SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF THE SUN GOD IN JOHN WYNDHAM's NOVEL THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS
In John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos,
which was published in 1957 and filmed as The
Village of the Damned in 1960, all the people and animals in the fictitious
village of Midwich lose consciousness for a day and all the women of
childbearing age become pregnant. This is all brought about by a UFO that
landed in Midwich and flew away before the general state of unconsciousness had
worn off. What exactly did the UFO look like? What kind of a crew did it have?
Did it have one or several passengers? How were the people and animals put to
sleep? How did the women get pregnant? By insemination? By mysterious rays? The
reader is not given the answers to any of these questions, so that he can let
his imagination fill in all the gaps. However, some conclusions about the
mysterious extraterrestrial visitor or visitors can be drawn through the
children born in Midwich as a result of this event, since children inherit
properties from their progenitors.
Their ability to learn and to impose their will on animals or humans through
telepathy, for example, is superhuman, which can only be explained by their
extraterrestrial origin. And then there are their eyes and other, less
distinctive features. At the same time, they are human children, not just
physically, but also emotionally: their childish, spontaneous behaviour and
their preference for peppermint sweets makes them seem more human and less
demonic:
Before
I could open the car door to get out, the front door of the house was pulled
violently back, and a dozen or more of the Children ran excitedly down the
steps with a scattered chorus of 'Hullo, Mr Zellaby.' They had the rear doors
open in a moment, and two of the boys began to hand things out for the others
to carry. Two girls dashed back up the steps with the microphone, and the
roller screen, another pounced with a cry of triumph on the jar of bullseyes,
and hurried after them.
…
There was nothing odd or mysterious about the Children now unless it was the
suggestion of musical-comedy chorus work given by their similarity.
Thus they have both human and superhuman qualities, an
aspect that also corresponds to their origins: they have human mothers and
their father (or fathers) is a being that is superior to humans. They are,
therefore, in the tradition of ancient mythical figures such as Hercules, Asclepius,
Aeneas or Romulus and Remus, who are called heroes or demigods, since one
parent is often a human being and the other parent, usually the father, a
deity. Thus, Hercules' father is the supreme god Zeus, his mother Alcmene, wife
of Amphitryon. The father of Asclepius is Apollo, his mother the princess Coronis.
Aeneas' father is the Trojan prince Anchises, his mother Aphrodite, the goddess
of love. The father of Romulus and Remus is Mars, the god of war, their mother
the vestal virgin Rhea Silvia. Such demigods become benefactors, such as
Hercules, who frees mankind from monsters, or Asclepius, who, as the god of
healing, cures the sick, or they become leaders, such as Aeneas, who led the
Trojans who survived the fall of Troy to a new existence in a promised land,
Italy, or founders such as Romulus and Remus, who founded Rome. From the
perspective of comparative religious studies, Jesus also belongs to these ranks
of these demigods or heroes, because his mother Mary is a mortal, his father
(a) God. He, too, is destined for higher things: to be the Messiah. He reveals
his superhuman power even as a child, just like the alien offspring in Midwich,
whereby he not only arouses the admiration of the other people living in his
village, but also their fear or even hatred –
as reported in the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Particularly
in the following episodes, the divine child brings to mind his successors in
Midwich: Jesus kills a fellow human being whom he feels threatened by (Chapter
4), just like the golden-eyed children do with Jim Pawle, who accidentally hits
one of them while driving his car:
After
that again he went through the village, and a child ran and dashed against his
shoulder. And Jesus was provoked and said unto him: Thou shalt not finish thy
course (lit. go all thy way). And
immediately he fell down and died. (1)
Even the relatives of the dead fall victim to the boy
as they take action against him. In The Infancy Gospel, the parents of
the murder victim are struck blind by the infant Jesus because they complain to
his father Joseph; in The Midwich Cuckoos, it is David, the brother of
Jim, who is punished. The children force him to commit suicide when he tries to
shoot one of them in retaliation (Chapter 4-5):
And
the parents of him that was dead came unto Joseph, and blamed him, saying: Thou
that hast such a child canst not dwell with us in the village: or do thou teach
him to bless and not to curse: for he slayeth our children.
And Joseph called the young child apart and admonished him, saying: I know that
these thy words are not thine: nevertheless for thy sake I will hold my peace:
but they shall bear their punishment. And straightway they that accused him
were smitten with blindness. And they that saw it were sore afraid …
When the teacher Zacchaeus wants to teach the Infant
Jesus, he is afraid of his superhuman intelligence, so that he wants to get rid
of him, which is also true of Zellaby, an educated inhabitant of Midwich, who
teaches the golden-eyed children and immediately considers it necessary to get
rid of them (Chapter 7):
Now
when Zacchaeus the teacher heard such and so many allegories of the first letter
spoken by the young child, he was perplexed at his answer and his instruction
being so great, and said to them that were there: Woe is me, wretch that I am,
I am confounded: I have brought shame to myself by drawing to me this young
child. Take him away, therefore I beseech thee, my brother Joseph: I cannot
endure the severity of his look, I cannot once make clear my (or his) word.
This young child is not earthly born: this is one that can tame even fire…
In Chapter 14, the Infant Jesus makes an adult who
slapped him lose consciousness, and this is reminiscent of the fate of
Midwich's Chief Constable, who interrogates one of the golden-eyed boys,
insulting and threatening him in order to intimidate him. The child puts him
into a convulsive seizure, taking this figure of respect down a peg or two:
But
when Joseph saw the understanding of the child, and his age, that it was coming
to the full, he thought with himself again that he should not be ignorant of
letters; and he took him and delivered him to another teacher. And the teacher
said unto Joseph: First will I teach him the Greek letters, and after that the
Hebrew. For the teacher knew the skill of the child and was afraid of him:
notwithstanding he wrote the alphabet and Jesus pondered thereon a long time
and answered him not. And Jesus said to him: If thou be indeed a teacher and if
thou knowest letters well, tell me the power of the Alpha and then will I tell
thee the power of the Beta. And the teacher was provoked and smote him on the
head. And the young child was hurt and cursed him, and straightway he fainted
and fell to the ground on his face. And the child returned unto the house of
Joseph: and Joseph was grieved and commanded his mother, saying: Let him not
forth without the door, for all they die that provoke him to wrath.
There are other things that speak for the fact that
the Midwich children are modern Infant Jesuses, future messiahs. A messiah,
from whom people learn and by whom they let themselves be guided, who is thus a
spiritual and often a political authority, isn't enthusiastically welcomed by
everyone. Many see in him a rival who threatens their power and wish to
eliminate him – as was the case with Herod in the New Testament, whom the Romans appointed governor in Galilee. He therefore
organised a campaign of murder that affected all new-born boys in Bethlehem,
the so-called infanticide of Herod, which in the English language is better
known as the Massacre of the Innocents. Thus, in the novel, too, they
consider a measure to eliminate the extra-terrestrial children: they want to
bomb Midwich. But because harmless English people would also be killed, this
plan is dismissed as a "massacre of innocents" – it is a biblical
allusion that foretells the fate intended for children and interprets it as a
repetition of Herod's campaign of murder: the divine children, whom the already
angered villagers wish to lynch, are blown up at the end of the novel.
The fact that the children of Midwich are modern Infant Jesuses is also
indicated by the term "parthenogenesis," that crops up in the novel
in a conversation between two educated inhabitants of Midwich, who try to
explain the nature of this miraculous procreation. Parthenogenesis naturally
puts one in mind of the biblical Maria, who became the mother of the Son of
God, but remained a virgin.
If the children of Midwich are modern Infant Jesuses,
their creator must be the Christian God. From the point of view of religious
history, God the Father of the Christian religion is the successor of the
ancient male gods of heaven, such as Zeus or Jupiter, who are pitted against
the lower deities of the earth, who are female and motherly. The Greeks call
Zeus Megas Aither "vast sky" (2). The kingdom of heaven includes the elemental forces above the earth, the
sun, its light and its warmth, the wind and rain, which tend to grow into a
storm, and, of course, thunderstorms with thunder and lightning, powers of
nature worshiped and feared as male deities that act on and fertilise Mother
Earth.
In many religions, the sun is the supreme god who, with his light and warmth,
creates new life on earth. Zeus, too, before assuming human form, was the sun
and bringer of daylight on his original barbaric-cum-natural-religious level,
whereby the etymological relationship of his name (Zeus < *Djeus) reminds
one of the Latin word dies meaning
"day". As such, he was a common god of the Indo-Europeans. The Romans
called him Jupiter. The Roman scholar Macrobius reports in his Saturnalia (1:15):
For
since we take Jupiter to be the author of light – and that is, why the
Salii in their chants sing of him as “Bringer of the Light” (Lucetius) and the
Cretians call him “The Day” (Dia) – the Romans also address him as “Father of
the Day” (Diespiter). (3)
Whoever worships the sun
worships "in the power of the sun the great generative power of nature" (4) – as
did, for example, Sitting Bull, a chief of the Sioux:
Behold,
my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of
the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love! Every seed is
awakened, and all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too
have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors,
the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land.
A religion in which nature is revered, as by Sitting
Bull, is called a natural religion. It was the religion of primitive people
still unspoilt by the civilisation, of people whom we today call children of
nature: Indians and black Africans before the arrival of the white colonisers,
or the ancient Teutons with their cult of trees, which the Christianity brought
by the civilised Romans battled against and overcame – though not completely: a
remnant of the old Germanic natural religion lives on, for example, in the
nature conservation of the GREENS or in the cult around Hambach forest. If one
speaks today of natural religion, it is often accompanied by condescension, a
derogatory view of something primitive, something that has been overcome. For
modern Western people no longer adore nature, but dominate it and exploit it.
To overcome the natural
religion it is necessary that the natural power of the sun becomes a personal
deity, a divine being with human or human-like form: with the Greeks this took
the form of Zeus, with the Romans Jupiter, a potent mature man of an age to be
the father of a family. Many believers also imagine the Christian God in this
way. For when people rise above nature, that is to say when they become
"civilized", the same thing occurs with their religious ideas and the
sun god loses his qualities as a force of nature. However, this did not succeed
completely, not even in Christianity. Traces have survived. This can be seen,
for example, in paintings by old masters depicting how Mary is fertilized by a
ray of sunlight:
It is the natural power of the
sun that impregnates Mary with a phallic ray. Mary's body is also nature like
Mother Earth, on which the sun, with its light and warmth, has a life-fostering
effect. Christ is the Son of the Sun God and also has characteristics that
reveal his descent from his heavenly creator. Take, for example, the light that
emanates from him: "His face shone like the sun" (Matthew 17:2), when
he showed himself to chosen disciples in transfigured form.
One can also call the faces of
the children in Wyndham's novel transfigured. With the "curious lucency of
the skin", they stand out from the mass of their earthly fellow men
through their divine descent. Their ancestry, however, shows through most
strikingly in their golden eyes, in their "quality of glowing gold",
which C.G. Jung also notes and thus calls them "children of the sun"(5). What does this mean for the
interpretation of the novel? TheMidwich Cuckoos forms part of the genre
of invasion literature that reflects
the fear of the British colonial rulers that the tables will be turned and
their country will be invaded by invaders as punishment, just as they had once
invaded the countries they colonized.
One example of this is H.G.
Wells' dystopian novel The War of the
Worlds. The aliens from Mars who occupy Britain represent invaders from the
Third World who are taking revenge for their colonization by the imperialist
metropolis. Such fantasies, called reverse colonization by literary scholars (6),
stem from the guilt of the Western colonial powers. The colonization of a country
always includes the rape and sexual exploitation of its girls and young women,
so what is done to the women of Midwich is an act of reverse colonization.
Since this act is performed by an alien who reminds us of the Christian God of
Heaven, it can be seen as a punishment imposed by God for colonial crimes, a
punishment in the form of unloved, even feared, children of the occupation. But
what sense does it make that the children who emerge from this act are not only
children of the occupation or even threatening invaders, such as the aliens in The War of the Worlds, but at the same
time children of God, messiahs from whom the British can learn and be guided? Maybe it can be explained like
this: in his subconscious, Wyndham believed that the over-civilized Western
colonial power that was Great Britain, made decadent by its wealth, benefited
from an injection of new blood from another world, for example from the Third
World, which was still ailing a bit on account of civilization, just as the
ageing, declining Roman civilization benefited from an injection of fresh blood
from the Germanic immigrants in the course of the migration of peoples. However, the conditions for
the coexistence of old and new immigrants have been renegotiated, as Aydan
Özoguz, Commissioner for Immigration, Refugees and Integration at the rank of
Minister of State, demanded on behalf of Angela Merkel's government for Germany
as a country of immigration. The fact that Wyndham's
subconscious also sees the dangerous semi-aliens as saviours can be seen as a
(fictitious) prelude to the refugee cult prevailing among German do-gooders
today. Even then, in 1957, just like the Green politician Katrin Göring-Eckardt
rejoiced in 2015, people were bestowed upon a country of the West.
1)
All
the quotations from The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (Greek Text A) have
been translated by Montague Rhodes James.
2)
Sophocles:
Oedipus at Colonus 1471. Translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (The Loeb
Classical Library)
3)
Macrobius:
The Saturnalia. Translated with Introduction and Notes by Percival
Vaughan Davies. New York/London 1969
4)
Carl
Gustav Jung: Symbols of Transformation § 135
5)
C.G. Jung: Flying
Saucers. A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (= The Collected Works of
C.G. Jung 10: 432-433):
“The peculiar parthenogenesis and the golden eyes denote kinship with the sun
and characterize the children as divine progeny. Their fathers seem to have
been angels of the annunciation who had come down from a ‘supracelestial place’
to take care of the stupidity and backwardness of the Homo sapiens.”
6)
Cf. Stephen D. Arata: The Occidental Tourist: “Dracula” and the Anxiety of Reverse
Colonization. In: Victorian Studies Vol. 33 No. 4 (summer 1990)
