154 Book Reviews / ARIES 13 (2013) 141–163

Jeffrey Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2011, xviii + 370 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45383-5

Taking as his dictum the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s notion that ‘the divine symbols of our world show up initially in the trash stratum’,in this follow- up to Authors of the Impossible—or more accurately, this volume to which Authors functions as a prequel—Jeffrey Kripal discovers the secret history of the twen- tieth-century religious imagination in a prime occultural location: pulp fiction and comic books. Featuring wide-ranging scholarly research molded by bold, imaginative theses, it is a definitive study of one strand of the complex historical interaction between American popular culture and paranormal-mystical experi- ence over the twentieth century. Mutants and Mystics, in its author’s words, covers ‘polar holes, conscious myths, early British psychical research, and a Martian in a Swiss silk shop; super- men, imaginal insects, flying saucers, a new American Bible, and ancient astro- nauts; an od and an id, a superspectrum, a Mothman, sex and violence between radioactive superheroes, and an evolutionary yoga; a morning of magicians, Cali- fornia mutants, cold war psychical spies, military spoon benders, an Israeli magician-psychic radiated by a UFO, and a NASA astronaut’s yogic union in outer space; a storm-raising contactee named PK-Man, a thought experiment named Starman, Superman and Batman in Tantric Tibet, and a discarnate spirit named Roy; impossible time-loops, a summer of superpowers, a bright pink cos- mic zapping, a sci-fi gnostic, and vision upon vision of a divine humanity evolving itself backwards and forwards in time’ (p. 329). To organize his diverse material Kripal identifies seven “mythemes” of Western culture old and new that describe the various ways we view and have viewed paranormal energy: as Divinization/Demonization (external energies above us ruling us), as Orientation (energies located in the East or Somewhere Else), as Alienation (energies coming from outer space), as Radiation (superen- ergies contained within matter itself ), as Mutation (transitional and evolving energy within matter, such as DNA), as Realization (the human perception that we are being written/created by these energies), and as Authorization (the human perception that we can harness these energies to write/create our- selves). Tese mythemes, he tells us, come together in an overarching Super-Story, ‘a deep, ofen unconscious’ (p. 5) metanarrative he positions simultaneously in real- world stories and fictional narratives, the material world and the extradimen- sional Elsewhere. Says Kripal: ‘You can’t think yourself out of the story you are caught in with the rules and elements of the very story in which you are caught. You can’t free yourself with the tools that the master provides you. You need a

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15700593-013010011 Book Reviews / ARIES 13 (2013) 141–163 155 new story and new cognitive tools. You need an intervention from the outside (even if this outside turns out to be a deep inside)’ (p. 263). Although they are cognitively somewhat hard to hold onto, Kripal’s return to structuralism with these categories is useful in chronologically sequencing his Super-Story through the twentieth century and what he sees as its evolv- ing paradigms. Te tricky part, as always, is how the paranormal is handled. Usually scholars pull out their disposable plastic gloves and treat it either as a topic or theme of the authors they are examining or as “reported” (as opposed to “real”) experiences. Although Kripal, as always, boldly dives into the fray with his own experiences of the paranormal as well as those of a wide range of testi- fiers, Mutants and Mystics still manages an artful negotiation through the heav- ily mined territory between the positions of true believer and dogmatic skep- tic that dominate this discussion of the territory Charles Fort called “truth- fiction”—that is, the paranormal real, imagined, and everywhere in between. Chronicling the transition, over the twentieth century, from the sacred into the parascientific, Kripal rightly identifies the worldviews of materialism and contextualism, the default mode of academic discourse, as “cognitively primi- tive” at the same time that he demonstrates that science—and science fiction, and fantasy—is the only language present-day mystics have available for their use. Noting that the sterile context of parapsychological experiments in mili- tary and corporate settings do not allow for the initiatory, healing, or sanctifi- cation experiences that seem crucial to triggering or eliciting psychic abilities, he records that some remote viewers who worked in secret government programs declared that their abilities were impossible without the matrix or “transcenden- tal structural ideas” of Scientology, sci fi, comics, and other territories of occul- ture. Kripal’s position, of course, however skillfully finessed, is clearly on the side of believers, and for this he will undoubtedly take flak from mainstream academics and scientists. Te framing of his “Super-Story” in terms of textuality and the imaginal, however—with the paranormal ultimately to be read ‘not as literally or factually true but … as an act of imagination in touch with some deeper stream of physical and cultural reality’ (p. 180)—makes his argument slippery enough to elude the most obvious charges that he has defected to the side of the crackpots. Kripal is doing important work here in navigating between notions of history and mythology, and though some may protest that he conflates a hermeneutical reading technique with “real events”,I think he manages this dance with delicate precision. Tis is the paranormal loop as Kripal defines it:

1. ‘Some paranormal events are real and true in the sense that individuals hon- estly experience them as such’.