Celtic Mythos – Inroad to a Bigger Universe

Guest Posts Quincy Allen The Writing Life 1 Comment

Quincy 2

A guest post by Quincy Allen.

When I was in my teens I discovered Celtic mythos through the works of Kenneth C. Flint. Specifically, I picked up the first paperback edition of The Riders of the Sidhe and quickly became enamored. I tore through it, and the sequel, and the third installment as soon as they were released. Along the way I started digging into Celtic legend and developed a taste for something very different (and even taboo) in the environment that spawned me (see my previous post “Seeking Wisdom and Import from Bastions of the Banal,” for some back story there).

As a child I was interested in pretty much three things beyond sci-fi: dinosaurs, astronomy, and Greek mythology. Let’s just say that in the house where I grew up an active religious revolution was being waged (it was the 70’s after all), and I had to find data-fodder for that revolution-wherever I could.

Those three topics were the only ones that didn’t brush up against “things taboo,” but they did offer a fairly logical young mind the means by which to debate literal interpretations of your favorite, Western staple of theology. They were considered “meat and taters” to white suburbia rather than heresy, so traditional censorship didn’t occur. This essentially made Flint’s work a sort of “forbidden fruit,” and I sure as hell ate that apple… and the core… and the stem.

What appealed to me most about Flint’s series-and the Celtic legends of the Tuatha Dé Dannan and Fomorians- was that it offered a sense of grandeur to the notion of “old gods,” and they were gods that pre-dated the New Testament. Additionally, like so many other ancient mythologies, they were wiped out almost completely by the Roman Empire. I must admit that I found some appeal in the Celtic mythos for just that reason.

Like virtually all mythologies, there was a strong sense of good versus evil. However, unlike what I had been previously exposed to, there was an absence of “specific moral behaviors” and a broader exploration of seeking freedom in the face of oppression. This had great appeal to that young, logical, and increasingly egalitarian mind. It set me down paths of investigation into Norse mythos and that of the American Indians. In later years I explored ancient Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese mythos, realizing that the world and its rich history was exponentially larger than the meat and taters I was raised with. I had irrevocably developed a taste for international cuisine when it came to reading.

And then I discovered The Many Colored Land by Julian May.

I can only guess what paths led her to creating that rich, vibrant series. But the net result was that she took the Celtic mythos and dropped it smack dab in the middle of some of the best sci-fi I’ve ever read. Without delving too deeply into the story, metapsychic humans of the future find a gateway to six-million years into the past. There they discover two alien races-exiles from another world-which are the source legends for the Tuatha Dé Dannan and the Fomorians.

These “elder” gods, both good and evil, became contemporary figures to me, and the heroes destined to fight tyranny were people with whom I could relate. I suspect that at least some of my penchant for questioning authority stems from and was fed by this series. I suppose that’s part of the reason why I loved Flint’s series but kept rereading May’s year after year. The Many Colored Land, set me in her world with a context that related to modern precepts, whereas The Riders of the Sidhe felt more like reading ancient legend. Both are wonderful explorations, but May’s felt more experiential rather than Flint’s historical.

Either way, there is something to be said for knowing and writing about the myriad mythologies that abound in human culture. It is perhaps a bit ironic that in the final analysis, we are left with the thought, “Nihil sub sole novum,” which translates as, “There is nothing new under the sun.” I’m sure you’ve heard it, and you can find it in Ecclesiastes, a Latin transliteration of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Koheleth. The trick is taking what was old and making it read as if it’s fresh. Flint did it. May did it, and the rest of us should to strive similarly.

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 Quincy Allen has been published in multiple anthologies, online and print magazines, as well as in one omnibus. His steampunk version of Steampelstiltskin is under contract with Fairy Punk Studios, and he’s written for the Internet radio show RadioSteam. His novel Chemical Burn-a finalist in the Rocky Mountain Writers Association Colorado Gold Writing Contest-was first published in June 2012, and has been picked up by Fantastic Journeys Publishing. His new novel, Jake Lasater and the Blood Curse of Atheon, will be on sale this summer, and he’s writing an off-world steampunk-esque novel called Paragon. You can follow his ongoing exploits on Facebook and at his website.

 

 

 

 

Shapeshifting: Mythical and Modern

Character Craft & Skills Guest Posts 3 Comments

Guest Post by Tristan Brand

As someone who spent seven years studying math, I’m interested in patterns. My favorite type of patterns are the unexpected ones. Seeing similarities emerge when previously you saw only differences is really neat.

Now, as much as I know you’re all hoping I’m going to spend the next thousand words discussing some very exciting developments in algebraic number theory, I’m going to apply this concept instead to myths.

One of the cool things about mythologies is how diverse they are, culture to culture. Though the Greeks, Norse, Egyptians, and Celtics all had their own pantheons of gods, each were different in their personalities, powers, and how they interacted with mortals.

From this diverse set of myths, we see patterns, similarities. Cultures whom never interacted with one another – who never even knew of the other’s existence! – came up with some of the exact same ideas. There’s a term for this; cultural universal. An idea that occurs in essentially every known human culture.

One of those cultural universals is shapeshifting.

Now, if I were to guess where these cultural universals come from, I’d conjecture they emerge from common human experiences. We’re all bipedal, two-armed, two-eyed omnivores. Surely that would have to lead to some similar developments. We all talk; we all walk; we all eat. What we don’t do is turn into wolves and run around in the night making trouble.

Yet, apparently, we all tell stories about exactly that.

Maybe this is less surprising than it seems.  Humans’ connection with animals in the real world is as ancient as our myth. We’ve depended on animals to survive; dogs protected our homes, horses carried us through terrain we’d never survive on our own while oxen hauled our belongings; cows gave us milk and chickens gave us eggs. Even when animals aren’t doing our work for us, we’ve always kept them around for companionship. They had pet cats in ancient Egypt,  who no doubt knocked over their fair share of cups of water and urns containing your ancestors organs.

This connection to animals seems to lead to a couple things. First, we begin to anthropomorphize the animals close to us. The trusty oxen you’ve used to haul your equipment for the past two years suddenly becomes Eddie. You start to ascribe moods to him as you would a human – happiness, sadness, boredom, anger. Maybe you even start talking to him,  something I may or may not do with my own pets.

Second, we look at the traits animals have and wonder: what would it be like to run like a wolf? Smell the scent of your prey in the night? To swim like a fish. People have looked up at birds and wondered what it was like to fly for centuries before we ever developed the technology to do so.

But as the universe did not grant us such traits, so we did the next best thing: we imagined. We thought of men and woman transformed to these animal shapes. What would they experience? What would they see? What would they do?

We imagined, and we told stories. The Greeks told of Circe turning Odysseus’s men into pigs. The Celtics told of Llwyd ap Cil Coed, who transformed his wife and attendants to mice to eat the crops of rival Dyfed. The Norse told of the god Loki, who took the form of a mare to sabotage a man building a wall.

Shapeshifting is still prevalent in modern stories. Though shapeshifting itself is a shared idea among every culture, the way each individual storyteller handles it is different.  It can impact a story in a thousand different ways.

One common approach is when then main character is unwillingly transformed into an animal. A classic example is in Roald Dahl’s novel The Witches, where the main character, a young boy, is turned into a mouse early on. Another, perhaps less known example, is The Dragon and the George by Gordon R. Dickson, where a man is transported to a fantasy world and transplanted into the body of a dragon.

Often in these stories, the main plot question becomes “How do they become human again?’ Additionally, we get to see the characters struggle with their new forms, learning new senses, new body parts. Other conflicts appear that would never matter to a human – like a mouse having to evade mouse traps, or a dragon having to deal with a new propensity toward freshly killed meat.

In other stories, the character controls when, and sometimes even what, they can change into. The wargs in George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series can project their mind into that of animals at will. The were-wolves in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series control when and how they turn into wolves.

Usually when shapeshifting is a choice, it becomes less of a plot question and more of a tool that the characters use in chase of the rest of the plot.

Another way shapeshifting changes in a story is how other characters within the story view shapeshifting. Is it considered a gift or a curse? Is it something that can be done openly or must it be hidden? The answers to these questions will help shape the world around your story, and make shapeshifting a natural part of that world. A great example of this is in Robin Hobb’s Tawny Man trilogy, where people with a power called the Wit can bond with animals – and even inhabit their bodies. The disgust others in story-world have toward this practice motivates a number of important plot points.

These examples only shallowly explore how shapeshifting affects stories. Every author has a different take on it. Some of them will resonate more than others, and will be read by our children and our children’s children and so on. Today’s stories slowly become tomorrow’s myths. I bet a thousand years from now, when humanity has travelled to the stars,  they’ll still be telling stories about shapeshifting.

Maybe by then we’ll have even figured out how to shapeshift for real.

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Tristan Brand is an aspiring fantasy author and technical writer. When he’s not obsessively checking the mail for his long-overdue invitation to wizarding school, he can be found playing StarCraft II, practicing classical piano, or reading a good book. He keeps a blog at www.TristanDBrand.com, does a web-show with his friend called Why We Like It (http://day9.tv/d/b/why-we-like-it/), and can be found on twitter as @TristanDBrand.

The Bokor’s Daughter

K.D. Alexander The Writing Life 1 Comment

It is said the Bokor serves the Loa with both hands. 

For good or for ill. 

Elise, my father, was many things. None of which were a good man. Once I was gone, the hardest part was in him letting go. 

I remember the long night he cried to Baron Semadi to not dig my grave. It took two days for my body to rot. 

And six days before I walked again.

The term “zombi(e)” has been a part of american pop-culture since the pulp age of literature. Their cultural significance goes back much longer.

George Romero may have invented the zombie, but Haitian Vodoun have known about their existence since the dawn of their civilization. The Zombi is so ingrained in the Haitian culture, that to create one is as much a crime as pre-meditated murder.

I am neither scientist nor philosopher, and I’m certainly not a medical doctor. But there are plenty who are and who were.  Sometime around the late-80’s, a guy named Wade Davis had pontificated on the scientific reality of zombies. He focused on the case study of a man by the name of Clairvius Narcisse.

Narcisse was, for lack of a better term, a trouble maker. He defied the common acceptability of Haitian culture. He placed a tin roof on a a hut that should have been thatched, he refused to allow his brother the use of his land to feed his family. And considering social-norms, he was almost a complete and total prick.

It is believed that his brother, feeling the slight from the denial of his land consulted a Bokor, a kind of mercenary magician. The Bokor created a zombie powder, which was used to turn Narcisse essentially into a zombie.

After checking himself in to a hospital for a number of medical complaints,including coughing up blood, Narcisse ended up being pronounced dead by western doctors.

He said that shortly before being pronounced dead, he felt as if his skin was on fire with insects crawling beneath it. He heard his sister weeping as he was pronounced deceased, even felt the sheet being pulled over his face. Although he was unable to move or speak, he remained lucid the entire time. Even as his coffin was nailed shut and buried. He even had a scar on his face from when a nail was driven through his face. He said that while he was underneath the earth, he felt a strange floating sensation as if his consciousness was almost above the coffin. He lay there for an unknown about of time until the Bokor and his henchmen dug him up, where he was immediately beaten into submission, bound, gagged, and spirited off to a plantation where he lived for the next two years while being force fed a single meal a day.

That meal contained Datura, a strong hallucinogenic that is called the zombie cucumber. It causes extreme delirium and total amnesia, among many other symptoms. Narcisse later recalled that his time spent on the plantation was full of days where the world seemed to pass by in an almost slow-motion haze.

Scientific analysis of multiple powders revealed ground up bones, ground up glass, urticating bristles, toads, and all sorts of other witches’ brew ingredients. There  was a commonality to the powder though. Tetrodotoxin. The poison inside of a puffer fish that has been known to cause a near catatonic or death-like state.

Keep the myth behind the legend in mind.

Because sometimes, the truth is more terrifying than the fiction.

The Outsider’s Perspective

Character Mary Pletsch World-building 2 Comments

When I’m waiting at the bus stop, I see all kinds of people.  People with skin colours from cocoa to olive, from toffee to porcelain.  People in turbans, in hijabs, in saffron robes.  People wearing crosses, pentacles, Stars of David.  People of all ages, of all income levels, speaking a variety of languages.

When I’m writing, I want to reflect that kind of diversity in my stories.  Unless there’s a specific story-based reason for everyone to look the same, believe the same, and exhibit the same behaviours, I like my fiction to encompass the wide variety of human experience.

Growing up, I read a lot of stories based on Greek and Roman myth, Biblical personages, fairy tales, Norse legends, King Arthur.  The prevalence of these tales made sense in a historical context; these mythologies form the bedrock of modern Western culture.  I also found a few precious collections of different mythologies, containing very different personages:  Nanebozho, the Ojibwe trickster.  Rama, the hero from India.  Fox spirits from China.  I loved these stories.  I’d memorized Cinderella and Snow White.  These anthologies provided me with something new, something different.  As I grew older, I found that readers, and publishers, are increasingly open to stories featuring a wider diversity of characters, based on legends and mythologies from all over the globe.

Full disclosure time.  I’m white, female, of predominantly German ancestry, in a relationship with a man.  But I write about all kinds of people.  People whose life experiences I cannot base on my own; people whose cultures I was not raised in.

I have to be very careful when I write about these people.

Cultural appropriation is the act of taking something from another culture and using it to suit your needs.  To an extent, all cultures in contact mix and borrow from each other.  Suburban youth listen to rap songs about life in the hood; Canadian teenagers read Japanese manga; people all over the world go to movies based on American comic book characters.  There is, however, a tension in these relationships, particularly when a group with power plunders groups with less power, taking their symbols and distorting them, commodifying them, stripping them of their cultural context and selling them.  There is also a tension when people “try to be something they’re not,” particularly when this means they act out of fantasy and idealization rather than a true understanding, or forget their own heritage in the attempt to ape someone else’s.  Appropriation can perpetuate stereotypes (think of how Vodun, aka “voodoo,” struggles to be recognized as a religion), water down symbols (it’s hard to take a powerful symbol seriously when you can buy it as a T-shirt or fridge magnet), and confuse with partial understandings and half-truths.  Borrowing mythology from cultures not my own is tricky.

And yet, to write only about white, heterosexual people of European ancestry is both dishonest (in that it doesn’t reflect the totality of human experience) and dangerous (in that it insinuates these are the only people worth writing about).

The beauty of fiction is that it demands that I, as a writer, develop the ability to see through my characters’ eyes.  I need to know what motivates them, what their dreams are, what their fears are, what their goals are.  Their point of view makes sense to them and I need to understand it in order to figure out what they will do next.  I need to see them both in the context of their cultures, and as individuals, whose behaviours and beliefs may vary a little-or a lot-from their cultures’ norms.

And so I imagine what it would be like to be a man.  Or a lesbian.  Or a Hindu.  Or an Asian woman.  Or someone who lives in the 18th century.  I learn about issues these groups face that I do not, in the hopes that my portrayals are based on reality and not on stereotypes.  I do my best to portray the myths of other cultures with respect for the context in which those myths were created, and with the reverence I would give to the figures of my own childhood.  And I aim to honour, rather than use; to share in, rather than take.

It’s a balancing act, and I can’t please everyone, but when the alternative is to write about a world where everyone is White and European and middle-class and straight, I’ll take some risks, and do some research, to build a world that’s an honest portrayal of the human experience.