My favorite kinds of stories to read are stories containing myth. One of the reasons for this is that they take me outside time and place to some origin point that all people regardless of culture have in common. Jung called it the ‘collective unconscious’. Mircae Eliade called it ‘illo tempore’. Both mean time out of time, and time out of place that contain the archtypes of all our experience, human or otherwise. So the kind of stories I like to write often contain myth.
As a kid, I wanted to somehow do mythology for a job. Since I have no superpowers like the X-Men, the closest I could come was a degree in anthropology. In years since, I’ve been looking through the lens of anthropology at my own beliefs and culture too, and finding that in most cultures, myth is the point through which common elements are expressed, and beliefs are internalized.
In my understanding of vodun beliefs, the cross doesn’t just symbolize the Christianity that is an indivisible part of vodun. But the cross has a much older meaning: the crossroad between the divine and man, where they meet in the same place. Divine doesn’t have to mean holy in the Judeo-Christian sense, but sacred, something spiritual and magical that intersects our profane world. Viewed in such a way, this notion of the divine sidesteps the Western Christian paradigm of separateness of one world from the other, though most cultures have a division of some kind for the sacred from the profane. But when I read, or write myth in stories, I feel one step closer to that crossroad, and see magic in the real world, the same magic that young kids simply accept and most adults forget exists. I forget the constant task list in my head and get a view of what the world might look like from my kid’s point of view.
