How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
One of the things that put me off writing for a while was that piece of advice everybody gives new writers: 'Write what you know.' Nobody would ever want to read about my boring life! But I do know a lot of things about different societies' cultures and mythologies. The way people were and are.
I think the more you understand myths, the more you understand the roots of our culture and the more things will resonate. Do you have to know them? No, but certainly it is nice to recognise how deeply these things are embedded in our literature, our art.
My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.
I write on sacred stories, symbols and rituals of all cultures - European, American and Chinese - but my audiences, typically, like me to focus on India.
Whenever you're writing a book or creating a movie or a game, your first task is to get the reader/audience/player to suspend disbelief, to buy into the logic and boundaries of your world, even though those boundaries might include things like dragons and magic. To do that, you need long threads - of history and culture.
The more I've gotten interested in writing about history and making sense of myself within the continuum of history, the more I've turned to paintings, to art. I look to the imagery of art to help me understand something about my own place in the world.
If you want to learn about a culture, you look at what buildings the people lived in but you also want to know about their cosmos.
Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.
With science and reason throughout history, what people believed turned out to be false. So I like to keep an open mind to all perspectives and learn and become more fully realised as a person. I just feel we're never going to know what the full picture is.
You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.
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