View Full Version : The Eternals: an attempt at an interpretation.
Jack Kirby’s Eternals series, created at Marvel in the mid 70’s, is often seen as one of his lesser efforts, at least in comparison with the multi-title Fourth World epic so unfairly aborted at DC. It has even been referred to as a sort of “Fourth-World-lite”, a relatively uninspired rehash of ideas which he had given a more profound treatment in that earlier set of books. The Fourth World, like it or hate it, at least has some pretty clearly defined themes: good vs evil, freedom vs oppression, nature vs nurture, just to cite some of the more obvious. The Eternals, though, doesn't appear be “about” anything any deeper than the story itself, a typical Kirby-style adventure yarn riffing on the then trendy 'Chariots of the Gods' books of Erich von Daniken.
I'm going to take a contrary view: Kirby's Eternals has a lot going on beneath the surface narrative and can be opened up to an incredibly rich and intricate symbolical interpretation. Far from being an inferior variation on the New Gods, it is a unique concept, built on an entirely different set of thematic and narrative premises from the earlier work, and is by no means the lesser creation in terms of originality and thematic resonance.
So what do I mean exactly by all these vague and pretentious phrases? (“ 'thematic resonance',” indeed; this is comics! And Jack Kirby comics at that!”). What, in other words, are the major themes of the Eternals, how do they differ from those of the Fourth World and what makes them so “resonant”? To answer that is going to take some doing, especially since my impression is that the average reader is quite resistant to the idea that Kirby was capable of writing anything with any degree of depth or subtlety; I think most people are going to need some convincing, so bear with me if I seem to be taking a long time to get to the point. I'll have to break this up into a series of fairly long posts, most of which I've written over the last couple weeks.
So, with all that in mind, let's begin with a few fairly obvious observations that i think will be acceptable to most people:
What are the distinguishing characteristics of the Eternals and the Deviants, respectively? The Eternals live high above the dwellings of humans, on inaccessible mountaintops. They are practically immortal and indestructible, and have developed fantastic powers and abilities, both physical and mental, through centuries or even millenia of self-discipline and training. They have regular, even features, are for the most part youthful or in the prime of life and physically handsome and/or beautiful (apart from father-figures such as Zuras and Valkin). Their attitude towards humanity is benign, although somewhat paternalistic or even, at times, authoritarian, and in the distant past they acted as humanity's teachers and protectors. They usually look at the Deviants with disgust and contempt at best, and as dangerous enemies at worst. They regard the Celestials with awe and wonder, and aspire in some far distant future to reach some level of understanding of the nature of those enigmatic beings, an achievement far beyond even their amazing abilities at present.
The Deviants, on the other hand, are almost uniformly ugly and misshapen (in fact, it is noteworthy that the epithet “ugly” is often used, almost as an accusation, by various Eternals on more than one occasion when referring to the Deviants; something I'll get back to later). They are habitually suspicious and envious of the Eternals, aggressive and exploitative towards humans when they can get away with it (enslaving them in pre-historical times), and are possessed by an almost irrational terror and hatred of the Celestials. Within their own society they are cruel and brutal to their social inferiors, but sycophantic towards superiors. They are genetically unstable and prone to produce bizarre and unpredictable mutations, most of which they ruthlessly exterminate. They live underground, beneath the very ocean, in fact, in a hidden city very rarely visited by any non-Deviant.
I think it's apparent from this description that, at a symbolic level, the mountain-top-dwelling Eternals connote the higher consciousness that humanity has always striven to reach, whether through religion, philosophy, science (knowledge), or some other means. Their mountaintop habitat, their advanced mental evolution (“They probed the universe with their minds” Kirby says), their physical beauty, all mark them as higher beings, a status they have achieved both through their own innate genetic potential and through intense self-discipline. Their past role as teachers and benefactors of humanity is also significant.
The Deviants, on the other hand, obviously have strong associations with the dark side of human nature, the chaotic mass of cruel and violent impulses suppressed in the human subconscious, forces, not coincidentally, associated with the chthonic (“of the underworld”) in ancient Greek myth. The underworld and the oceans are both strongly associated in various mythologies with chaos and savagery, and we have seen that the Deviants' dwelling place is connected with each. The Deviants themselves behave with fear and hatred of anything they perceive as stronger than themselves, and with ruthless brutality to anyone weaker. They are creatures of impulse, attacking what they do not understand or what they think they can overwhelm and exploit. Kirby describes them s “volatile and energetic”. A Freudian might say they represent the id as opposed to the Eternals' superego, with humans as the ordinary ego situated “between” these lower and upper levels of the psyche. I don't disagree entirely with this interpretation, but would caution against simple equation in which X always stands for Y as is the case in a strictly allegorical narrative. I think we're dealing with symbols, not allegories (more on the difference later).
But “so what?” you might say. You could, for example, look at any monster story and start talking about how the monster represents the dark side of human nature, etc, but does this have any real meaning when we look at the story itself? Or is it just a bunch of impressive sounding mumbo-jumbo that makes no sense when we try to apply it to the narrative? I think that the symbolism tentatively outlined above does indeed bring us to a deeper understanding of what the Eternals series is all about, and the rest of this exercise will be an attempt to demonstrate how. So let's start looking at what actually happens in the story.
The series opens with Ikaris leading an expedition of human archaeologists (Dr. Damian and his daughter Margo) into the Andes where they discover the “chamber of the Gods” and Ikaris proceeds to inform them of the existence of the Space-gods, Eternals, and Deviants. In an apparently (but only apparently, as I'll get to in a moment) trivial scene, an ordinary human-flown airplane disappears when it inadvertently runs into a mysterious energy barrier which turns out to have been created by the Deviants, whom we then see sending Kro up from their undersea city in order to prevent the Eternals from activating a device that will call the Space-gods back to earth. He and his Deviant lackeys attack Ikaris and the Damians, trying to kill the humans, who are protected by the Eternal. The conflict is interrupted by the landing of the Gods' spaceship. End of issue #1.
So what's going on here? My reading goes like this: we are dealing with a metaphorical effort at consciousness raising. Ikaris leads the Damians (the ego, or ordinary human consciousness) to the mountaintop (enlightenment), where he does indeed enlighten them regarding some crucial aspects of human reality, aspects of which everyday consciousness is unaware: the existence of unguessed-at dark, primal forces (Deviants), and highly evolved mental faculties (Eternals) each of which is intimately associated to ordinary human conscious (as the Eternals and Deviants are genetically related to ordinary humankind) . That is, he attempts to make the mundane consciousness aware of facets or potentials of the mind normally unperceived by it. He also tells them of the existence of the Celestials who are described as an unbelievably awesome race of space-faring, god-like beings who are responsible for genetically engineering all three races. I'll get to what this signifies at the symbolic level a little later.
So far, so good, but things aren't quite that simple – luckily for the reader, or we wouldn't have much of a story. For one thing, I think we have some ambiguity in the symbolism of the physical setting of this attempt at consciousness expansion. The secrets of the gods, as we'd expect, are situated high up in the Andes, but at the same time the actual “Chamber of the Gods” is located beneath the ground, always a clue that we may be dealing with the dark psychic forces represented by the Deviants; and, sure enough, the Deviants break into the scene, literally from beneath, and disrupt the entire exercise, attacking Ikaris and even attempting to kill Margo and her father. At a symbolic level, then, it appears that the attempted consciousness raising is for some reason prevented from succeeding by the primitive instincts represented by the Deviants.
Moreover, Ikaris himself is an interestingly ambivalent choice as guide, since his mythological namesake, Icarus, is best known, not for his ability of flight, but for his foolhardy attempt to fly too high and its disastrous results, a theme repeated elsewhere in Greek mythology (e.g. Bellerophon, who attempted to fly to Mount Olympus on the winged Pegasus, and was hurled to earth for his presumption). Lest we think this a mere coincidence, allow me to point out in advance that the very first time we see Ikaris in flight (in issue #3) he is attacked by Deviants, endangering his human companion, Margo, and that later on (#4), when we see him foolishly attempt to take on the entire Deviant invasion of New York by himself, he is downed in flight, again by the Deviants, and immobilised.
Finally, I return to the seemingly unnecessary scene in #1 in which the human-flown airplane disappears. More particularly, what happens is this: The airplane is flying over the ocean when the pilot begins complaining that he's lost (“My compass has gone wild! I don't know where I am!”); then, “he is suddenly confronted by a wall of seething energy”. This description alone (mental confusion, panic, ocean, “seething energy”) would be enough to connect the incident symbolically with the inchoate psychic drives and forces represented by the Deviants, but Kirby leaves no room for doubt by actually making the disruptive energy wall a Deviant construct.
So, just as the mythological Icarus flew too high and fell to earth, so does the Eternal Ikaris, when he attempts to bring his human companions to the secrets of the gods, end up endangering them. How? By exposing them to Deviant attack. And just as the Damians are in danger from Deviant attack due to high-flying Ikaris, so the “human flight” of the airplane comes to a bad end through an encounter with the Deviants' “wall of seething energy”.
In other words, a premature attempt to expand (or raise - recall the flight motif and the mountaintops) an unprepared consciousness leads to the threat of extinction of that ordinary but at least rational consciousness by “the return of the repressed” - the Deviants. Or, again in other words, an attempt at psychic development which disregards the existence of those repressed forces runs the risk of disaster.
But maybe this is all just coincidence. Sure, it's easy to come up with a few facile statements about symbolism for a single issue, but does it make sense for the series as a whole? I think it does, and I hope to show how by a fairly detailed description and analysis of the rest of the series.
T GUy
03-12-2005, 02:49 AM
Fascinating reading of The Eternals, berk. keep 'em coming.
I assume that you're not familiar with Fabio Barbieri's essay on The Eternals in The Jack Kirby Quarterly back in the 1990s?
Kirby himself said something like 'The New Gods was the question; The Eternals is one of the possible answers.' (Mind you, he also said that the questions are always more interesting than the answers.)
Thanks, T Guy.
No, I have a few issues of the Kirby Quarterly, but nothing about the Eternals. Was it along the same lines as what I'm doing?
I started thinking about the Eternals 2 or 3 years ago, in response to a thread on the Eternals message board at comicboards.com, asking what everyone's favourite issue was and why. I chose #10, which was the last of a 3-issue story that began in #8, so in order to explain why I liked it I had to go back and describe the whole story, which led me to look at it closely and try think about exactly what it was saying. Previously, I had just enjoyed the series at the story/character level, without really analysing it too deeply.
I'll make another post in a couple days. There's a lot of material here, so I don't want to swamp everyone with too much information at once.
The Kirby comment you quoted is new to me, and certainly is intriguing.
T GUy
03-12-2005, 10:26 AM
I have a few issues of the Kirby Quarterly, but nothing about the Eternals. Was it along the same lines as what I'm doing? Not in the sense that you are interpreting it from a Freudian - or at least psychological - view. My - rather vague - memory is that it was interesting and quite good except for all the Hindu mythology which either I failed to follow or Fabio dragged in unnecessarilly.
A point I forgot to mention: it's significant - from the point of view of your analysis - that Ikaris is with scientists/explorers in No. 1 when he's seeking to contact the Celestials. They (both the Damiens and the Eternals) represent the part of humanity that seeks truth and beauty. Sudden thought: do the Celestials represent that truth and beauty?
Conversely, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Vira (the titular she-demon in No.2) creates architecture and religion from the simple necessity of survival.
T Guy said:
A point I forgot to mention: it's significant - from the point of view of your analysis - that Ikaris is with scientists/explorers in No. 1 when he's seeking to contact the Celestials. They (both the Damiens and the Eternals) represent the part of humanity that seeks truth and beauty. Sudden thought: do the Celestials represent that truth and beauty? I agree that it's very significant that the Damians and Ikaris are all seeking some from of truth, some new level of knoweldge that is in some way associated with the Celestials. As for what the Celestials represent, I don't use the terms you suggested (truth and beauty) but I don't think they're incompatible with what I end up saying. Symbols (as opposed to allegories) are difficult to pin down to one easily defined meaning, as I'll get into a little later.
Ah well, I was going to wait a while before posting anything further, but I can't wait. Here's the next bit (see following post):
The most significant events of the next few issues (#2, 3, & 4) are:
the arrival of the Celestials and the characteristic reactions to it from Eternal, Human and Deviant; the resurrection of Ajak; the escape of Ikaris and Margo from the Andes retreat before it's sealed off for 50 years; the Deviant attack on New York City; the introduction of Sersi; and the downfall of Ikaris by Deviant hands. There's lots to say about each of these incidents, but I'll try to limit myself to those which I think have the most direct bearing on the major themes of the series (which, I realise, I still haven't spelled out completely, but bear with me: I'm gettng there, bit by bit).
Just as earlier we scrutinised the Eternals and the Deviants in an attempt to guess what those beings might signify at the symbolic level, let's have a look at the Celestials. Their most important charcteristics appear to be: their vast size; their immense, nearly incomprehensible power; their role as engineers of all higher life-forms on earth, (Eternal, Human & Deviant); their association with space (the most common designations for them are “Celestial” and “Space-Gods”); their silence; and their sheer unfathomability and awesomeness. They are described as “huge” and “vast” and Kirby gets this across visually more effectively than any other artist I've ever seen. Even though later artists drew them at the same scale, their Celestials never gave such an impression of sheer awe-inspiring enormity as did Kirby's. Double-page spreads of their spaceship (#2), and of Arishem's head and hand (#3) help get the point across.
Of Arishem himself, the leader of the Fourth Host, the caption of the final panel of #4 says “His face is hidden, but his eyes can see everything that lives in this world ...”; elsewhere, at various points, Damian comments on the “facelessness” of the Celestials, how “huge and enigmatic” they are. Even the Eternal Ikaris, in #2, says that it is “beyond me” to “read the thoughts of the gods”. There are numerous comments on and demonstrations of the unfathomable power of these beings throughout the series.
So the Celestials are associated with a complex of ideas and feelings concerning with the origins of the human race, space, vastness, power, awesomeness, and incomprehensibility.
There's a famous quote from 17th-Century French mathematician Blaise Pascal describing his feelings upon gazing at the night sky:
“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with terror.”
This line, in my opinion, expresses much of what Kirby was trying to suggest with the Celestials.
In the first panel of the 2nd last page of #4, Kirby writes of the appearance of one of the Celestials above Ajak and Dr Damian: “... The sky is blotted out by a great shadow. It moves ... draws close ... and resolves itself into a reality of staggering import!” Ajak gestures at the gigantic figure and says, “Behold! One of the Celestial Host ... To merely see him is to marvel at the wonders that lie among the stars.” My feeling is that with the Celestials, Kirby was trying to represent in symbolic form the awesome incomprehensibility of the universe in which we (humanity, earth) occupy so miniscule a place. And by implication, not only the universe, but reality itself, i.e. the reality that underlies the visible phenomena we are familiar with. Their vast scale (it makes no sense that anything that size could actually function in an anthropomorphic form) evokes the unbelievable vastness of the universe. Their unbelievable power evokes the relative powerlessness of beings such as ourselves before the forces that govern this universe. Their unfathomability, their complete and utter silence, and the huge, unreadable masks they wear in lieu of faces evoke "the eternal silence of these infinite spaces."
At some level, then, the Celestials signify the fundamentally unknowable mystery of that in which we as beings find ourselves existing.
But what of the following: The final panel of issue #2 reads: "Arishem, Leader of the Fourth Host, lands firmly upon the pylon. He will stand upon it for fifty earth years, towering like the surrounding mountains above all life below. And on the last day of the fiftieth year - he will step from the pylon - and on that day, earth will live - - or DIE!"
This is indeed a very important element, at both the narrative and symbolic levels, and I'll come back to it when I get to some of the middle issues, particularly #6 and #7.
But for now let's turn to the Damians, so far our most important human characters. When the Celestials arrive, Kirby gives us a full page panel of Kro, the Damians and Ikaris, in that order, left to right, background to foreground. Carrying on with the symbolic scheme I've been trying to outline, the humans are placed between the Deviant and the Eternal because those two strange races represent, among other things, aspects of the human psyche of which ordinary consciousness, as represented by the Damians, is not usually aware.
This mundane consciousness is represented by a father and a daughter for very good symbolic reasons: we soon see that Margo, who is to become in some ways the main human character in the book (insofar as there is one at all), is forcibly taken from her father by Ikaris when Dr. Damian decides to remain with Ajak to study the Celestials. In psychological interpretations of fairy tales, scenarios of this sort are often taken to indicate an effort on the part of the psyche (Margo) to develop, to outgrow the dependencies of childhood and become a developed individual. If this were a fairy tale, Margo would probably be the protagonist, and the Eternals and Deviants her supporting characters, allies and adversaries in her subsequent adventures. And to some extent, this is indeed true of the Eternals series.
Except that Margo is a supporting player instead of leading heroine. Kirby, typically, is working at the same time on several different scales: Margo represents, not only an indivdual consciousness, but ordinary consciousness in general – the entire human race, in one sense, just as, in another sense, the human race (in relation to Eternals and Deviants) represents ordinary consciousness.
I think that this, paradoxically perhaps, is why the human presence in Kirby's Eternals is largely a passive one: in a way, ordinary consciousness, the ego, is more of a spectator than a participant in this story, because the story is largely about the discovery of these hitherto hidden aspects of the psyche, the process of learning about their nature, the interactions amongst them, the change in their inter- relations brought about by this new knowledge, and so on. Ordinary human beings like Margo observe and wonder at these newly discovered entities and their strange abilities and actions. All this may sound a little abstract, but for now I want to leave it at that. The best way to make these ideas clearer will be to continue looking at how they're manifested in the story.
But before leaving the subject, I can't resist pointing out that the name “Damian” itself was a very interesting choice on Kirby's part for his main human characters. To me it looks like a variation on the ancient Greek “daimon” which had several realated meanings:
“demon” (the word is actually derived from daimon)
“spirit”
“divine being” (recall Socrates's daimon, a personal divine spirit which he believed instructed him what to do in a manner not dissimilar to what we today would call conscience).
In my opinion, this ties in too nicely with the symbolic scheme I've been outlining to be a mere coincidence. Let
“demon”= Deviant = id/unconscious,
“divine being“ = Eternal = superego/conscience;
the obvious conclusion might be that:
“spirit” = human = ego,
but also perhaps more importantly:
“spirit” (in the sense of soul/mind) = psyche = human.
(don't allow these “equations” to mislead you; this isn't allegory; I simply use the '=' sign as a shorthand, not to to suggest that I have formulated anything definitive about these symbols.)
Anyway, in other words, while, on the one hand Eternals, Deviants and Humans each represent certain aspects, hidden or otherwise, of the psyche, Humankind, as psyche, also contains all three. i.e. In one sense, the human mind is the setting for the entire story (another reason perhaps why human characters aren't the main protagonsts of the narrative). In another sense, that of humans-as-ego or what I've been calling “ordinary” or “everyday” consciousness, a recurring pattern in the book is human failure to cope intellectually or emotionally, when faced with the existence of the Celestials (examples include the American SHIELD agents in #7,, the Russian military in # 11) or even that of the Eternals and Deviants (e.g. the students who unleash the cosmic-powered Hulk in #).
Rod G
03-12-2005, 10:35 PM
I for one wouldn't mind an Essential Eternals.
I think an Essential Eternals would be agreat idea, although the series really needs to be seen in colour. It is a very "colourful" story, literally and figuratively, and Kirby's inked artwork doesn't really have the inpact it should in B & W (his uninked pencils are another matter, and look pretty good in b&w).
Getting back to the story, we left Ikaris, the Damians and Kro witnessing the arrival of the Celestial Host. Kro reacts in typical Deviant fashion, hurling threats at the Space-Gods and various dire predictions and ill-wishes at Ikaris, and finally running away in terror of the power of the Celestials, whose arrival is threatening to collapse the ancient stones of the god- chamber, and finally fleeing back down to the Deviant lair underneath the ocean. At first glance it might seem that, symbolically, we could say that the primitive destructive instincts represented by the Deviants have been successfully repressed so that the exercise in consciousness expansion interrupted earlier can continue. I think we need to take a closer look, though.
First of all, Kro flees voluntarily, not because he is driven off by Ikaris, so we should interpret this retreat in terms of an interaction between Deviant and Celestial. The unconscious, or the primal instincts represented by the Deviants, have come face to face with the Celestials, i.e. The terrifyingly vast power and unfathomable mystery of the universe, of existence. They react with threats, terror, and flight. At one level, this is simply the reaction of an infantile psyche when faced with the shocking experience of an external reality that does not comply with, in fact shatters, the psyche's illusions of omnipotence and self-sufficiency. At another (but not unrelated) level, we have the terror of Western Man in the face of an indifferent universe, a universe ruled by cold, inhuman forces to which our thoughts, passions, and desires are irrelvant (hence, IMO, Western man's yearning for a universe created and ruled by a personalised, caring, paternal god).
We could see the god-chamber, which, although situated high in the Andes, is at the same time buried beneath the earth, and is connected to the Deviants lair by a long, water-filled, underground channel, as a womb from which the psyche is attempting to be reborn in a new, enlightened form. However, the infantile psyche is unprepared for the final step, and when faced with the terror and insecurity of external reality – i.e. Of the world outsed the familiar security of the womb – it retreats, and the attempted re-birth is spontaneously aborted (represented symbolically by the collapse of the god-chamber, etc). [EDIT: the imagery and symbolism of the god-chamber episode are complex, ambiguous, and in some ways conflicting; and perhaps for those reasons, I'm not entirely satisfied with the explanation I've outlined in this paragraph. I'll probably come back to it later, but for now, I want to keep ploughing forward.]
Secondly, Ikaris himself decides that Margo must leave the area and forcibly removes her from her father, who, as we saw above, decides to remain. In other words, higher consciousness realises that more work has to be done, more progress made, before ordinary consciousness is ready to face the Celestials. At the same time, the removal of Margo from her father underscores the fact that the effort to develop, while postponed for now, is to continue.
Finally, if this suppression is a success, it is a very temporary one. The Deviants have not gone to sleep, and soon return to threaten the human and Eternal once more.. They make a brief, unsuccessful attack on Ikaris and Margo as they fly to New York City, but, more ominously, are shown making plans to turn their defeat into victory. Their plan is very simple and very significant: Kro intends to masqerade as the Devil and hoodwink the Humans into thinking that the he is part of the Celestial Host, provoking them to attack the Space-Gods out of the instinctive terror and hatred he believes this devil-image will arouse in them. They are actually on their way to New York in order to carry out this scheme when they make they make their attack against Ikaris and Margo. Ikaris takes Margo to meet another Eternal Sersi and leaves her under her care while he goes off to fight the Deviant invasion single-handedly. However, he is very quickly brought down by the Deviants, who hit him with a "brain-mine", rendering him unconscious. They encase him in a coffin-like capsule and bury him beneath the sea.
All this has several interesting implications on the symbolic level, most of which should be obvious by now:
The race between Ikaris and the Deviants to get to New York, and the physical conflict between them, signify the battle for control of the psyche between the primitive drives represented by the latter, usually suppressed in the unconscious, and the higher ideals represented by the former. New York City, as a human city and the scene of the battle, is the psyche itself, the setting for this conflict (see the previous post's comments on the Damians).
Once again we have what Freud called “the return of the repressed”. No matter how many times they're defeated or driven away, the Deviants always come back, eventually. They have to, because the primitive drives they represent are an inescapable part of human nature. (With the Eternals, the same fact is symbolised more directly by their immortality and their very name).
Their decision to impersonate the Devil is wholly appropriate because the Devil himself is and has been for most of 'his' existence a symbol for, among other things, the very same primitve instincts I keep bringing up (telling phrase) every time I mention the Deviants (as was one of his several ancestors, the Greek God Pan).
Their choice of tactics – to make the humans attack the Celestials out of fear, hatred, and anger – is an explicit statement of some of the most powerful of those same primitive instincts I keep mentioning. Kirby couldn't make it much more clear: this is what the Deviants do – they drive humans to act on the basis of their most basic and primitive emotions. The prehistorical (=preconscious?) enslavement of the human race by the Deviants is a symbolic way of saying that humans were once ruled by those primitive instincts.
The ease with which the Deviants nullify Ikaris's counterattack and bring him down in mid-flight signifies how very powerful these drives can be, no matter in how much contempt they may be held by higher levels of consciousness. “That fool Ikaris,” his friend Ajak comments, “He would try to take on an entire force of Deviants. That's what happens to heroes.” (As a minor aside, I believe is that there is also a hint here that the Eternals series isn't about heroes in the ordinary comic-book sense of the word; i.e. That the series is concerned with another kind of heroism, not of the usual Superman/Captain America variety). Ikaris's failure indicates the error in thinking that these drives can be dealt with simply (i.e. merely, only) by attacking and repressing them by force. (And in fact, Ikaris's attempt and defeat are parallelled by the aggressive reactions of the humans at this stage of the Deviant attack.)
So, things aren't looking too good at the moment. Kro's plan to frighten the humans seems to be working, Ikaris's attemptted counterattack has failed, and he, Sersi, and Margo are prisoners of the Deviants. That is, the psyche has been taken over by its most primal, instinctive drives and is reacting with fear and anger.
Issue #4 ends with Ajak pointing to the gigantic form of Arishem and saying to Damian, "I know what you are thinking, Doctor. What will the humans do when they see him?!" We than get a full page panel of Arishem with the caption: “His face is hidden, but his eyes can see everything that lives in this world ... They are the eyes of a judge ... even as his hands are those of a destroyer ... When Mankind discovers Arishem, it will find itself against overwhelming, TOTAL POWER!!”.
In other words, how will a psyche ruled by its most primitive passions react when faced with the terrifying awesomeness of a reality before which it must dwindle into insignificance? And what recourse is there when, so far (in the story), all attempts at repressing those primal instincts have failed?
The answer to this question will bring us one step closer to the key to the meaning of the entire series (which I'm sure is beginning to take shape for those who have stuck with me this far).
Cei-U!
03-14-2005, 08:15 AM
I've always found Kirby's Eternals superior in both conception and execution to the New Gods tetralogy. Perhaps it was the symbolic depths to the series you're sounding so adroitly that I respond to. This is *great* stuff, berk. Keep it coming.
Cei-U!
I summon the "More!"
Thanks Cei-U. I do believe that readers respond to the symbolic depths, as you put it, of stories, even if they don't consciously analyse them the way I'm trying to do here. I was an Eternals fan for years without ever really thinking too much about what the series might mean at the symbolic level, but still feeling that it had some sort of resonance for me. It "hit a nerve" as the saying goes. But as soon as I did begin to think about it (in regards to my favourtite story of the series in #'s 8 - 10) the symbolism opened up like a flower to me.
Anyway, I will keep them coming. I've sketched out analyses of each issue up to and including #10 so far (and have a few ideas about some of the later stories although I haven't thought about them in depth yet). Since I've only covered up to the end of issue #4 so far in the posts, there's lots to go yet. I'll probably post another one or two tonight.
Shellhead
03-14-2005, 05:32 PM
I think that Kirby was stuck in a rut with certain archetypes. Before the Eternals and Deviants, Jack was working with the New Gods and Darkseid. Before that, it was the Inhumans and their Alpha Primitives.
Well, I think the New Gods was dealing with a different set of themes than was the Eternals. I certainly agree that the whole idea of an more advanced alien race experimenting genetically with earth life was part of the original Inhumans concept, but we'll never know what Kirby intended at the time he created the Inhumans, because he wasn't given a free reign back then. As far as we can tell from this perspective, the treament of that idea in the Eternals is a very different kettle of fish from that given with the Inhumans. For example, the Kree are very different from the Celestials, and could not be construed to operate at the symbolic level in anything like the way I think the Celestials do; and so on.
In any case, I wouldn't call it a rut. Artists often keep coming back to a few central ideas that interest them. Philip K. Dick is an obvious example, but you could include people like Beckett, Kafka, ... even Charles Dickens.
InfoBroker
03-14-2005, 07:26 PM
request to Sir Tim: While it's a natural outcome of a discussion/analysis of Eternals to compare it to New Gods, and I think a lot of interesting discussion can come from comparing the labels of ruts to artist's themes, and also pointing out all the stuff that Kirby created between the "rut" of New Gods and the "rut" Eternals, and while I will also add that there is a lot more to Kirby's New Gods than just the surface theme of "New Gods and Darksied" and while I find it interesting to explore the aspects of the roots of these later series in his earlier works like Inhumans, and their link to the Kree, and even earlier stuff in Thor and also Jack's golden age material like Mercury...
I would appreciate all that stuff being segmented to another thread and keep this one focused on the analysis of the Eternals.
Note to Berk from another big time Kirby fan: I am enjoying your analysis and as time permits I will be adding my two cents worth.
- jb the ib :cool:
Getting back to our story ...
When we left, at the end of issue #4, the Deviant invasion of New York was moving along just as they had planned, with the humans reacting with fear and aggression, Ikaris out of action and Sersi and Margo prisoners. Makarri, an Eternal in Olympia who earlier witnessed (via video-screen) the Deviants' capture of Sersi and Margo, rushes off to inform Zuras, the Prime Eternal, that “the Deviants have come out of their hole” (again, note the phrasing; OK I'll stop pointing the obvious now). He manages to get admitted to the presence of Zuras, whom we find playing a game involving remote-controlled robot-boxers with his daughter Thena (Thena wins, KOing Zuras's fighter). Upon being informed of the situation, Zuras explodes in rage, bolts of energy crackling around him in his anger.:
Zuras: Must we ever remained chained to savage cousins with whom we share this world?
(Note the ambiguity: he could well be referring to Deviants and humans, not just the Deviants). Then we have an interesting exchange among the three (Makari, Zuras, and Thena):
Thena (responding to Zuras's enraged energy display): Father! You'll ruin the furniture!
Zuras: Don't divert me with trivia, Thena! Your true thoughts cannot be hidden from mighty Zuras!
Thena: Then mighty Zuras knows that the Deviants must be taught to respect Eternals! You know that I intend to do the teaching!
Makarri: Well said,Thena!
Zuras: Go then – both of you! Vent your aggressions upon the Deviants. There's more to do here than join in small encounters!
Thena (pulling Makkari off his feet as she strides from the chamber): You heard him! We leave at once!
Makarri: Y-Your wish i-is my command Thena!
The siginificance of Zuras's first quoted comment should be pretty straightforward by now: "Must we (higher consciousness) ever remained chained (inextricably connected) to savage cousins (Deviants/primitive, irrational instincts) with whom we share this world (the psyche)? " It's a cry of frustration from the higher, more rational levels of the mind at its inability to shake off those primitive drives which insist on breaking through at the least opportunity.
However, there are some elements in the scene described above that may appear at odds with some of the things I've been saying throughout this analysis: I've been saying that the Eternals as a group represent a complex of more or less related ideas, including :
the concept of enlightenment;
higher consciousness
something akin to the Freudian idea of the superego, including what we call conscience
the love of wisdom and the quest for knowledge
the pursuit of the ideal of truth and beauty [thanks to T Guy for this observation]
an ideal or model of higher evolution to be emulated or striven for (it's very important, for instance that their amazing abilities are often described, not as simple genetic gifts or "super-powers", but as having been achieved through hundreds of years of discipline and training; there are many exmples of this throughout the series)
But here we have Zuras exploding in anger, Thena and Makarri expressing aggressive intentions towards the unruly Deviants, and so on. Are these the actions of a higher consciousness?
The simple answer, of course, is that even a highly evolved being sometimes needs to defend itself and those under its protection, but this evades the question: if the Eternals stand for something presumably above these sorts of hostile feelings (which, after all, I've been asserting are actually represented by the Deviants) shouldn't the Eternal characters be a little more serene and sort “above-it-all” in their attitude towards things?
A better answer, I think, is that while the Eternals as a group "stand for" the concepts I've outlined, and even individual Eternals, as Eternals, can at times represent those same ideas (as I've claimed Ikaris does in the first issue), they are symbols, not simple allegorical figures. Perhaps this is a good point at which to talk a little about something I mentioned earlier: the difference between symbolism and allegory. I think there are two main points of distinction:
Individuals such as Ikaris, Sersi, and Thena are fully rounded characters, so that, for example, each character, as a character, would each have a fully rounded psyche, including his/her own superego, ego, and id (to stick with the Freudian terminology, for the moment). This is in contrast to allegorical figures which tend to be flat, card-board cutouts – simple placeholders for that which they represent.
Carl Jung, in his essay Psychology and Literature, defines a symbol as “not … an allegory that points to something all too familiar, but an expression that stands for something not clearly known and yet profoundly alive.” That which is represented symbolically isn't a clearly delineated, easily defined concept, but rather a complex of ideas and feelings which would be very difficult to define or discuss in simple terms; which is exactly why literature resorts to symbolism in order to deal with them.
This isn't to say that a symbolic work can't be interpreted allegorically at some (usually fairly superficial) level. The Greek myths have often been analysed this way, for instance; ot that allegpries cannot be a powerful and evocative technique for the treament of certain themes (My favourite example of allegory is Pilgrim's Progress, a great read which I recommend to everyone).
Keeping these two points of difference in mind then, I'd point out that it's very appropriate that when the Eternals do behave aggressively, it is almost always due to Deviant provocation, which of course is exactly what we'd expect given the symbolic plan I've outlined. The Deviants represent, among other things, primitive aggressive instincts, so it is fitting that they'd provoke individual characters to express those instincts in their actions. (One implication of this interpretation is that even when the Deviants lose at the narrative level, they can still “win” at the symbolic level, since by provoking an antagonist into an aggressive reaction, they've caused that antagonist to allow his/her actions to be ruled by those very same primitive passions the Deviants represent. This idea will become very significant in a later story I intend to get into).
There's more to say about how this introduction to Thena and Zuras, and how it reflects on them as characters, but for now, let's get back to the story.
Thena and Makarri then travel to New York City in one of Makarri's faster vehicles, and begin a counterattack against the Deviant army. This battle takes up most of the remainder of issue #5 and continues into the beginning of #6. The final page of #5 switches scenes to the Pentagon, where we see the US military command reacting to, not the Deviant invasion, but to their first intelligence concerning the landing of the Celestial Host in South America. And they don't react well (“What can it all mean, sir?” “It may add up to the damnedest war we've ever fought!”).
Back with Thena and Makarri, it is quickly apparent that their battle against the Deviants is a much more serious affair than Ikaris's ill-considered solo attack. With Makarri piloting and Thena using a high-tech crossbow that shoots “cold energy” bolts, they take out large numbers of Devaiant Mutates before one of them manages to disable the weapon with his staff. He soon finds himself in trouble, though, when Thena grabs his staff and smashes him into the side of a building. The two Eternals are then attacked by a horde of flying Mutates; with Makarri steering, Thena holds them off for the time being with her fists, but they are in danger of being swamped by sheer numbers until Makarri sends the ship into a deep freeze, causing “the ice-encrusted Mutates to tumble from the sky”. Thena comments that “It took intense concentration to endure that bit of whimsy” and Makarri replies that at least “I did get us free of those ugly boors.”
The splash page of issue #6 has Makarri and Thena still flying in the aircraft, Thena poised to throw a sort of high-tech “energy spear”. Then we get a double page spread of Kro and a squad of Deviants at bay within a ring of energy caused by the spear, which Thena's cast has embedded into the pavement in their midst. Suddenly, any Deviants near the spear begin to fly helplessly off the ground; it's an anti-gravity spear, and they begin to “speed like bullets across the city until their mad flights are broken by obstacles in their path.” We see various Deviants helplessly pinned against walls, begging Kro to save them. The battle is won, and Kro has no choice but to surrender.
From this synopsis, it might appear at first glance that Thena has committed the same error I've accused Ikaris of making – attempting to suppress the Deviant menace by force. However, let's take a closer look at exactly how Thena and Makarri defeated the Deviants:
Thena does all the actual fighting, first with her "cold-energy" crossbow, then with her fists, until, when they are at the point of being swamped by numbers, Makarri sends the ship into deep-freeze, effectively immobilising their assailants.
On the symbolic level (are you tired of hearing this phrase yet?), the Deviants (primitive aggressive instincts) have provoked Thena and Makarri into reacting aggressively against them. But this aggressive reaction, after some initial success, has brought them into danger of being overwhelmed by the very forces they are trying to suppress. The situation is temporarily saved by literally cooling everything down (i.e. calming the emotions), first with Thena's "cold-energy" bolts, then by throwing thier entire vehicle and their own bodies into "deep-freeze." It takes “intense concentration,” as Thena says, for her and Makarri to endure this; the deviants can't, and are rendered helpless. i.e. the highly self-disciplined, self-controlled consciousness of the Eternals are able to calm themselves, to "cool their passison", thus neutralising the Deviants, that is the primal instincts, assailing them. Somehow, Thena and Makarri, while still fighting to suppress the Deviants, show signs of possessing a deeper understanding of their nature than did Ikaris's simple method of attacking "like with like".
However, this is only a temporary solution – Thena's and Makarri's immediate assailants have been stymied, but the main Deviant army is still menacing New York. What happens next? Thena neutralises them with her “energy-spear” which soon turns out to be an “anti-gravity spear”. Remember, the Deviants are intimately associated with the lower levels, literally and symbolically: they live beneath the ocean, they represent primitive subconscious forces, and so on. So when Thena makes them fly helplessly through the air with her anti-gravity spear, we see that they are disconnected from their milieu, their power-base. We might say that these instinctive drives and instincts have been brought up, by higher consciousness (Thena), from the subconscious to a psychic space (consciousness) where they can be dealt with by that higher consciousness (as opposed to unexpectedly erupting up from the unconscious through their own energy and wreaking havok). We can see that the primitive aggressive instincts are somehow being dissipated rather than suppressed. Next, we see this symbolic event being confirmed by at the narrative level, as Thena quickly reaches a truce with the Deviant leader:
Even though Kro's soldiers have all been neutralised and he has been left isolated, he himself seems to be quite satisfied with what he has accomplished: “My work here is done! “ says Kro, ”I'm certain the humans have taken the bait! ... The Space-Gods have returned! The humans will now associate them with 'devils' and wage a cosmic war, while we Deviants watch them destroy each other.”
Thena replies that humans have “outgrown this 'devil' fear” and when Kro, ostensibly to prove his confidence in his declaration, offers a truce on any terms, Thena accepts, ordering him to release all captives.
So, in contrast to earlier confrontations, we have the Deviant soldiers being harmlessly neutralised instead of being driven back beneath the earth, and we have a relatively voluntary truce between the Eternals and the Deviants. In other words, some sort of provisional accomodation appears to have been reached. Instead of the higher consciousness (the Eternals, Thena) simply repressing the primitive instincts (Deviants) by sheer force and thinking they will remain quiescent, it (Thena/higher consciousness) has demontrated some understanding of their (Deviants'/primal instincts') nature and acknowledged their existence (and thus, by implication, their right to exist). Once Kro surrenders, Thena immediately ceases all aggressive action. She has used force when it was necessary, but quickly moved to diplomacy and negotiation as soon as it was feasible; just as it is often necessary to repress primitive emotional reactions in the short term, if we are to avoid exploding in anger and hostility at every moment, but in the long term we have to come to some sort of understanding of our anger (to stick with that single example) if we are not to be plagued by it breaking through at the least provocation; in other words, if we are to become mature, psychologically balanced individuals.
Back to the narrative: We then switch scenes to Margo and Sersi. The latter, becoming bored with captivity, is in the process of humiliating various Deviant guards by transforming their weapons when they threaten her or Margo. (This scene has some interesting implications for the nature of Sersi's character, but I'll stick to the main thrematic thread for now). She and Margo are then informed that they are no longer prisoners anyway because of the new truce, and they are taken to see Ikaris freed from his submerged cylinder. Ikaris doesn't take kindly to his experience and begins to rough up the Deviant officer until Thena appears on a wall-screen ordering him to stop. I want to quote the following exchange in full:
Thena (on view-screen): Cease this hostility! Old feuds have no place in universal issues.
Thena: Our task is to unite all our species in an effort to deal peacefully with the Space- Gods. Cynical Kro feels this will fail! He feels that the humans will panic and resist the Gods.
Margo: I've seen the Space-Gods. I was among the Inca ruins when I saw their ship land. War with such powerful beings could be catastrophic for humanity.
Sersi: Only the Deviants would gain from such a war.
Ikaris That's why evil Kro attacked. To set this war in motion.
Sersi: The humans will now strike at the Gods on sight.
Ikaris: Can we stop this, Thena?
Thena: There is hope. The truce is on my terms. It means that Kro will help, too.
Margo: I'll help! If I can!
Thena: The humans must learn the entire story about their relationship with the Space-Gods and our two species. But it must be revealed first to academic sources – who can analyze and verify the facts.
They then arrange for a friend and colleague of Margo's father, Sam Holden, a professor of anthropology, to meet representatives of the Eternals and Deviants and present them, along with all this earth-shattering information, to the public. We see a news conference doing just that in the last pages of the issue.
I think we can see that this exchange confirms the interpretation we tentatively put forward for the preceding events. Ikaris, who is still following the his unsuccessful pattern of reflexively attacking the Deviants whenever he feels menaced by them, is commanded by Thena to stop his aggressive actions. She then explains that:
“Our task is to unite all our species in an effort to deal peacefully with the Space-Gods. “
Think about how deeply this statement contrasts witht everything that's gone before: from the very beginning of the series, the Deviants have been treated as violent, brutal, treacherous enemies. Yet here is Thena saying they have to be included - more that all three of our species must be united. It;s quite a turn-about from what we've become used to. In fact, I've highlighted the sentence quoted above because I think it gives away the key to the meaning of the Eternals concept.
On the symbolic level, I believe there are several implications: first of all, we have something related to Jung's idea of individuation. And what is that, exactly? Here are a few definitions I found on the web:
“In Jungian psychology, the gradual integration and unification of the self through the resolution of successive layers of psychological conflict.”
“An individuated [person] is one in whom the unconsious and conscious are harmonized ... This is achieved by getting in touch with the unconscious, without allowing the ego to be overwhelmed by it. ... “
“Blocked or distorted development of the personality is characteristic of neurosis, and in psychosis consciousness is overwhelmed by the unconscious. The aim of psychotherapy in Jung's view is to develop a situation where consciousness is not swamped by the unconscious, but neither is it shut off from it. The encounter between consciousness and the symbols arising from the unconscious enriches life and promotes psychological development, individuation.”
The correspondence should be clear: when Thena talks about uniting Eternals, Humans and Deviants, at the psychological level she is talking about uniting the elements of the self – in Jungian terms, the ego (Eternals/Humans) and the unconscious (Deviants). (For now, I won't get into the finer details of the Jungian system – the shadow, anima/animus, and so on). At the narrative level, there are obvious benefits for all three species if they can learn to accept one another and coexist peacefully. At the symbolic level, to combine two of the definitions above, “integration and unification of the self” “enriches life and promotes psychological development, individuation .“
But there is more: Thena says the the unification of the three species is not only an end in itself, but is necessary in order “to deal with the Space-Gods.” Symbolically, then, we cannot confront that which the Space-Gods represent without first undergoing this process of psychological development (individuation), achieving an improved awareness and acceptance of all aspects of the psyche, leading to a more unified self. But what do the Space-Gods represent? Remember that famous line of Pascal’s: “The eternal silence of these infinite abysses fills me with terror.” At the most abstract level, the Celestials are a symbol of the infinite, of the eternally silent abyss that lies behind reality, and before Eternal, Human and Deviant can face that terror, it must face itself. Thena is telling us that, before it is capable of confronting the universe in all its vastness and incomprehensibility, the psyche must become harmonised by confronting the darkest and most hidden aspects of its own nature.
Getting back to the story, the remainder of issue #6 is taken up by the press conference mentioned earlier, presenting the startling fact of the Eternal and Deviant existence to the “human) public. If there was still any doubt regarding what all this means at the symbolic level, Kirby continues to give the reader all kinds of hints through various pieces of dialogue:
Sam Holden: You see before you three divergent species of Man.
Ikaris: In the dim past, a common ancestor produced us all.
Kro: Since that day, we've all shared the planet together. But you've known this only through your myths and legends.
Sam Holden: Our three species have made contact in the past, but we humans recorded them as fantasy.
Ikaris: You see, it was the only way in which the humans could live with the facts and still keep their egos.
At this point, there probably insn't any need for me to explain, but anyway, Eternal, Human, and Deviant are related because, symbolically, they each represent various aspects of the psyche. These aspects do make contact with one another, but the Humans (i.e. the ego, as Ikaris's last line makes explicit) can only see Eternals and Deviants (the hidden aspects of the psyche) as creatures of fantasy. As Kro states, it is only through the symbolism of myths and legends (he might have added dreams) that the conscious ego is able to deal with these unconscious or supra-conscious elements can be dealt with, which is of course exactly what this story, the one in which these Eternals and Deviants are speaking and acting right now, is trying to do.
In the final panel of the press conference, another statement of Thena's sums up and reiterates what we've been talking about for the last several paragraphs, the concept I believe is at the very core of the Eternals. Thena says:
Once our three species can face each other – we can then confront the Space-Gods!
Once we can face the inner reality of our own nature, including all the hidden, unpleasant aspects the conscious ego usually wants to forget, then and only then can we face the enigma of outer reality and try to deal with its terrors and mysteries.
That's it, that is what I believe the Eternals is “about” if it is about anything. But we're not done yet. The last page of issue #6 shows an encounter between a team of Shield agents and the Celestial Gamenon. And once again, the humans do not react well: to quote directly from the scene:
The Giant shadow is upon the agents with a sudden, startling swiftness .Gamenon, of the Fourth Host, is an awesome sight to behold. To attempt to describe him is fruitless. To face him is frightening. To escape him is impossible.
Agent 1: Hold your fire. H-He may just be curious!
Agent 2: I'm not waiting until he grabs us like mice!
Agent 2: He-he's going for us! I-I've got to shoot!
[Fires his rifle at the Celestial]
Agent 3: Group to Base! We've made contact! The alien – he's big! BIG!!
There are final words which end in a scream. In the silence that follows, only the winds are left to speak for missing men ...
Radio: Shield to Group One! Come in Group One! Report! Report!!
The language Kirby uses when speaking of Gamenon (“frightening”, “awesome”, inescapable, and vast) once again emphasises the qualities that correspond to that which the Celestials represent: the awesome vastness of the universe, the frightening, inescapable mystery of reality itself. The agents attempt to remain calm, but react almost as badly as would a Deviant, and in the end cannot keep from panicking and striking out in fear. The ego, the unindividuated self (the human Shield agents) cannot face the frightening awesomeness of reality (Gamenon). The consequences of failure? We get a glimpse in issue #7, “The Fourth Host”.
Thanks Infobroker, and I look forward to reading your thoughts. I'll post something on issue #7 tomorrow. Then there might be a small delay while I gather the material for the big three-part story of #8 - 10, which I find so rich in layers that it could take some time to arrange my comments.
Back to the story ...
There's a line from Nietzsche, familiar to most comics fans from Alan Moore's Watchmen series:
“When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back.”
At the end of issue #6, we saw what can happen to an unprepared psyche when it dares or is forced to “look into the abyss,” to confront the Celestials: panic, terror, and then - oblivion. Now, at the beginning of #7, when Dr. Damian expresses his satisfaction at having the opportunity to study the Celestials, Ajak responds: “Remember, ... the Celestials are studying us as well.”
One of the Celestials offers a small container to Ajak and Damian. The capsule turns out to contain the stored atoms of the three Shield agents we saw at the end of the previous issue. Ajak reconstitutes them, but, after a few introductions, they attempt to force Damian and Ajak at gunpoint to give them information and help them leave. Ajak disarms them with a wave of his hand, and, impressed, they listen quietly, for the moment, as he tries to tell them about the Eternals (“While the humans fought each other on the earth's surface, We spent the centuries developing the ability to do things like that [levitate the agents' weapons out of their hands].” ) and the Celestials.
What he has to say isn't exactly reassuring to them. He describes how “The Celestials visit a planet in four hosts,” the first created Eternals, Humans, and Deviants from a common ape-like ancestor; the second came in “wrath and discipline” causing many civilisations to vanish and “forcing Man to climb again in new directions.”; the third concerned itself with “inspection and cultivation”; and the fourth? We don't get to hear yet, because the Shield agents interrupt him: Their thinking still mired in narrow conceptual boundaries (“As an American, Damian, you've got to help us!” “As a human being I've got to warn you that this is not the place or time for fool heroics.”), their irrational, aggressive impulses come to the fore again, and they attack Ajak and Damian with violence. Declaring that “Shield wants solid fact, not old wives tales” their leader produces a small device in his hand. “Gods, devils, or space giants – this tactical nuclear device will decide what they are!” and throws it at one of the Celestials, Tefral. The giant closes his enormous hand on the nuclear bomb and allows it to explode, causing no damage whatsoever. The caption reads, “The thought of those who would detonate plutonium with such rash abandon is a saddening one, indeed.” Then we have series of panels showing the Celestials and their ships, with some narration I'll quote:
Thus it begins! Wherever the Fourth Host must do its task the survival creatures, having reached their technical maturity, react with a fear beyond their past behaviour ... isn't it strange how they seem to sense that this is the TIME!
...They reach for the stars but they are forever cut down by the Fourth Host. This has proceeded since before Genesis was written ... and will continue until THE DAY OF ALPHA!
Above the earth, in fixed orbit, their cyclopean space home hovers in sombre majesty. Inside it is the One Above All. His word will set the task in motion. It will be his word that will end it ...
He sends down a message on a laser beam ten billion years evolved. Seen once before by the ancient earth, it was called the Ladder of Fire! ... flaming, snapping, ever-changing forms of light which make the horizon ring with sound – and men feel the presence of their own souls ...
Shield Agent: W-what is it? I-I've never seen or heard anything like it!
Ajak: Fear-stricken humans.! It's nothing more than a coded voice – decoding itself.
The “ladder of fire” then engulfs the Celestials, and they vanish: “They have entered and are part of the 'Wheel within a wheel' ”. A great rush of wind picks up the agents and tosses them against the pyramid wall. Shaken, they still intend to try to break out so they can bring this information back to Shield.
Stevenson (leader of the agents): Nothing's going to stop us! Nothing!!
Ajak (pointing to Arishem): He will! It seems you overlooked his presence during these proceedings.
Stevenson: Good Lord! He's the largest of them all! How could I have missed spotting him?!
Ajak: He's aware of you, Stevenson. Anything that moves on this planet is subject to his scrutiny. And I tell you, mister Shield agent, that neither you nor I will leave this place for the next fifty years.
But the agents make the attempt anyway, only to have their atoms scrambled and stored once again in the capsule. The final, full-page panel is a close-up of Arishem, with his arm outstretched, plam down, thumb horizontal, in the pose of a Roman emperor about to pass judgement on whether a gladiator will live or die. The caption reads:
Arishem, the mightiest of the Fourth Host, having enforced his will, raises his mammoth arm toward the sky. It signals the beginning of the Fifty Year Judgement – the final stage of an experiment carried out by the Celestials, among the countless stars, on countless worlds, in the fond hope of geberating what the Celestials term as ALPHA DAY.
But endless time has produced endless failure. Thus, Arishem stands ready to do what he has always done.
He is a planet-killer!
Engraved on his thumb is the formula for world destruction.
If earth fails --
EARTH DIES!
Obviously, there is a lot going on in this issue. Kirby uses Biblical allusions (“ladder of fire”, “wheel within a wheel”) effectively to create an atmosphere of almost religious awe around the Celestials. When Gamenon holds out the capsule to Dr. Damian and Ajak, and Dr. Damian hesitates: “I-I wonder -”, Ajak says “”Never question or refuse a Celestial ... Accept them as you would the whimsies of Fate.” Questioning or refusing to accept reality is the sign of an immature, perhaps even damaged or non-functional, psyche.
The Celestials are described as “giants [who] come and go in ways undefineable to their observers”. Ajak tells the Shield agents, “Their kind is as old as the stars. Their home is the vast universe.” A caption tells us that inside Arishem's “impregnable armour is a mind incomprehensible to Man. It broods in a manner which encompasses space and time and the invisible trails that cross in dimensions not of this universe ...”. When the One Above All sends down his “Ladder of Fire” “ever-changing forms of light which make the horizon ring with sound – and men feel the presence of their own souls “. Statements like these, in my opinion, reflect on the Celestials as symbols for the enigma of ultimate reality, and the impossibility, at least at our present stage of development, of coping with it, intellectually or emotionally. In a nice reversal of what I've been saying is one of the main themes of the series - that we cannot hope to face the enigma of external reality without first facing our inner reality - the last line quoted tells us that a confrontation with the ultimate nature of that "external" reality (the universe or however we want to name it) forces us into an awareness of our internal reality ("and men feel the presence of their own souls").
[EDIT: I have more to say about this 'external/internal' language I've been using, but want to leave it for later. I'm sure if Paul McEnery, for example, is reading this, he'll have some thoughts on the dangers of allowing this sort of dichotomy to frame our thinking about the problems being treated here. Bear with me, I'll try to return to this when I comment on a later incident in the series.]
But what about the the Fifty Year Judgement? I think the key to understanding this concept is in the lines that talk about how Man has reached a certain level of technological sophistication, and in the behaviour of the Shield agents, which illustrates how Man tends to use that technology. The point is that, while our technology has become highly developed, our minds have not. It's an observation that's been made by many thinkers over the years. Einstein once put it this way:
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift towards unparallelled catastrophe.”
The Shield agents, in spite of their efforts to remain calm and to rationally assess the mind-boggling situation in which they find themselves, still end up reacting with fear and aggression, and use the most destructive technology they possess to attempt an attack on the Celestials themselves. The Fifty Year Judgement is a metaphor for the crisis in which Humankind finds itself due to the disparity between its technological and spiritual/psychological levels of maturity. Simply put, with the destructive potential of our technology, as exemplified in the story by the nuclear bomb, if we continue to behave with the same mind-set we have possessed throughout our history, we will destroy ourselves. In the story that destruction will be visited from an external source - Arishem; but this is simply a metaphor for a destruction we will have visited on ourselves.
[EDIT: in the story this is illustrated through the image of nuclear weapons, but in reality, of course, there many other ways we might destroy ourselves - environmental degradation, resourse exhaustion, etc. Also, I don't necessarily mean that, if the series had been brought to an end by Kirby, we would have seen the Celestials destroying one or more of the human, Eternal, or Deviant races, even if the verdict of the Fifty Year Judgement were negative. Once I say most I want to say about the Kirby issues we're left with, I intend to speculate a little about where the series might have gone had it been allowed to continue without editorial interference. More on this later.]
OK, I've been pretty slack in carrying on with this, but enough procrastinating. If you're reading this thread for the first time, I hope you'll take the time to go back to the beginning, because I'm trying to build a case and nothing I say here will make much sense if you don't know what's been discussed so far.
The first 7 issues, as described above, gave us the basic set-up for the Eternals concept, on both the narrative and symbolic levels. The next story in the series takes many of the ideas we've been talking about so far and shows where the series was going with them. It is also one in which Thena takes a central part. There are some very suggestive parallels between Kirby's Thena and her namesake, the goddess Pallas Athena of ancient Greek myth; so suggestive, in fact, that I think that this mythological model was chosen and handled by Kirby with great care, and it might be helpful to give a little background information before I start talking about issues 8, 9, & 10. I'm going to use a lot of quotations from various sources, because I don't want anyone to think I'm making all this up just to fit my thesis.
If you look up the proper name “Athene” in the Oxford English Dictionary, you'll see two points emphasized: that she is the “personification of wisdom” and that “she sprang fully-armed and uttering her war-cry, from the head of Zeus.” This warrior goddess of wisdom is described by Robert Graves in his exhaustive compilation of Greek myth as follows: “Although a goddess of war,she gets no pleasure from battle, as Ares and Eris [Strife] do, but rather from settling disputes and upholding the law by pacific means. She bears no arms in time of peace and, if ever she needs any, will borrow a set from Zeus. Her mercy is great …Yet, once engaged in battle she never loses the day … Many gods, Titans, and giants would gladly have married [her], but she has repulsed all advances.” [The Greek Myths 25.1] Athena was born from the head of Zeus, fully-grownand clad in armour. And at the moment of her birth from Zeus's head, all heaven and earth trembled and the sun itself stopped in its path:
With Pallas Athena, that glorious goddess, my song begins,
Who is bright-eyed, rich in craft, who has an implacable heart,
The virgin in revered, protectress of cities, possessor of strength,
Tritogenes. It was Craft-filled Zeus himself who gave birth
From his sacred head to her already in armour of war,
Golden, all-gleaming; every immortal was gripped with awe
At the sight. But quickly she leaped from his deathless head to stand
Before Zeus who bears the aigis, and brandished her keen-tipped spear.
At the might of the bright-eyed goddess great Olympos reeled
In a fearsome tremor, the earth all round with a dreadful scream
Rang out, and the deep was stirred in a mass of seething waves.
But the salt sea suddenly checked, and Hyperion's splendid son
Foe a long-drawn moment kept still the swift hoofs of his chariot's team,
Until from her deathless shoulders Pallas Athena took off
That armour fit for a god, and Craft-filled Zeus rejoiced.
[Homeric Hymn to Athena. tr. Michael Crudden]
She is the only god, besides Zeus himself, who is either capable of wielding or permitted to wield Zeus’s Cyclops-forged thunderbolts [Eumenides. Aeschylus]. She is the most courageous and fearless of all gods, and was the only god to stand her ground before the first onslaught of the monstrous Typhon; all the rest fled to Egypt in animal form (incidentally enabling this myth to provide an explanation for the theriomorphic appearance of the Egyptian gods). She is described by the notoriously misogynistic Hesiod, who is with Homer one of the prime sources, both for the ancient Greeks and for ourselves, of information about the gods, as “equal to her father [Zeus] in strength and in wise understanding”[Theogony 895], and she is the only god of whom it is said that she has never been defeated in any battle. In fact the goddess Nike [Victory] is closely associated with her, and may be seen as a personification of one of her aspects.
She is the goddess of wisdom, but also of war and battle, and is usually pictured with spearand wearing armour. In striking contrast to, not only her own implacability in battle, but to practically every other divinity, Athena is also distinguished by her gentleness and mercy. In, for example, Aeschylus's Oresteia, particaularly the last of the trilogy, The Eumenides, her respectful and conciliatory attitude towards the Furies, after she has thwarted their desire to destroy Orestes, is both remarkable and moving. The role of the goddess which is perhaps best known to readers today is that of protectress of mortal heroes such as Heracles, Achilles, Odysseus, and Diomedes. Several of the Twelve Labours of Heracles are accomplished only with her crucial aid, and we see her performing a similar function in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Argonautika, as well as in the exploits of many other famous heroes such as Cadmus, Bellerophon, Tydeus, and Perseus. She is often described as Zeus's favourite child and enjoys a specially favourable relationship with him.
Finally, Athena is unique in that, while she is the Olympian goddess par excellence, she has strong chthonic associations, as evidenced by the serpents that often appear in her representations, and fringing her shield (the famous and impregnable aegis) as well as the story of Erichthonios, outlined below. She is in many ways a unique individual among the twelve Olympians of ancient Greek myth. Karl Kerenyi describes her as second only to Zeus in the ancient religion of which the surviving Greek myths are our main source of information [The Gods of the Greeks 7.2]. She often appears with Zeus and a (variant) third god or goddess as part of a trinity of specially honoured gods at many locations in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Ernest Dodds, in describing the stark nature of the ancient Greek religion, says “and in fact, of the major Olympians, perhaps only Athena inspired an emotion that could reasonably be described as love.” [The Greeks and the Irrational. p.34]. To sum up, Athena is a figure of unsettling contrasts: goddess of battle and war vs goddess of wisdom; fierceness in battle vs gentleness and mercifulness especially to defeated enemies; virgin goddess vs maternal relationship towards heroes she protects and to Erichthonios; Olympian goddess (“Golden Athena”) vs chthonic aspects.
Before leaving the subject of Athena, I want to mention one more thing: one of the strangest myths involving the goddess, the story of Erichthonios: Hephaistos attempted sexual intercourse with the virgin warrior goddess, who repulsed him without difficulty, but did not otherwise punish him; his semen fell down to the earth, fertilizing it, so that Gaia gave birth to a creature human in appearance from the waist upwards, but with the body of a serpent from the waist down. When Gaia, and all the other divinities, refused to have anything to do with the monstrosity, Athena, ignoring their ridicule, took him under her protection and raised him to adulthood, naming him Erichthonios. Note the word element “chthon” in the name, and his half serpent nature; Erichthonios is another sign of how chthonic elements keep manifesting themselves in the mythology surrounding Athena. Recall that the cthonic signifies the earth, the underworld, and thus the same unconscious forces associated with the Deviants.
Sean Dulaney
04-12-2005, 05:34 AM
One of the things that the Eternals benefited from compared to the Fourth World (especially for the time) was it was confined to the one book. While the Fourth World books had their own internal continuity, having three to four titles with the common theme and villian, Kirby could and would continually toss the new concepts into the books to a point where it could overwhelm the reader and if your local spinner rack only got Forever People and something new is mentioned like it was old hat, you wondered if it was a concept from New Gods or Mister Miracle only to find out later that month was a "detour issue" for those titles and the concept was never seen in those titles.
Eternals had way out concepts, but it was more of a laser focus than the shotgun blast of ideas you had in the Fourth World. (Oddly enough, I felt the shotgun theory would apply to 2001. Perhaps Cap/Falcon as well.)
Interesting point, Sean. I like the Fourth World experiment with multiple titles (which is now being emulated by Grant Morrison with Seven Soldiers, as Mar Andrew pointed out on the DCU board). But perhaps Kirby decided not to go that route with the Eternals after the abortion of the New Gods titles at DC; or perhaps he just thought the Eternals concept wasn't suited to that format. I do think the Eternals was a rich enough concept to support multiple titlaes, but concentrating it in a single series made it one of the few truly ensemble series I've ever encountered, with different characters taking the spotlight in each story, and I agree that this did give the book a unique impact. I wonder whether or not, if it had caught on with the public the way Kirby must have hoped, he would have branched off some titles somewhere down the road.
EDIT: By the way, everyone, sorry about the long post above re Pallas Athena. It really isn't as off-topic as it might seem right now, but I probably should have edited that one down a little, just for readability. I'll post the follow-up in a few hours once I get through a few errands.
Cei-U!
04-12-2005, 08:25 AM
I wanted to mention that thanks to this thread I've begun recollecting the series. #1-3 should arrive today or tomorrow. Thank you, berk, for lighting the fire under me.
Cei-U!
I summon the renewed interest!
That's awesome, Cei-U. That makes every minute I've spent on this thread worth it. I hope you enjoy the series as much as I have. I particularly like Kirby's arwork in the first few issues, before ike Royer came on board. Not that I don't like Royer's work as well, but John Verpoorten (I think it was) added a more organic feel to the artwork that was different from Royer's very faithful inks.
OK, we've had a look at Pallas Athene. What exactly does she have to do with the Eternals?
Well, some of the parallels between Kirby's Thena and the description of that Greek goddess given a couple posts above are readily apparent. In her first appearance (issues 5 & 6) Thena is presented as a calmly forceful personality who, as soon as she is informed of the Deviant invasion, takes charge of a quite serious situation: New York is under siege, and the human forces cannot cope with Deviant military technology. Ikaris, who has chracteristically bitten off a little more than he can chew, has been captured and immobilised by the Deviants, and Sersi, hampered by Margo’s presence, has also been captured. Thena at once turns this debacle completely around, attacking and defeating, with Makarri’s aid, a large squadron of Mutates, then taking out Kro's personal guard, and finally arranging a truce in which the Deviants agree to cease all hostilities and return all prisoners (Ikaris, Sersi, & Margo).
No one questions her right to act and speak for the Eternals as a whole, and she herself does not defend it or even assert it verbally. She simply takes command, with no fanfare, no pompous speeches, and everyone accepts her as the voice of authority in the absence of Zuras. Even Sersi, who behaves to pretty well everyone, Eternal, Deviant, and human alike, in her customary teasing and irreverent manner, is relatively serious when she addresses Thena. In fact, Thena and Zuras are the only two characters with whom she usually drops her otherwise playful and/or flippant tone. All this indicates, in an unobtrusive way, that Thena is an object of unusal respect among the Eternals.
Note also the manner in which Thena uses force when necessary (the Deviants have already attacked and must be repulsed), but immediately turns to negotiation as soon as it is feasible. Thena is also the only Eternal ever shown sharing counsel with Zuras in his Chamber of Command, as she is doing in her very first appearance when Makarri brings the news of the Deviants’ attack and the capture of Sersi. An although we haven't seen it thus far (up to #7), Thena is also, in striking parallel with her namesake, the only Eternal throughout the series able to wield the bolts of Zuras, other than Zuras himself, of course.
So, keeping all this in mind, lets get back to the Eternals. We left off at the end of issue 7. Thena has succeeded in neutralizing the Deviant invading force and in arranging a truce between Eternal, Human and Deviant in order that they may try to reach some kind of peaceful co-existence and thus be able to deal with the reality of the Celestials' return to earth. I won't repeat what all this signifies at the symbolic level: it emerged from the series as it progressed through the first 7 issues, as described in the earlier posts and if I start going over it again, I'll probably end up re-writing the whole thing. Instead, let's get back to the story.
I'm going to try to describe a lot of what happens in the next three issues in some detail, with a lot of direct quotes from Kirby's captions and dialogue, all of which I hope will aid those of you who haven't had the opportunity to read the issues to see where my comments are coming from.
Issue #8, “The City of Toads”, opens with a scene in Lemuria, where Great Tode, the Deviant leader, is observing a combat between a masked Deviant “Reject” on one side and several opponents. A caption says: “What is a reject? Is it not that which is despised or cast out by its brothers? Or can it be a fear – a vision of doom – a finger pointing at the flaws of the perfect society ...” The Reject defeats his adversaries, killing most of them, and is then forced with the electric whip to kneel before Great Tode, who orders his mask removed. “He is truly ugly,sire,” says a Deviant soldier, “The mere sight of him may upset you. But he is unequaled in combat. A born killer, if I may say so.” The mask is removed, revealing a dark, handsome young man. The unstable Deviant genes have produced an anomaly: a Deviant who looks like an Eternal. The final caption goes: “In the City of Toads, no name but Reject can be found for him. His face is his crime -- and to disguise this crime, he excels in what is most admired by his fellow Deviants: a superior cunning and the ability to destroy his enemies.”
The scene then switches to NYC and a conversation between Thena and Kro. Kro is trying to convince Thena to accompany him on his return to Lemuria. It emerges that they have known each other in the distant past, and had even begun a romantic relationship, which seems to have failed. Kro wishes to renew this romance, but Thena, while not unsympathetic, feels “the gulf between us is too wide.” Kro pleads that “The passing centuries have narrowed the gap! Let me prove it, Thena!” But she is hesitant – one of the only occasions in the series when she is anything but decisive and commanding. However, after a brief scene with Sersi and Sam Holden, we see that Thena has indeed decided to accept Kro's invitation, and their “undersea warcraft slips unnoticed into the deeps”. They soon find themselves travelling through the ruins of Lemuria, destroyed when the Deviants attacked the Second Host of the Space-Gods millenia before. Kro boasts that “They'll find us ready this time. Our new weapons-systems are invincible. ... You shall see our new city.” Thena replies that “It is doomed to suffer the fate of this one if you dream of resisting the Space Gods.”
Given the symbolism we've outlined earlier, it should be obvious that the invitation extended to Thena by Kro is in fact a plea for recognition from the unconscious to the higher levels of consciousness. Thena's acceptance shows her interest in exploring the “lower” levels of the psyche – the unconscious. The fact that she appears to have a past history with Kro shows that this interest in the unconscious is not something new, it has always been a part of her psychic nature, making her a unique figure among the Eternals. Her hesitation is a milder form of the distaste Eternals as a group have for the Deviants, i.e. The mistrust of the higher levels of consciousness for the primal instincts. To sum up, when Thena and Kro descend beneath the ocean to the Deviants' city, we are actually embarking on a journey into the depths of the unconscious. From this perspective, then, Thena’s descent to the symbolic home and seat of the unconscious becomes a quest to explore its nature, and to eventually reintegrate it with the higher consciousness, to become complete and whole. In other words, individuation and integration.
Back to the story:
As they disembark in the City of Toads, they are greeted by a large ceremonial guard. The Deviants appear to be pulling out all stops in an effort to impress their Eternal visitor. But as they proceed “ toward the city's centre” something goes wrong I'll quote much of what follows in full:
A clammy, misshapen arm thrusts itself at Thena and grasps her with uncanny strength ...
Thena: By the fire bolts of Zuras, wha --!!?
1st Deviant Guard: Fool! Did you let that reject get out of hand?
2nd Deviant Guard: I-I couldn't help it! He tore free!
Kro: Away with you both! Hurry! Lest this creature's sight offend our royal visitor!
[We see a monstrous, deformed, but somehow pitiful creature being cruelly whipped by the two handlers.]
Thena: Poor thing! He offends me not! If anything, the plight of malformed birth makes him the victim, and fate the villain.
1st Deviant Guard: He'll soon be rid of his misery! Strange how his kind seems to sense the coming of Purity Time.
Kro: Purity Time! I'd forgotten that it was due! Let's not tarry here, Thena. We must pay our respects to Great Tode.
Thena: Not yet, Kro. If there is truth here, I must know it all!
Thena: What is the truth, Kro? What is Purity Time?
Kro: I-I cannot tell you now. I-it would destroy your faith in my dream ... the dream of removing the Deviant curse of structural instability ... the hope of erasing the ugliness from our image!
Thena: Very well ... I shall keep my thoughts elsewhere for the present.
[Kro commandeers a vehicle to take them to Great Tode's palace]
Deviant Bystander: Here they come! Here come the Death Wagons!
Deviant Bystander: They've collected every misbegotten monster among us!
Deviant Bystander: Don't push! I want to see them!
Kro: Blast! I'm undone!
The Death Wagons roll in slow procession through the square. Their cargoes of horror are to be seen in full view of the curious onlookers.
Deviant Bystander: Ugh! Look at them! See the cursed things!
Deviant Bystander: Cleanse us of them! Leave us pure and clean!
[We see the pitifully mal-formed Rejects being carted off in an enclosed, transparent container.]
Thena: What will be done with them Kro? Where are they taking them?
Kro: To the place ... from which they will never return to haunt us. It is there, Thena.
[We see a great, smoking inferno rising from some large building or machine in the distance .]
Thena: Horrible! Horrible! There are monsters here indeed! But they are not in the Death Wagons!
Kro: Make no judgements, Eternal, until your species begins to carry within itself the uncontrollable seed!
Kro: Come Thena. Come and see the one Reject who offers a hope of stability!
Thena: I've already seen too much, Kro. Whatever was between us has died with those helpless creatures.
In exploring the unconscious, there is always the danger that consciousness will be overwhelmed by the powerful instinctive drives it has hitherto suppressed, giving them free rein. This danger, or temptation, is represented by Kro, who is a member of the Deviants’ ruling clan, and is anxious to pursue a romantic relationship with Thena – a marriage in effect, in which by definition the two partners would be more or less equals. It is by Kro’s invitation that Thena actually makes the descent, showing that her immediate motivation is perhaps curiosity about the nature of the unconscious forces that he, as a member of the Deviant elite, represents. In Lemuria she first encounters ugliness in the form of a misshapen reject Deviant who reaches out to her as he is driven away by his jailers; but instead of recoiling in disgust, as Kro expects, and as would be typical of Eternals (and humans), she reacts with instinctive compassion, showing that not all unconscious drives are of a negative nature. [EDIT: this probably isn't necessary, but I feel I should spell out at least this one example: the mistreated Reject, as a Reject and a Deviant, represents an unconscious drive; but Thena (higher consciousness) doesn't reject him. This Reject is, at the narrative level, the object of Thena's compassion. But at the symbolic level, in this scene, he is the representative (i.e. symbol) of her compassion, that is of compassion as an instinct.]
This scene is also significant in the way Kro tries to guide and limit Thena’s exploration of his realm. Thena’s words, “If there is truth here, I must know it all!”, take on a double meaning in the light of the quest motif. She wants to explore this unknown territory on her own terms. But the unconscious has its own motivations and seeks to take over the exploration process, forcing consciousness to follow its lead. For the moment Kro has some success, and is able to persuade her to accompany him to see the Great Tode, leader of all the Deviants. “Very well,” Thena says,”I shall keep my thoughts elsewhere for the present.” In other words, she is allowing her thoughts, her exploration of the unconscious, to be guided away from something it does not want seen.
But Thena does find out the truth about Purity Time, in spite of Kro’s efforts to keep her in ignorance, and with this understanding, which from the viewpoint I’m taking here also stands for a deeper understanding of the psychological forces represented by the Deviants. Thena loses her fascination with Kro. (“Whatever was between us has died with those poor creatures.”), which, at that moment, also signifies a desire to abandon her quest (“I’ve already seen too much.”). The unconscious is home to many dark and disturbing forces, and facing them can be a shocking experience. Purity Time represents this aspect of the unconscious, and Kro's efforts to hide it fromThena show that even though he may be doing what he thinks is best for her, he is not to be trusted as a guide. He wants to control her knowledge and exploration, which means he wants to control her, at some level. Having for the moment avoided the danger of succumbing to the unconscious drives she is exploring, she is now at risk of retreating back to the un-integrated state of mind/psyche which is the norm for Eternals (not to mention Humans and Deviants), rendering her quest to become whole abortive. We'll see one of the effects of this retreat a little later on.
Back to the story (we're still in the middle of issue #8):
The scene switches to the “Combat Room of the palace grounds”, where the handsome Reject is having his armour put on by his handlers. One of them says that he knows who the Reject's next opponent is and that “the Reject will die in this battle.” But, a caption tells us, “The mere mention of defeat drives the Reject into a frenzy”, he snatches a weapon, the guards panic and run for their lives. The Reject stalks through the corridors while the guards cower in fear behind corners, consoling themselves that he'll soon be destroyed by “that horror they whisper about ... that thing they call Karkas.”
Next we see Kro and Thena enter the presence of great Tode. Kro prostrates himself before the Deviant King, but Thena refuses, much to the displeasure of the Deviants courtiers. However, she does speak respectfully, and addresses him as “your excellency” and “Sire”. Great Tode is in a good mood because of the exciting entertainment he's arranged for their guest: a spectacular battle between two Rejects. Thena is not enthusiastic, but doesn't make a scene, although she does exchange a few barbs with Kro. “Simmer down, female!” Kro says, “I know you love a good fight!” I warrant you'll find this exciting.”
Thena's attitude towards Great Tode is typical of the general moderation of her character. Another Eternal, Ikaris for example, probably would have been disdainful or even insulting; Kro, at the opposite extreme, obsequiously prostrates himself and grovels at the feet of his master. Thena is neither subservient, nor insulting. Although the Deviants think she is being “haughty”, she is actually quite respectful to the Deviant ruler and tries to keep her negative judgements of the proceedings under control. Although she has retreated from her initial desire to explore this strange realm, she is still herself, balanced and moderate.
But now, the first combatant , the handsome, human/Eternal appearing Reject, enters the arena. He and Thena are each amazed by the other's appearance:
Reject [thinking]: S-she looks as I do – yet she sits with royalty!
Thena: H-he's handsome by any standard! Are you sure he's a Deviant?
But then a huge, monstrous Deviant smashes into the arena, tossing guards away, and roaring fearsomely. The issue ends:
Although all the royal spectators are protected by a hidden electric barrier, they are highly uncomfortable in the presence of the massive mutate! Only Thena rises in concern for the Reject's fate ...
Thena: Stop the combat! The boy will be slaughtered by that thing!
Deviant: HAHAHA!! Ignore her! Begin the battle!
Thena: Fools! Fools! You'll destroy the one object of value in this ugly domain!
It is noteworthy that the epithet “ugly” is often used, almost as an accusation, by various Eternals (Ikaris, Makarri, Sersi, and Thena herself) on more than one occaision when referring to the Deviants, and that the other Eternals are disapproving of Thena’s relationship with Kro and her descent to the Deviants’ realm. I think this signifies a disconnection between the upper and lower levels of consciousness, or, to put it a different way, a denial of powerful subconscious drives by the higher consciousness. Thena's partial retreat back to this un-integrated state is signified by her attitude towards the two Rejects who are to fight in her honour: she automatically assumes, in typical Eternal manner, that the handsome Reject is “the one object of value in this ugly domain”, and that Karkas is just a “mutated monster”. Thus, issue #8 ends with a very much unresolved situation: Thena's quest to explore her psyche has come to a stand-still. She has “seen too much” and seems to have lost her desire to continue. But she is still in Lemuria, so the quest has not been explicity abandoned, it has been blocked. Its fate will unfold in the following two issues.
Issue #9, “The Killing Machine”, begins with Ikaris flying through some mountains, Makarri and Margo following behind in one of Makarri's vehicles. Suddenly, just over Olympia, they are attacked by a grotesque, dragon-like monster. Ikaris strikes it with his eye-beams, but it simply changes into another , even more monnstrous form. Makarri flies his ship away from Ikaris and the monster, and soon finds a small Eternal with a glowing head, hovering in the air. He unceremoniously shoots the brat in the arse with some kind of ray-gun, whereupon the monster vanishes. Ikaris is pissed and chases after the prankster, who has the appearance of a boy and is named Sprite.
Then we get a series of scenes in which Celestials are encountered by humans in different locations around the planet – Russian military leaders study a photograph of Nezzarr taken in Siberia; Australians in the Outback get a close-up look at Oneg; Hargen the Analyzer is seen by mountaineers in the Swiss Alps, and Eson wades waist deep in the ocean off Miami beach in the US. The human reaction ranges from disbelief (“That thing isn't real! I hear there's a movie outfit on location ...”) to narrow-minded opportunism (“This camera will get a close-up shot worth millions!”) to apprehension and fear (“It frightens me Harry! Please head back for shore!”). Eson then plunges into the ocean depths.
These two scenes illustrate points we've seen earlier in the series: Ikaris's sometimes impulsive (strange for an Eternal) behaviour and tendancey to run into trouble while in flight, parallelling his mythic namesake. And an overview of the range of human reactions to the Celestials (mundane consciousness reacting to Reality): from denial to the urge for selfish exploitation to terror and panic.
The story then returns to the combat arena where the Reject is facing the huge and monstrous Karkas:
Great Tode: This event is dedicated to you, my dear Thena! To lure an Eternal from her mountain-tops to these regions is an occasion indeed!
Thena: I am not pleased, Great Tode! This is anything but a fair match.
Kro: er – forgive her, Great Tode! She cannot judge these affairs by our standards. Enough, Thena, enough!
Thena: I shall speak my thoughts, Kro! This ugly society has, for the first time, produced a Deviant of handsome visage – yet, out of envy, it stamps him as a Reject – and now sacrifices him to that mutated monster!
Kro: Don't underrate the Reject. He is a veteran of these games. His chances are good.
Thena: Against that thing you call Karkas? Never! It's destroyed its keepers like rag toys – and wrecked the arena!
Great Tode: Don't waste your sympathies on an outcast, sweet Eternal.
Thena: Fools! He's the only thing of beauty in this ugly domain.
Thena's words here reiterate what we saw last issue: her condemnation of the Deviants' domain as “ugly” and her automatic assumption that because the reject is handsome and looks like an Eternal he is the only thing of value in that “ugly domain” are typical Eternal (and human) reactions, highlighting the disconnection between the consciousn and unconscious levels of the psyche.
Note also, however, Great Tode's creepily familiar tone towards Thena: “My dear Thena,” and “sweet Eternal.” The primitive drives represented by this king of the Deviants are not without their threatening aspect. Great Tode's attitude here is one of desire to possess; he even expresses satisfaction at having “lured” Thena down “to these regions,” signifying the danger of higher consciousness being enveloped and overwhelmed by the unconscious forces it has encountered in its quest to explore the lower depths of the psyche.
But Greta Tode has another line of great significance: “This event is dedicated to you, my dear Thena!” This has profound implications at the symbolic level, as we'll see very soon.
Getting back to the narrative, the Reject, belying Thena's concern and the audience's anticipation of his imminent destruction, begins to fire his weapon, striking expertly at the vulnerable points of Karkas's anatomy, until the monster, to the amazement of the audience, cries out:
Karkas: You're like them –You hurt Karkas! Why?!
Audience member 1: Wonder of wonders! That monstrous mutate can think!
Audience member 2: A-and talk!
[It is not clear whether either of these speeches is made by Thena or Kro.]
Karkas finally does what the Reject has been waiting for. With a roar that shakes the arena, Karkas charges.
The Reject husbands his shots. He fires short but telling bursts at Karkas's face and legs.
Karkas is unable to see – unable to stand. When he falls, the arena rocks as if from an earth tremor.
At that moment, the Reject's eyes blaze and his jaws distend like a carnivore at the kill. A snarl escapes his lips. He rushes toward his stricken foe.
The Reject leaps upon his victim and releases the last, most powerful bolt left to him.
Karkas screams and grows silent.
But the killing frenzy is upon the Reject. Combat is the only life he knows. There is triumph only as long as it continues. It must go on – and on – and on ...
[We see the Reject smashing his weapon like a club into Karkas's fallen form over and over again. The Deviant guards try to stop him, but he turns on them, hurling the weapon like a spear into the face of one guard who is tryin to take aim at him. Then he goes on a rampage:]
The Reject is upon them – using every reflex, every trick that life in the arena has taught him.
The surprised guards are hurled in every direction. One fires his weapon as it is turned upon himself. [We see the Reject twisting a guard's arm so that his gun is pointing as his own face as he fires. More chaos as the Reject continues to take out soldiers with his bare hands.]
Guard: We can't stop him! We're no match for him!
Guard: Call for reinforcements -- quickly!!
The Reject is not alarmed. He is in his natural element. With a weapon ripped from a fallen guard, he meets the new dangers. ...
In his hands a weapon becomes an artful instrument that plays a deadly overture ...
With unerring flight, each shot finds its target. The new attackers are shortly added to the list of casualties.
More guards arrive. They flank the Reject and rush him from either side.
To hold the Reject is impossible. He is a killing machine that reacts to each new move with precise timing – with precise force. [We see the Reject elbow the guard holding him from behind, knocking him down.]
Pressing his remaing attacker against the wall, the Reject turns his trapper into the trapped. Then, a mighty arm swings backward to gain momentum.
The ensuing blow strikes like a hammer.
A grim hush falls upon the arena. The royal court surveys the carnage in dismay. They have witnessed a slaughter – but with totally unexpected results.
The Reject slowly advances toward then. His feet touch the floor like those of a stalking tiger.
He leaps at them – and strikes fire! A protective energy screen sears him to his marrow!
Kro: There's your poor little sacrificial lamb, Thena! What do you think of him now?
Thena: H-he's a destroyer!
Reject: I hate you! I hate you!
Reject: I'll kill you all!! You'll see! You'll see!!
Thena: Poor creature! The lot of an outcast has robbed him of any worthy emotions. I – I pity him.
[Great Tode orders that the reject be killed, but before Kro can carry out this out, an earthquake rocks the arena. We see the Deviant defence forces firing their guns at Eson, who is outside the sunken Deviant city].
The tremendous power unleashed against him does little to disturb him – Eson knows power well. He draws it to him and drains the weapons system.
Emptying the city of power is also a simple task ...
In the arena, the animal instincts of the Reject relay strange messages ... somehow, he senses that the energy barrier which separates him from his enemies is gone!
The Reject cautiously extends his hand. It pauses where the barrier should be. Then it moves ahead, piercing dead space and nothing more ...
He is now free to wipe out the objects of his burning hate. He moves menacingly forward!
[End of issue #9].
The bulk of this issue is spent in demonstrationg the true nature of the handsome, Eternal-appearing Reject: he, not Karkas, has turned out to be the frightening “Killing Machine” of the title, as Kirby demonstrates to chilling effect in this action-filled story (some of the best-written combat scenes in comics, IMO, although I think the truncated 17-page issue length of the time severely hampered the effectiveness of the artwork).
Up to this point in the series, Kirby has drawn Thena in the erect, commanding posture that is typical of her, but at the moment when the Celestial Eson causes a great tremor to reverberate through the Deviants’ undersea city he shows her, for the only panel in the entire series I think, in a vulnerable position, thrown off-balance, and being held by Kro. Of course by now you’ve all guessed that I think that this is not a coincidence. Psychologically, Thena is at her most vulnerable at this point. She has done what no other Eternal would even consider doing – descend into the depths of the realm of the Deviants, she has “seen too much “ of what the dark drives she is exploring are capable of (Purity Time), and now she has had some of her most deeply held “Eternal” assumptions about beauty and worth turned on their heads. This is the moment of her greatest danger to being overwhelmed by the dark forces in which she has immersed herself, and it is symbolized by the disappearance of the energy barrier that had protected her and the ruling Deviants from the combatants in the arena. Note that the disappearance if the barrier is indirectly caused by Celestial activity, i.e. Reality – the universe - has impinged on the inner reality which is the location of this adventure. Thena is going to have to confront these forces directly, with no protective force field to hold them at a distance.
Issue #10, “Mother”, opens with the gigantic hand of Eson crushing a battery of Deviant guns on the perimetre of the city. The Deviants retreat in panic.
Deviant 1: Thanks to a force field, the collapse of this station will not bring the ocean waters in upon us.
Deviant 2: It couldn't keep him out. The Space Gods move in a mysterious manner which defies all barriers to their progress.
Eson, ignoring further attacks from Deviant ships, reaches his arm through the tunnel leading to the city and stretches his hand up through the waters, surveying Lemuria through the “universla eye”, a Kirbyesque device, in his palm. The water displaced by his immense arm and hand causes floods and panic in the city. The Deviant authorities are interested only in protecting the elite, leaving the commoners to fend for themselves as best they can. Meanwhile Eson departs from the area, and we see him gliding past a group of sperm whales as if they were a school of trout.
Some people might be a little confused by the highly stratified Deviant hierarchy and its strict political organization, given my assertion that they symbolize the violent and chaotic drives and primitive instincts of the unconscious. But it is a common theme in literature that symbols of the unconscious and of chaos are often given to complicated political hierarchies and intricate rules of conduct. Compare, for example, the Goetia of Moore's Promethea and their rigid hierarchy and elaborate military titles and manner of speech; or the strict code of honour governing single combat and so on in Courts of Chaos in Zelazny's Amber books.
Also, there is the old concept of "as above, so below": the complicated Deviant hierarchy is a parody or base imitation of the very simple one of the Eternals ("Great Tode" vs "Great Zuras"); the Deviant attitude towards their Rejects echoes the Eternal attitude towards the Deviants; and the Deviant Purity Time is even a parody of the Celestial Fifty Year Judgement. In each of these cases, the readily apparent wrongness of the Deviant behaviour forces us to look at, either the Eternal or Celestial object of parody or our own human behaviour in a new light. It's no coincidence that the highly mentally developed Eternals have a very simple political system: apart from the patriarchal figure of Zuras, all Eternals appear to be more or less equal, although in an emergency they have no problem following a leader. And of course, this is what we'd hopefully expect from a people who are so advanced that individuals can be left to their own guidance. But the suspicious and mentally unstable Deviants have a complicated political system with power concentrated among an elite and the vast bulk of commoners oppressed by their rulers.
There's more to say on this subject, but I want to get on with the story, so ...
We next see a short series of panels to let us know that the Celestials are still causing consternation in Australia, Switzerland, and Russia. Nezarr, in Siberia, is observed by a squadron of MIGs. For now, the Soviets are showing restraint, and take no offensive action.
The scene switches to Olympia, where the Prime Eternal, Zuras, is attempting to make contact with the Celestial “One Above All” in the orbiting space craft, with the aid of a special “link-up” helmet.
Zuras: The Celestials represent power beyond measure. Their thoughts do not yield to communication easily.
Once stimulated by the “link-up”, the mind of the eldest Eternal dwarfs all others on earth.
It penetrates the hull of the gargantuan craft -- and makes sudden contact!
Zuras is seized by violent tremors. The “link-up” blazes with a dazzling brightness that results in a terrifying backlash of shocking strength. It rocks both Eternals to their very core!
Zuras: I-it is done, Domo. I've no further need for the “link-up.”
Domo: But, you must tell me, sire! Wha - ?
Zuras: What, indeed! What have the dark and vast stretches of the universe spawned and sheltered and nurtured and grown in that unthinkable time before our planet was formed --
Domo: Good gracious! It is impossible to conceive of a mind that could visibly shake the Prime Eternal! Yet, it is up there – in the craft of the Space Gods!
[Zuras then informs Domo of the Fifty Year Judgement, and orders him to “activate the Unifier.”]
[Caption:] Soon, at the most complex instrument ever produced on earth ...
[Caption:] The Unifier ... is a technological aid which does what was once an ability of Zuras alone ...
Domo (thinking): The call goes out across the planet. Eternals everywhere must respond to it. As in the ancient times, there will be a mass gathering.
Eternal 1: I-it is the Call! It sounds after centuries of silence!
Eternal 2: Days of fear lie before us! I can sense it!
[We see a panel of Eternals expressing surprise and concern at hearing the call for the first time after so many centuries. Then the scene switches to Makarri, Margo, and Ikaris. Ikaris has Sprite over his knee and is in the process of giving him a spanking when they are interrupted by the call:]
Makarri: To the alert, Ikaris! Open your mind to more important channels!
At the end of this scene is a bit of dialogue I think is significant to the larger themes we've been following:
Makarri: ... But that was during a time when Humans and Eternals were still separated by fantasy. Now we must share the same fate.
Margo: Does this mean the Call is meant for me as well?
Ikaris: It means you are welcome to join us and the others. Although its sound is denied to Humans, the Call will be heard by Eternals everywhere – by Eternals like Sersi, who live in Human cities --
Makarri: Let's not forget those like Thena – who take foolish trips! Somehow, the strange fascination that lures her to Kro, the Deviant General, has brought her misfortune in the past. She is with him now, among the Deviants! I wonder how she fares?
The main thrust of the Zuras scene is to demonstrate once again how incomprehensibly far beyond even the Prime Eternal are the minds and powers of the Celestials. There isn't going to be any "ultimate nullifier" there isn't going to be any Reed Richards to "figure out" some of their technology and save the human race (partly because Kirby has larger concerns than making readers feel good about themselves with yet another story about the "indomitable" human spirit overcoming an alien threat, etc, etc).
Then we have the introduction of the concept of the Uni-Mind, which seems to tie in with Thena's earlier statement (the one I'm claiming is the key to understanding the series) that Eternals, Humans, and Deviants must unite if they are to face the Celestials. And sure enough, Makkari and Ikaris indicate to Margo that she and Sam Holden are welcome to join the Eternals in the Uni-Mind ritual. But someone and something's missing: and in case we didn;t notice, Kirby points it out with Makarri's last line: " Let's not forget those like Thena – who take foolish trips! Somehow, the strange fascination that lures her to Kro, the Deviant General, has brought her misfortune in the past. She is with him now, among the Deviants! I wonder how she fares?" The Deviants have not figured into the Eternals' plans for the Uni-Mind ritual, and Thena, the only Eternal who's shown any signs of wanting to deal with them as anything more than a nuisance and a menace, is missing - because she's taken a "foolish trip" into the realm of the Deviants. All this shows the reader that the Eternals as a group are still hampered by their attitude, understandable as it may be, towards their Devinat cousins. Higher consciousness has still not accepted the need to accept the existance of the unconscious, or to explore it. Thus we should anticipate that the Uni-Mind ritual will be at best only a partial success.
Makarri's words about Thena serve, of course as a segue back to Lemuria where the barrier protecting the royal spectators from the arena combatants has disappeared, due indirectly to Eson's actions, and the Reject is about to attack them.
At that moment, in the city beneath the sea, Thena looks squarely into the face of danger ...
And it is a strange, deceptive face. Wreathed in shadows and set on a well-shaped, muscular body, the face of death draws nearer.
We see Thena aiming a calm and level gaze at the Reject as he approaches for the kill. Then an interesting panel in whichthe Deviants spectators surrounding her are all in a state of movement, most of them fleeing in panic, while Kro's body is off-balance as he leans on the rail in one direction, trying to get in front of Thena, and gestures energetically in the opposite direction. In striking contrast to the turmoil of their surrondings, two figures are balanced and still: the Reject, caught by the “camera” in mid-stride as he stalks purposefully towards Thena; and Thena herself, who stands calm and erect as she faces him.
Deviant: Save us from the Reject! He'll kill us all!
Kro: Send for more guards! He's destroyed the others! Hurry!
Thena: Your combat arena fails to be amusing when it begind to involve the spectators, Kro!
Thena: You Deviants have only yourselves to blame for this. The poor thing was trained to kill ... and now he can't stop.
Kro: Your words won't stop him, Thena. I'll try to hold him off.
Kro's brave gesture is never completed. The Reject is upon him with uncanny swiftness ...
[The reject grabs Kro by the face, twisting his head back.]
Suddenly, the arena is illuminated by a powerful blinding flash of energy which hurls the two apart!
The Reject lies shaken and puzzled by this unexpected resistance. His instincts tell him that the female is the cause of what happened. From his very first glimpse of her among the assemblage of Deviants, he has sensed a hidden strength behind her cool self-assurance.
Rage seizes him once more. He attempts to rise, but another burst of power cuts him short ...
The Reject grows livid with anger! A savage snarl escapes his lips! He leaps like a tiger at the female who defies the onslaught of this unbeaten veteran of the arena ...
Then he runs headlong into the strongest of the energy blasts!
Thena: That stunned him for certain. He has yet to learn respect for the daughter of great Zuras – and for all other life as well.
Kro: We Deviants have bred him since childhood for the arena. He cannot change.
Thena: And so you would destroy him. What a cruel fate for one of tender years and fair visage.
Kro: It's his one virtue. He is living proof the Deviant gene has finally stopped producing monstrosities.
Thena: The fault lies not with your monstrosities, Kro, but with yourselves. Were the Deviants to exercise their noble qualities, they would shed the “self-hatred” which plagues them. These noble qualities exist in you, Kro. They bid mightily for expression.
Kro: Perhaps so, Thena. Perhaps, when I reach for your – aproval – I-I find these things you speak of. Let the Space Gods empty this world - - and leave but you and I!
Thena: That's a possibility. The Celestials grow more active. Thus I must take my leave, Kro.
Kro: No, Thena - - stay! We need time! If we part this moment - - we may lose each other for ever.
Thena: Time has been taken from our hands. I have heard the Call, Kro!
Kro: Great Zuras sounds the mental klaxon once more, eh? Vcurse the meddling Celestials! They have caused this!
Thena: No Eternal can fail to answer the Call. I – I must return to Olympia ... If we face trial with the Space Gods, let us do so in ways they must honour!
Karkas: HAHAHAHAH - - ! No instrument was ever made that could find honour among the Deviants! HAHAHAh!!
Thena: Great Zuras!
Kro: Wha - - !? It's the monster called Karkas! I thought him to be slain in combat with the Reject!
Karkas: I suffer from deep wounds, Kro! But I live! I live to laugh at lofty words spun by those who judge others!
Thena steps close to Karkas without fear ...
Thena: You think! You feel! You speak with great sensitivity! I – I find this amazing in one so - - different!
Karkas: Thank you, my Lady - - for not calling me - - monster!
Karkas: Yet, the Devinats will have me slain because I was born of them! A “mutate embarrassment!” An outrage of their standards!
Thena: Is this an issue you plead? What is it that you want of me?
Kro: Careful, Thena!
Karkas: I seek sanctuary, My Lady! A place to spend my life in fruitful pursuits!
Kro: You;ll get what you're fit for, monster! Your place is in the arena - - to fight - - or die!
[But just as Kro speaks these cruel words, we see the Reject has risen and is approaching menacingly from behind. Then, with a single strike, he downs the Deviant general, who then lies senseless on the floor.]
Once more the Reject arises to vent his anger against the Deviant oppressors. Theya re simple to destroy. But this female is not like the others.
Thena: Have a care, foolish youth! Strike out - - to your sorrow!
Reject: You – you sat with them! You sat with those who would wacth m