I wanted to rock back and forth between myth and distant futures, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It felt a bit like prophecy and a bit like storytelling.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The ultimate function of prophecy is not to tell the future, but to make it. Your successful past will block your visions of the future.
I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.
All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.
I want to link together ancient forms of storytelling and the future.
I tend to think of a myth and then explore how it would play out if it were happening in the modern-day world. I modify all the myths I use, but I stick very closely to their structure - it is the hidden teacher in me.
It took some time to gather the research and develop it into the storyline, and to finally finish an origin myth poem that I had been working on for twenty years.
One of the things I'm trying to do over and over again in my books is create new mythologies, create new ways to understand the complexity of the world. I think what mythology does is impress upon chaotic experience the patterns, hierarchies and shapes which allow us to interpret the chaos and make fresh sense of it.
The point of mythology or myth is to point to the horizon and to point back to ourselves: This is who we are; this is where we came from; and this is where we're going. And a lot of Western society over the last hundred years - the last 50 years really - has lost that. We have become rather aimless and wandering.
Myths are wonderful tools that we've had, oh, for eons now that help us navigate the situations we find ourselves in.
Prophecy is what we all have to go by now.
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