July 12, 2005
Mexico and Myth and Forests of the Old Gods
I have always been ambivalent about belief, simply because I need a preponderance of evidence in order to believe something.
And yet, I've always had a sense of the 'world beyond this world' and even an intuition that everything we dream of may be possible, simply because once, centuries ago, people dreamed they could fly. And now we can. Just the fact that they didn't have the knowledge and mechanism for flight, or that they couldn't conceptualize a flying machine, doesn't take away from their dreams being possible.
And yet, their dreams were wholly irrational at the same time, weren't they?
I've often fought this sense, even while relishing world mythology, studying the histories of the vanquished and how the invading cultures demonize the gods and culture that is being squashed. The gods are part of the irrational. Belief in the unseen, in the untested wisdom, in the intuition, in the myth -- all irrational.
When I was in fifth grade, my family and I took a long summer trip to Mexico. We had a driver who drove us to the pyramids and to the markets of Oaxaca and to the mines of Taxco -- and all over. This was the first time that I'd ever heard that churches were built atop the ruins of the old religious temples of the previous culture -- quite literally burying the gods of the vanquished.
And of course, this happened in Europe, and elsewhere in the world -- the new god, the new belief, enters the land, owns it, and buried the old gods, destroys their written record, turns them into demons who live underground, and turns their beauty, their virtues, their philosophy into deviltry, unless the old gods resemble the new in any way.
Since I was a boy, this has fascinated me. Frazier's The Golden Bough is a book I've been reading since I was little; and from it I've moved toward popular studies of myths (Campbell, etc.) as well as the more academic studies.
I wrote in the blog entry below (look for the "You Always Return to Your First Loves," entry) about the forest in Brittany (called now, "Paimpont") -- a mythic forest, full of the legends of the old gods and goddesses, tales of Druids and of faerie, of sacred trees and kingdoms beneath lakes. It is from all this, and a sense of wanting to unearth the secret history of the past, that brought me to explore the world of The Vampyricon, and The Priest of Blood.
To me, the vampyre is an archetype of the old gods of lost kingdoms, and so I took Canaanite, Hurrite, Phoenician, Greek, and African myth and brought elements of these and others into a mythology of the forest, of vampyres as the lost priest-kings of an ancient world, and of the "Sacred, Terrible Mother," who haunts many mythologies.
Medusa was one such sacred, terrible mother goddess. In Greek mythology, she was a snake-haired, half lizard creature who had once been beautiful but whose vanity had slighted the goddess. Now, her gaze dooms all who see her, and turns men to stone.
And yet, the story of Medusa did not begin there. She was, originally, a goddess or Queen of Libya, conquered with a new culture and a new religion that debased her to the level of demon. Once, she was the sacred madonna of one culture; then, she become the lilith-hag of the next.
There is some possibility that early vampire legends came from Medusa, and this helped create the origin of my vampyre race in The Priest of Blood, descending from the priests who betrayed their goddess, and stole her immortal blood, her flesh, and soul -- leaving behind a shadow known as a "Dark Madonna," who searches from beyond the Veil to enter the world again to take back all that was stolen from her.
The stories of mythology -- of the ancient religions, of the places where the supernatural meets with the natural, of the magic history of the forest and of buried kingdoms -- all bring me back to the day when I was ten years old and climbed the stairs of the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico.
I saw scorpions and a nest of snakes far below, and the heat of the sun beating down, seemingly directly above the pyramid. My parents had remained below, and my brothers were many steps above me.
I felt the power of that myth, that culture -- a power that had been buried, its kingdom buried, when the marauding culture and warriors had arrived. Buried them -- for in those days, other pyramids had only been half-dug out of the centuries of dirt and dust thrown upon these beautiful, magnificent pyramids.
Even then I knew: there is a secret history of the world. We do not know all. The conquerors wrote the history; the vanquished were buried or absorbed. There is so much of the world's past we do not know simply because it has been hidden.
From this sense, I began moving toward writing this epic.
One day, I knew I wanted to write about legend, about myth, and even as a boy, I gave my nod to those forgotten gods and cultures that had suffered beneath the feet of the invaders.
And so, in Brittany, in that forest, and in years of research of hidden myths, sacred rites, lost worlds -- I found the tale that could bring out from inside me what I had been waiting -- and wanting -- to imagine and create since my earliest years.
And it is about magical history, a history of that speaks to the metaphor of the soul rather than the rational mind.
Even earlier in life, I had a remarkable -- to me -- experience, when I was just four years old. I'll write more about that later. But it gave me a sense of awe and wonder and curiosity about the world, and I've never lost it.
This is my preponderance of evidence -- that at certain points in my life, I had this sense, and it was powerful enough to remain with me all these years, and swim up from its dark water to the surface so that I might tackle it as subject matter, as a way of looking at and understanding the world, and as a way of exploring the metaphors of mythology, as a way of entering the forest where you aren't supposed to go.