#Or maybe it's a certain Goddess on the JLA?

[popcartoonkabala]

Wonder Woman as axis between history, mytholgy, religion and pop modernity: Cartoons as family ritual and social education pt1 (Malchut sheb Bina)

http://nerdist.com/wonder-woman-mash-up-tribute-beyonce-madonna-britney-spears/ I went to see Wonder Woman with my 9 year old daughter yesterday. I asked her an esoteric question before we went into the theater: What planet, from the big Seven, would she identify Wonder Woman with? Her answer surprised me. She’d grown up on some of the original Marston masterpieces as well as the sweeter parts of Gail Simone’s ultra-dignified yet sweetly hilarious run, alongside alot of represntation in Sholly Fisch’s Super-friends tikkun, and Grant Morrison’s JLA-into-Final-Crisis, and eventually the JLU cartoons, and that fantastic Gail Simone scripted movie.  Co-incidently, she grew up with the Sepher Yetzirah as a fundamental play-text, a song to start summertime pre-school with. A child, 3 or 4 years old, we used Wonder Woman to introduce the liminal moment where history, mythology, religion and pop-media all meet, a mystery that troubled me since I was her age. Because Religion, History, Mythology and Pop-media all serve a certain degree of Same Purpose: Education. Empowerment. Perspective. Wisdom-as-Story. The confusion between the literal and the rhetorical has afflicted the exploitation of these four synonyms, intentionally or unconsciously. Growing up and honestly believing in the depth in stories, moral and conclusion, truths communicated in ways that they could be understood and thus irresistibly and subtly digested.  I also, in late adolescence, was introduced to the Torah of R’ Nachman of Breslov. A radical Chassidic master, probably the greatest one ever according to arguably the majority of religious identified Jews nowadays, amongst radical principles testified and justified by R’ Nachman was the divinity and secrets of the sublime nature of G-d and divine experience and the nature of being buried in, specifically, popular folk stories. At the end of his life, after revealing a series of the most astounding and yet integrated and coherent and accessible pieces of Torah in all Chassidic and Jewish history, at least since the Zohar and honestly more coherent and functional, amidst an epic bout of Tuberculosis from which he would eventually succumb, R’ Nachman stopped giving over Torah in the forms of dissertations or theological treatises or apologetics or explanations almost at all, “realizing” that folk stories would A) say so much more and B) reach so much deeper. So he began his epic telling of thirteen long stories, composed by him as sometimes subtle sometimes startling fairy tales, in the Eastern European Grimm’s sort of model.  Disney is bad, right? Because corporate and archaic introduction of sinister commercial morality? Maybe, BUT: the stories they relate are sold because they are so resonant, and they are resonant because they are so deep. R’Nachman’s very first story was the main fall back bedtime story I would tell my daughter, or really anyone else, when asked for a story: The Lost Princess. The story of the King’s Daughter, who is so loved until the day he father gets angry for one moment so she flees in the night, and disappears from the Kingdom. A Hero is sent to find her, and in the end he does, but we never hear QUITE how until the very last of all of R’Nachman’s stories, The Sixth Beggar. Where R’Nachman’s first story is about the experience of the Hero, on his functionally mystical quest for the precious beloved lost Daughter of the treasured King-of-kings, R’ Nachman’s last story, and several of his intermediary ones, are about the experience of the Princess herself, as she goes on her way, often amoral and always capable. In the very last story, the entire problem of control is adressed, as is the secret of The Sixth in this context, the last day before the end of the problem. The King’s Daughter is identified, in the initial story with the divine presence, and thus, the Sephira of Malchut, Jerusalem, and the Moon. All the yearned for and distant and yet realized and extant, Real Somewhere. This is because the Hero is looking for her, and occasionally being found and communicated with by her, as he searches, forever, not giving up hope despite failing to rescue her repeatedly, for lack of appropriate discipline and consumption-into-slumber at all the wrong moments. This is a simple Apollonian parable, about the importance of not giving up the quest despite finding no one who can help direct. Going beyond and searching infinitely for the true precious. Compare this with her in the last story, the wounded but powerful force now under the auspices of the Prince of Evil, eventually turned against her out of fear of losing her.  I don’t know how much she is Malkhut when Malkhut is the enemy. My daughter was introduced to the idea of Wonder Woman as I sought to find characters who appear in both Jewish Midrashic Tradition, “History” and in modern media, to address and introduce the idea of Characters and Different Versions of how they’re used and expressed. In the Talmud as well as in a range of world traditions of Alexander Romances, both Western and Eastern, stories are featured describing Alexander the Great’s conflict with, and ultimate submission to, and Island of Only Women, successfully using both Power and Wisdom to maintain autonomy. A character functioning in a modern era as an expression of that refuge, coupled with villains who are actual literal Nazis was too tempting for me as a young parent to resist the opportunity to willfully confuse my daughter’s emerging morality with. Nazis are enemies of Women, Jews, likeable Americans, Blacks, Indians etc. A force of aggressive playfulness and exctatic responsibility-as-adventure, the story of Wonder Woman overtly identifies the great world war with the conflict between Mars, the literal God-Of-War with all the repressed Goddesses, starting with Athena and encompassing the once contentious trinity of Athena, Hera and Aphrodite, as if they were all united in fear of and love against the horrors of male aggression, female subjugation and war at all.  So. In light of Goddesses like Athena and Aphrodite, as well as Luna or Artemis being such strong parts of Wonder Woman lore, I was shocked by my daughter Chayleigh’s response: “I think she’s most like Ares.” I asked her why and she said look: We were in the theater, and looked over at one of the many ads hanging on the walls. One was a shot of Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, coming out of a very red background with the word “power” writ large. So much red. Which is what the word for the planet Mars means in most languages. MaAdim. Mancala. Etc. Identified with the color of blood very often, the regional God of War is always a different kind of thing. Because different times and different places relate to their God-of-war differently. More to come about this, and the presence of actual gods-as-charachters in media this week, soon enough!