Guardians of the Galaxy: A Gnostic Saga

It's probably no coincidence that Hollywood is both dominated by people of Hebrew extraction, and its movies are dominated by Kabbalistic themes. Kabbalism being a Jewish form of Gnosticism, there is much overlap when dissecting titles such The Matrix, or Dark City. What is more subtle is the long, protracted tale of the Guardians trilogy, directed by James Gunn. As a trilogy of films they are my favorite. I much prefer to watch these than Star Wars, which is another Kabbalistic saga. GoG is fun and intelligently written; Gnostic themes may not be obvious until one sees the third installment, but throughout all three films there is a running discussion of metaphor. I think this is our first clue to understanding these films; they are an extended Gnostic metaphor. The 1st film is pulling double duty by introducing a world and a panoply of characters while also setting up the back story for the broader Infinity conflict. The second film acts as an origin story for Star Lord and is Gnostic in its own right, but the third film is a masterpiece of Gnostic exposition, second to none, in my opinion. 

Vol. 3 follows the origin story of Rocket Raccoon, although he has assiduously denied being a Raccoon across the entire MCU at this point. He claims to be a one-off creation, a freak. As he says to Drax in Vol. 1, he didn't ask to be "torn apart and pieced back together, over and over." We are given vague clues as to his origin in the first two films, but vol. 3 provides a full revelation. 

The film opens with Rocket listening to Peter's (Star Lord's) Zune player. He's listening to Radio Head's Creep. The words are important, so you should pay attention to them. In fact, pay very close attention to the dialogue in this film because it hides certain gems that were lost on 99.9 percent of the audience, or more. The song goes: "I'm a freak, I'm a weirdo . . .what the Hell am I doin' here??? I don't belong here, I don't belong here." Rocket truly does not belong in the Guardians. He belongs in the woods of North America, doing whatever raccoons do. Imagine for an instance the psychological strain inherent in elevating a simple mammal to the complexities of human society. Now consider that you are also a mammal forced to deal with the complexities and strain of modernity and human society. Keep that in the back of your head. 

Rocket is still wanted by the Sovereign, a race of genetically perfected humans with a golden hue, for the theft of Amulax batteries. The leader of the Sovereign is a matriarch called the High Priestess, hearkening back to the tarot arcana of the same name. She is the titular mother of a genetically enhanced progeny, Adam, the pinnacle of the Sovereign race. This Adam is capable of flight, can survive the vacuum of space, and can shoot fire from his hands. He is a superman. Adam is sent into the Guardians' base of operations, a space station called know-where. He violently attacks Rocket and mortally wounds him. Nebula likewise delivers a wound to Adam by piercing his torso with a blade. He lives to fly off to safety, but Rocket does not have long to live as his body was altered to contain a kill switch should anyone tamper with him, even to save his life. It is discovered that he was a product of genetic experimentation by a god-like figure known as the High Evolutionary. 

Meanwhile, the High Priestess (Ayesha, the name means "life" and invokes thoughts of Eve), and Adam are seen in a docking bay within the compound of the High Evolutionary. The wounded Adam (pierced through his side) is laying across the lap of Ayesha in the style of Michelangelo's Pieta. The linkage between Christ and Mary, Adam and Eve, are here plainly exhibited, but only briefly, and one would have to know a handful of other data to make these connections. They report to the High Evolutionary that they failed to capture Rocket. We discover that he's wanted for more than theft; the Sovereign are working for the H.E. to capture Rocket for the simple reason that the Sovereign are the creation of the H.E., and he threatens their entire race with death should they fail in their mission to retrieve the raccoon. 

At this point it should be obvious that the High Evolutionary is a Demiurgic figure. He creates and destroys whole peoples, and it is said as an aside, that he is regarded as God in certain portions of the Galaxy. He wears a suit entirely of purple, identifying him as the source of the red/blue duality we have seen in  another post:

In a moment of frustration, the H. E. screams: "There is no god, that's why I stepped in!"

It was this character that created Rocket, quite by accident. He was a part of a batch of butchered and cobbled cyborg animals with enhanced intellects and modified limbs. Rocket was the most intelligent of them all. In a flashback we are shown a math lesson between The H.E. and Rocket; afterwards, a test subject is rolled in and subjected to a forced evolutionary process. The results are impressive but dangerous. The enhanced turtle is wildly violent, and not conducive to H.E.'s vision of a perfect animal society. Keep this in mind, too. H.E. is not interested in modifying human beings. He is chiefly interested in modifying animals to mimic human beings -- to remake them in the image of their god. 

Rocket intuitively understands the failure of this experiment, saying that the chemical induction system lacked proper filtration. He was right. We then see one of the most striking scenes in the whole film: rocket is dragged from his cage and shown the successful results following his filtration fix. H.E. screams "How did you know! -- I MADE YOU!-- HOW DID YOU KNOW!!!!"

The profundity here is intense, not only in its content, but in how so much meaning is packed into a few words in a single scene. The greatest fear of any god is that he will finally create the creature that dethrones him. As Uranus was castrated by Saturn, and Saturn was imprisoned by Zeus, so Zeus will one day be dethroned by a man (Christ?). The H.E. is amazed, and probably not a little afraid that one of his experiments has exceeded him in his own business of accelerated evolution. And how can something greater come from something lesser? Rocket is informed that he will be terminated in the morning and his brain studied. Rocket escapes the following day, but not without personally assaulting the H.E. and killing his guards. In the melee, Rocket's friends are killed as well, even his special otter friend, Lylla. Rocket then steals a spacecraft and flies off into the sky that he had often dreamed about but until this point had never seen. As a type of Adam, Rocket has been expelled from Eden. 

The original sin and tree of knowledge here were Rocket's analytical abilities which exceeded even those of the H.E. While this is not expressly the case in the biblical Eden, there is another story which supports God's anxiety over the intellect of his own creation: the story of Babel. Elohim descends on the camp of mankind in Shinar to discover a tower stretching to heaven. The God[s] says to himself, let us confound their language, for if they are left alone nothing will be impossible for them." These are not the words of a transcendent and impassible God -- these are the words of minor deities concerned for their own overthrow. Mankind is scattered from Babel, and Rocket is sent into galactic exile for much the same reason. 

Peter and the gang secure information about Rocket's origin and a potential fix during an armed infiltration of one of the High Evolutionary's subsidiaries: Orgo Corp. They learn that a bypass code can be obtained from one of H.E.'s recorders, permitting Rocket to be healed. The recorders are white clad bio-technicians who are themselves modified to record everything seen and heard in their dealings with the H.E. The male recorder is Theel, and the female is Vim. These represent dualistic emanations from the demiurge. Their polarity is reversed according to the intuitive order of things in the Kabbalistic way: a soft and malleable male juxtaposed against a severe and limiting female.  The male, Theel, is quite soft and feminine, with a weak voice and cowardly disposition. His name, Theel, has little meaning outside of a place-name, but Theel could be understood as The-El, i.e. God on the right pillar in Chesed. Vim, the female, has hard features, a rough voice, and even possesses the strength to oppose H.E. directly with force. Vim is Latin for force or strength, and represents the limiting aspect of Binah receiving the emanation, or "force" directly from Chokmah. Below, these characters are depicted in their appropriate relationships. 

The Data that Peter needs is contained in the device fixed to the head of Theel. To retrieve this, Peter takes his ship with a dying Rocket and the rest of the crew to Counter Earth, a recreation of our world circa late 80's. Peter lands in the suburbs of New York City after flying by a statue in New York harbor showing the High Evolutionary cradling a monkey in one arm, with his other stretched over his head, apparently holding a torch, but this is mostly hidden. There is an interesting absence of modified simians in H.E.'s menagerie of specimens. I think this is likely because a hyper evolved chimp would look exactly like us. There is a message in such absence. The movie is silently screaming at us to consider ourselves in this process and where we might fit.

The Guardians are not well received. They are treated as hostile and invading aliens, but I think there could be more to this. Margaret Barker highlights many times in her books the fact that in most visions and parables, man is shown analogically as an animal, and angels are revealed as men. Consider the analogy of sheep and goats. Humans are depicted as animals. And also the parable of the tares and wheat, man is the fruit of the field, but the angels are the human reapers who will gather in the harvest and burn the weeds. In Guardians vol. 3, the team of humanoids arrive on a world of anthropomorphic animals. If we follow the same pattern of interpretation, the Guardians are playing the part of angels. In spite of the initial shock, Peter is able to borrow a car from a family of bat-people and drives to the headquarters of H.E. The High Evolutionary lives and works in a large compound shaped like a pyramid, again alluding to the demiurgic nature of his character and work. Only Peter and Groot are permitted inside.

A brief audience is held with H.E. before Groot un-holsters several hidden firearms and, with Peter, proceed to kill every guard in the room, leaving only Recorder Theel alive. Before H.E. and Vim can intervene, Peter throws himself and Theel out of the high rise. Groot follows close behind and all three hold on to each other as they fall. Groot creates a wind break which slows Peter's fall and Peter uses Theel as a cushion for the landing. Theel is killed on impact and his recording device is severed from his head. 

It then becomes necessary for the Guardians to escape what has become an exploding planet. Counter-Earth was only an experiment, a proof of concept. All of its life and potential is now being engulfed in a  cataclysm. It's the end of the world in the style of the Apocalypse. Flames and explosions rip the planet apart while H.E.'s building complex rises into the sky, revealing itself as a large space craft. Drax, Nebula, and Mantis, having been stranded earlier, are forced to board H.E.'s ship to survive, while Peter, Groot and Gomorrah make their escape on their ship with Rocket aboard.

And this is where the film makes its most profound statements regarding our origins and our relationship to God and his mediating archons. Rocket begins to code on the table as Peter arrives with the necessary code. During what appears to be his final moments he's reunited with his old compatriots from batch 89, the friends he couldn't save on the say of his escape. He speaks especially to Lylla who tells him that they've been enjoying the "sky" this whole time, that it's beautiful and goes on forever. She tells Rocket that this story has been about him all along; he just didn't know it. Rocket responds: "They made us for nothing! Just stupid experiments to be thrown away." Lylla says: "There are the hands that made us, and then there are the hands that guide the hands." 

Perhaps truer words were never spoken as a theological statement of our origins. As I see it, Rocket is not a raccoon, and H.E., Theel and Vim are not humans. Just as Hebrew allegory behaves, this metaphor turns humans into animals and angels into men. Rocket is you. Rocket is me. We are freaks. We don't belong here. Original sin is our bestial proclivities. We have the mind of God wrapped in the body of an ape. Perhaps you feel as I do that we are someone's stupid experiment that may be disposed of at any minute. 

Lylla speaks of another set of hands. A set of hands of a higher order that guide the archonic forces to shape us into the image of God. We, like Rocket, have the power to think thoughts that have never before been thought. We can even best our immediate creators at times, which is why they fear and hate us. H.E. expressed the greatest disappointment that the only creation of his, in all the centuries of their experimentation, capable of original thought was a raccoon "cobbled together by fat fingered children." We possess the logos, and we are, in spite of everything, the very image of god in a way that the archons can never be. The story is about us, we just never knew it. 

Rocket is finally revived and faces off against the H.E. on his ship, the Arete, a Greek word meaning "the pursuit of excellence," a perfect description of the goals of the demiurge. The ship in full view is a cube decked with pyramidal protuberances, a combination of the triangle, denoting three dimensional space, the canvas of the archons, and the cube, a symbol of Saturnian power. The ship is heavily damaged in the fighting and Vim attempts a mutiny. It is unsuccessful. As Rocket attempts to free the aniaml test subjects within the bowels of the Arete, he is confronted by the High Evolutionary one last time. By a combined effort the guardians subdue him and it is revealed that he's been wearing a mask since his previous battle with Rocket many years ago. His face is hideously disfigured.

This reminds me of a passage in Moby Dick I read some time ago. The maddened Ahab has turned Platonic in his thinking. He tells Starbuck, "All the world is as a paste board mask; and whether it be the white wale agent or the white whale principle, I will strike through that mask!" Ahab knew he was at war with god, not a whale. The whale was just a mask that the unjust god wore in this world. I do not believe it is without reference to Melville that when the High Evolutionary is defeated it is revealed that Rocket struck through the mask. 

The climax reveals a type of deluge event where all the animals make their escape from the Arete onto the space station Know-where, which becomes an impromptu ark. Peter, in an effort to save his mp3 player, becomes stranded in the void between the ships. He dies, in a sense, and must be revived by the life giving touch of the messianic Adam in a clear nod to the Sistine Chapel.

This too is Gnostic metaphor as the Christ figure, although descending directly from the demiurge, does not consider him to be the Father. The High Evolutionary was something which must be defeated rather than something which must be worshiped. If there is a Divine Father, it is the transcendent, guiding hands spoken of by Lylla.

So, there it is. A complete Kabbalo-gnostic theology laid out for the world to see, if they have eyes to see. We are the experiments of the archons who control earth with no regard for the transcendent father. Yet, in spite of themselves, the archons make the very image of God that will defeat them in the end, guided by the hand of the god whose existence they deny. We truly don't belong here, but we are no accident.

-SJ