After a truly infuriating day at grad school, I'm going to go ahead and write something fun. In this instance, the notes getting pulled from the Ivory Tower are about... Spiderman. And Shakespeare. With a small detour into Carl Jung!
So: your basic Spiderman origin story has a teenage whiz-kid getting bitten by a radioactive spider and somehow getting both great power and great responsibility. Comic Book fans will know this schtick. What interests me, however, is not the origin of a super hero, but the origin of the origin story.
And now for a brief detour to Jung's philosophy on the way myth is translated!
Carl Jung believed that humanity shares a collective unconscious, and a history. It is these two ways that myths, particularly (for this blog) creation myths. A core essence of a creation myth would get passed from people to people, like a massive game of telephone, complete with the hilarious distortions. Except in the case of creation myth telephone, if you miss a detail you fill it in with a cultural value and belief of yours instead of the giant blue doink from Watchmen.
This eventually leads to what we call Universal Archetypes. A Universal Archetype is basically (according to Jung) the collective experiences of humankind, all put into a giant crucible, from which the crap is burned off and the dross comes out as the collective unconscious from which we build archetypes. A good example of this is the Peter Pan complex, which we all know from our various childhoods of either Classic Disney or Spielberg's Hook, depending on how much your parents loved you.
How does this tie into Spiderman and Shakespeare? I'm about to get there.
In Shakespeare's little known Romance (and trust me, I use this word in its loosest possible sense!) "The Winter's Tale", the lunatic king of Sicilia (with whom we shall never go in against when DEATH is on the line!) has a speech in which he... Well, let me let him speak for himself:
There may be in the cup
A spider steep'd, and one may drink; depart,
And yet partake no venom (for his knowledge
Is not infected), but if one present
Th' abhorr'd ingredient to his eye, make known
How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,
With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider.
- Leontes 2.1.39-45
Given 400-ish years of time for this to make its way into the world's collective unconscious, it's clear to see: Leontes drank out of a cup with spidery fluids inside and went off his nut. Peter Parker got bitten by a radioactive spider and got Spidey-sense. Clearly humanity has gotten much nicer in 400 years...At least about spiders driving you insane anyways. Peter Parker gets to defeat bad guys, but Leontes had to watch his wife and son die, plus he had his henchman leave his infant daughter out for the bears. I know which spider I'd rather come into contact with!
Hopefully you enjoyed this set of Notes from the Ivory Tower, next time should be equally as random!
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