“I want to tell you a story, because storytelling is a form of weaving and weaving is a form of magic.”- Ariella Daly
I’ve been rewatching “American Gods”, a television series adapted from Neil Gaiman’s book of the same title. Oof, SO good. I’ve loved it just as much, if not more, this time around.
The show invites us in at a crux point- an impending war between the old gods and the new. The team of old gods is composed of those that traveled with the many early immigrants who made a home in what we now call North America, as well as indigenous Turtle Island entities that were here from the start. The new “gods of progress” are technology, media, globalization, and modernity personified. As ancestral creation myths, folk tales and stories of spirit are lost in a rapidly changing world; as we stop believing in and praying to great figures such as Norse Odin, Hindu Kali, West African Anansi, the Slavic Zorya, Middle Eastern fire-being ifrit, Egyptian Anubis…they lose their hold; their power to guide and influence fades.
The new gods, with tools like irresistible TV and the addictive portals to the World Wide Web, set their efforts not only on converting mortals, but old gods too. They, like us, are susceptible to the shiny and new, driven by hunger for followers renewed. All that’s asked in return is they replace their ancient ways with those more in line with Western culture’s contemporary values. Like in the case of Vulcan, Roman god of volcanoes, fire and the forge, who assimilates to this new world by raking his riches in as creator of a bullet factory: all those who lock and load his devotees, all those who fall, his sacrifice.
As the stories we carry change, so does culture. So, too, do we.
Around the same time I circled back to this series, a movie called “Three Thousand Years of Longing” came on my radar. This film follows a mythology professor who happens across a jinn (an Arabian land spirit with pre-Islamic roots, called upon as muse, wish-maker and source of otherworldly knowledge) on a work trip. I won’t spoil it, but it’s a whimsical love story that spans ages, and a joy to watch. Similar to “American Gods”, it centers around faith in the numinous, the way modern industrial life suffocates magic and the power of belief, or narrative. Between the two of these, I was swooning. This really is my genre, in whichever art form it arrives.
“The desert mother is the void’s daughter who’s head of hair is 13 rattlesnakes and the eggs they lay hatch into an infinity of rising moons and setting suns. At the peak of each day those suns leave black marks in her skin where stars are born. Eventually, they’ll swallow her whole and all will be sky again, but each night the moons cool the mark’s burning edges and so slow comes the return to the desert mother’s mother.”
As I landed back in my reality, I found myself reflecting on just why that may be. What is the familiar tingle in my spine that these worlds elicit? Where does this profound awakening of wonder come from? And why does it ring truer and deeper than the facade of daily life to me?
In response, I keep coming back to the power of story. At the source of each of our varying versions of lived reality, there lies a story. Story as root system. At the pinnacle of all we believe possible, there we find a story. Story as a guiding star.
We are birthed into story. Our bodies eventually return to Earth, but our lives remain in memory. We stay here in story. Everyone, everything, has a story. We are all connected through story.
And when I say we, I mean all of us. Towering trees and climbing vines, ancient stone walls and smooth black sand, roiling ocean and placid lake, monocropped field, spider monkey, coywolf, gnat swarm, deadly virus, gecko, unnamed black hole, baby being born right now and man taking a last breath, this very second. All of our stories matter.
Stories can lead us into right relationship. Stories can misguide us. Stories can create and connect. Stories can rupture and destroy. We’d be wise to never underestimate the power of story. We’d be wise to sort through our stories, to examine them. Stories can’t exactly be destroyed, but they can be transformed. They can be unhooked from.
Stories can be forgotten, stories are being forgotten. Just like the old gods, stories need tending and devotion.
I think it’s up to us find the stories we’re missing, the ones we want to call back.
To remember them forward.
Now, we can talk about stories to most people without getting much pushback but what “American Gods” and “Three Thousand Years of Longing” also open me up to is magic. And magic? Getting folks to take that seriously often presents a real challenge.
Sophie Strand writes, “Magic is all of that sensory data that is beyond what we all gate out- beyond what we’re culturally expected to see and believe. It is both absence and presence. It’s everything combined. It’s things that are so impossible and so real that our apparatus, our cultural systems, can hardly even comprehend them.”
Yes, magic is entering otherworlds through our senses.
(Give the podcast linked below a listen if that sentence intrigues you!)
Magic is entering storylines that live beyond the material; beyond the known; beyond the carefully constructed face of things.
Magic governs the terrible and the miraculous.
Magic explodes the rules.
Magic is the wilds of mystery and the yet-to-be proven, perhaps never-to-be confirmed.
We didn’t create magic, magic created us. And any creator knows, a piece of them lives on in their creation. A cord connects the whole family of what they’ve made. We are all vessels for this magic- or whatever word you prefer- to flow through, that’s what I believe.
Like story, magic responds to belief and revels in attention. Find a magic thread and grasp it, and surely you’ll be pulled in. Trouble is, we’re quick to forget. Quick to explain away. Quick to push out the strange and settle back into the familiar. We often fear what we don’t understand, so we attempt to make it small and powerless in our minds.
But what if we let it be big?
What if we let possibility take up space?
What if we left the gateway open for wonder? What if we let the twinkle of sun on water that feels like more than just a play of light, be more? What if we let ourselves hear the song on the breeze? What if we let the madness of our dreams mean something?
I agree with Emily Dickinson, who said, “The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.” As a matter of fact, I have that on rotation as one of my home screen’s backgrounds because sometimes I forget.
Sometimes, I need a reminder. The kind that asks, “What if?“.
The first quote you opened this writing with is so perfectly fitting, for you do a great job of weaving story with magic and leave the reader in a deeper sense of appreciation for both. You give us a glimpse into the thought wandering of a true mythic mystic.
I read this newsletter a few days ago and it has been weaving its way through the forest of my mind, winding, morphing, tying little bows on some laces undone. The thought that keep taking shape is that Humans are made of stories perhaps even deeper we are made for stories. We need them to tie us to our world and experience, and they need us to give them breath and form.
We act out what we don't understand and then we tell people about it and the story gets to ripple forth and change shape and become more complex even while often times it grows shorter and more concise. When a story gets passed down long enough and is important enough to keep retelling it grows into myth.
We need myth, every culture that we know about has myths. It seems like an evolutionary necessary human adaptation, and one that should not be messed with, for we have no real understanding just how important deep stories are.
I often ponder how would any culture survive without myth? We are seeing it start to play out now and it isn't pretty. But one thing that has me feeling hopeful is how many outspoken atheists are starting to also speak about how myth and religion might be necessary for survival.
So like you and many others, I want to call back in the stories, and especially the myths. We need the stories that evoke wonder and are loaded with meaning. We need stories that remind us that we are all intrinsically linked.
We need stories, and they need us.