Per signum Crucis de inimicis nostris libera nos, Deus noster.
Growing up in the ’70s, Ultraman was the most popular superhero on TV. Like every other kid in my poor neighborhood, I was crossing my arms and zapping away at imaginary kaijus every time we got together. It was a cool power move, one that our hero would always unleash upon evil when it seemed like humanity was threatened and all was lost. The brilliant blast of light from his Spacium Beam would cut down the darkest and ugliest of monsters.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that Ultraman’s special ability with his cross beam in the original series was actually based off the traditional blessing given by Catholic priests.
Eiji Tsubaraya, the special effects legend and creator of Ultraman and Godzilla, was born in 1901. The death of his mother when Tsuburaya was only 3 years old ended any hope of a stable childhood, and the boy spent most of his youth in the homes of relatives, where he was brought up as a Buddhist.
One day while experimenting with cranes as a cinematographer on a film, the wooden scaffold he was standing on with his camera collapsed. He fell to the ground injured. A young woman who had been visiting the set at the time, ran to Tsubaraya to check on him. She also followed up with multiple visits to the hospital. Moved by her kindness and attention, he fell in love and they eventually got married.
His new wife, Masano Araki, was Catholic. Tsubaraya himself, despite being raised Buddhist, later converted and followed his wife into the Church.
During the course of his career until his death in 1970, Tsubaraya would occasionally incorporate Christian imagery into his work, including one Ultraman storyline where our heroes found themselves strung up on crosses by a villain on the Planet Golgotha.
Some suggest that the Catholic faith of Tsubaraya and the Christian sensibilities of his wife often colored his creative vision, which is how the Spacium Beam of Ultraman — when he would cross his arms in the shape of a + to unleash a powerful torrent of light against darkness — came to be inspired by the priestly blessing with the sign of the cross.
It was this sign (the power of the +) unleashed upon every monstrosity and evil in every episode of the first seasons of Ultraman that gave lasting courage to every young boy of my generation, who knew that the power to defeating the night-time monsters of our imagination and nightmares lay in simply making the sign of the cross and unleashing the LIGHT.
