No Gods But My Own was the name of my Substack newsletter. I’m in the process of shutting it down and wanted to have a more permanent home for these essays here at We the Hallowed. The Four Color Grimoire was the second volume in the series. Originally posted on on March 23rd, 2022 and published in the book The Four Color Grimoire on March 31st, 2023.
04. THE BOG LORD
These are the spirits of nature unencumbered. Slow, lumbering spirits connected to every corner of the world through mycelial threads and the unheard voices of deep soil. Perhaps these creatures of the swamps and gardens had been human before but through fateful dissolution they found themselves dead but then resurrected in the green
These beings range from elemental to intellectual, ambivalent to villainous, but all have the unbreakable bond with nature in common as well as a drive for violent conservation if necessary. They will protect that which rebirthed them over humanity every single time.
The most primal of these beings is a creature called Man-Thing. Before a terrible accident in his bayou lab, Ted Sallis had been a top chemist in his field. When foreign agents attempted to steal a human enhancement serum that he had been perfecting, Sallis injects himself and drives off into the night to escape. Tragedy strikes as Sallis’s car is sent into the swamp. What emerges in his stead is far from human.
Through the fusion of science and magic, Ted Sallis is changed into a thing of the bayou. His new body consists of nothing more than muck and vegetation and his mind is all but extinguished. Vague memories of the earlier confrontation compel the creature to return to the lab where he dispatches his attackers with a fiery touch brought on by their fear of this being of sludge in front of them.
Man-Thing is a being of pure empathy with no intellectual filter. The vegetation in its body is tuned to the dominant emotions of all around it. When surrounded by negative emotions it secretes an acid that burns any who feels its touch. Man-Thing is drawn to situations that stir up human turmoil and inspires the creature to wander into the dangerous crossroads of humanity and the supernatural. Eventually Man-Thing’s mindless empathy and connection with nature earns him the title of defender of the Nexus of All Realities, the place where all universes of multiverse weave and intersect.
Man-Thing is nature at its purest, most primitive form. It is untainted by the inner life of man and lumbers about, pushed only by the winds of fate and the rig of outside influence. I would consider it the saint of saplings and fresh growth.
Next is the most intellectual: Pamela Isley, otherwise known as Poison Ivy. Before taking a turn toward ecoterrorism, Isley was a prominent botanical biochemist. When a colleague accidentally poisoned her with an experimental toxin, Isley dies and is reborn as a changed woman. She developed a deep connection with all plant life and can control how they grow or act. An ability to exude mind altering pheromones which she used to seduce weak willed men is complemented by her poisonous lips.
Poison Ivy is the physical manifestation of the chaos of nature. Isley suffers from violent mood swings and can go from calm to bloodthirsty with little to no provocation. One day she wants nothing to do with humanity, pinning only for a solitary place to take refuge far away from people. The day after that might entail a full scale assault on Gotham City, choking the city off with enormous vines and monstrous vegetation.
Poison Ivy is generally seen as a villain but that’s only a single sided point of view. The laws she breaks are in service to striking out at industrialists and land developers who do irreparable harm to the ecosystem. Her methods may be extreme at times but are usually for a much higher purpose. She is nature in the form of anarchy.
If you want nature in it’s most balanced and serene you could look to Black Orchid and her drive for a world far from cruelty, far from violence, and from sudden, pointless death. Her ways are a dramatic departure from the masculine and aggressive means of fighting against colonialism and humanity’s drive to pillage the natural world.
Starting as a generic superheroine, Black Orchid underwent a major reinterpretation in the nineties, taking her from masked crime fighter to epiphytic savior of the planet. The reimagined Orchid is a clone of the original, grown from genetically modified seedlings that are plagued with scattered memories of their source material. Like a tree sprouting through the middle of a derelict house or a dead factory being reclaimed by the wild, she is nature at its most benign, choosing non-violent solutions whenever possible and framing the world of plants as silent patrons and sentinels for the earth.
I saved the most potent and transcendental of all the swamp creatures for last, the patron saint of vegetation and alchemical marriage, Swamp Thing. The most important run in the history of Swamp Thing is possibly the best representation of spiritual alchemy in comics, illustrating the process in stark detail through the metamorphosis of man into avatar of nature.
Swamp Thing started much the same way as Man-Thing. In fact, their origins nearly overlap in their entirety. This isn’t entirely surprising; both of their creators were roommates at the time of conception and both creatures made their first appearances only a couple months apart. The only real difference seemed to be their publishers.
Like Ted Sallis, the scientist that became Swamp Thing was a scientist with a lab in a Louisiana bayou. Alec Holland, like Sallis, was working on a special formula that drew the interest of criminals but instead of focusing on creating peak humans Holland’s aim was to solve world hunger through manipulating plant growth.
This is where the story gets cloudy, the silt of forking narratives muddying the waters and taking Holland down a path with unexpected conclusions.
That murkiness starts with an explosion; Holland’s lab goes up in flames, bombed by a criminal organization. Holland gets coated by his formula in the blast and runs into the swamps to extinguish the flames. Alex Holland doesn’t emerge from that swamp, not in human form at least. These are the first stages of alchemical transformation: calcination and dissolution. This is where the prima materia is burned to ash and dissolved in water.
Alec Holland is born anew, a being of roots, moss, and other fauna of the deep bayou. There are many similarities to Man-Thing, with Holland’s body retaining a little more of his human features, but unlike Man-Thing and its loss of Sallis’ personality, Swamp Thing maintains Holland’s consciousness and scientific knowledge. Here is where Holland reaches the alchemical steps of conjunction and fermentation, where elements that are deemed worthy are combined and integrated with new organisms to test their mettle.
Most of the early adventures of Swamp Thing numerous attempts at reverting back to his human form and repeatedly facing off against fellow scientist Anton Arcane with his ever-growing army of hideously disfigured henchmen called the Un-Men. Shortly after defeating Arcane for the final time Holland is killed by a wealthy industrialist with interest in his bio-restorative formula, shot through the head so the body could be autopsied.
It’s during that process that Swamp Thing transcends the human trappings of Alec Holland and reaches the final two steps in his alchemical journey: distillation and coagulation. This is where the solution is boiled and condensed in order to purify it before it finally crystalizes once again into a solid state.
For Swamp Thing that process was initiated by finding out that it had never been Alec Holland and that he had truly perished in that fire. Swamp Thing was only a plant dreaming it had once been a man. There was nothing left of Holland’s human form, only vegetation grown in odd ways to resemble the internal organs and form of the man he believed he had been.
What the scientists did not know was that Swamp Thing had been regenerating all along and awoke during the procedure. When faced with revelation that it had never been human, Swamp Thing kills the scientist that had tried to murder it and cripples the botanist in charge of the autopsy that revealed its hidden truths. In a state of shock, Swamp Thing returned to the bayou that birthed it and took root.
That was where Swamp Thing learned that plants could dream. It was in that dream that The Green reached out. The Green is the mycelial network writ large, connecting all plant life across the world and through time. Within The Green exists the Parliament of Trees, elder plant consciousnesses like Swamp Thing, that can be consulted when needed and hold the history of their kind. They tell Swamp Thing that it is the next in a long line of plant elementals, tasked with protecting the world of nature.
This storyline, told between issues twenty and thirty four of Saga of Swamp Thing, comes from the unsurprising source of writer Alan Moore, the preeminent magical practitioner in comics. Saga of Swamp Thing was Moore’s first regular series in American comics and feels to me like his first truly occult work and one of his most important.
The Bog Lord, as bodied by these four characters, shows us the deep spiritual cost of our disconnection and exploitation of nature. It reminds us of what was lost when we dissolved our symbiosis in the name of progress.
It’s time to reconnect with the green.
Plant a tree.
Bury your hands in the soil.
Remind the world where your roots truly belong.
SUGGESTED READING
Essential Man-Thing, Volumes 1 and 2 by Stever Gerber and various artists (Marvel Comics, 2006, 2008)
Man-Thing, Volume 3, issues 1-8 by J.M. DeMatteis and Liam Sharp (Marvel Comics, 1997-98)
Black Orchid, issues 1-3 by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean (DC Comics, 1988-89)
Batman: Poison Ivy by Mike Carlin and Brian Stelfreeze, 1997)
Batman/Poison Ivy: Cast Shadows by Dan DiDio and John Van Fleet (DC Comics, 2004)
Detective Comics, issues 751-752, “A Walk in the Park” by Greg Rucka and Shawn Martinbrough (DC Comics, 2000)
The Saga of the Swamp Thing/Swamp Thing, issues 20-78 by Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, Jamie Delano, Stephen Bissette and John Tottleben (DC Comics/Vertigo 1984-88)
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