The Golden Lasso of Truth - “Please take my hand. I give it to you as a gesture of friendship and love, and of faith freely given. I give you my hand and welcome you into my dream.” - Wonder Woman

 

"a deadly weapon, that not only binds you, and follows  its mistress'

 commands, the damned thing can see into your soul."  Gail Simone

The Lasso of Truth is a fictional weapon wielded by DC Comics superheroine,  Wonder Woman, Princess Diana of Themyscira. It is usually referred to as the Magic Lasso or Golden Lasso and forces anyone it captures to obey and tell the truth.

Creator of Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston  also worked on the systolic blood-pressure test while a graduate student in psychology at Harvard University.  Blood pressure was one of several elements measured in the polygraph test invented by John Augustus Larson in 1921 though it had been associated with deception since at least 1895, when Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909)  invented a device that police used to measure changes in the blood pressure of crime suspects.

 Wonder Woman's Magic Lasso or Golden Lasso was the direct result of their research. In noting the correlation between it and the systolic blood-pressure test, Geoffry Bunn states:

"Anyone caught in the lasso found it impossible to lie. And because Wonder Woman used it to extract confessions and compel obedience, the golden lasso was of course nothing less than a lie detector.  Like the lie detector upon which it was modeled, Wonder Woman's Golden Lasso produced truth - and by implication justice and freedom too - through coercion."

Empowered by the Fires of Hestia, the Lasso forces anyone held by it to tell the absolute truth. Furthermore, simple physical contact with the lasso can be enough to have this effect such as when Barbara Ann Minerva attempted to swindle it from Diana, but was forced to confess her intentions when she held the lasso. It is also infinitely long, and can lengthen depending on its user's desire. The fires are said to even be able to cure insanity, as they did in the case of Ares, God of War, when he attempted to incite World War III. He renounced his plan when the lasso showed him that such a war would not only destroy all life on Earth as he wished, but also any potential worshipers he sought to gain from it. 

The lasso possesses incredible strength and is virtually unbreakable. One story even showed Wonder Woman using the lasso to contain the explosion of two atom bombs. Unable to stop the American bombs that would set off a Russian doomsday machine, she wrapped the bombs in her lasso and let the bombs explode^.  It has easily held beings with tremendous superhuman strength such as Superman, Captain Marvel, who has the strength of Hercules and the Power of Zeus, and Power Girl, as well as gods such as Ares and Heracles. (In several Pre-Crisis stories, it was even capable of binding Wonder Woman herself on the occasions she was caught, sometimes by Gunther.) It is shown that Wonder Woman still has her powers even if bound by the lasso .

 The only times it has ever been shown to break was when truth itself was challenged. For example, in JLA the lasso broke when she refused to believe the confession it wrought from Rama Khan of Jarhanpur.  Elsewhere, when the backwards-thinking monster Bizarro was caught in Trinity, he was horrified by the very idea of truth.   As the antithesis of reason and logic he was able to break the lasso.  The fairy tale villainess, Queen of Fables, who has the power to bring any fictional or non-true character to life, and is herself "fictional," had power over the lasso by bringing fictional characters to life and having her non-true minions break it. It is worth noting that Wonder Woman had in fact hoped to win simply by lassoing her and let its powers of truth destroy the fairy tale villain.

The magic lasso has subsequently been shown to produce a wide array of effects. When battling the entity Decay, Wonder Woman used the lasso's link to Gaia, the Greek Goddess of the Earth, as a circuit between the earth and the monster, pumping the entity of death with life-giving energies that destroyed the creature. Wonder Woman has also used it to create a ring of protective fire around people to protect them from Circe's bestiamorphs. The lasso's energies are also shown to be capable  of destroying beings forcibly resurrected by the rings of the Black Lantern Corps .   As the goddess of truth, Diana also used it to take memories of Donna Troy and restore her to life. In Pre-Crisis comics, the lasso also had the power to effectively mind control those bound.

In the mini-comic enclosed with the release of the Kenner Super Powers figure of Wonder Woman, the Amazing Amazon ensnares a mind-controlled Superman with her lasso, preventing him from destroying the Washington Monument. Superman is unable to resist the powers of the lasso as Wonder Woman renders him unconscious. Later, Wonder Woman uses her lasso on Brainiac and commands the villain to release Superman from his mind control.

In later Post-Crisis comics, the power of truth was written as innate to Wonder Woman herself, with the lasso merely a focus of that power. A storyline in the Morrison-era JLA comics by Joe Kelly depicted the lasso as an archetypal manifestation of universal truth, and, once broken- when Wonder Woman doubted the truth that it was revealing to her because she didn't like it-, disrupted the underlying truth of reality itself.

With the lasso broken, reality came to be dictated by whatever people believed to be the case, starting with older beliefs and extending to beliefs that were held by various individuals in the present, resulting in:

• Earth becoming the center of the universe for two weeks, 
• Earth becoming flat for several hours, the moon turning into cheese for a time, 
• Kyle Rayner assuming a Hal Jordan-like appearance- as many people still saw Hal as 'the' Green Lantern 
• Batman fading in and out of existence due to his 'urban legend' status meaning that people weren't sure if he even existed.

 This allegorical interpretation is often ignored in later stories and by much of fandom, as the lasso was long established as magically unable to break, and was never before stated to be the ultimate representation of truth. During her adventures with the Justice League team of superheroes Diana eventually battled a villain named Amazo who was able to duplicate aspects of the lasso for his own use.

 In the Elseworlds tale Red Son, Wonder Woman was subdued and restrained in her own lasso by the Soviet terrorist incarnation of Batman.  In order to free herself and rescue Superman from Lex Luthor's deadly red sun lamps, Wonder Woman snapped the cords of her "indestructible" lasso. The shock of the incident appeared to age Diana, leaving her grey-haired, frail, and unable to speak.

During her current tenure as writer for Wonder Woman, Gail Simone has further explored the nature of the Lasso of Truth, describing it as "a deadly weapon, that not only binds you, and follows its mistress’ commands, the damned thing can see into your soul."
 
*More about Geoff Bunn

Dr. Geoff Bunn devised the 'Mind your Head' exhibition at the Science Museum in 2001 to mark the British Psychological Society's centenary. A discursive psychologist, he is interested in the historical origins and consequences of psychological language terms such as 'soul', 'mind' and 'brain'. His forthcoming book (The Truth Machine: A Social History of the Lie Detector) examines how assumptions about human nature are built into science and technology. He is currently Chair of the British Psychological Society's History & Philosophy of Psychology Section.


“Please take my hand. I give it to you as a gesture of friendship and love, and of faith freely given. I give you my hand and welcome you into my dream.” -Wonder Woman #167

Note from Leo:  As always, my most sincere thanks to Wikipedia and Google