Wouter Hanegraaff is going to discuss Alan Moore.
He admits he never cared for comics but Jeff Kripal’s book Mutant & Mystics really opened his eyes.
The best way to hide something is to put it in plain site. And the occult and ancient religion is right in your face when it comes to comic books.
Now he’s interpreting Alan Moore’s Promethea. She’s different, an obvious walking occult symbol with nothing hidden. The comic books are more like an introduction to the Esoterica. Promethea is a celebration of the human imagination, saying that there is no difference between fiction and reality.
Some have called comic books:
- Fiction-based religion.
- Hyper-real Religions
- Invented Religions.
They are about personal experience and there is practices shown in many.
Alan Moore present as Promethea as historical, but she’s invented.
The story starts with a young girl during the days of Alexandria, being persecuted by Christians, meets Hermes Trismegitus, who makes her into a goddess by sending her to an imaginal realm.
Being seized by a story, Wouter says, which certainly sound like what Tolkien spoke about…that Middle Earth was the imaginal realm and not fictional.
Wouter now goes into the elaborate story of Promethea and her many incarnation throughout history, as she comes out of the imaginal realm to assist humanity.
Promethea deals with Kabbalah, the Tarot, Crowley, and basically everything. Again, it’s also a beginners text on occultism. It’s really stunning, pregnant with symbolism and a great plot.
I need to re-read it. The slides from the comic book are amazing, and Wouter deftly breaks apart the occult messages that are even deeper than the obvious ones.
The message is that anyone can find the imaginal world and find their own divinity.
Promethea also deals with the end of the world, but more like a Singularity, a shift in consciousness that might have happened in 2012. How does she do it? She basically turns to the reader of the comic book reader that reality is a long story and we can change history is we awaken.
Wouter compares Promethea to the Matrix, trapped in a bad story of bad dudes. Promethea is different as it isn’t about waking up but staying awake, as all of us know what is right but we are continually drowned by lies. We can create our own world, and it can be good, break away from the machine as Neo.
Wouter basically interprets: Prometheas’ thrust is that you should start your own religion…your artistic spirituality. Or like I say: write your own gospel and live your own myth. That is Promethea.
