Wolverine was always my favorite X-Men character. I’ve always gravitated towards “dark” heros who border on moral ambiguity, or who sometimes cross the line: Batman, the Punisher, John Constantine are also good examples. I never much cared for Wolverine as portrayed by X-Men comics though. Weapon X was pretty awesome, but I always liked him best when he was wandering through the hinterlands of Canada as Logan, getting drunk and wearing a flannel shirt.

But then something would happen to set off his mutant instincts, and all hell would break loose; some great mysterious force inside would well up and explode. Which made his membership in the superheroic X-Men team something of a pickle. From an organizational standpoint, a loose cannon is a liability. Cyclops typifies the best of the best as far as being in an institution. When his mutant forces well up from inside him, he’s able to focus and hone them into a controlled blast.

But just what the hell is this mysterious force in them, the mutant element, the x-factor? Thinking so much about gnosticism in pop culture lately, I leapt to the connection of what Philip K. Dick calls the plasmate. Though his context is much more religious, the plasmate (or the Logos or the Holy Spirit) is basically a “magical force” which can sort of break-in and take over humans. Philip K. Dick felt that during his mystical experience of 1974, he was annexed by the plasmate. He wrote in his Exegesis:

The Savior woke me temporarily, & temporarily I remembered my true nature & task, through the saving gnosis, but I must be silent, because of the true, secret, transtemporal early Christians at work, hidden among us as ordinary humans…

Dick theorized, essentially, that he was a part of an invisible underground team of spiritual superheroes, which he termed the Secret Gray-Robed Christians. Each one of these individuals had basically become a “mutant” by having cross-bonded with the plasmate. They were now members of an interspecies symbiosis, they were homoplasmates. In the parallel X-Men tradition, I believe mutants are referred to as homo superior, and are thought (by their supporters) to be the evolutionary successors of mankind.

Interestingly, we also can find reference to classification of people according to their spiritual progress in Gnostic tradition. The Manichaeans had their “Elect” and the Cathars had their Parfait. The Cathars had a sacrament called the Consolamentum in which they believed the Holy Spirit came down and corporally inhabited the body of the believer, elevating him to the spiritually elite. The Valentinians also spoke of a tripartite division of humankind:

According to Valentinus, the Human Race is divided into three Races corresponding to the three sons of Adam: the Hylic, corresponding to Cain; the Psychic, corresponding to Abel; and the Pneumatic, corresponding to Seth. […] The Pneumatic individual possesses the Sperma Pneumatikon, the Seed of Spirit [plasmate?], and the Knowledge of the Plêrôma. The Pneumatic is destined for salvation from the final destruction of the manifested Universe, regardless of his or her behavior. The Hylic dwells in the utter darkness of materialistic ignorance, and is destined for destruction. The Hylic is entirely composed of illusory, transitory matter, and will vanish along with all the other illusions at the restoration of the Plêrôma. The Psychic is situated half way between the Pneumatic and the Hylic, and possesses free will. Salvation for the Psychic is a matter of choice, of right aspiration, and of faith.

Let’s compare this to the X-Men story-system. In it, we have humans, and then we have good and bad mutants. To simplify a little: humans hate and fear mutants, and in some instances seek to wipe them out. The good mutants, lead by Prof. Xavier are trying to peacefully integrate with humans. The bad mutants, lead by Magneto are trying to forcibly overtake humans. You could possibly try to say one of these groups if hylic, one psychic and one pneumatic, after the Valentinian typology. But I don’t think it’s a perfect fit necessarily. I’m more inclined to see the humans as hylic, and the mutants as psychic (some quite literally, I suppose), and the actions of the mutants as determining whether or not they transcend to the level of pneumatic.

If we go back to Dick’s quote above, we hear him talk about how the plasmate came to him, and he understood that he was part of an underground resistance to overthrow the Black Iron Prison, the Empire. But what if when the plasmate came to somebody else, they saw the truth laid out before them, but instead chose to align themselves with the Empire? There’s really nothing to say this couldn’t or doesn’t happen. Instead of just overthrowing the archons, you choose to replace them - Magneto’s choice. Or the parallel to Tolkien’s Ring of Power could be made: that it tempts each person to make that choice - either disavow all authority, or overthrow it and become your own.

Going back to Wolverine, I think he really typifies this struggle. He is a mutant- ie, he has acquired illumination - but he continually battles himself over what he will do with it. He is the ultimate in free-will in that he is indecision - punctuated by violent bursts of intuitive non-rational instinct overtaking him. He’s also overwhelmed by what Philip K. Dick called “anamnesis” or loss of forgetfulness. In Dick’s case, this means he began “remembering” other lives, stretching back to Biblical times. He experienced them overlapping his own. For Wolverine, the equivalent is his experiences with the Weapon-X program, which gave him his adamantium skeleton. It is a past-life in which he was a government-built super-soldier, and flashbacks to it constantly threaten to overtake him. It becomes the riddle he must solve, as we see in the X2 movie. The same could be said for Batman and the Punisher as well - each must cope with powerful “past-life memories” and find the direction their lives will go after their superheroic transformations.

Ultimately, whether the X-Men and superheroes in general are somehow gnostic is, of course, in the eyes of the beholder. For me, my own superheroic transformation process entails an enormous amount of creative interpretation. As Elaine Pagels writes:

Like circles of artists today, gnostics considered original creative invention to be the mark of anyone who becomes spiritually alive. Each one, like students of a painter or writer, was expected to express his own perceptions by revising and transforming what he was taught. Whoever merely repeated his teacher’s words was considered immature. Bishop Irenaeus complains that

“every one of them generates something new every day, according to his ability; for no one is considered initiated among them unless he develops some enormous fictions!”

Welcome to my very own enormous fictions.