The new members of the League of Infinity

Alan Moore introduced four new members to the League of Infinity in Supreme: The Return #4, and based them mostly on historical figures. Notably, Moore used the fictional accounts of these people, rather than the historical truth, both because it's more interesting and makes them appear to have powers, but also because it goes along with the entire basis of his Awesome universe, which is the power of fictional ideas. If ideas are real, then the fictional idea of the people is just as valid as the historical truth.

Anyway, I thought it'd be useful to give some notes (thanks Wikipedia) on who these people were:

Chu-Ko Liang (often spelled Zhuge Liang)

Liang lived from 181-234 A.D. and was a chancellor and regent of the state to Shu Han (one of the three states vying for control of China during the Three Kingdoms period. He was an accomplished strategist and has been compared to Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War.

Zhuge Liang was believed to be the inventor of mantou, the landmine and a mysterious but efficient automatic transportation device (initially used for grain) referred to as the "wooden ox and flowing horse" (木牛流馬), which is sometimes identified with the wheelbarrow:

 

Zhuge Liang is also credited with constructing the Stone Sentinel Maze, an array of stone piles that is said to produce supernatural phenomenon, located near Baidicheng. It sounds like the array might we more of a work of fiction than fact, but as we've seen, that's never stopped Moore:

The Stone Sentinel Maze was mentioned in Chapter 84 of the historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong. Liu Bei was defeated by Lu Xun at the Battle of Xiaoting and he fled towards Baidicheng with Lu Xun hot on pursuit. When Lu Xun arrived at Yufu Shore by the Yangtze River near Baidicheng, he felt a strong enemy presence and cautioned his troops of a possible ambush. He sent men to scout ahead, who reported that the area was deserted except for some scattered piles of rocks. Bewildered, Lu Xun asked a local, who told him that qi started emerging from the area after Zhuge Liang arranged the rocks there when he first entered Sichuan. Lu Xun personally inspected the area and believed that the "maze" was only a petty display of deception, so he led a few men inside. Just as he was about to leave, a strong gust of wind blew. Dust storms overshadowed the sky and the rocks seemed like swords, mountainous piles of dirt emerged while the river waves sounded like an attacking army. Lu Xun exclaimed, "I have fallen into Zhuge Liang's trap!", and attempted to escape from the maze but to no avail. Suddenly, Lu Xun saw an old man, who offered him assistance in exiting the labyrinth. Lu Xun followed him and got out of the maze unharmed. The old man identified himself as Huang Chengyan, Zhuge Liang's father-in-law. He explained to Lu Xun that the maze was constructed based on the ba gua concept. Huang Chengyan also told Lu Xun that Zhuge Liang had predicted that a Wu general would chance upon the maze when he first built it, and had asked him not to lead the general out when he fell into the trap. Lu Xun dismounted and thanked Huang Chengyan. When he returned to camp, he exclaimed that he was inferior to Zhuge Liang in terms of intelligence. He then made plans to return to Eastern Wu because he feared that their rival state Cao Wei might take advantage of the situation to attack Wu.

No documentation of this event is found in Records of the Three Kingdoms, the authoritative historical text for the history of the Three Kingdoms period.

Siegfried

Siegfried is the hero of an opera by Richard Wagner completed in 1871. In the opera, Siegfried is raised by the dwarf Mime to become a dragonslayer. However, Siegfried keeps destroying all the swords Mime makes. Eventually Siegfried recrafts the powerful sword Nothung and Mime takes the boy to the dragon.

Siegfried stabs the dragon Fafner in the heart with Nothung. When Siegfried withdraws his sword from Fafner's body, his hands are burned by the dragon's blood and he puts his finger in his mouth. On tasting the blood, he finds that he can understand the woodbird's song. Following its instructions, he takes a powerful magic ring and a magic helmet from the dragon's hoard. He soon can read thoughts and learns that Mime plans to poison him, so Siegfried stabs Mime, killing him.

Eventually Siegfried vanquishes the powerful god Wotan and falls in love with Brünnhilde, a beautiful woman.

Mata Hari

Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod (née Zelle) was a Dutch woman who, after divorcing a terrible Dutch East-Indies husband, became an exotic dancer in the early modern dance movement (which took influence from Asia and Egypt). Promiscuous, flirtatious, and openly flaunting her body, Mata Hari captivated her audiences and was an overnight success in Paris in the early 1900s.

As was common for stage performers, she made up background information, and her Dutch East-Indies accent made her sound foreign and exotic. One evidently enthused French journalist wrote in a Paris newspaper that Mata Hari was "so feline, extremely feminine, majestically tragic, the thousand curves and movements of her body trembling in a thousand rhythms." One journalist in Vienna wrote after seeing one of her performances that Mata Hari was "slender and tall with the flexible grace of a wild animal, and with blue-black hair" and that her face "makes a strange foreign impression."

By the 1910s, she had become a courtesan and had relationships with high-ranking military officers, politicians, and others in influential positions in many countries. During World War I, the Netherlands remained neutral. As a Dutch subject, Zelle was thus able to cross national borders freely.

A Russian lover was shot down and captured by the Germans and Mata Hari agreed to spy on the Germans in return for assistance to see her injured lover. While trying to get to see the German prince, she offered to share French secrets with Germany in exchange for money and became known as Agent H21.

She shared so little with the Germans that they retaliated by exposing her as a German spy to the French. The French tested her by giving her names that eventually led to the killing of a double agent and Mata Hari's arrest. Used as a scapegoat for all the problems in the war, the French prosecuted her and it was plastered in the newspapers.

Eventually she was executed by firing squad. Reportedly  she was not bound and refused a blindfold. She defiantly blew a kiss to the firing squad.

Wilhelm Reich

Reich was an Austrian pyschoanalyst who followed in the footsteps of Freud. He worked on character and the idea of muscular armour (the expression of personality in how the body moves). He also coined the phrase "the sexual revolution."

He believed that a major psychological problem was "orgastic impotence", or failure to attain orgastic potency (not to be confused with anorgasmia, the inability to reach orgasm) which always resulted in neurosis, because during orgasm that person could not discharge all libido (which Reich regarded as a biological energy).

Anyway, he moved to New York in the late 1930s to escape the Nazis and claimed to have discovered orgone, a biological energy which he said others called God. In 1940 he started building orgone accumulators, devices that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about sex boxes that cured cancer.

Reich said he had seen orgone when he injected his mice with bions and in the sky at night through an "organoscope," a special telescope. He argued that it is in the soil and air (indeed, is omnipresent), is blue or blue-grey, and that humanity had divided its knowledge of it in two: aether for the physical aspect and God for the spiritual. The colour of the sky, the northern lights, St Elmo's Fire, and the blue of sexually excited frogs are manifestations of orgone, he wrote.

Over the years, he became a cultist about the power of Orgone, to the point of trying to get Albert Einstein to confirm its existence and creating a secluded lab in Maine called Orgonon.

In 1951 Reich said he had discovered another energy that he called Deadly Orgone Radiation (DOR), accumulations of which played a role in desertification. He designed a "cloudbuster," rows of 15-foot aluminium pipes mounted on a mobile platform, connected to cables that were inserted into water. He believed that it could unblock orgone energy in the atmosphere and cause rain.

During a drought in 1953, two farmers in Maine offered to pay him if he could make it rain to save their blueberry crop. Reich used the cloudbuster on the morning of 6 July, and according to Bangor's Daily News, rain began to fall that evening. The crop survived, the farmers declared themselves satisfied, and Reich received his fee.

From at least early 1954, he came to believe that the planet was under attack by UFOs, or "energy alphas," as he called them. He said he often saw them flying over Orgonon – shaped like thin cigars with windows – leaving streams of black Deadly Orgone Radiation in their wake, which he believed the aliens were scattering to destroy the Earth. He and his son would spend their nights searching for UFOs through telescopes and binoculars, and when they believed they had found one would roll out the cloudbuster to suck the energy out of it. Reich claimed he had shot several of them down. Armed with two cloudbusters, they fought what Reich called a "full-scale interplanetary battle" in Arizona, where he had rented a house as a base station. In Contact with Space (1956), he wrote of the "very remote possibility" that his own father had been from outer space.

He eventually was forced to destroy his accumulators on a case of fraud and later was imprisoned, where he died in 1957.

Moore would later use Reich's crackpot science in Neonomicon, with the concept of Orgone energy used to attract creatures inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos.