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by Evan Hansen
BEFORE POP CULTURE ADOPTED ITS FAVORITE primary color-loving humanitarian, Superman, as a universal icon of strength and virtue, the notion of a super man was far less than utopian. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, creators of the comic, started with a much different vision: Published in their fanzine Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization #3 in 1933, “The Reign of the SuperMan” featured a mortal villain imbued with special mental powers. Perhaps Siegel and Shuster were influenced by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose concept of the ubermensch (literally “over man” or “super man”) from Thus Spake Zarathustra was of a human breaking free from conventional morality so that, as Nietzsche put it, “. . . man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. . . .” It’s interesting, even puzzling, that it took so long for someone to put to paper the notion of a superman expressed precisely in that way, especially since “super” is such a widespread and ancient concept. Indeed, the word itself is practically timeless, an archetype of sorts that repeats through cultures throughout history. The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists the root super- as being derived from the Latin word super, itself a relative of the Sanskrit “upari,” the Greek “hyper,” and the Old English “ofer.” Each carries the same meaning, the primary definition of which the OED lists as: “Over, above, at the top (of ); on, upon.” These common words across such uncommon cultures, geographies, and historical eras suggest not just catholic meaning but a shared point of origin, and we find one in Proto-Indo-European (PIE). As explained in The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, PIE is the hypothetical and reconstructed language from more than 5,000 years ago
ÉÉ 10 n LSA spring 2010