmaus” stunt,
attending his own funeral in disguise, on television but I cannot remember
whether this scene was in the original Raffles series, having read the latter
only once. This does not matter here because the present article is reflective,
not researched. It evokes memories of resurrection images in popular fiction and
in different media. The Flash Gordon story above is a beaut and one that I might
well not have known about. What else is out there?
Television and Time Travel
I read of a TV series that handled the
death and resurrection theme with originality. The actor playing Robin Hood was
not due to return for a second season. At the end of the first season, Robin
dies. In the second season, a nobleman called Robert joins the merry men,
becomes their leader and comes to be called “Robin.” We are to understand that
the Robins merged in the legend which is in any case inconsistent. Thus,
continuity is maintained, contradictions are explained and a real death does not
end the story of Robin Hood, as indeed it cannot. This approach would have
accommodated even the death of the first actor, which, fortunately, had not
happened.
The time traveling “Doctor” explains
changes of actor and longevity of the character by “regeneration,” periodic
rejuvenation, which is easily invoked in a science fiction (sf) context. One
early regeneration was treated very like a death and resurrection. However, the
story of the Doctor needs to be retold from the beginning with Time Lords as
future humanity, not an alien species, and with a subtler understanding of the
relationships between life, death and time travel. A time traveller who has died
is not dead all the time if, before dying, he had made extended excursions to
periods later than the date of his death. (See The Time Traveler’s Wife
by Audrey Niffeneger.) It would be possible to show in chronological order the
Doctor’s adventures, then his death, then more of his adventures. The second set
of adventures would be after his death to non-time traveling characters but
before it to the Doctor himself.
The British sf writer, Christopher
Priest, once said publicly that he had written a script featuring a death of the
Doctor that was not subsequently prevented or explained away. It was a real, not
an apparent, death. I do not think that that script was used although, not being
a big Who fan, I am not certain. Such unpublished and apocryphal stories
add extra dimensions to legendary characters.
A time traveller would be able to fake a
resurrection or ghostly apparition by learning the time of his death, then
making a brief appearance after it. (See The Shield Of Time by Poul
Anderson.)
The Doctor is currently described as
“the last Time Lord.” This means not only that other Time Lords have died but
also that he no longer meets them wherever or whenever he travels. However, if
they were all killed in, for the sake of argument, 2000 AD, then a journey to
1999 or earlier will take him to a time when they were still alive. Further, if
they, as time travelers, had visited periods later than 2000, then some of them
may be around now (2008) and certainly are in the future. If, as is suggested,
they died in a “Time War” and if, as seems probable, such a war involves time
travel, with battles in different periods, then it is questionable whether they
could all have died at a single time. Some of their deaths, or at least some of
the Time War battles, could be still to come.
In any case, from a four dimensional
perspective, everyone, whether a time traveler or not, is alive at some times
and dead at others so no one is permanently dead to a time traveler, even
before we ask whether it is possible to change events by preventing deaths, an
issue that Doctor Who made a complete mess out of. It demands subtlety. A
Time Patroller was seen to fall into a waterfall and records showed that she had
never returned to her home base or to anywhen else so a colleague from a
different era rescued her, then proposed to her, thus explaining why there was
no further record of her under her maiden name. (See The Time Patrol by
Poul Anderson.) The second Patroller changed not known events but their
significance. Without his further action, her absence, under her maiden name,
from subsequent records would have been caused by her death in the waterfall,
not by her marriage to him, but Patrollers are forbidden to prevent deaths that
are definitely known to have occurred, for example when the body has been found.
Breaking this rule would generate not
one timeline with a death and resurrection but a first timeline with a death and
a second with a prevention of the death. The Time Patrol is committed to
preserving a single timeline. Cyrus the Great was killed as a baby. When he was
needed as an heir in adulthood, a captured Time Patroller was forced to play the
role. In order to be able to return home to the twentieth century, that
Patroller with a colleague prevented the killing of the infant Cyrus so that the
right guy played this historically necessary role after all. (The Time
Patrol.)
The Time Patrol exists in the same
timeline as Holmes and must prevent him from detecting their activities in his
era but I suggest that they would consult him in his retirement when there would
no longer be any risk that their interaction with Holmes would affect Watson’s
accounts of the detective’s adventures. These are historical accounts so the
Patrol has to preserve them as they stand, including the one piece of evidence
for time travel that is in there, but Patrollers might also need Holmes’
expertise to investigate a case concerning Jonathan Wild, the master criminal of
the previous century, whom Holmes compares with Moriarty.
In another TV/film sf series, of course,
Spock died and returned. Part of the process was the finding of an empty coffin
with an abandoned burial shroud. (Spock should be re-written as a descendant of
human extra-solar colonists, not as a human-alien hybrid. Since Vulcan was a
hypothetical, although non-existent, solar planet, it is questionable whether
that name should have been applied to a fictitious extra-solar planet but that
is now a lost battle. "Vulcan” popularly means Spock’s home planet.) The series
continued long enough to incorporate a real death of Captain Kirk without a
resurrection although, even then, Kirk spent some time in another realm between
his historically recorded death and his actual death.
Conclusion
This article began with the realization
that sacrifice and resurrection are separable concepts in Christianity, then
pursued resurrection in unexpected directions. Whenever we appreciate a work of
fiction in which the hero dies or appears to die but is alive later, the myth
remains active as it was in Adonis, Balder, Christ and Osiris. (The Norse gods
failed to rescue Balder from Hel (= Hades, not Hell) but he will return after
the Ragnarok when Odin, Thor and Loki have died.)
Sacrificial death and resurrection
survive in Evangelical sermons. Self-sacrifice, death and resurrection recur in
heroic fiction. Marxists hope to end the conditions that generate both
Evangelism and nationalism but not to end appreciation of myth or fiction. I
think that we will fully understand the Four Gospels and, for example, the James
Bond novels when we have transcended current conflicts so that contentious
issues no longer include the historicity of the Resurrection, the nature of
alienation, the need for atonement, sexual morality or Cold War politics. We
will then appreciate these texts without having to argue against contrary views
and will instead debate the merits of as yet unwritten works, of which some will
continue to express perennial myths though in new ways. Societies change but
life and death are constants.
