Mythology is something I think about a lot. Not quite an obsession, but definitely a big thing for me. Maybe you’ve noticed.
I find a strange kind of satisfaction in piecing together puzzles with missing pieces, so many missing pieces. Making wild leaps head first, connecting dots that are barely visible, finding little coincidences that connect sideways, or by wormholes in hyperspace, or by candlelight. Thinking about what the originators of those stories must have been going through. Hurricane Dorian has me thinking about the consequences of unexpected extreme weather. Less than 100 years ago there was no early warning siren when a tornado or severe thunderstorm approached. Now, our county sounds the sirens for friggin’ hail. If a storm system puts a toe over the county line we get full-on sirens screaming fear and flee and gloom and doom.
There are a lot of old, old stories out there about massive storms, and things like volcanoes and earthquakes, too. Before people understood what weather was all about, they had to have some explanation for these extreme events, so . . . the gods did it. The gods were behind it all. A fire god threw a fit of jealous rage over being denied some other god’s daughter, so he erupts in flame and burning rock for three days straight, obliterates the sun and the moon and the stars for a month, and everybody in the neighborhood dies. Because gods really do not give a shit and have no impulse control at all. Really.
I recently read a book called When They Severed Earth From Sky by Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T Barber, subtitled “How the Human Mind Shapes Myth.” Paul Barber is actually part of a geological team that investigates ancient weather phenomena and matches it to stories and mythologies. It’s a fascinating read. So many myths are about deadly weather and geological events, from every part of the world. These myths were repeated and programmed into the minds of descendants of the survivors of these events, so everybody remembered – don’t live on the side of that mountain, it’s the home of a really pissed off fire god who will drag away your red-haired daughter and blow up if you try to take her back, and her red hair will stream down that mountainside and that’s the last you’ll ever see of her.
It’s hard not to look back on that notion without cracking a condescending little smile.
But think about it – there are things happening in the world all around us every day that we can’t explain. Science has a hard enough time keeping up with reinventing the cell phone every six months. But the things that are the least likely to get explained by Science are the things we — and by we I mean us Spiritually Woke and Woo folks — who know that we’re really energy beings stuck in these meat sacks so we can experience mud and learn to love our enemies and shit like that, live, breathe, eat, drink and wallow in on a daily basis. Every once in a while some scientist bugger will come out with some big-shot theory about how magic works (without realizing, of course, that us magicy folk have been doing what he’s explaining for centuries if not millennia), and I’ll just laugh and say, “Welcome to the party, glad you could finally make it!”
That stuff, well, we don’t need an explanation for it. It’s cool to see it explained in concrete, real world terms instead of our usual wibbly-wobbly woo-speak. Kind of shoots the hell out of the old “that which cannot be told” thing, but at least we know we’re really and truly not crazy. Well, most of us aren’t anyway. We’re just ahead of our time.
But there are things that science is explaining that we’re not listening to, and maybe we could benefit from a little anthropomorphic personificating. Sea levels are rising because Mother Gaia is weeping uncontrollably for Her children. Her human children started out with such incredible promise, but then a Bad Influence came in, and made them greedy and manipulative. They ignored all the signs and signals from Nature, and continued to plunder and drill and burn and create more and more toxicity in the world, and Mother Gaia’s immune system started to kick in and cause these massive weather events, extreme climates, wildfires, floods and droughts that are causing such devastation in so many places.
The polar ice caps where Brother Bear lives are melting, taking his home away, killing his children.
The wildfires are driving starving animals into cities, where they are killed by unstoppable iron chariots.
A water goddess in India has a broken heart, and her tears have turned to sand, so the people have no water to drink.
Any one of these scenarios could be turned into a piece of new mythology. And by my reckoning, they should be. We should be telling these stories as though real people are being affected.
Because all the puppies are going to die if we don’t do something. (Kitties, too.)
We have to make this real and emotional and about something much, much bigger than we are. Because it is. It’s about every lifeform on this rock, the trees and the bugs and the weeds and the snakes and the pandas and the rhino and the ‘gators and the birds . . . and it’s about us. We can’t survive if they can’t survive. We’re all tied together, and if everybody doesn’t get that in their little pea-brained heads, then we had better start preaching it from our hearts. Hearts are frequently smarter than brains anyway. This may be the way to get people to finally engage. Bypass the rational part of the brain and go straight for the heartstrings. Sing it, write it, paint it, speak it, sculpt it, animate it, I don’t care what medium, just start telling these stories in as powerful a way as you can. This is why we were given Art, people. Use it.