Warning: SPOILERS for Justice League Dark #3.
Wonder Woman has just gotten a massive power-up in this week’s Justice League Dark #3. With the fate of all magic on the line, Diana taps into a power she never knew she had – a new form of magic that even Zatanna has never encountered before.
James Tynion IV’s Justice League Dark is a thrilling series, one that has faced Wonder Woman and her mystical allies against a terrifying threat. Magic has gone wrong, corrupted and twisted by a monstrous presence, with spells turning against their users. It seems that all magic is drawn from another realm; and now the creatures who live in that realm have broken through to our own reality, and are preparing to wreak havoc.
Related: Say Goodbye To Magic in DC’s Comic Universe
Justice League Dark #3 sees all the heroes’ attempts to defeat the creature, who calls itself “the Upside-Down Man,” come to naught. John Constantine even uses a sigil that would kill a god, one that he can barely control, and the monstrous being survives relatively unscathed. At the last second, Wonder Woman steps in. The scene seems deliberately evocative of Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, with the Amazonian blocking a surprise energy attack with her shield. The Upside-Down Man senses something inside her, and awakens it out of curiosity.
The result is stunning. Wonder Woman is transformed into a living fountain of magic unlike anything seen before in the entire DC universe. She blazes with white power – power that seems to deliberately contrast with the blackness of the Upside-Down Man’s sorcery. Zatanna herself admits she has never encountered anything like it. Significantly, the transformed Wonder Woman has a symbol upon her forehead: the Triple Moon, a popular Pagan and Wiccan icon that refers to the Goddess. That symbol is considered representative of all aspects of the divine feminine power – intuition or psychic insight; creative energy; and wisdom & mystery. It points to the age old idea of the Mother, the Maiden, and the Crone, with each of the moons pointing to a different part of female life (commonly seen on the crowns or headpieces worn by High Priestesses).
Robert Graves discussed the symbol at length in his 1948 book The White Goddess. There, he proposed the existence of a new European deity, the “White Goddess of Birth, Love and Death.” It may be that Justice League Dark is suggesting that Diana herself is the White Goddess foreseen by Graves, which would fit with the fact that the power blazing out of her is a dazzling white.
Whether that is the case or not, though, she’s clearly now one of the most powerful mystical beings in the entire DC Comics universe.
Justice League Dark #3 is available now from DC Comics.
