What is the relationship between traditional mystical literature and popular American mythology, that is, how might one go about explaining the obvious similarities between mystical, psychical, and occult events in the history of religion and the common fantasy of a superpower in the American comic book? Most poignantly, what are we to do with the rather astonishing fact that there is very solid empirical evidence to suggest that the superpowers are common features of real-life human experience, that is, that they may be, well, real?

Serious research on the religious side dates back at least as far back as 1882, when classicist Frederic Myers and his Cambridge colleagues founded the London Society for Psychical Research. It was Myers who coined the adjective supernormal (as well as the term telepathy, in 1882). "By a supernormal phenomenon I mean," he wrote, "not one which overrides natural laws, for I believe no such phenomenon to exist, but one which exhibits the actions of laws higher, in a psychical aspect, than are discerned in action in everyday life." And by "higher" he meant "apparently belonging to a more advanced stage of evolution." A similar vocabulary of the supernormal as super natural evolutionary gift has pervaded the literature of Esalen over the last forty-five years, primarily through the occult realist novels and technical writings of co-founder Michael Murphy.

"The Supernormal and the Superpower" is an invitational symposium designed to explore such (im)possible things with major figures from four professional areas:

1. historians of religion who work on the subjects of mythology or mystical literature;
2. scholars, professional collectors, and historians who have written on comic book culture and its social history;
3. artists, writers, directors and editors from the New York comic book industry and Hollywood, that is, those who have imagined the superpower in text and image and on screen; and
4. major figures from the human potential movement who have written on the related subjects of evolutionary metaphysics, the mysticism of science, and psychical research, that is, those who have explored the supernormal as a real and realizable human potential.

We are particularly interested in the question of how to portray supernormal phenomena and the altered states of consciousness and energy that so often accompany them on film, in art, and—perhaps most improbably—in public scholarship.