[The following piece was originally published at MartinLund.me and it is reposted here with the author’s permission.]

Is It a Thing? “Pantheonic Bricolage.”

If you are at all familiar with my work, you know that I have a particular interest in the intersections between comics and religion. I have spent countless hours studying comics in relation to Judaism and Jewishness, on editing a book about Muslim superheroes (the release of which is so close now I can almost taste it!), and I’m currently drafting a book about the recently deceased evangelical comics propagandist Jack T. Chick (about whom I have written here and here).

In addition to this, I’m also working on a guide to comics and world religions with a couple of fellow scholars of the topic. We have hashed out a rough structure and are working separately on our chapters. In addition to writing about the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), I will also be tackling what we have chosen, for now, to call “Archaic Traditions.” (I just might make another “Is it a thing?” post about that label somewhere down the line.)

This means that I am writing about Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and Old Norse religions. And I am loving it to no end. There is so much interesting material to work with here, and I will be sharing thoughts and reviews as things progress.

But for now, I want to bounce a thing off the internet and see what happens.

I want to talk about what I have been calling, for lack of a better term: “pantheonic bricolage.” It sounds complicated, but it really isn’t.

The notion of a pantheon should be known to most readers: it is, in the simplest terms, the collection of gods believed in or recognized by a particular group or religion or country. The Egyptian pantheon’s most famous gods are probably Isis, Oriris, Ra, and Set, but it included many more and its composition changed over the years. The Greek pantheon was centered around the twelve gods of Olympus: Zeus, Hera, Ares, Demeter, Dionysus, Hermes, Athena, Hephaistos, Poseidon, Apollo, Artemis, and Aphrodite. In Old Norse religion, the gods were divided into two groups: the Aesir and the Vanir. The former group included Thor, Odin, Loki, and Baldur; the latter group included Freya, Freyj, and Njord. The Roman pantheon grew as the Empire included new lands and new peoples, whose gods were incorporated into the official religious structure.

The word “bricolage,” in turn, has two different meanings that are both applicable here. First, as an anthropological term, it was coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss to denote a way of myth-making that consists of bringing together whatever symbolic materials that are at hand, often in unusual ways. In cultural studies, on the other hand, the term has come to mean the assembly in new ways of objects and symbols that have a specific meaning in a society and giving them a new one. Neither sense is fully applicable to comics, but the defining characteristic is: bricolage is a way of combining symbolic materials at hand in novel ways. In instances of “pantheonic bricolage,” the symbols combined are gods from across the globe and history for the creation of new myths and narratives.

What I’m trying to get at with this concept is the way many comics create a hodgepodge world in which all religions are seen to be true to some extent, and all their gods real. Anybody who has read superhero comics for a while has seen this happening. I wrote a review about Marvel’s “Chaos War” a while back, in which I commented on how, in it: “The gods [from different religious traditions] co-exist, they know each other, and some have banded together before the story begins, while others do so after. This mix gives the impression of a divine melting pot where all deities are superheated to become alike, so as to better fit the genre in which they appear.” The thing I’m talking about doesn’t just happen in superhero comics, however. It is at the center of Nick Marino and Daniel Arruda Massa’s Holy F*ck, where Jesus and the devil team up to stop Zeus and a bunch of other gods. It’s at the center of God is Dead and of The Wicked + the Divine, and so on, ad near-infinitum. It’s also familiar to readers (or, now, viewers) of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods or the TV show Supernatural or countless other pop culture franchises and texts.

One thing that I’ve noticed, in Holy F*ck and in many other (but not all) examples, is that comics bricoleurs who go on pantheon-raids seem to either: 1) leave the Abrahamic God and Jesus out of the mix; 2) include them with the seeming purpose of ridiculing them; or 3) explicitly affirm their primacy. All three approaches, in the final analysis, have the same effect – they all land in #3, because they turn the Abrahamic into the gold standard, even in the cases where they do so only to mock. In none of the examples I have read so far have I seen a level playing field across the board.

Now, the question is, why is that? Is it because the Abrahamic is still around? Is it because Abrahamic faiths foster a distance between God and humanity that other religions did not? I will be digging into these issues as time allows, but I wanted to put this out there to see if anyone else has had the same experience, has read something that goes against the general trend I’ve been seeing, or has additional examples of comics that present a divine melting pot.

And another question: does the term work? Is there a better one already out there? If you know of one, please let me know! I would hate to reinvent the wheel.