Contains Spoilers for Rise of the Powers of X #5!The X-Men have just won one of their biggest victories ever, thanks in part to Professor X, who revealed a huge new fact about the very nature of psychic power. The answer lies in one of Marvel’s metaphysical realms, and in the very forces that shape the multiverse as readers know it.

In Rise of the Powers of X #5, Professor X is able to bring Moira MacTaggert onto the astral plane, despite the fact that she’s a robot, confirming that anything with a brain can be contacted psychically. Professor X drags Moira into a mindscape, where he reveals that he wiped part of her memory years ago, as seen in Rise of the Powers of X #3.

It’s possible that already having this connection built into Moira’s mind helped Xavier ‘access’ Moira in the present, but the ability to impact ‘robots’ is still a huge new dimension to his powers.

Marvel Redefines Charles Xavier’s Psychic Powers In A Jawdropping Moment

Rise of the Powers of X #5 – Written By Kieron Gillen; Art By Luciano Vecchio, Colored By David Curiel & Lettering By Travis Lanham

Moira was originally a human mutant, but in the miniseries X Deaths of Wolverine, she transfers her consciousness into an artificial body, literally and metaphorically shedding her humanity. It’s appropriate that Rise of the Powers od X #5 is the moment that she partially redeems herself. Professor X is able to reach what’s left of Moira’s humanity, with her adopting her own human form on the astral plane, to convince her to help mutantkind, even if it is mostly for her own self-interest. Her humanity returns, and she’s reborn on an alternate earth.

Rise of the Powers of X is the culmination of Kieron Gillen’s larger X-Men tenure as follow-up to writer Jonathan Hickman; the writer has proven to fascinated with different forms of consciousness, and the distinctions between artificial and organic life. The main threat of the series is Enigma, a ‘Dominion’ consciousness that has transcended time and space. Much like a psychic, Enigma can appear to anyone as if invisible. Dominions can also be created through the melding of both artificial and organic consciousnesses, blurring the line between organic and artificial even further.

Marvel’s Psychic Powers: More Spiritual Than Science

The argument that all thinking things are connected to the astral plane also suggests that the root of psychic powers isn’t in the brain, but on some higher metaphysical level. In other words, Rise of the Powers of X suggests that it is not a brain that enables psychic connection, but consciousness itself. In many ways, Marvel’s depiction of the astral plane feels less like a precise, scienctific realm, and more akin to spiritual place for consciousness to reach toward.

This also parallels the other major realm from Rise of the Powers of X. The White Hot Room, birthplace, resting ground, and home of the Phoenix. The Phoenix is fire and life incarnate, and in Rise of the Powers of X #5, it equates its strength with the totality of mutantkind, their power and belief. Both the White Hot Room and the astral plane are inherently connected to life and deeply fundamental to Marvel’s reality itself. Perhaps the two are deeply linked, and while Professor X thinks of one as his domain, it may only be a subset of the X-Men’s spiritual resting ground.