DeConick A.D

82
SUPERPOWERS AND MONSTERS
bench-press 1,200 pounds. There is Tony Stark, who, suffering from a
chest injury, engineers for himself an amazing suit that augments his vital
systems, turning him into the invincible Iron Man. Even exploding
nuclear warheads can’t stop him from saving the world.
We might also consider Doctor Strange, whose way to immortality
depends upon shamanic instruction. It all starts after an accident destroys
his surgeon hands. Doctor Strange wants to be healed, so he wanders the
world seeking a cure. He comes across a guru, the Ancient One, who
lives in the Himalayas. There, Doctor Strange is initiated into the mystic
and magical arts, morphing from a selfish surgeon to an immortal wielding
his acquired powers against evil. With his training, Doctor Strange is
transfigured into a being of immense power whose job it is to stave off
the demons and rulers of the dark dimension so that the world will not
be destroyed by them. He is capable of doing just about anything. He
flies through the air, resurrects dead bodies, reverses time, and restores
entire universes.
The Gnostic Hermes is comparable to these modern human superheroes.
The mechanism that underlies his story is like the mechanism
underlying Doctor Strange’s story: shamanic initiation. Through an initiatory
process, the human Hermes ascends through the spheres. Once he
reaches the pinnacle of the world, where the gods live in the skies, Hermes
claims that his mind switched out. His mind left his mortal body and
permanently entered the immortal body of a god, so that “I am not what
I was before” (Corpus Hermeticum I, XIII.3). After this transfiguration,
he descends to earth as a new god, Hermes Trismegistus, the Mind of Rê,
and remains in the world to reveal the secrets of the divine world to other
men and women (figure 3.3). His revelations, according to the Hermetics,
are recorded in the Hermetic literature.
In the eyes of the Hermetics, Hermes Trismegistus was the perfect
candidate for the job of revelation and redemption because he was able to
naturally straddle the human and divine worlds. Because he himself was
once a human and discovered the route to divinity, he is the authority on
initiation and can effortlessly conduct others through their own process
of transfiguration into gods. Because he is the Mind of Rê descended to
earth, he possesses knowledge more expansive than we can imagine, and
he can effortlessly communicate this knowledge to us. He is a Gnostic
superhero caught somewhere between Superman and Doctor Strange.