In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [10]
Consider the oldest poem we know anything about, the Mesopotamian cycle sometimes called “Inanna’s Journey to Hell.” In it, the life-goddess Inanna descends to the Underworld to confront her sister, the goddess of death, Ereshkigal. To defend herself during the trip, Inanna puts on and carries an astonishing number of talismanic and powerful objects: the special sandals, the seven insignia, the desert crown, a queenly wig, a rod, a number of gems, two pectorals, a golden ring, some face makeup, and a robe of sovereignty. But the laws of the Underworld say that she must give up each one—you couldn’t take it with you, even then—and when all her protective charms are gone, she’s naked; whereupon she dies and is hung up on a spike. For every Achilles there’s a heel, a condition of vulnerability; for every Superman there’s a kryptonite, a force that negates special powers.
The Mesopotamian story does have a somewhat happy outcome. Inanna is the goddess of life and reproduction, so it would be a catastrophe for her to remain in the land of the dead. But no mortal can be sent to the Underworld to resurrect her with the Water of Life, since any mortal who goes there will die; so the god Enkil makes two non-human beings from the dirt beneath his fingernails and sends them down instead, thus giving us—we might say—the ancestors of Golems, and statues that come to life, and, ultimately, robots. We are not told that on her journey back to the upper world Inanna regains all her regalia, but it must have been so because later in the poem she is again wearing her crown of authority.
How much older than Mesopotamia is the connection between special clothing and talismans and heightened powers? Quite a lot older. Some of the very few human figures in Paleolithic cave paintings are in fact semi-human: they are thought to be shamans who by putting on the skins and horns of animals become part animal themselves, and thus able to join the animals in thought, to determine their whereabouts, and perhaps to ask them to make a gift of their bodies to the hungry tribe.
It’s the outfit and the ritual associated with it that embodies the shamanistic power. The shamans of hunter-gatherers lived with the community, not in a palace or temple. Most of the time they went about their daily lives like everyone else, but when occasion required it they transformed themselves into their magic alter egos in order to serve the community. There’s an Australian Aboriginal film called Ten Canoes, set in pre-contact days, in which we can see this transformation taking place. The shaman’s powers are needed; he steps behind some bushes and emerges in full body paint, ready for magic. He is two people: his ordinary self and his other self, powerful in extraordinary ways, and able to travel between the seen and the unseen. His special decoration, just like Captain Marvel’s, is a signal to the watchers that he is in his altered state.
THE DOUBLE IDENTITY
The doubleness of superheroes thus has a very long ancestry. But more immediate ancestors abound in the period just preceding the advent of the comic book.
In nineteenth-century fiction, doubles are plentiful, as they are, indeed, in nineteenth-century opera and ballet—think of the white and black