Hypnomedia’s Terry O’Brien brings us another fascinating Esoteric Saturday.
Looking over the diverse cast of mesmeric characters in the Golden Age of Comics (which is the period from the start of comics publication through the end of WW II) one is eventually struck by the rampant sexism involved. Practically every villainous hypnotic character is male, from the shady sideshow hypnotists and crafty con artists to the mysterious mystics and malevolent magicians to the sinister scientists and demented doctors. Which should be no surprise, as there were very few female villains at all during that time. The most famous female hero of the time, Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman had several female opponents, but her two hypnotic opponents, one female and one male, both disguised themselves: the female one was Hypnota, the self-described “?agician of the Blue Ray” and member of “Villainy, Incorporated”, who disguised herself as a man using a fake mustache and goatee, while the requisite male hypnotic villain was Dr Psycho, who hypnotized a subservient female spirit medium to evoke and manipulate ectoplasm at his command, including disguising his dwarfish body with a handsome ectoplasmic shell.
There were a few others, of curse, such as the Harlequin, who used a pair of hypnotic glasses as part of her circus clown motif, but she was a much more sympathetic character and eventually reformed, and Baroness von Gunther, another of Wonder Woman’s opponents, who on at least one occasion tried using hypnosis to interrogate a captive office (which ultimately failed, again possibly demonstrating male superiority.) But these were quite the exceptions: it almost seems as though the comics writers just didn’t want to or weren’t allowed to have a female character, hero or villain, who could control the male characters. It was acceptable for Luthor to put Superman under his hypnotic control, but no woman could. Given the sexism of the culture at the time, that seems a likely explanation.
But that all changed at the dawn of the Silver Age of Comics (starting around 1964), which happened to roughly coincide with the dawn of the Women’s Movement. Strong female characters like Saturn Girl of the Legion of Super-Heroes and Sue Storm (the Invisible Girl, later the Invisible Woman) started appearing, so it was fitting that it also see saw the dawn of the first true female hypnotic villainous characters.
And what a dawn it was.
Enter the Enchantress. A minor Asgardian goddess (it has been suggested she was based on Freya, although later suggestions are that she was Idunn) she long lusted after the noble Thor, all the way from when they were young godlings, all to naught, as Thor was either too interested in battling giants or in his battle companion Sif (a purely potentially Platonic relationship) whereas Amora, to use her given name, was more interested in pleasure and the satisfaction of her amorous desires. During that time, she made several suspected and one certain attempt to enthrall Thor but was constantly thwarted, either by Sif or her own misjudgment about Thor himself. That never stopped her, however.
The Enchantress possessed the average abilities of any Asgardian god or goddess, strengths and abilities far above mere mortal men and women, but it was her superior seductive skills and mesmerizing mystic abilities that truly earned her the title of the Enchantress. She was an apt magical pupil of Karnilla, Queen of the Norns (who had her own unrequited passion for another of the Norse gods, Balder) until Karnilla banished her, and she used her wiles and magical ways to seduce and learn from other instructors. She used her supernatural beauty as a weapon as powerful as any repulsor ray or mystic hammer, and employed her mystic learning to devastating ends. She excelled at spells of enchantments and illusions, going so far as enchanting her lips so that any man she kissed (which even included the Vision, an android) into falling deeply in love with her. She had several other mystic charms and enchantments and artifacts in her arsenal, as well.
Visually, the Enchantress lived up to her name and reputation. A tall, green-eyed blonde with long flowing hair and longer legs (there is one memorable image of her, by an artist with demonstratively limited knowledge of human proportion, which showed her with legs twice the size of her body: the image was derisively titled “Stilt Girl”) she is one of the best examples of artist Jack Kirby’s women, and subsequent artists have also done her justice.
The Enchantress first appeared in “Journey into Mystery” (1964) in a plot by Loki: her mission was to seduce Don Blake, Thor’s mortal alter-ego. Her supernatural beauty allowed her to manipulate the mortal populace of New York, but Thor’s own supernatural heritage and noble love for Sif allowed him to resist even her charms. For this and other crimes, the Enchantress and her cohort the Executioner were banished to Earth by an angry Odin (Avengers #7), where they set about contacting like-minded criminal individuals, eventually forming an alliance with Baron Zemo and creating the Masters of Evil. In their first scheme to battle the Avengers, the Enchantress summoned Thor by way of a haunting call, then momentarily mesmerized him with a hypnotic stare and placed him under her control using a powerful potion. Under her control, he saw his fellow Avengers as cruel enemies and started attacking them. Fortunately Iron Man realized Thor was under a hypnotic spell and managed to awaken him with a bright flash of light.
That set the pattern for the Enchantress. Her plots typically involved some scheme to gain control over Thor or some way to further her satisfactions. She would target Thor or any other male hero with her mesmerizing beauty and hypnotic spells, including such heroes as Captain America, the Black Knight and the Vision, if she thought she could gain something from the encounter. However, she was more vain and self-centered as opposed to actually villainous, so very little actual damage was ever done. She avoided confrontations with female heroes, but she did have battles with the Scarlet Witch (once the wife of the Vision) and Clea, the paramour of Doctor Strange.
That pattern began to change when Lorelei, Amora’s younger sister, showed up. Lorelei did what Amora never could, managing to snare Thor’s heart, although she had to use a mystic love potion and the aid of Loki to do so. A jealous Amora helped free Thor and take her vengeance against her sister by causing Lorelei to fall in love with Loki by way of the same mystic potion. When Thor discovered them together in bed, he was so enraged at their duplicity and at how he had been enchanted: that he forced Loki to free him from the mystic love spell by threatening him with certain death and Loki could only comply.
Its hard to say whether that event, the later death of Lorelei, or other factors effected a change in her character, but it did lead to a change in her relationship with Thor. When Odin removed Thor’s powers and banished him to Earth, he and Amora finally had the relationship she desired, living together in New York, but it didn’t last, as Thor suddenly went missing (as did many other heroes at the time.) When Thor later returned to Asgard to return the missing Odin to the throne, then assumed the throne himself, he and Amora continued that relationship. But all that ended when Loki initiated Ragnarok and destroyed Asgard and the Asgardians. Yet gods do not die so easily, so long as mortal men remember them: Thor eventually awoke and returned to the mortal world. When he was manipulated by Loki into awakening the rest of the other Asgardians, it included Amora, who is now hanging with the Young Masters.
Its hard to imagine a character like the Enchantress as a model for the Woman’s Movement, but in many ways she was. Certainly she was vain and self-centered but she was also strong and independent, allying herself and using others but never subservient to them, more often at least their equal if not superior to them. She used her own talents and beauty to make her own way in the world and was totally unapologetic about it. She had the will and the drive to excel at her chosen endeavor, plus the patience to see her through any setback. But underneath her manipulative exterior, she still had a heart. The other man in her life, Skurge, the Executioner, was infatuated with her but rarely assisted her schemes unless they were directly related to Thor or Asgard. For her part, Amora heartlessly strung him along. But when he sacrificed himself in a raid on Hel, she found herself truly grieving for his loss.
In short, Amora is a ground-breaker and a trend-setter, a complicated character and a true enchantress. And a fitting icon of the Women’s Movement that she sprung from.
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