X-Men, Emerson, Gnosticism

Geoff Klock
geoffklock@earthlink.net

"We're monsters. I don't dress it up with fancy names like
Post-Human or mutant. Man was born crueler than animals and
we were born crueler than men. It's the natural order."
---Sabertooth, in Mark Millar's Ultimate X-Men

I

     Professor Charles Xavier, mutant telepath and genius, describes to a dinner companion (and fellow mutant) his life with his wife and son before founding his superhero team, the X-Men. "Very much in love" with his wife, he was changed forever when he met Magneto.

I don't know about you, but the first time I met another adult mutant was like being hit by a thunderbolt. Far, far more powerful than being in love and our human wives knew it. Our eyes were brighter. Our minds were faster. Sometimes we could spend seventy-two straight hours on the telephone just talking about our ideas for the world. Even poor, little David [his son] felt alienated when Magneto's twins would visit. ... I honestly don't think there was one specific argument which caused me to leave. Just the drip-drip-drip of silent nights in front of the television set and the growing unease with my own child's scent. It's monstrous in hindsight but I don't even think I said goodbye the night I left to build our little South Sea Island Utopia. ... I had no shortage of love for my son, you know. Like an owner's love for his pet, sometimes, but it was love nonetheless. [1]

Ralph Waldo Emerson speaks of his son in much the same way, in his essay Experience (1844):

Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, - no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the death of one of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.[2]

What Professor Charles Xavier and Ralph Waldo Emerson share, in their apparent coldness, is an affiliation with a vanished heretical second-century sect of Christianity known as Gnosticism. It is my belief that this moment in which Emerson and Xavier meet allows Emerson's implicit Gnosticism to reveal Xavier's, as dusted fingerprints appear under ultra-violet light. Starting with a recognition of Xavier's Gnosticism, I am going to connect some dots in two Marvel Comics' X-Men comic book runs - Mark Millar's Ultimate X-Men (2000-2003) and Grant Morrison's New X-Men (2001-2004) - to argue that these works present, at least in a subterranean logic, a new conception of the Post-Human: what I am going to call Gnostic, or pessimistic, Post-Humanism.

II

      With the exception of literary critic Harold Bloom and some northern Californian lunatics, Gnosticism is dead as a religion, but is still alive and kicking in the works of such literary figures as William Blake, Herman Melville, and Franz Kafka (such work continues far out ahead of us all). It also survives in such science fiction films as Alex Proyas' tragically underrated masterpiece Dark City (1998) and The Matrix (1999) (whose plot should be kept in mind as you read this paragraph). The central tenant of Gnosticism is the belief that the universe is a vast prison, the innermost dungeon of which is the Earth.[3] The universe is created and run by the Archons, basically Satan and his minions (in The Matrix, Smith and the Machines). It is an Archon, not God, that people worship in traditional churches, because the Archons work to keep people ignorant of the true state of things. Each person has, inside themselves, a piece (or spark) of the True God kept hostage in the Gnostic prison; the goal of Gnosticism and the Gnostic messiah is to liberate people to transcend the world-as-prison, to wake up and thwart the Archons through knowledge (Greek: gnosis) of that original spark and the True God of which it is a part. The True God is completely alien, and detached from the universe, which he neither created nor governs.

      It ia Gnosticism's conception of the self that is most interesting and radical: Gnosticism makes a distinction between the soul (in Greek the psyche) and the spirit (the pneuma). The psyche is primarily what we traditionally associate with the mental self, most exhaustively treated by Freud in his psychoanalysis: appetites and passions certainly, but also our love and our tastes, and much - perhaps all - of our personality. Emerson, an implicit Gnostic, referred to this as the "adhesive self."[4] Christianity, implicitly or explicitly, conceives of the body as a prison for the soul; Gnosticism conceives of BOTH the body and the soul (again, the personality, appetites and desires) as a prison for the spirit, the Gnostic spark, the part of God. (Freud's "bodily ego" admits the connection of body and psyche, though not as a prison for something else). Emerson's Gnosticism is evident in his remarks about his son. He laments that grief (which occurs at the level of the psyche) cannot get him closer to "real nature"; for a Gnostic everything but the pneuma is unreal, including to a large extent other people. Bloom associates the spark with Genius;[5] it is probably best to think of it as the self that is beyond all categories, catalogues of traits, and definitions. Because Saint Paul defeated the Gnostics in the battle to control the destiny of the church (in much the same way Plato defeated the Sophists in the battle to control the destiny of philosophy), contemporary culture has nothing like this distinction, which is why it is so anti-intuitive. The imagination of the traditional Christian, for example, conceives of an ascent to heaven that would transport the individual to a blissfully happy place; we still recognize personalities, however happy, in Dante. Gnosticism, by contrast, speaks of the afterlife as the re-integration of the Gnostic spark with the divine, shedding the shell of both the body and the psyche. It is difficult to picture what would be left. The Matrix, Gnostic in its cosmology, could have been Gnostic in its "psychology" as well: Morpheus may have gotten Neo out of the illusory prison the Machines built to trap us, but can he get him out of the love he has for Trinity? A fully Gnostic director could conceive of his love for her as occurring on the level of the psyche, as another trap created by the Archons to keep him from waking up to realize his own power, his Gnostic spark.[6] These examples show that recognizing such a distinction has radical consequences, particularly when we use it to question existing conceptions of the Post-Human.

III

      In the world of the X-Men [7] a certain percentage of human beings develop extraordinary powers around the age of puberty - powers like telepathy, telekinesis, wings, or the ability to teleport long distances instantaneously. These are the mutants, hated and feared by the world as "freaks" and "monsters." Many theorize that they are evolution's successors to homo sapiens. Humans (such as those that run the Weapon X program, see below) have attempted to wipe out mutant-kind. Mutants (such as Magneto) have attempted to set themselves and their species up as rulers of the planet, reducing humans to the status of animals. Professor Charles Xavier (Professor X) has created a school where he teaches mutants to control their powers; his X-Men are those students who fight - against forces like Weapon X and Magneto - for Xavier's dream of peaceful integration between humans and mutants. The X-Men have been through a host of various rosters, but the selection for Ultimate X-Men is fairly representative: Scott Summers (code-name: Cyclops, power: optic blasts), Jean Grey (Marvel Girl, telepathy and telekinesis), Bobby Drake (Iceman, freezing powers), Henry McCoy (The Beast, enhanced strength and agility), Ororo Munroe (Storm, weather control), Peter Rasputin (Colossus, organic steel skin and super-strength), and James Logan (Wolverine, healing factor and extendible razor claws).

      Recent superhero comics have begun to play games with the basic codes of the genre. Mark Millar's Ultimate X-Men follows this trend when the new students comment on their code-names, drawing attention to one of superhero comics' silently accepted structures. Henry McCoy, for instance, wonders if he is the only one who finds "The Beast" derogatory. Professor Xavier (nicely anticipating a point that might be made by an academic writing on Post-Humanism and the X-Men) explains the concept: "You've just been rebaptized as a Post-Human being. It's ... a name which describes your own skills and personality as opposed to those of a long dead ancestor." [8] By rejecting the identification of the self with a long dead ancestor, Xavier rejects identifying the self with inherited traits; Freud, with his belief in Lamarckian genetic memory, would be the first to point out that the psyche (the mere mind) falls clearly into this category. But the pneuma does not. Ancient Gnostics conceived of the pneuma as completely alien to anything like "inherited traits," which could only be inherited from the world, the prison; the pneuma is unique, original, uncreated, and only temporarily trapped in space and time. (Time is just another aspect of the world-as-prison, the Archon's failed attempt to imitate the True God's eternity). At a later point in the story Xavier defines mutants as ordinary people with extraordinary talents, associating the mutant power with abilities in sports and music; [9] this might remind us of Harold Bloom's association of the pneuma with genius. There is a connection lurking here between the mutant power and the Gnostic pneuma, both of which are seen in their respective systems as offering real power. By introducing his students to their Post-Human identity, Professor Xavier is asking them to identify themselves with their Gnostic spark -- their mutant power inspiring, for example, Bobby Drake to take his Post-Human identity from his ice-powers and become Iceman. Thus the X-Men suggests an identification of the Post-Human with the pneuma, the Gnostic spark, the antithetical self opposed to the world, the body, and the psyche. This would locate Post-Human theory, not with Haraway, Hayles, and Moravec, but with Blake, Melville, and Kafka -- something worth thinking about. But this new approach to Post-Humanism has dark consequences, embodied by Xavier himself.

IV

      In the most flattering light (e.g. the X-Men films) Magneto is conceived of as Malcolm X to Xavier's Martin Luther King. Magneto is a holocaust survivor whose family was murdered in the concentration camps; in his film incarnation he is sympathetic and justifiably skeptical of the possibility of integration, but in the end goes too far to achieve his goals. Ultimate X-Men, in contrast, portrays Magneto as a tyrant bent on exterminating the human race to justify his eugenic claims for placing mutants at the top of the food chain. Generally, in superhero comics the villain will mirror some aspect of the hero: a reasonable, sympathetic Magneto clearly exists as a counterpart to the dominant portrayal of Xavier as reasonable and sympathetic. But Ultimate X-Men plays with a more radical, edgy Xavier as a counterpart to Magneto's more clearly evil incarnations.

      (One way to think about the difference between Millar's Xavier and Magneto might be found in the Ethics 101 debate between the altruist and the egoist. The altruist believes that the most important ethical principle is helping others, so he preaches altruism. If the egoist genuinely believes in self-interest as the most important ethical principle, and if (contra Rand) he believes that a world of egoists is not in his (personal) self interest, he will also preach altruism. Magneto clearly believes that mutants are superior to humans, destined to replace them as the dominant species, and he proclaims as much, bringing every superhero down on his head. Millar's Xavier often seems to believe that mutants are superior to humans ("Our eyes were brighter. Our minds were faster."), destined to replace them as the dominant species, but he preaches integration, perhaps because it is the easiest path to mutant succession. This is merely a thought experiment, but one that goes a long way toward understanding Millar's darker portrayal of Xavier.)

     Mark Millar and Adam Kubert's Ultimate X-Men, like the films, exists outside X-Men continuity, so readers aren't expected to be familiar with more than forty years of convoluted X-Men history. But unlike Patrick Stewart's Xavier, Millar's novice Xavier is morally ambiguous. Though Xavier is never clearly a villain, Millar peppers his portrayal of him with vaguely villainous moments. When Xavier is first introduced in Millar's run, to both his students and to the reader, he sports the trimmings of a moneyed liberal, a Perrier and a prominently displayed AIDS ribbon; [10] later we will learn that he doesn't like prison and is against capital punishment. [11] But his serenity is made sinister by the room's odd, long shadows, intimidating vaulted cealings, (see figures 1 and 2) and the fact that we learn that it is called a library in spite of the fact that it holds no books, because this is where he reads the minds of his favorite writers as they type. [12] Millar's cleverness here is much more noticeable than the obvious invasion-of-privacy issues, but it is nevertheless a factor. His Xavier also makes his first appearance with a cat, an animal known for being (like Xavier himself) aloof, superior and clever. For these reasons it is an animal often owned by villains like Inspector Gadget's Dr. Claw and Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather. Thirty-two issues later we will learn that the cat shares both her name and her distinctive diamond-marked forehead with the shape-changing supervillain Mystique.

      In the course of Ultimate X-Men Xavier will send teenagers on dangerous, life threatening missions; when his mission to gain the president's trust by sending the X-Men to rescue his kidnapped daughter goes wrong, Storm remarks to a fellow teammate, "Even Professor X was ready to sacrifice all seven of us just to save some spoiled little white chick with an old money surname." [13] Xavier's son raises the question of Xavier simply controlling the mind of his students (something clearly within his power); [14] it is a question the Beast takes seriously over the course of several issues. [15] When Iceman tells his new girlfriend all about his secret superhero life, Xavier not only erases the conversation from both their minds, but also erases the knowledge of ever dating this girl.[16] He selects the Guggenheim as neutral territory for discussions with Magneto's terrorist children, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, and sinister language and panel composition (Xavier is at the far end, heading out of panel, in shadow: see fig. 3) suggest he is controlling their minds. [17] Their teammates report that they have become like Xavier after this meeting,[18] and they both eventually turn against their father. [19]

      Xavier appears to plan everything to the Nth degree, and announces, in sinister scenes with distorted images, that various "phases" of his plan are complete, that (for example) his bid to gain the trust of humans has succeeded: these are characteristics we associate with the supervillain. Xavier promises Cyclops that the next phase of his plan will be "a lot more interesting," [20] (see fig. 4) a choice of words that makes him sound like an aloof dandy. In another decadent moment he notes that conversation holds few surprises for a telepath. [21] He refers to the "politics of the ape man," [22] an unkind phrase to describe the people he publicly considers equals. There is a scene in which a reporter asks if attacks on mutants ever make him resentful; he is unable to answer right away, but after an ominous pause, says that while he counsels turning the other cheek, one never gets used to hate. [23] His estranged ex-wife describes him as cruel and adds: "no one knows what goes on in his head. After fifteen years I was only scratching the surface." [24] Magneto says of him "Charles is very crafty. How he manages to perpetuate this saint reputation is something I'll never understand." [25] Illustrations, such as this extreme close-up of his eye, (see fig. 5 and 6) make him look like a madman. [26] In the end, by recapturing a Magneto he had allowed to live while convincing the world he had killed him, he is in a position to combine his organization with that of the government military machine. A discussion with the head of that organization suggests this is what he had in mind all along (see fig. 7). [27] In the final issue of Millar's run, Magneto says as much, and Xavier's final act at the closing moment of the book is to erase the conversation from the minds of all observers and destroy the surveillance. In the parting panel of Millar's run, the elevator doors close on this enigmatic genius, placing him just a little off center in the panel composition, to be just slightly unsettling. [28] Ultimate X-Men is the first extended X-Men run to make Xavier the primary character, and its ambiguously dark picture is very persuasive.

      There are moments when Xavier seems genuinely concerned about his lack of humanity: he describes himself as an emotional vacuum at one point, because he cannot cry at his son's funeral and his primary concern when his wife is sobbing is that she will get mascara on his shirt. [29] But at another moment, when he is upset, he worries that he is holding on to a human sentiment evolution wanted to obliterate. [30] On the whole his almost ludicrous optimism carries him through every problem - even in prison, with the planet on the verge of destruction, he notes that it is nice that his mutant cell-mates, who rejected his offer to join him, now have to listen to his philosophies all day. [31] Post-Humanism in Xavier (as in Emerson) dangerously verges on something unsympathetic (the merely human reader is, of course, aligned with those "ape men" mutants have come to replace). Freud would be the first to point out that sympathy exists at the level of the psyche, the center of humanism; in breaking with the psyche, his inheritance from long dead ancestors, and identifying himself with his pneuma, his individual mutant power, Millar's Xavier reminds us that the inhuman is the dark side to every Post-Humanism. We should always ask ourselves, when we find a vision of the Post-Human that we feel sympathetic toward, whether our ability to sympathize points to a weakness in that vision: should mere humans be able to sympathize with Post-Humans? Did Neanderthals sympathize with the early homo sapiens who murdered them all?

fig. 3

Click Here for larger image

fig. 4

Click Here for larger image

fig. 6

Click Here for larger image

fig. 7

Click Here for larger image

V

      As a superhero team the X-Men are a significantly more radical concept than, say, the Justice League of America. The primary concern of the JLA is to save humanity from disasters and to fight off those that come looking for a fight. The X-Men live in a world where the evolutionary process has put mankind face to face with its replacement, the super-powered mutants. In Mark Millar's Ultimate X-Men and Grant Morrison's New X-Men, Post-Humanism is the central theme, as the X-Men lead the fight for their Post-Human brethren. Xavier and Magneto represent two ways of dealing with the emergence of the Post-Human: integration or the dominance of mutants. But throughout Millar and Morrison's X-Men there are other alternatives waiting in the wings, a full gamut of academic and science fiction thought experiments imagining the Post-Human. The Weapon X program, where Wolverine was made, is run by humans to produce specialized super-soldiers to deal with the mutant threat, with various programs creating ways to make humans super-powered, controlling and experimenting on mutants to use as soldiers, making man-machine hybrids, or just creating advanced machines. In Ultimate X-Men: World Tour, Cyclops and Wolverine run into a machine that has achieved sentience and is creating a Post-Human race of machines integrated with corpses (literally post-humous) that will survive on an ozone-depleted planet or in deep space; it argues, "animals evolve, likewise ideas, why not machines?" [32] In New X-Men: Germ Free Generation, Grant Morrison introduces John Sublime, a self-help Guru who preaches to his followers, the U-Men, of a Third Species (not unlike gender theory's idea of the Third Sex) in which super-powered mutant organs (like X-ray eyes) are transplanted into human bodies: homo sapiens and homo superior (mutants), claims John Sublime, will both be replaced by his third species, homo perfectus. (The U-Men reveal their connection to Gnosticism in their choice to wear a kind of scuba gear: they will not breathe the air of the "fallen world" until their mutant grafts make them perfect.) New X-Men: Riot at Xavier's connects Post-Humanism with the process of education itself; only in the X-Men are the Post-Humans supeheroes and visionary students and teachers. Quentin Quire, leader of a school protest that gets out of hand, eventually experiences a "secondary mutation" in which he is completely dissolved into light, [33] a scene that suggests Gnostic transcendence, but also current theories identifying the Post-Human with the dissolution of the ego. The Stepford Cuckoos, students at the school, are identical telepathic girls who refer to themselves as the "five-in-one," [34] suggesting theories that locate the Post-Human in larger social co-operative units. There is a mutant drug "Kick," [35] for those who look toward chemicals for transcendence from the human.

      What is really surprising about these recent X-Men books is the way this lush, Post-Human pluralism is allowed to be completely eclipsed by the Phoenix, a creature described in Ultimate X-Men as "an Ultra-dimensional entity that wants access to this reality so it can annihilate [this world] like it annihilated a billion worlds before us. It talks ... in Latin and ... wants to decreate and unravel everything God has ever made." [36] In Morrison's New X-Men, the Phoenix is simply described as burning away everything that isn't necessary. [37] The Phoenix Force is seen as the highest power - the extreme endpoint of evolution understood in these books. In terms of Gnosticism it might be conceived of as the Gnostic God (a rare figure in pop culture); the language of the leader of the Hellfire Club who attempts to harness it through Jean Grey attests to as much: "We want to replace your God with our own chap, Charles. After twenty billion years in this many-angled prison." [38] The phrase Hans Jonas uses in the subtitle for his seminal book on Gnosticism, "The Alien God," is appropriate here. The Phoenix is alien in every sense (including extra-terrestrial): it is eternal, outside space and time, and has no regard for individuals or any part of the created universe. This is the central problem: the Phoenix is a negative endpoint -- the dark idea that will eventually be produced by evolution's violent progress from Human to Post-Human and beyond -- not a progressive Post-Human utopia, but something completely alien and inhuman that will destroy us all. Visions of a Post-Human utopia are primarily confined to the rhetoric of Xavier and Magneto; when the book gives us a glimpse of the future it is always a version of Chris Claremont's seminal Days of Future Past (Uncanny X-Men 141-142, 1980), a nightmarish future Morrison connects to the activation of the Phoenix Force (since Gnosticism would locate this force outside time, and since it conceives of this world as irremediably fallen, this connection makes sense). As proper comic book superheroes, the X-Men always win, of course, but the real philosophical challenges voiced by the better villains are never really dealt with. The comic book format expresses this dark, subterranean logic perfectly: pessimistic Post-Humanism. The idea that, yes, Post-Humanism is our destiny, but in the end it will do little more than provide the means for our continued violence and ultimate annihilation. As Sabertooth puts it: "Super-people are supposed to be the next stage in human evolution, and all we do is fight each other." [39] This pessimism is an unintentional but undeniable part of the serial form of superhero comics. The X-Men have continued their fight to integrate humans and mutants for forty years. Marvel Comics needs a sustainable universe where the X-Men will always be needed (a Utopia, which can end a book or film, doesn't work in a continuously serial narrative because it generates no new stories worth telling, publishing, or selling). These aspects of the form combine to create a world where no one can win and a dark future always threatens. The X-Men continue their fight for justice, but no higher force than the Phoenix and its attendant nightmare future is offered. Post-Humanism is very often utopian and teleological; the comics form itself fights against both these things.

VI

      I would like to close with a discussion of Grant Morrison and Chris Bachalo's New X-Men: Assault on Weapon Plus as a Gnostic Post-Human allegory. It should be noted that, unlike a lot of the claims I make about popular culture, this one is actually backed by some source study: Grant Morrison is a man who knows his Gnosticism and takes it as seriously as he takes anything. He has built his masterpiece, The Invisibles (1994-2000), around a Gnostic framework (the villains are actually called Archons) and has made claims suggesting that he takes his fictional universe as more than a mere story. [40]

      New X-Men: Assault on Weapon Plus is the journey of Cyclops, Wolverine and Fantomex (a new character introduced in Morrison's New X-Men run) to "The World," a factory-city connected to the Weapon X program. Fantomex describes it as:

a square mile of experimental micro-reality, with its own culture, its own religion, its own history ... a giant petri-dish where the lives of ordinary humans are used up in days, even moments. A torture chamber. They call it the World. [41]

The process that the World uses to create super-soldiers in humanity's fight against mutants is described by one of the faculty's scientists (and serves as a great example of Morrison's prose):

Basically the 'Euthanasium' set-up allows us to fine tune population levels in the World. After splicing human genetic material with Sentinel micro-technology, we're then able to sculpt the resultant strains through high-speed real-time scenarios using artificial evolution technology. Artificial evolution allows us to accelerate nature's own processes to create highly evolved and specialized super-soldiers. [42] 

They have created a new kind of super-sentinel, a creature that is a mutant killing machine, and Cyclops, Wolverine, and Fantomex have come to stop it. As an added benefit, Fantomex has promised Wolverine that this is the center of the program that created him, and it contains information on who he was before they turned him into a living weapon and replaced his true memories with false ones in order to to control him.

      The interesting thing about Assault on Weapon Plus is that its plot can be summarized to sound like Gnosticism and Emerson (not only because the name of the Weapon Plus base invokes our whole reality): the World is an elaborate prison construct and torture chamber, a place where the powerful -- those that could be heroes -- are broken down into playthings and controlled by a shadowy evil. The hero is the man who sees the World for what it is and, rather than being made, makes himself, and breaks out of its boundaries. Fantomex discovers a note he wrote when he lived there which describes Gnosticism's arc of knowledge in "the World"; he reads aloud, apparently without his accent:

My name is Charlie Cluster 7 ... The World operators tell me I am a living hall of mirrors. I am a stealth fighter. I am a Super-Soldier Generation Thirteen. They say mutant monsters will come to steal the World and kill all my friends. But they shouldn't have made me so smart or I might have believed them.

Cyclops says: "I thought you were French." He responds: "No. I just like the accent. We all find our dignity where we can - mine is in Fantomex.'" [43] The point here is that he is successful in creating himself rather than in being created; he is able to transcend what others tell him he is. Fantomex (see fig. 8) is one of Morrison's perfect creations -- and one of comic books' perfect creations -- because (like the Silver Surfer, for example) he rides a fine line between the hyper-cool and the completely ridiculous: looking like a G. I. Joe figure, Fantomex -- whose name is derived from the French pulp-novel character Phantomas -- is a Matrix-style acrobatic, wise-cracking, double-gun-toting French super-ninja genius with multiple brains for independent processing, whose mutant power is that his nervous system is located outside his body in the form of a sentient, living flying saucer that grew from something he literally coughed up one day. Morrison occasionally hints that Fantomex only appears to have the powers he displays, suggesting at several points (including the line quoted above about being a "living hall of mirrors") that his only powers are illusion and misdirection -- the ability to convince others he is what he says he is. With this height of non-conformist self-creation we should recall the words of Father Irenaeus from the early church complaining about the radically free-thinking Gnostics of his day: "Every day one of them invents something new." [44] Certainly Fantomex has invented himself as something very new. In another clearly Gnostic moment Weapon XV breaks out of "the World" to see if it really is the artificial prison he thinks it is; [45] for the Gnostics, discovering the true nature of the world is the first step toward gnosis. Artificial time and the control of time within the World recall the ancient Gnostic belief that time is a product of the Post-lapsarian fall, the Archons' shoddy attempt to imitate the True God's eternity. The chapter title of Assault on Weapon Plus's first issue, "Brimstone and Whiskey," puts us in the context of a Sermon, and the titles of the follow-up chapters - "The World," "The Flesh," and "The Devil" - each conjure up some Archon control mechanism central to Gnosticism. [46]

      In the history of writing on the X-Men, several plot lines have become perennial favorites - "The X-Men versus Magneto" (the plot of the first X-Men film), "Return to Weapon X" (the plot of X2, and the second Ultimate X-Men plot), "The Rise of the Phoenix" (Jean Grey is possessed by an ultra-dimensional cosmic force which offers great power but threatens to destroy existence) and "Days of Future Past" (the definitive anti-utopian superhero future). These plots are re-written in the same way Dante is re-translated every couple of years: a new version for a new generation of readers. Assault on Weapon Plus is a retelling of the standard "Return to Weapon X" story line, in which the X-Men confront the organization that created Wolverine. Morrison's twist (one of his best) is to revise and re-organize a huge amount of Marvel history by "revealing" the role of the World in the creation of super-soldiers: Weapon X is merely a splinter division of the larger program of the World. X-Men continuity has established that Wolverine was made into a living weapon and programmed by a shadowy organization called Weapon X, and that his code-name was Weapon X. Morrison outdoes himself in returning to this classic by revealing that the "X" of Wolverine's former code-name is actually a Roman numeral: he is not Weapon X but Weapon 10 (which is set up in the earlier plot which introduced Fantomex, New Worlds). This huge continuity revision is followed quickly by its fantastic consequences: Weapon XII, two generations more advanced than Wolverine, attacks; [47] Fantomex is revealed to be Weapon XIII, [48] gone rogue like Wolverine; the new threat from the World is Weapon XV. [49] Once inside the headquarters of the World (located in an orbiting satellite), Morrison is able to recast Marvel history into his new mold when Wolverine unlocks the Weapon Plus files: [50] Captain America was Weapon I, an obscure Frank Miller Daredevil villain from the mid-80s was another. The continuity of the Marvel Universe is a given any Marvel writer must work with; Morrison's innovation is his ability to re-cast that continuity and achieve a new freedom within it (a host of new stories are made possible by Morrison's move, including those exploring the identity of the other Weapon Plus creations). If the Marvel Universe is Morrison's prison (the rules he is forced to work within as a writer), then this device  - a creative misreading not unlike Fantomex's misdirection - is his Gnostic bid for freedom, and it is very successful. Again we hear Irenaeus' "every day he creates something new," return as the very definition of Morrison's genius.

      What does Morrison do with his new-found freedom? He completely explodes the idea of the Post-Human. The Weapon Plus program's idea for releasing their "living weapons" on the world, of getting the public to accept their extermination of mutant kind, is to introduce them as a comic book superhero team, complete with a headquarters in space and a round table with code-name-labeled chairs. (Dr. Sublime, the man behind the Weapon Plus program, complains to Fantomex regarding his betrayal: "you should have been our team's cool stealth killer. We'd have scripted you to be the kind of character people love" [51]). The principle of villain as a mirror of the hero comes up again here: like the Weapon Plus program the X-Men only appear to be superheroes. Morrison sets up this coup in his first issue, as the team discusses the new Tommy Hilfiger-style uniforms:

WOLVERINE: Suddenly I don't have to look like an idiot in broad daylight.
THE BEAST: I was never sure why you had us dress up like superheroes anyway, Professor.
CYCLOPS: The Professor thought people would trust the X-Men if we looked like something they understood. [52]

To emphasize Dr. Sublime's explanation of the superhero front as "corn they [the public] can understand," [53] Bachalo dedicates a nice page to Weapon XV's entrance into the satellite that would have been the "team's" headquarters (see fig. 9). [54] It is a full-page cutaway revealing a multi-level structure: this will remind any comic book reader of those cutaway layout maps (e.g. of Wayne Manor and the Batcave below, with secret passages clearly labeled) that were often featured as a sort of appendix to a previous generation of comic books. "A genetic cleansing operation disguised as a comic book fighting team" (as Fantomex calls it [55]) is an extreme parody of the X-Men comic book as the vehicle for optimistic Post-Humanism - how else can we explain the otherwise silent detail that the round table for the World's "superhero team" sports the X-Men logo, which is also a Gnostic cross (the symmetrical, centered cross in a circle) (see fig. 10)? [56]

      Even the design for Weapon XV is, in the context of Post-Humanism, parodic (and very funny). If, in the Marvel Universe, we would understand Captain America as the first Post-Human (the first human to possess super-human abilities), then thanks to Morrison's bizarre and brilliant concept of speeding up pockets of time to advance generations in minutes, Wolverine is ten generations beyond, and the super-sentinel he fights, fifteen (so Captain America and Wolverine, who we have seen fighting together in Marvel Comics for years, are generations apart). Bachalo has designed Weapon XV with hands that appear to sport an extra thumb below the little fingers and another in the center of the back of the hands (see fig. 11 and detail). If the evolution of opposable thumbs allowed humans to transcend animals, then of course a fifteenth-generation Post-Human is "gifted" with two more sets. And like Hamlet (that highly evolved consciousness Harold Bloom credits with much of what he refers to as "The Invention of the Human"[57]), Weapon XV's extreme introspection makes him almost totally useless when it comes to his instructions to kill, though (again like Hamlet) he is casually muderous, killing bystanders indiscriminately, as if uninvolved. Confronted with Wolverine he asks:

What is the purpose of life? Doctor Sublime has told me my purpose is to exterminate all traces of the mutant genetic line on Earth. But there are millions of living mutations and ... I wonder ... I could have been a painter as well... [58]

Compared to Fantomex's self-invention, it is hilarious to note that two artificial generations later, re-inventing the self is already decadent
     And Wolverine's response to Weapon XV closes the story, as Post-Human decadence leads to Post-Human death. Having just discovered who he was before the Weapon Plus program re-wrote his memories (though we, the readers, do not share his knowledge) he says incredulously: "You're asking me about the purpose of life, you [fucking] genocide machine? It's like this..." [59] and he detonates the explosives Fantomex has placed around the satellite, apparently killing them both (in the obligatory cliffhanger every comic book reader knows is never lethal). Wolverine echos Freud, who made the famous assertion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, apropos of his concept of the death drive that he introduces in that book, that "The aim of all life is death" [60]. It is the end of Assault on Weapon Plus and Morrison's final punch, in this concentrated barrage that suggests that the Post-Human, while inevitable, is paradoxically silly, decadent, and ominous. It also returns to where Morrison started, as Wolverine inadvertently agrees with Morrison's first X-Men supervillain (and his own creation) Cassandra Nova, who claims that the point of evolution is that all life ends up as manure. In the context of a book whose primary themes are evolution and Post-Humanity, this is a stark rejection of any progress, teleology, or utopia. Like Weapon XV, Cassandra Nova is one of Morrison's devices to explode the utopian Post-Human ideal: she first appears as a creature who is to mutants what mutants are to humans, but she is quickly revised into Xavier's evil twin, the dark side to his dream (as she says [61]). She is, of course, both: the idea that the Post-Human, our successor in the Great Chain of Being, will simply enlarge our capacity for evil and cruelty is the dark side of Xavier's dream, a dark side Millar's Xavier already approaches, as we have seen. (Morrison's Xavier is cut from the same cloth: when he and his X-Men are "outed" as mutants he says "no more need to hide our mutant natures. No more human rules." [62])

      The connection of Gnosticism to Post-Humanism has dark consequences because Gnosticism is a deeply pessimistic religion: the world is a prison, and everything in it -- from the people you know to the stars in the sky -- is trying to either keep you locked up or murder you; there is transcendence, but (at least it seems to me) it involves leaving behind, as part of the prison, everything you would recognize as you. Gnostic Post-Humanism suggests it may be our destiny to evolve beyond the merely human, but it may be a move toward a dark future where we are simply destroyed or made more advanced in the realms of torture, cruelty, and humiliation. This perspective, however frightening, is the consequence of our present moment, an antidote to those science fiction narratives that present reactionary humans fighting against monstrous Post-Humans (e.g. Captain Picard versus the Borg) or Post-Humans still working within the bounds of a humanistic ethics (e.g. The Matrix). There are two ethical consequences of the Gnostic belief that the world is a vast prison. One is to become a complete ascetic, staying far away from worldly things because they are all part of the prison. The other response is to recognize that the prison is not only the physical universe but the ethical one as well. There were Gnostic sects that recognized ethical rules as Archon control mechanisms and that encouraged libertinism as a way of fighting the world-as-prison. Neo breaks physical rules in his kung-fu fight against the Archons, but The Matrix cannot ask if the transcendence of ethical rules is also central to the emergence of the Post-Human -- whether bans on orgy-sex, pedophilia, and murder are the equivalents of such physical laws as gravity. Millar and Morrison's work within the superhero framework raises the question of Post-Human ethics that The Matrix avoids. [63] Of course Xavier looks villainous, and Weapon XV decadent: we define these terms according to our received ethical systems. Perhaps we are wrong use our traditional humanistic ethics to judge Post-Humans like Xavier and Emerson as cold toward their sons, their heirs, the next generation - perhaps this is just what the future holds.

fig. 8

Click Here for larger image

fig. 9

Click Here for larger image

fig. 10

Click Here for larger image

fig. 11 (detail below)

Click Here for larger image

          Imperial (118-126) (incl. Germ Free Generation)