BATMAN: The Complete Half-Human

Ancient pagan hero and astrological subject.   

 

The superhero comics world is our world. Mirrored. As any cultural product this domain is a replika of something we experience. This something may be trivial, essential or anywhere in between.   Both worlds, the domain of the real life, full of events and processes out of our individual and often group control, and the constructed world of cultural fiction, are filled with individuals struggling for completion.   

In ancient wisdom, coming to us through fairy tales, mostly, and those individuals that learn to understand them, a man becomes more then he was and comes to completion through trials, combat and pain. When he finaly wins he also completes his soul and that means finding his totem animal, his beast counterpart that assists him in his hard moments. The instictual, savage, beast part of his soul that civilization as we know it needs to keep hidden, under foot, tied down, impotent and weak. Ancient celts, greeks, asians had a clear understanding of this: you are not complete only by age, blood or education,  you gain completion through fear, suffering, fighting, will. Through personal victory. You conquer life, and also yourself, through struglle and adversity.  Owain and the lion, the animal companion, Herakles and the lion, in greek mythology, he actually will wear the skin of the beast, like a costume, like “modern” superheroes, are two examples of beast-human heroes. This unknown and hidden part accumulates anger and seeks vengeance if not taken into light and assimilated in ones life journey.  

The Batman, hero of the long now, in modern terms, series of stories of loss, bravery, crime, madness, gothic scenery and nightly battles, found completion in the depths. The depths of his personal history (Cancer, 4th house), in his home's underground (Scorpio, 8th house), in his soul's bottom (Pisces, 12th house). He goes deep under and emerges up high. The symbolistic is obvious: astrologicaly the Scorpio was traditionally the Vulture. The Scorpio goes in the dark and foul, into the unknown and wild, where no one else would, to find wisdom and enlightment, to elevate himself, through fear, suffering and will. The Vulture flies high, dominates both sky and ground, fearless and unbeatable. In the eyes of the hero the world is not perfect and the solutions are never perfect: the continuous struglle is the only plausible answer and way of life. The bat-man is the Scorpio/Vulture and his fight is funded by the family money (Taurus, the oposite sign, of work and monetary gain, of tradition and family). Another aspect of completion is the symbolism concerning these two signs: family/tradition/finance vs. tragedy/ combativity/self discipline.The individual that undergoes those events emerges apparently only half human, but in truth he has risen above, gaining his personality and the knowledge of his totemic animal counterpart.
 

In Cristopher Nolan's Dark Knight movie and also through the main and most important comic tales on the conflict of heroes and villans, we are presented with the battle between the man that knows his soul and purpose, that found and embraced his totem beast, on one part, and the nihilistic, spiritually dilluted man, on the other, that believes completion to be impossible, beting on the deploring state of modern humans as being also the fundamental all time intimate state of human soul. The amorality/imorality of the arch-villain is based on the degraded and transitory state of its contemporaries' souls: they are used and learned to ask and accept authority from the external and once they are left outside of it they go mad, “like animals”, and morals are in thrown to the dumpster.   

The supreme test is stepping out of the central authority and protection. The Mafia is the first to do it, representing an alternate social order, and a challenge to the central authority. The mafia members find their place according to their ability and talents. This is evil from the start in our way of thinking, mainly through Holywood movies/statist propaganda). But the brave individual goes to a solitary, long and painful process of transformation before he Begins.  He puts out an effort to overcome tragedy (his parent's death) and with the help of faithful friends (Alfred, later doubled as Gordon) and after completion he doesn't bow to the formal authority. He embraces justice and the work he has to do for justice, even if that means going lawless.   

The Joker is the exponent of the mad soul that has no more chances of salvation. He gave that up long ago, when the joke became vision and reality ( “Do you know how I got these scars?” means “do you know how I became this that I am now? Do you know what deep wonds make me what I am? “ The face is identity, the scars on face are literally what changed one's self, the marks of transformation). The transformation of the smile into grin, of laughter into sadistic bark/growl, using all additional help (blades) is relevant as an expression of this transformation. The actor playing the Joker in the Dark Knight has several times paired the mad laugh with a  certain hyena like pose, enforcing it's image and impact. An totem animal? Freud considers the origin of human laughter in that teeth showing grin of some predators, like an impending aggression. The lack of humor in comedy he brings into (lack of ) modern justification of evil, through trauma : there is evil, there is death and nothing explains it, nothing justifies it. The clown sees the only solution would be  dissolution into undiferentiated matter: the explosion ( "I love dynamite" ). In vedic astrology the demon Rahu stands for explosions (emotional, sentimental or downright things that blow up, “violently expanding“), obsession, intelligence and insatiability. To make bits and pieces of the thing that you cannot complete or perfect, repairness being impossible, that is his response to spiritual problematics. Bodies and souls blown up. The demon Rahu is a severed head, never to be reunited with Ketu, wich is a headless body. Again the incompletitude, the impossibility of entirety. The Joker  may very well kill himself in this frantic game, and almost does that but what saves him is the adversity he finds in the hero. He steps out from the circle of the central autority (both social and psychological, from the authority of reason, common sense and morals) through tragedy, both in the family and in his carrier and outside finds savagery and murder. This tragedy is accompanied by the soul hole that a comedian's vision of the world creates. Have you ever tried to use jokes as existential explanations? Or have you ever seen how easy can you transform an aphorism into a comercial spot catch phrase? You see the world as a joke, the joke is on you, because you are part of this world. You don't just find the catch, you are cought in it!   

The Jokers killing game is intricate, the same nature as those arguments in favor of nihilistic phylosophies in the 20th/21th century (?) are. Have you noticed? When he explains things the ideas appear pretty logical, clever and very compeling, but when he acts he is all crime games, trickery and murder. This strongly reminds me of socialism/comunism: everybody (what? no way) thinks it is a good idea, but just poorly implemented, and so, people die; try again, more people die! Maybe the joker is Marx paired with a hyena? He is "an agent of chaos" and "chaos is fair" (enter Harvey Dent) but instead he plots deadly tricks and sets loose that animality that lacks it's human (moral) counterpart unto the world. The soul stage that made his enemy powerfull is precisely missing in those who he sets upon the decaying city. To once and for all corrupt Harvey Dent (through trauma and ideology, joker's  model)  he is using a magic formulae (speech) to fit a soul into madness and to reach that part of the soul that is unfulfilled.  Harvey is, after his idealistic but spiritually unrooted actions of justice, hence their short life, the soul stagnating in between his downfall and elevation. He has two faces, he can go either way but doesnt have the moral power to choose: so he lets chaos dictate. If the Joker's soul is nowhere, Harvey is on the thinnest line, and that means no completion, again. Only the acknowledgement of a moral axis, but not knowing it's orientation. Instead of going ahead and trully  become the white knight (Sagittarius, half horse, half man, centaurus, justice and idealism, courage and optimism) he falls to the other end: the duplicity of Gemini (the double, the personal deed and action, the hands as a tool for good or bad deeds, merchantilism – the two faced coin) a duplicity that he once griped and controled (he was called Two Face only by his back), when he had Jupiter (justice) on his side,  but no more.   
 
 

We are having this story and this kind of stories in this day and age because our spiriual life lacks essential answers or entire themes, when it is not missing altogether. Through everything we invent and create  we seek blindly to cure a sickness that we cannot name: our souls crave completion and everything we can do is stall and postpone, because there is no soul guidance. And that is what the magic of cinema and pop-culture probabily is: a simulacra (sim -lack of)  of spiritual life. Nobody seeks elevation when something resembling elevation is experienced through magical and illusory art that engulfes individuals and their lives.