So, picking up right where we left off from the review, we find Hercules wrapping up a fight with the Eternals just in time to make it to the shadowy purpose for which Athena has drug Herc and Amadeus across the country. Namely, Athena’s called a meeting of all Earth’s pantheons to deal with a threat so huge no single group of deities could hold it.
Here is meta-myth in action because this is simply not something that could have happened before literature starting using her wiles on mythology. A vast array of different cultures’ deities show up, bicker and whine, have pissing contests, and generally act exactly like you’d expect a bunch of pagan deities to act toward other pagan deities because it’s just like they treat each other, only moreso. The closest you get to this in the ancient world is syncretism, which often turned out a bit hamfisted because everybody wanted the details to match up but a lot of them just couldn’t. The mess you were left with was drafted into the mythology of the borrowing culture and the rough edges were ignored or sanded off as time went on.
Syncre-whatnow?
Syncretism just means combining different forms of belief or practice and usually in religion or mythology. It’s why Christmas is during what used to be Yule instead of when Christ was actually born. Or why Dionysus’s myths don’t really make all that much sense with the rest of Hellenist mythology. These are just two quick examples, but there are tons throughout the ancient world.
What Marvel as a whole, and Pak and Van Lente in particular, have done here is syncretism on an epic scale. They have created a playground where it’s entirely appropriate for Hercules and Thor to be on the same super team and then go hang out with their Canadian counterpart whose roster includes a Native Canadian shaman and a demigod daughter of the gods of the Great North. Or, more on point, have Athena beseech the pantheons of Earth for champions to go to war with the alien gods whose followers are infiltrating Earth. Oh, and they can include their own gods like Eternals and Celestials into the mix as well, thus both incorporating and transcending the existing mythologies. Whether Stan and Jack meant to do it or not, it leaves us with a brilliant place to play with these ideas.
Even to play with the very idea of syncretism itself.
The War Will Be Syncretized
One of the God Squad (the small cadre of champions who go to war with the Skrull gods) tells the rest of the group what happens to the gods of the various cultures that the Skrulls overthrow. They aren’t forgotten just because all of their followers are dead, Oh no, that would be too easy. Instead, within the shrines to the Skrull gods there are idols to each and every one of the fallen deities from the subjugated and destroyed cultures. The Skrulls have syncretism with every culture they take over if only to bring those deities into a pantheon of the fallen. This syncretism tells the tale the Skrull gods being mightier than all other gods. It’s worse than being forgotten, it’s being remembered as the losers.
But this is super hero comics. And in super hero comics every conflict gets literalized as people in wild outfits punching each other, which is exactly what happens here. It’s so literal that Demogorge of the God Squad tries to eat Sl’gur’t, the chief Skrull goddess. Earth’s gods try to ingest physically the Skrull gods. It’s like a visual exclamation point on the word SYNCRETISM.
But even before that, the God Squad has to fight their way past every deity of every culture the Skrulls have destroyed. Even as they try to avoid syncretism with extreme prejudice, they must face the fact that the Skrulls are really, really good at it. It’s a fight that is simultaneously physical, philosophical, and psychological for the characters and two of those for the readers.
The Mighty Marvel Wrap Up
Pak and Van Lente created a story that is an allegory for syncretism. And it is clever even in its obviousness because super hero comics so literalize their conflict that it takes you a bit to realize that these are one set of gods (who have been sycnretized into a super hero universe) trying to not be syncretized into a lower position by another set of gods.
You could almost miss the underlying, more philosophical stuff because the literalness is so ingrained in the chosen medium that it circles from subtle through unsubtle and back into a sort of super-subtleness. This is one reason I talk about super hero comics more often than any other medium when it comes to meta-myths. I’m not saying it couldn’t be done anywhere else, but I’m certain that nobody else is trying as hard to do it as comics do. And that’s why I love them.
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