Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

What drives humanity to place their hopes in gods and messianic figures? And why aren’t any of them female?

OK, it is my understanding that many people who would classify themselves as Wiccans or Pagans do claim to worship a ‘goddess’, but I’m talking about most ‘modern’ forms of religious belief, particularly Western ones. Almost universally, the gender of the deity in question is male; Our Father, who art in Heaven, etc. In Christian belief structures, we have the messiah Jesus of Nazareth, who was to become or perhaps was vested at birth with divinity, chosen as the Son of God. Why not the daughter?

Several years ago, I read an interesting story in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction where the author pondered exactly that question, and came up with an interesting tale to tell as a result. In the revisited version of the virgin birth, God’s original intention was to use it as proof of Mary’s divinity, not that of her son, Jesus. Problem was, the times being what they were, folks didn’t ken to the concept of female messiahs, so obviously the world’s new guiding light had to be the progeny and not the parent. According to the story, the Lord wasn’t really very happy about this, but as there appeared to be zero chance of persuading the populace to embrace a new concept, the future role of saviour was reluctantly transferred from Mother to Son. The rest is history, or perhaps just another slightly less imaginative myth.

Moving forward about 2000 years, the contemporary knowledge collected in the biological sciences pretty much casts doubt on the idea of Eve being created by cloning Adam’s rib, since we now know for a fact that at an early embryonic level, all humans are initially created female. If, and only if certain genetic ‘switches’ get thrown does the fetus develop into a male child. In addition, there is the somewhat obvious fact, even going back tens of thousands of years B.C., that women give actual birth to new life, men don’t. Yes, we males contribute genetic diversity, which from a long-term survival-of-the-species standpoint is pretty darn useful, but the basic biological mechanism itself is already 99% present in the bearers of the X-chromosome. So how come we don’t routinely credit the genuinely fertile sex with spiritual birth-giving as well?

Debarking from this point, I could go into a long, detailed essay about feminism and patriarchy and the historical roles played in human societies by men and women since we descended from the treetops, became hunter/gatherers, learned to speak and write, and later rendered godly theorems onto physical substances for passing-on to the next generation, but I won’t. Instead, I’m going to talk about Buffy Anne Summers’ mythologically ultimate destiny as a god(dess), and why she will make a good one. At the same time, I’ll obtain an opportunity to do a little theological deconstructing as to what humans look for in messianic figures, and how the desirable qualities for same have changed over time.

Humans are a social animal; we like to hang out with one another, and most of us prefer to adhere to a vertically structured hierarchy where we find our place/space either somewhere inside the pack, or else gravitate towards the top of it. The majority of people, given the opportunity to do so freely, choose the social position they are most internally comfortable with. Some choose to lead, some choose to follow. Since the hierarchy typically has a multitude of levels, you will have followers following other followers, the leadership thing being entirely relative until you finally reach either top or bottom.

Persons who believe in a creator who is directly responsible for the appearance of life in the cosmos, or at least here on our familiar little ball of stone, water and sky, quite logically presume that said creator is at the top of the organizational ladder. It also logically follows that pronouncements from said creator regarding the proper care and feeding of the created should be adhered to; after all, the engineer should know the specific requirements of /for his/her/its design. One slight problem with this logic is that the engineer seemed intent on creating a universe that allows for (A) the existence of randomness and chaos and (B) heuristically programmed living beings enabled with the free will to self-alter their programming. These two choices, the physical reality of which I submit as being self-evident based on historical experience, can provide fertile ground for occasional failures to communicate between designer and designed. (Whether the designer has been left either upset, amused or merely befuddled at the final product is not my place to guess).

On the purely evolutionary side, all things started as chaos, and as external energy was put into the system, simple forms of life came into being, over aeons ending up as us. In which case, we are still social animals who have arranged ourselves into an elaborate top-to-bottom structure, as previously mentioned, except the mechanism self-evolved as did the origin itself. In this scenario, if a creator/god does not exist, we then need to make one to provide a source for all the answers that the top members of the hierarchical pack haven’t been able to suss out so far.

While I personally lean towards the latter explanation, I try to be flexible in my thinking. The philosopher William James, who considered himself to be a pragmatist when it came to the subject of religion, noted that if the beliefs of the believer resulted in a positive improvement in the quality of his/her life or the society s/he lives in, then the nature of the deity in question was not important, only the belief structure itself. Or, put another way, if a need exists and personal belief in a higher power meets that need, then it makes sense for humans to structure their mythology to support the existence of gods or messianic figures.

In that the theme just described is one which multitudes of artists and writers return to time and again for inspiration, it illustrates clearly that the ascendency of the scientific method and the technological world it has placed around us is insufficient to meet what seem to be basic human emotional and psychological needs. Joss Whedon, the creator of and spiritual guide within the mythological universe of BtVS professes to be an atheist, yet drops multitudes of religiously themed thoughts and scenarios into his fictional world at regular intervals. While to date, in the middle of the sixth season of the show, Whedon has never formally declared his intentions to make a god-being out of his still apparently mortal heroine, substantial hints have nonetheless been dropped and collectively beome difficult to ignore. Season by season, Buffy Summers has had to rise to meet an ever-escalating series of profoundly emotional confrontations which could very well be seen as ‘tests’ by the ‘Powers that Be’ for creating a new guiding light in the firmament.

While strongcore BtVS fans will already be very familiar with the events I intend to summarize in the series of paragraphs below, for the uninitiated viewer these condensations of critical themes should provide some insights into the particular topic under discussion. I will try my best to illustrate events in a fairly linear manner, and work through the show on a season by season basis. Again, for the benefit of newcomers to the ‘Buffyverse’, it should be kept in mind that Whedon had no assurance that his creation would survive past the initial 12 episodes, and a great deal of the philosophical layering and increasingly elaborate sub-themes did not begin to take root until the second and later seasons.

In season one, Buffy, who is only 16 years of age, must face the challenge of accepting the inevitability of her own physical death, as she seeks to destroy an ancient and powerful vampire known as ‘The Master’. At first understandably unwilling to make what appears to be the supreme sacrifice, she eventually reorders the value of her own life as being secondary to that of her friends, who are quite obviously terrified of the apparently predestined apocalypse. Confronting The Master, she is killed by him, as predicted by prophecy, but is revived/resurrected by one of her friends, who performs CPR. Upon returning to consciousness, she states that she feel ‘strong’, and returns to battle The Master, succeeding in bringing about his much-deserved end.

In season two, Buffy gradually falls in love with ‘Angel’, a ‘vampire with a soul’, who started life several hundred years ago as a mortal man named ‘Liam’. Normally soulless, evil creatures, this particular vampire demon, ‘Angelus’, has been given the soul as a curse by a Gypsy sorcerer in revenge for the killing of his daughter. The curse of the soul is meant to cause Angelus to suffer the undying pain of regret and guilt for all the hideous death and suffering he has inflicted over the centuries. However, should Angel (the name adopted by the ‘cursed’ Angelus/Liam) ever enjoy even a single moment of true happiness, the soul will be cast out of the undead body and the demon Angelus will return to full control. (Angel is unaware of this aspect of the curse).

This transformation does in fact occur late in the season when Buffy, fully in love with Angel and likewise unknowing of the ‘happiness’ clause of the curse, makes love with him and thereby provides the ‘moment’. With the killer Angelus ‘reborn’, Buffy must now destroy the person she has come to love. In a monumentally heartbreaking moment that still sends shivers down the spines of the show’s loyal fans, a magical spell created in an attempt to return Liam’s soul to Angel succeeds, but Buffy must kill him anyway, sending him to eternal torment in a ‘hell-dimension’ in order to close the dimensional portal to that world, which is about to take over our own. Thus, Buffy must not only sacrifice a lover, but one whose death is a passage to torment, not merely release from life-- a ‘Sophie’s choice’ on a cosmic scale.

In season three, the ‘big bad’ is none other than the Mayor of Sunnydale (Buffy’s adopted home town), a human who having made a pact with evil forces, intends to ‘ascend’ to becoming a full demon, and of course wreak serious Earthly destruction in the bargain. To date, the ‘world’ that Buffy has had to save repeatedly has been represented in her mind by a fairly small number of people, all of whom are friends, intimates or family members. Now, Buffy begins to become aware as she approches her high school graduation, that the mulitudes of people in the world at large have come to count on her to protect them, and so she beings her transition into adulthood by organizing her schoolmates into a collective that will work to defeat the evil mayor. Buffy has now moved from a largely ‘lone warrior’ persona into a leader of other ‘warriors for good’. Based on the admittedly small degree of detail that Whedon has provided so far as to the history of the long lineage of Slayers, this is completely unprecedented-- ‘Chosen Ones’ are exactly that, chosen ones. Slayers traditionally operate in complete secrecy, and usually alone. Buffy selectively defies this paradigm, and succeeds by doing so, accepting the potential consequences of leadership intelligently as she accepts this new duty of adulthood and her calling.

In season four, the enemy is now humanity itself, with all it’s potential treachery and guile. Up until this point, the moral shading of the Buffyverse has been very black and white, whereby demons are always incontrovertibly evil and humans are essentially good and need to be defended. The story arc of Buffy’s freshman year at college relates not only to her beginning a search to discover who she really is, and the heritage she has been connected to down through the centuries via the previous Slayers, but that the evil creature to be defeated is a part human, part demon, part technological chimera that embodies the worst elements of all three. Buffy, who has found herself pulling away emotionally from her friends and family, discovers that she must reconnect with both her humanity and her mystical Slayer nature in order to defeat ‘Adam’, the ironically named human/demon/cyborg. In the final act of doing so, she displays a command of power that is literally god-like in nature, acting as a lead-in to the season’s dreamscape closing episode wherein a spirit guide proclaims mysteriously “You think you know, who you are, what’s to come. You haven’t even begun”.

Season five once again has Buffy confronting her death, but now it isn’t the simple physical death of the body that is the challenge. It is the death of spirit that can occur when one has to face that there are some challenges that simply cannot be conquered, inevitabilites of the manner in which the universe unfolds. Buffy has lost battles before, but ultimately she has always won the war. Now that bedrock of psychological support suddenly vanishes from under Buffy when her mother unexpectedly dies, and she is left to care for a younger sister, ‘Dawn’, who was once a mystical energy force known as the ‘key’. Dawn is now fully human, very corporeal, and extremely frightened, being sought after by an evil goddess who wishes to tear down the barriers seperating the dimensions of the universe in order to return to her own. Buffy nearly gives over to abject despair from the downward spiraling sequence of events, but again with the aid of her friends pulls together and somehow manages to do what should be impossible-- defeat an essentially invulnerable being.

Despite this apparent triumph, all does not end well. The magical ritual to use Buffy’s younger sister as the ‘key’ to open the dimensional portals has already begun, and once started, it cannot be stopped except when the flow of blood from the ‘key’ has ended. Buffy is about to do what she has previously sworn that she would never do, under any circumstances-- allow her sister to die in order to prevent the world from ending, which Buffy sees not as simply the death of another member of her family, but a death to all that stands in opposition to evil itself, an innocent being sacrificed simply to suit the vanity of a god. As the sun slowly rises above the morning horizon, and Dawn insists on sacrificing herself to save the world, Buffy has an epiphany. The forces that molded the energy of ‘The Key’ into human form, and placed it in Buffy’s keeping as her sister used Buffy (and possibly Buffy’s mother) as the physical/spiritual template for the human Dawn. Thus, Buffy shares something with Dawn-- her blood. Buffy’s epiphany is that she can close the portal by ‘stopping the blood from flowing’ but with her blood as substitute for Dawn’s.

It was at this point in time, as I watched Buffy dive off a platform at the top of a tower, arms spread wide in cruciform fashion, falling into the blinding light and heat that represented the opening of the dimensional portal in order to close it with her death, that I became convinced that Whedon intended to create not just a heroine for the times, but a messianic figure for the ages. Like in the film (based on the book of the same title) The Last Temptation of Christ, when Jesus suddenly realizes that he is both man and God at once, and always, and that his death is a gift of life for all others that come after him, he arrives at peace. It is this moment of perfect spiritual clarity that provides him with ultimate focus and purpose. In the same fashion, Buffy connects to the cosmic oneness, and in her death gives not just life, but hope.

Spiritual perfection aside, a goodly percentage of the Buffy faithful pretty much freaked. Whedon had planned for Buffy to die-- really die, not a death like the one in season one where she was revived in a few minutes, but moldering-in-the-grave death. He also planned to bring her back, to continue the next stage of the hero’s journey, to use the (Joseph) Campbellian term. As I write these words, we are in the middle of season six, and the return to the land of the living for Buffy Summers has not been pleasant. There are suggestions that, due to the ‘dark magicks’ employed by Buffy’s best friend Willow Rosenberg, a witch of increasingly formidible powers, that Buffy ‘came back wrong’ as a consequence of the resurrection spell.

My guess, and indeed it is only speculation at this point, is that ‘The Evil’ that Buffy will need to conquer before the remainder of the current season plays out will be what for her is a fear of something far worse than death-- namely immortality. Bringing Buffy back from the afterlife did more than reanimate her body and mind-- it appears to have pulled her soul-- torn is her word for it-- out of Heaven. Now, if the long term plan by the Jossverse Powers That Be is to turn Buffy into a god, she will be obliged to accept both the benefits and the burdens of godly immortality. Buffy has always been the reluctant saviour, dutifully accepting the responsibilities of her calling, but having no inherent, ego-driven desire to wield the power she has been gifted with. Ironically, this is her greatest strength. As stated to Buffy by a spirit guide near the end of season five, “You are full of love-- it is brighter than the fire.”

It is this aspect of The Goddess Buffy Summers that may be a newer wrinkle in humanity’s quest for visionary figures to inspire their thoughts and deeds. As very young children look to their parents for support and guidance, they will, or at least should, someday mature and eventually take on the role of the mentor themselves. Humanity as a collective may have traveled a long and often difficult road over the last several millenia, but in cosmic terms we are still only children. That childhood must eventually end, and in order for it to do so, our belief structures must evolve to meet the revised needs of our greater human responsibilities.

It is no longer enough to look to a deity and submissively accede to whatever we think that deity wants us to do, since those ‘wants’ tend to be our wants, desires that reflect our inner selves. As we become more fully aware of the universe and whatever role we will eventually play within it, we need visionaries who recognize that all true power resides in balance, as does responsibility. We need messianic figures who understand that life itself is intrinsically difficult and that there are shades of gray to be dealt with, and that ‘the answers to everything’ aren’t written in toto in any book, no matter how passionate the philosophies within. We need a messiah who has been there, who has been as we are, who has been tempered in the fire of the current reality.

We need Buffy.