‘Mutants & Mystics’
Rice scholar explores the paranormal and popular culture in new book

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

Jeff Kripal’s latest book boldly goes where few religious studies professors have gone before.

Kripal, the J. Newton Rayzor Professor Religious Studies and chair of the Religious Studies Department, has written about the creators of comic books and science fiction as heirs and producers of modern mystical literature.

The book, “Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics and the Paranormal,” argues that much of the recent popular culture of the United States, from the early pulp fiction magazines of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, through the sci-fi novels of Philip K. Dick, to the most recent Marvel Comics blockbuster movies, is concerned with what has come to be called the paranormal. In the opening chapter, Kripal explains his project as “showing how these modern mythologies can be fruitfully read as cultural transformations of real-life paranormal experiences, and how there is no way to disentangle the very public pop-cultural products from the very private paranormal experiences. And that, I want to suggest, is precisely what makes them fantastic.”

“Mutants and Mystics” is a work of comparative religion set in the modern era. Starting with the first “Superman” comic in 1938, Kripal weaves discussions of modern myth-making, enlightenment experiences and autobiographical accounts of extreme religious experiences into a single, over-arching “super-story.” Describing the Superman character as a sort of proto-shaman or “crashed alien,” the author explores the mythical themes of mutation and alienation in the story of the “man of steel.” These concepts, in turn, link Superman to accounts of alien visitors that proliferated after World War II and continue into the present.

“I think we should be looking very, very closely at these sorts of wild, untamed experiences,” Kripal said in an interview, “as what I think we are looking at is religion in the making before it becomes religion.”

Kripal is adamant that the narratives of these artists and authors contain meaning. “We simply need to stop shaming, humiliating, demonizing and dismissing individuals who come forward with heart-felt descriptions of their own encounters with the impossible,” he said. “We also need to integrate these narratives and experiences into our models of the world, be these advanced in the humanities or the sciences. I am completely convinced that the cultural taboos around these things are really quite weak and basically insecure. … The truth is that the vast majority of thinking individuals are utterly, and rightly, fascinated by these extraordinary events. Why do we have to be so damned boring? Why should we stay in our boxes?

“I want the book to challenge the common assumptions people make about profound, life-changing, mind-blowing mystical experiences — that the really good stuff lies safely in the past, preferably in another language; that these events are always coded in religious or theological terms; that these have nothing to do with psychical phenomena; that UFO or alien frames automatically translate into ‘fraudulent’ or ‘crazy,’ etc.,” Kripal said.

“More positively, I want to suggest that anomalous religious experiences are often closely linked to artistic and literary genius, and that paranormal events often act and look like living narratives or stories. Most simply put, I want to revisit the notion that writing and reading are essentially magical activities.”