Curious Christian

Just a few stray thoughts: Have you even noticed how many mythological messiahs are hybrids?

I’m not just thinking of the demigods of ancient mythology like Hercules, Orpheus and Achilles. What I’m primarily focusing on are the half-humans and bi-cultural heroes from contemporary mythology. Here are a few of my favorites:

There are the science fiction hybrids

• Terminator – The hero of the second movie is a cyborg who saves the future savior
• The Dune series – The Messiah, Paul Maud’Dib, is a water world boy who comes as desert savior. The God-Emperor, Leto, is a half-sandworm who leads humanity down the Golden Path.
• The Hyperion cantos – The savior of humanity, Aenea, is the child of human and AI parents
• Superman – An alien raised by human foster parents
• Stranger in a Strange Land – The human hero was raised by Martians
• Taken – In this new TV series the child of promise, Allie, is a half-alien human

Then there are the fantasy hybrids

• Lord of the Rings – Aragorn, the coming king, is an Elf-friend steeped in Elf culture
• Harry Potter – The hero is a half-blood wizard

Then there are the horror hybrids

• Blade – The hero is a half-vampire
• Hell Boy (not really a favorite but I’ll mention anyway) – The hero is a demon raised by humans
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer – The heroine’s lover and sometimes savior, Angel, is a redeemed vampire with a human soul

And to take a more historical angle, think of bi-cultural heros such as Laurence of Arabia and Ghandi. Remember Ghandi spent time being educated in England before he led India to independence from England.

As archetypes go, hybrid heroes are the ones who stand between worlds and offer hope of uniting them, or alternately, defeating the alien other.

The Blade character is the one that prompted these thoughts last night given I was at the Blue Moon Festival. Here I was, sitting eating dinner in Enmore and thinking over my previous post on Pop Culture and New Religions when this Goth guy walked in dressed full on like Blade, chest armor and all!

Further reflection: the hybrid hero is often the tortured hero.

Much of the street theatrics at last night’s Blue Moon Festival seemed to have an element hero-worship to me. Idolization of tortured icons. Think about it. There’s an obvious link to Jesus in all this. But is Christian community as we experience it more like a torturing community than tortured community? If you are one who stands between worlds and the community is locked into one world it can sometimes feel that way. But the resurrected Christ stood between worlds.

If we are the body of Christ should that not be true of us also? If Christianity is ever to regain heroic status in popular consciousness (as it once had) we must relearn (as a community) to stand between worlds: to live as hybrids.

I’ll leave you with a quote:

Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

Joseph Campbell,

The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949