Superbeing

The detective’s appeal to the Spaniard probably lay in the fact that, like Don Juan, he was a superbeing. This is doubtless, too, the explanation of his attraction for the rest of humanity; but the interesting feature of his Spanish vogue is that in fiction and in drama he was elaborated, if not improved, upon.

When they undertook to describe in words the ineffable nature of the supreme reality, Erigena called it the superbeing which is the being of all things; Anselm, that than which nothing greater can be thought; Abelard, a trinity of power, wisdom, and goodness; Bernard, the bridegroom of the soul; Isaac, that which exists through, of, and in itself.

Possibly such events were exceptional, but the activities of shamans among the masses of the people in early medieval times probably owe the little attention they have received to the failure of documentation. What we get in the best literature is an emphasis on the refined offshoots of shamans—the transcendent superbeings (hsien) of Taoism.

Until the 1960s and 1970s when movie stars, comic-book superbeings, and other mythic figures threatened to crowd out more accessible models of behavior and understanding, the lawyer-hero and the writer-hero occupied an important place in the spectrum of postmartial heroism.

It traces the growth of homo gestalt with the uniting of six lovely outcasts of society who have psi powers and come together as a hive mind, thus creating a gestalt super-being.