The book begins with a boy named Max dressed in a wolf suit misbehaving, terrorizing the dog and talking back to his mother. He is sent to bed without any supper. But a strange thing happens: his room magically transforms into a forest with a nearby ocean. He boards a boat and sails across the ocean for nearly a year before he comes to an island inhabited by terrible monsters known in the book as “wild things.” Max manages to tame them, and they crown him king of all the wild things. After an indefinite amount of time, he grows lonely and wishes to return home. He gives up being king, boards his boat, sails back across the ocean, and returns to his room. He finds there his supper waiting for him.

Many fantasy novels have characters who journey between our world and another world. In some works, like C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia or J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, these other worlds are accepted as true: within the story, that is, they exist as real places. In others, though, like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or The Bridge to Terabithea, the voyages to these other worlds are presented — even within the story — as dreams or as journeys of the imagination. It is not clear how to classify Max’s voyage to the land of the wild things along these lines. The narrator, on the one hand, always describes the events of the story in factual terms:

In Max’s room a forest grew […] and the walls became the world all around.

He sailed off through night and day and […] he came to the place where the wild things are.

Max stepped into his private boat and waved good-bye and sailed back […] into […] his very own room.

But on the other hand, one subtle element in the artwork convinces me that Max’s adventure is meant to be understood as an imaginary one. An illustration of an early scene contains a picture Max drew before he went on his adventure. Max had not yet been to the place where the wild things are when he made this drawing, yet his drawing looks exactly like one of the wild things he would later meet.

The text of the story does not refer to Max’s drawing at all, but it is an important clue in how to understand the story. I think the similarity between the drawing and the wild thing demonstrates that both originated in his imagination. Even though the narrator takes Max’s journey at face value, I think it is intended to be understood as an imaginary journey.

Throughout this imaginative journey, a change occurs in Max. At the beginning, he is just a naughty little boy. He is eager to escape his room, where he serves his sentence for misbehaving, and imagines himself as the “most wild thing of all” instead of as a well-behaved boy. He sends the wild things to bed without any supper — perhaps directing some negative feelings for his mother towards these innocent creatures of his own imagination. But as he sits alone, he has a change of heart:

Max […] was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all. […] So he gave up being king of where the wild things are […] and sailed back […] into […] his very own room.

He no longer wishes to be with the wild things: he now wants to be with his mother. Max’s imaginative journey gave him a new perspective on his life, and this new perspective resulted in a different attitude and (presumably) in different behavior after his return. The illustrations capture this effect on Max in a subtle but powerful way. Before Max’s journey, the illustrations of Max’s real world are always contained by a white border on all four sides. As his room transforms into the forest, that border slowly shrinks until the illustrations fill the whole page. (The added black border represents the edge of the page.)

The world of Max’s imagination is larger, more wonderful, and less bounded than the real world. Every page depicting the land of the wild things has illustrations that bleed to the edges of the page; not one of them has a white border surrounding it on all four sides. When Max returns to his room from his imaginative journey, though, the border does not return.

The broadening of the illustration nicely mirrors the broadening of Max’s perspective. In the very first article here, discussing how we define “myth” on this site, I said that the mythic narratives found in ancient mythology and modern fantasy can dramatically change the way we look at our own world. As we read the story of Max’s imaginative journey, we can engage our imaginations to participate to some degree in his journey. We may even be able to have our perspective, our attitudes, and our behavior transformed in a similar way. In both the plot of the story and in some subtle details of the artwork in his Where The Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak conveyed the role of imagination in this transforming power of mythic narratives.

Reference

• Sendak, Maurice. Where The Wild Things Are. Harper & Row: 1963.

[Editor's Note: The first part of this interview appeared in a previous issue as A Science Fiction Primer. The conversation below is a continuation of that interview.]

Randy Hoyt: What first got you involved in Native American studies?

Amy H. Sturgis: The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma is part of my family heritage on both sides, and my parents made sure that I was educated with that cultural awareness. I grew up in Tulsa and Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and so from my earliest memories onward, I felt the influence of “Indian Country.” When I was at Vanderbilt University working on my Ph. D. in history (with an emphasis in intellectual history), I was particularly interested in constitutional studies. Most of the work in Native American studies at the time was related to social and cultural topics, not intellectual and constitutional ones. I ended up writing an in-depth analysis of the evolution of Cherokee constitutional thought for my dissertation. I found that taking these two disciplines (constitutional studies and intellectual history) and applying their analytical tools to the subject matter of Native American studies yielded some fruitful and fascinating results.

Of course, this put my work a bit outside of the mainstream work done by scholars in Native American studies and in constitutional studies: neither group seemed much interested in the work of the other, and I thought both had missed out on some valuable insights. That was the beginning step for me in bringing he Native American heritage that had always been a part of my personal life forward into my professional life in a conscious and intentional way. I ended up passing the foreign language competency exam for my Ph.D. not in French (which I’d studied in high school) or Russian (which I’d studied in college), but in Cherokee. I have since gone on to write investigative pieces and current policy work about Native America, as well, so my focus is no longer simply historical.

RH: The two books you have published in Native American studies both related to events from the first half of the nineteenth century, a biography of Tecumseh (who died in 1813) and a book on the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia (the “Trail of Tears” in 1838-1839). I noticed that these dates correspond roughly to the beginning of modern science fiction we discussed previously. Is there any relationship or connection between these events?

AHS: Needless to say, this is an era that draws my attention and enthusiasm for many reasons. The connections between the two areas are interesting to consider. Tecumseh is a figure I find to be remarkable. He was the Shawnee leader responsible for the largest pan-tribal confederacy in the history of Native America, and he was one of the visionaries most responsible for challenging the peoples of the different Native nations to start thinking of themselves as American Indian instead of solely Osage or Potawatomi or Creek. Even before he was tragically killed in the War of 1812, he had become a figure of mythic proportions. He was described as a kind of King Arthur figure among his people, and their British allies drew on some very rich mythological language to describe him to their compatriots across the ocean. A number of Native American writers in the late twentieth century wrote alternate histories about what would have happened if Tecumseh had survived: it is interesting to see political scholars such as Vine Deloria writing essentially what is science fiction to talk about this great leader who was legendary even in his own age.

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), perhaps the leading contender for being the first modern work of science fiction, Frankenstein’s creature is out in the wild, living on his own and educating himself by eavesdropping on a family living out in the woods. When he hears about the plight of the American Indians, Shelley emphasizes that Frankenstein’s shunned, isolated, and mistreated creature — surely miserable in his own right — weeps for them. So even at the very beginning of the genre, science-fiction authors commented on the state of Native America. Throughout the nineteenth century, starting with the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Trails, one Native American nation after another was displaced from their original lands. By the time of H.G. Wells’s work and the beginning of what would become a golden era in science fiction early in the twentieth century, there’s a period of tremendous upheaval as the Native American nations were managed — or, more to the point, manhandled — by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the United States Government.

As science fiction was coming into its own, Native America was being dismantled in a systematic, military fashion. Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (1950) reflects on those events, using Mars as a metaphor for North America. Some of the characters in the novel consciously identify what happened to the Martians with the de-population of Native America, and these characters begin to understand what is being lost only after it is too late for anything to be done. This has been an ongoing theme throughout science fiction, and a number of works engage it. One of my favorite contemporary science-fiction novels, Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow (1996), also discusses these events using the metaphor of interspecies contact with life on another planet. It is a remarkable consideration of who is to blame when everything goes wrong and tragedy unfolds — as it did following the Columbian encounter with Native America.

RH: Do we have any evidence of how Native American myths and legends adapted or changed during this time?

AHS: It varies depending on the nation and the stories, but to a degree we can chart some differences and note how evolutions and adaptations unfolded in the act storytelling, especially across Native nations. There are surviving oral traditions that explain, for example, the genesis of the Great Law of Peace (which is essentially the Constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy), which pre-dated contact with Europeans by quite a good margin; we can see how the origin stories explaining this remarkable compact evolved over time. New stories were told as a result of these events: new legends, for example, arose in the Cherokee Nation during the Trail of Tears. We can date the beginning of these stories and then see how they now permeate Native American literature. It is also interesting to observe how the stories and legends of these two drastically different cultures, Native American and European, in a sense cross-fertilized each other. Some of the Southwestern nations, for example, have Catholic symbolism informing their mythology after contact with the Spanish. Most of the stories were transmitted orally throughout this time period, but in the nations that adopted written languages, we even have a literary snapshot of stories, capturing them at the moment when they were first recorded, and we can track how they have changed — and how they have stayed the same — over the years.

RH: The Mythopoeic Press announced The Intersection of Fantasy and Native America: From H.P. Lovecraft to Leslie Marmon Silko, a book you co-edited with David Oberhelman from Oklahoma State University. What kind of material will readers find in that book?

AHS: I presented a paper in August 2006 as the scholar guest of honor at Mythcon 37 in Norman, Oklahoma. In that talk, I noted that taking the analytical tools from two disciplines (this time fantasy studies and Native American studies) could yield great results when each was applied to the other’s subject matter. Both sides I think are missing out on great opportunities to talk about and share the remarkable — and remarkably similar — literature in their respective fields. In my talk I recommended ways of bringing together those who love fantasy and those who love Native America. The Mythopoeic Press approached me about editing a volume on that topic, using my keynote speech as the first chapter, and the challenge I laid out in it as its guiding theme. We cast a wide net, finding an exciting international group of cross-disciplinary and multi-ethnic scholars to talk about three things:

1. Native American mythology in literature,
2. Native American authors writing works with fantasy elements, or
3. non-Native fantasy authors incorporating Native America into their own work.

The final product includes some fascinating contributions from a wide range of able and accessible scholars on authors from H.P. Lovecraft, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling to Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and Gerald Vizenor, among others. I think it is a tremendous volume that shows how much scholars and readers in two different traditions can gain from expanding their horizons and bringing all of this rich material into one conversation.

RH: Let me ask about these points, starting with the last one. Many readers will be familiar with the use of other mythological material in works of fantasy. (Jason explored in a previous article, for example, material from Norse, Old English, and Welsh mythological traditions in Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.) What fantasy authors have done this same thing with Native American material?

AHS: Not enough have done this, but some have done it well. There’s Orson Scott Card; you have published a series of articles about his Alvin Maker series, in fact. His books take the reader on a journey through an alternate America — and what a place it is to visit with his kind of introspection! I think Card had real insight about how Tecumseh and his movement represented a kind of American myth that had reached legendary proportions in Tecumseh’s own lifetime.

Perhaps my favorite novel along these lines is Neil Gaiman’s American Gods: I think Gaiman did an elegant job of drawing on Native American mythology. Others like Charles de Lint and Michael Bishop also come to mind. One of my favorite authors of speculative fiction, H.P. Lovecraft, actually draws quite a bit on Native American mythology and settings. His short story “The Mound” (published posthumously in 1940) takes place at a real burial mound in Binger, Oklahoma, and a handful of his other stories draw on the richness of the Native American legends. His works are surprisingly well-researched for the amount of information that was available in the early twentieth century.

Many non-Native authors who have drawn on this material have done a spectacular job. Some others, of course, have failed to do justice to their subject matter.  But I think the number of authors who incorporate Native America into their fantasies is still too small. Many non-Native authors are simply not aware enough or comfortable enough with Native American mythology — or contemporary Native American ideas — to attempt it yet. Not only could these authors create great works in their own right using this material, but through them many more readers could be introduced to these great tales.

RH: What do you think it takes for non-Native authors to become aware enough and comfortable enough with the legends to be able to incorporate them into their fiction?

AHS: Tolkien’s use of other mythological traditions provides a good example: when he found himself interested in the stories from The Kalevala, he went and taught himself Finnish so he could read it in the original language. He did his homework before he incorporated other people’s myths into his own stories. If authors want to use Native American stories, I think they ought to research these tales to gain an understanding of their history, of their particular origins and context. This does not necessarily mean learning a Native American language (although that is an excellent place to start); there are fantastic oral history collections available for listening, and there are fantastic anthologies and collections of these stories available. It is not asking much for people today do the research to find accounts as close to the original as possible.

Moreover, Native America is alive and well today, and many of the contemporary settings and stories of modern American Indians provide rich sources for writers, regardless of their own ethnic backgrounds.

There is a great debate about who has the right to draw on Native American traditional material, about who is authentic and what is credible. These questions for the most part disturb me. We do see mythology incorporated into fiction badly and disrespectfully, but I do not believe the solution is to prevent non-Native authors from accessing and being inspired by this material. The authors who use Native American traditions without doing even the most basic research, drawing instead on inaccurate stereotypes, have failed as artists, I would say. It seems to work out that the non-Native authors who are sensitive, inquisitive, and respectful of these stories and traditions also end up creating beautiful and lasting art.

RH: You mentioned that the book also contains material on Native American authors incorporating their own mythological traditions into their fantasy stories.

AHS: Yes. Some of these Native authors produce works that are clearly fantasy by anyone’s definition: Drew Hayden Taylor and Daniel Heath Justice are two excellent (and recommended) examples. Others write books often considered to be “magical realism” or simply “Native American literature.” This again raises the discussion about how to classify works, which I mentioned last time regarding what counts as “science fiction”: these are games with which the critics and scholars are more concerned than the fans and the practitioners. My concern is that many readers who love fantasy literature never discover some of the great Native authors, because these writers’ publications are labeled and pigeonholed due to the artists’ ethnicity. It is my hope that our book will help to introduce fantasy lovers to great Native writers. Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and Gerald Vizenor, for example, write works that incorporate elements of fantasy. (Gerald Vizenor, incidentally, also has written what I would consider a great work of Native American science fiction.) Some of these authors, such as Louise Erdrich, are gaining national and international reputations as “literary” authors: Silko’s works are taught in a number of universities and even high schools already, although usually in the context of Native American studies.

RH: After readers finish your book, what anthologies or sources would you recommend next for information about Native American myths and legends? Is there one particular book that provides a good overview of all the material available?

AHS: There’s not one perfect text out there as a good starting point. There are actually a lot of good collections, but none have put themselves head and shoulders above the others. I think anything by Joseph Bruchac would be a good first stop; he compiles and re-tells Native American myths in his books in a really compelling way. Another good source is the anthropologist James Mooney, who has a series of books written around the beginning of the twentieth century. He was compiling folklore from firsthand accounts, essentially writing down the oral history while it was still there. Mooney’s collections provide a great ethnographic perspective; I would recommend his work from a historical point of view and Bruchac’s work from a literary one. I like Lawana Trout’s Native American Literature: An Anthology as an introduction to Native stories both traditional and contemporary.

Recently I was pleased to be brought in as a scholarly consultant on Virginia Schomp’s 2008 book The Native Americans, which is part of the Marshall Cavendish Myths of the World series for younger readers. Schomp identifies the origin and context of each of the tales she relates and includes stories from the width and breadth of North America. Books such as this one give me hope that children of many backgrounds will be exposed to the delights and fascination of Native mythology; hopefully this first taste will lead to a lifelong appetite.

RH: What are your overall aspirations for the book? What do you hope the book will accomplish?

AHS: I hope that the book will help fantasy lovers to discover Native authors. I hope that it will help Native writers who write fantasy literature to be welcomed to the table of fantasy artists and studied by scholars of the genre. I also hope it will help non-Native American writers to feel invited to mine the wealth of Native American mythology to create new stories. But I suppose my main hope is that readers who love any of this material — whether it is Native American fiction or fantasy or mythology — will come away from the book with titles they want to read; I think it is a tragedy that works get pigeonholed in a certain genre or category in such a way that they do not reach readers who will appreciate them and benefit from their messages.

I have included links to all the books Amy recommended during the interview below. You can learn more about Amy’s work by visiting her web site, amyhsturgis.com. She is currently working on what sounds like an exciting new book, The Gothic Imaginations of J.R.R. Tolkien, Madeleine L’Engle, and J.K. Rowling, for publication with Zossima Press in 2010.

[Editor's Note: The first part of this interview appeared in a previous issue as A Science Fiction Primer. The conversation above is a continuation of that interview.]

Recommendations

• Oberhelman, David and Amy H. Sturgis, eds. The Intersection of Fantasy and Native America. Mythopoeic Press, 2009.

• Search at Amazon: Joseph Bruchac
  • Between Earth & Sky: Legends of Native American Sacred Places. 1999.
  • Thirteen Moons on Turtle’s Back. 1997.
  • View All »
• Author Page at Amazon: James Mooney
  • Myths of the Cherokee. 2009.
  • The Siouan Tribes of the East. 2008.
  • The Ghost Dance Religion And The Sioux Outbreak Of 1890. 2008.
  • View All »
• Schomp, Virginia. The Native Americans. 2007.

• Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus. 1818.
• Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles. 1950.
• Russell, Mary Doria. The Sparrow. 1996.
• Card, Orson Scott. Red Prophet. 1988.
• Gaiman, Neil. American Gods. 2001.
• “The Mound.” 1940. The Horror in the Museum. Arkham House Publishers, 1989.

Relief Representing Hermes, Eurydice, and
Orpheus. Circa 500-400 BCE. Source »

Orpheus’s failed attempt to rescue Eurydice from the underworld is one of the most popular and moving stories to survive from ancient Greece and Rome. The oldest extant written version of the story is found in Virgil’s Georgics (29 BCE), around four hundred years after the sculpture at Naples was created. In Virgil, Orpheus descends to the underworld and persuades the gods with songs on his lyre. They allow Eurydice to return with him on one condition: he must lead her out of the underworld without looking back himself. At the last moment, as they were nearing the light of day, he looked back — and lost her forever.

Those familiar with this version of the story often identify the scene in the sculpture at Naples with the moment Orpheus turned back. Let’s briefly look at two examples among many occurrences of this, one from an academic and one from a poet. First, archaeology professor Frank Bigelow Tarbell in his A History of Greek Art (1910) writes:

Tenderly, sadly, [Orpheus and Eurydice] look their last at one another, while Hermes, guide of departed spirits, makes gentle signal for the wife’s return. In the chastened pathos of this scene we have the quintessence of the temper of Greek art in dealing with the fact of death. (Tarbell 205)

Second, many authors, artists, and poets have created works drawing on the myth of Orpheus over the centuries. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) provides possibly the most extensive work of this kind in the twentieth century (Segal 118). Rilke most likely saw all three of these sculptures during his lifetime (Freedman 207), and his poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” (1904) was probably inspired by viewing the one in Naples (Strauss 172):

[…] If only he might
turn once more (if looking back
were not the ruin of all his work) […]
the quiet pair, mutely following him:
the god of errands and far messages, […]
the beating wings at his ankle joints;
and on his left hand, as entrusted: her

[…] suddenly
the god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry,
uttered the words: ‘He has turned round’ […]

For Tarbell, Rilke, and countless others, viewing this sculpture recalled to their minds the myth of Orpheus’s failure to return from Hades with Eurydice to which they had already been introduced. But looking back through what little evidence we have about the myth of Orpheus’s descent to the underworld, it is not at all clear that Orpheus failed in the version of the myth in existence at the time the sculpture was created. Euripides’s play Alcestis (438 BCE), written around the same time that the sculpture at Naples was created, contains the oldest surviving literary evidence concerning the outcome of Orpheus’s descent to the underworld. Admetus makes a passing reference to Orpheus when talking about his own love for his recently-deceased wife Alcestis:

Had I the lips of Orpheus and his melody
to charm the maiden daughter of Demeter and
her lord, and by my singing win you back from death,
I would have gone beneath the earth […]
[…] I would have brought you back
to life. (357f.)

This play does not explicitly state that Orpheus successfully brought his wife back to life: it merely states that Orpheus’s song charmed the gods of the underworld. It does not even mention that he descended to the underworld in order to rescue a woman. Even so, this reference would be horribly out of place if Orpheus had attempted but failed such a rescue. Admetus wished that he could sing like Orpheus so that he could bring his wife back from the dead, and many scholars see this reference as proof that a version of the story in which Orpheus successfully returned would have been familiar to Euripides’s audience (Robbins 16).

Plato mentioned Orpheus in the following century in the dialogue Symposium, his great work in praise of love (written around 360 BCE). Plato had one of his characters criticize Orpheus:

But Orpheus […] [the gods] sent empty away, and presented to him an apparition only of her whom he sought, but herself they would not give up, because he […] did not dare […] to die for love, but was contriving how he might enter Hades alive. (Symposium 179d)

In this version, Orpheus’s descent to the underworld is now clearly associated with an attempt to rescue a woman — though Plato does not give her name. Orpheus’s mission is admittedly a failure, but it seems that Orpheus returned successfully with what the gods gave him (the phantom of his wife). Instead, Orpheus failed to persuade the gods to give him what he sought. This substitution of a phantom for his real wife turns Orpheus’s otherwise-successful return into a failure; this substitution only makes sense as a variant of a version in which Orpheus did successfully return with her.

Around 330 BC, still three hundred years before Virgil, the poet Hermesianax of Colophon wrote three books of elegiac poetry dedicated to his mistress Leontion. Only a fragment of these books survive: one hundred lines or so were quoted in Athenaeus, an author writing in Egypt over five hundred years later. This fragment includes a version of Orpheus’s descent in which Orpheus returned successful. Athenaeus introduces the story with these words: “Hermesianax […] gives a catalogue of love affairs in the following manner”:

Armed only with the lyre, [Orpheus] brought back [the Thracian Agriope] from Hades. […] Yet Orpheus, though girded for the journey all alone, dared to sound his lyre beside the wave, and he won over the gods of every shape. […] By his song, Orpheus persuaded the mighty lords that Agriope should recover the gentle breath of life. (Athenaeus XIII)

The wife of Orpheus in this version of the story finally has a name (Agriope), though it is different than the name to be found in Virgil three hundred years later. Hermesianax celebrated the power of love, citing Orpheus’s successful rescue of his beloved from the underworld as evidence.

These three pieces of evidence show that it is a real possibility that the sculptor of the bas-relief at Naples was not intending to depict a failed attempt by Orpheus to rescue Eurydice from Hades. If this were the case, I would imagine that the sculptor intended to portray the moment of Orpheus’s triumph: still holding his lyre, Hermes brings his wife to him so that he might lead her out of the underworld. It is difficult to say with any certainty, though. While a non-narrative work of art has an undeniably strong connection to its corresponding narrative that evokes powerful resonances and reactions in its viewers, these responses can vary greatly from person to person. The fact that Plato, Hermesianax, and Virgil would all have experienced this same sculpture quite differently reveals just how complicated that connection can be.

This is one of the fascinating aspects of how myths work. Storytellers alter and shape the stories they tell to suit their own purposes: they might change a significant detail they find objectionable, or they might alter some minor details to shift the emphasis. Over time stories grow and evolve as the needs of the storytellers and their audiences change, taking on an organic life of their own. A story might affect an artist (like the fifth-century scultpor of the bas-relief at Naples)  in one way, while his work might affect a future storyteller (like Rilke) in a completely different way.

Works Cited

• Tarbell, Frank Bigelow. A History of Greek Art. Macmillan: 1910.
• Segal, Charles. Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989.
• Freedman, Ralph. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. Evanston: Northwestern, 1998. (You can view this reference online.)
  
• Rilke, Rainer Maria. “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.” New Poems. 1907. (You can read the full text of this poem online [PDF].)
• Euripides. Alcestis.
• Robbins, Emmett. “Famous Orpheus?” Orpheus: The Metamorphoses of a Myth. Edited by John Warden. University of Toronto, 1982.
• Plato. Symposium. Translated by Ben Jowett. (You can read the full text of this dialogue online.)
• Athenaeus. The Deipnosophists. (You can read the full text online.)
  

]]> http://journeytothesea.com/orpheus-naples/feed/ 0 http://journeytothesea.com/jesus-lilies/ http://journeytothesea.com/jesus-lilies/#comments Fri, 15 May 2009 12:01:03 +0000 Randy Hoyt http://journeytothesea.com/?p=2906 In a previous issue, I distinguished between two approaches human beings have used to understand the world around them: mythical thinking (mythos) and logical thinking (logos). Other writers have made similar distinctions using different labels like subjective/objective, romantic/classical, or idealistic/pragmatic. Many scholars have adopted the mythos label because this type of thinking about the world often leads thinkers to produce mythical narratives, but I think it is worth noting that many of the products of mythical thinking are not narratives at all. Proverbs and other aphoristic sayings often result from the same intuitive, subjective approach to understanding the world as myths do. Using analogies and metaphors, puns and riddles, mythical thinkers communicate their poetic insights or challenge their hearers to consider their world differently.

In this article, I want to look at a non-narrative teaching from the well-known “Sermon on the Mount” in the Gospel of Matthew, written sometime before the end of the first-century CE. This teaching, attributed in the text to Jesus of Nazareth, results from using mythos to think about an object found in the natural world, lilies growing in the wild:

Why are you worried about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? (Matthew 6:28-30)

Speaking to an audience worried about clothing (as well as food and other necessities, according to the surrounding passages), Jesus used the lilies of the field to turn them away from worry to trusting in God. It may have even been from observing and meditating on the beauty of the lilies of the field that Jesus first felt through intuition that the world was sustained by a compassionate creator who related to humanity as a loving father (Weeden 85). Jesus’s teaching works analogically, finding similarities between lilies and humans. God created and cares for both lilies and humans. Looking at the lilies, we can see that God cares enough for them to clothe them: since God cares more for humans, we can then extend the similarities to conclude that God will also clothe humans.

However, if we look at this teaching from the perspective of logos — as if it were a philosophical argument — we would have to conclude that it is unsound. Most importantly, lilies do not actually have any clothes. It might seem natural to understand their petals or their beauty metaphorically as clothing, but metaphor lies outside the realm of pure logos. If we want to prove that God will give humans literal clothing, we cannot begin the argument with a premise about metaphorical clothing. Another problem arises when we look at another logical conclusion that should follow from the analogy. If God cares more for Solomon than for lilies, shouldn’t God clothe Solomon more gloriously than them? But Jesus said this is not the case. If God clothes Solomon less gloriously than the lilies, how much less gloriously will God clothe other humans?

Looking through the results of a quick Google search reveals that even today Jesus’s teaching about the lilies of the field provides instruction and inspiration to people from diverse backgrounds, Christian and non-Christian alike. I imagine that this popularity comes from the fact that Jesus’s observations resonate with the feelings and intuitive insights of others.  Some may reject Jesus as a bad logician based on an analysis like the one above, but I think treating this teaching as a product of mythical thinking provides a better way to understand it and appreciate its meaning than to treat is as a product of logical thinking.

This is not to say that analogies are illogical: indeed, they start from a set of known similarities and proceed logically to derive unknown similarities. However, these known similarities are not observed in the same way that scientific phenomena are observed: often these similarities are hidden, obscure, or metaphorical. The thought process that uncovers these hidden connections and produces these analogies is more akin to the thought process that produces myths (mythos, mythical thinking) than to the thought process that produces scientific experiments and philosophical proofs (logos, logical thinking).

Jesus observed that God gives clothes to lilies without the lilies toiling or spinning, which has caused many Biblical commentators over the years a great deal of concern. One might easily conclude from this observation that God will also provide humans with clothes without the humans working for them — maybe humans should even stop working to be more like the lilies of the field. This conclusion would contradict other passages in the Bible, however, particularly instructions about working by St. Paul; it would also be socially disruptive. St. Augustine, writing in the late fourth century CE, addressed this concern in two ways. First, he pointed out that since God has given humans the ability to work, the results of our working should still be seen as God’s provision:

Concerning birds of the air and lilies of the field […] no man may think that God careth not for the needs of His servants ; when His most wise Providence reacheth unto these in creating and governing those. For it must not be deemed that it is not He that feeds and clothes them also which work with their hands. (“On the Work of Monks” ¶35)

Second, he pointed out that the similarities Jesus observed between humans and lilies (that God created and cares for both) do not extend into their capacity for work: no lilies can work, but humans can work. There are some similarities between humans and lilies, and those similarities include the fact that God will clothe them both. But there are also obvious differences, and those include the mechanism God uses to clothe them: lilies, God clothes naturally; humans, God clothes through the works of their own hands. But some humans, like lilies, do not have the ability for work; Augustine did think that God would provide for these humans in the same way God provides for lilies:

If any […] shall raise a question concerning the birds of the air, which sow not nor reap nor gather into stores, and concerning lilies of the field that they toil not neither do they spin; [Christ's disciples and others] will easily answer, If we also, by reason of any either infirmity or occupation cannot work, He will so feed and clothe us, as he does the birds and the lilies. (“On the Work of Monks” ¶36)

All this uncertainty and subjectivity might make logos-thinkers nervous. If we cannot look at the lilies of the field and conclude — in some objective and universal way, for all people at all times — that God will provide all humans clothing, then what good is this teaching? I will close with an example particularly relevant in these recessionary times: should we worry about losing our jobs? Using mythos, some people might look at the lilies of the field and decide not to worry because God will provide. Others might decide to quit their jobs and stop working altogether because God will provide even if they don’t work, while still others might decide that they should worry because God takes better care of the lilies than humans. Using logos, many people will look at the stock market or the unemployment rate: for some, the likelihood that they will lose their jobs will be above some threshold that causes them to worry; for others, it won’t. Others, also using logos, might instead look at psychology studies and decide not to worry because people who worry are unhappy, less likely to perform well at work, and more likely to lose the job they are worried about losing. Worry is a subjective response to the world, and even those using the objective tools of logos can respond to it differently. The more subjective and intuitive approach of mythical thinking seems well-suited to address this subjectivity: Jesus, as a mythos-thinker, shares his intuitive insights gleaned from observing the world with others in order to affect their subjective experiences of it, to turn them from worrying to trusting in God.

Works Cited

• The Gospel of Matthew. (Full text available online.)
• Weeden, Theodore J. “A Faith Odyssey.” When Faith Meets Reason. Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press, 2008. 83-96.
• Augustine. “On the Works of Monks.” (Full text available online.)

A good author with which to start would be J.R.R. Tolkien, arguably the most influential author of modern fantasy. Tolkien had written an extensive collection of myths and legends that he later incorporated into The Lord of the Rings as its mythological background. When seeking a publisher for both works together, he wrote a lengthy letter to one potential publisher, most likely late in 1951. (The Lord of the Rings was published separately in 1954, but the other material was not published until after his death as The Silmarillion in 1978.) In that letter, he included the following description of the earlier mythological material:

[The] stories […] arose in my mind as ‘given’ things. […] Always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’. (Letters #131)

In another article in this issue, Laura discusses science and religion in Madeleine L’Engle’s Many Waters. L’Engle, an American writer best known for her young-adult fantasy novels like A Wrinkle in Time (1962), L’Engle told an anecdote along similar lines about writing The Arm of the Starfish (1965). Her ten-year-old would listen to sections of the book as they were written, until one of the characters died.

He got very excited and upset. “Change it,” he demanded. […]

“I can’t. I didn’t want [that character] to get shot, either, but that’s what happened. I couldn’t stop it.”

“But you can. You’re the writer!” […]

He was so angry with me for allowing [that character] to die that he wouldn’t read anything else I wrote for several years. […] Now he has grown up and understands that the artist cannot change the work at a whim, but can only listen, look, wait, and set down what is revealed. (Walking On Water 185-186)

This moving and highly personal anecdote demonstrates to me in a powerful way that L’Engle took this aspect of her work quite seriously.

In a previous article, I discussed 2007 Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing’s book Shikasta in terms of mythical thinking. At the beginning of Shikasta, published in 1979, Lessing included some introductory remarks:

As I wrote [Shikasta] I was invaded with ideas for other books, other stories. […] It was clear that I had made — or found — a new world for myself. (Shikasta x)

Neil Gaiman, perhaps one of the best-known authors of speculative fiction writing today, expressed something similar regarding the title character of his popular comic book series The Sandman. The series, which ran from 1989 to 1996, has subsequently been published in eleven volumes. In an afterword to the first volume, written in 1991, Gaiman wrote:

Looking back, the process of coming up with the Lord of Dreams seems less like an act of creation than one of sculpture: as if he were already waiting, grave and patient, inside a block of white marble, and all I needed to do was chip away everything that wasn’t him. (Afterword 238)

I discussed the magnificent carved columns of the Pacific Northwest and their relationships to mythic narratives in a previous article on totem poles. Bill Reid, one of the great totem pole carvers of the twentieth century, described his art with these words:

With half my mind, I know I do believe that the figures on that totem pole I’m carving […] grew inside that tree as it was growing. And all I have to do is peel away the outer layers and there they’ll be. And the other half of my mind tells me that’s complete nonsense and romantic balderdash. I can live with both points of view — and enjoy them both, actually. (Bill Reid 4:50-5:30)

Reid’s first point of view — that the figures grow inside the cedar trees — resembles the other statements by the authors. These all reflect mythical thinking (mythos), which approaches the world through intuitive means and subjective insights. They all explain their art in terms of other worlds or hidden realms, which is a common element found in many products of mythical thinking. The land of the gods above the skies or faraway places over the seas are familiar expressions of this element, but mythical thinkers also often posit an invisible reality or hidden plane of  existence within our own world. I imagine that these authors and artists did not deduce the existence of their characters or their stories from objective experiments or impersonal proofs; rather, they posited these objects to describe the very subjective — but also very real — feelings they experienced while creating their art.

But do such invisible realities exist? Did the figures Reid carved actually grow inside the trees? Could L’Engle really not have changed the story to satisfy her son? Logical thinking (logos) might look for something more objective than hidden realms to explain these subjective feelings. A logos-only thinker might perform experiments on cedar trees, looking for the hidden figures. Such experiments would (presumably) produce no objective evidence for these figures, and their existence would then be rejected. Reid’s second point of view — that this is all “complete nonsense and romantic balderdash” — reflects the conclusions of such a logos-only approach. But Reid did not think that logos offered a superior or more satisfying way to think about his art, and I think all the authors I mentioned above would have agreed with him on the complementary nature of mythos and logos in this regard. Mythical thinking provided all these authors a method to make sense of their own work and to share that sense with others.

Works Cited

• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. 2nd edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
• L’Engle, Madeleine. Walking On Water. Bantam Books, 1982.
• Lessing, Doris. Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta. New York : Random House, 1979.
• Gaiman, Neil. “Afterword.” The Sandman, Volume 1: Preludes and Nocturnes. New York: DC Comics, 1991.
• Bill Reid. Directed by Jack Long. National Film Board of Canada, 1979. (Full documentary available online.)

[Editor's Note: The conversation below is the first part of a single interview. The second part of that conversation appeared in another issue as Native America & Speculative Fiction.]

Randy Hoyt: In the very first issue of this magazine, I proposed a working definition of myth that encompasses more than just traditional mythology, including fantasy and science fiction. What do you think that all three of these have in common?

Amy H. Sturgis: All three are involved in the project of answering the question of what it means to be human: the nature of humanity; the nature of humanity’s relationship to the earth, the cosmos, the infinite; and other questions like these. The very first storytellers, through their mythological stories, parables, and other tales, were trying to come to some sense of the world and to figure out their place in it. I see mythology as a “mother figure” out of which the other two have grown. I would group all these under the umbrella “speculative fiction,” along with much of horror. I would also emphasize that some of the sub-genres of science fiction like utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and weird fiction or Gothic fiction fit under this heading. I think all of these forms of speculative fiction originate from the same impulse that was first shown through mythology.

RH: I like that term, “speculative fiction.” Could you explain a little bit more what you mean by that?

AHS: I think the easiest way to describe it is to consider what does not fit in speculative fiction. On the one hand, you have the kind of fiction that describes the world as we can see it or taste it or feel it, a world that is already familiar to readers: “mundane fiction.” These stories take place in the time and place in which the readers live or one with which they are familiar from history. For example, when reading Jane Austen, readers don’t have to be told how gravity works in order to understand her story because it’s taking place in a world that they already recognize. Speculative fiction is the opposite of that. These stories use imaginative tools in order to answer the important questions about the human experience, attempting to explain everything from what happens when we die to what makes thunderstorms occur to how the earth and its inhabitants came into being in the first place.

RRH: In what ways would you say that fantasy and science fiction differ in their approach to these questions?

AHS: I think the impulse to draw a line between these two types of speculative fiction is something with which the critics are more concerned than the practitioners, those telling the stories. Some of my favorite authors move fairly easily between the two: Lois McMaster Bujold, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Orson Scott Card, for example. But as a critic, the distinction that is helpful for me — inspired by some of the work that scholar James Gunn has done — involves describing science fiction as the fiction of change and fantasy as the fiction of difference. In a work of science fiction, it’s our world, our universe; we recognize its natural laws as identifiable and familiar to us; but there’s a change. Artificial intelligence might exist, or we might have interstellar travel or time travel. It’s our world with a change added to it, a “what-if.” That change requires plausibility, if not probability: the change could really happen. Fantasy, on the other hand, is more about overall differences. When you are in Middle-earth or in Narnia, there’s a different set of rules in effect there. Even in the wainscot fantasies like Harry Potter, with the wizarding world that butts up against our own, things are still different in that secondary universe. This is what Tolkien wrote about in “On Fairy-stories,” a believable world of fantasy with its own internal dynamic and its own laws that hold true for that world. I think this angle — change vs. difference — helps me to move any given work in one direction or another, but I think there’s an argument to be made that some works incorporate both, some blur the lines, and other are just not easily pigeon-holed in either one.

I think it’s interesting to see whether science fiction or fantasy gains an ascendancy over the other one at different times. In the 1950s, for example, there was a sense of wonder and excitement about the future and technological progress — “We’re going to go to the moon!” and “Think of all the things we’re going to accomplish!” At that time, there was a greater interest in science fiction than in fantasy, particularly with science fiction becoming popular in young-adult fiction thanks to the juveniles of Robert A. Heinlein, Andre Norton, and others. Contrast that with today, when the national polls say that young people don’t think their life is going to get better, that they don’t think the world their children will inherit will be as good as the world their parents lived in, when there’s a general societal concern about what the future holds. Today, you see the trend moving sharply from fantasy and away from science fiction. I’m not saying there’s a definite causation, but there is definitely a correlation between the way we view the past and the future and which of the two genres speaks to us. At a given time one seems more popular than the other in part because of the way we feel about the state of our affairs today.

RH: When would you say that modern science fiction as a genre began?

AHS: I think that all speculative fiction has a very long past. In terms of the greater tradition out of which science fiction emerged, you would have to go all the way back to something like the Epic of Gilgamesh or Plato’s Republic to find the seeds. As scholars again, more than as fans or practitioners, we pinpoint when certain movements began or shifted. Scholars differ about the beginning of modern science fiction as we know it, but I think the best case can be made for Mary Shelley’s 1818 publication of Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus. Elements of science fiction can be found in earlier works, but Shelley really combines all of the necessary ingredients for what we consider modern science fiction. The next important figure would probably be Edgar Allan Poe. The genre really came into its own with people like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells writing at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

Science fiction has of course gone through many different stages, waves, or movements since. The thing I like most about the history of science fiction is how closely it is connected to the question of what it means to be human. The science part of science fiction keeps expanding. It starts out as biology and chemistry, then takes in physics, then takes in linguistics and anthropology and sociology. As more disciplines get brought in under the science part of science fiction, we get new insights into what it means to be human. I think at some level, we always answer the question “What is human?” with something like “Whatever is like me.” That is just our frame of reference. But as science fiction has expanded its lens by incorporating the tools of different sciences, the notion of “what’s like me” gets bigger and bigger. So the answer starts out to include only well-educated, land-owning white men and then evolves to include people of both genders and all races. But then, what traits must a computer or an artificial intelligence possess in order for us to think of it as something like a human? What about different biological creatures, like a primate on our planet or a different life form on another planet? What of clones? What is necessary for us to consider any life human enough to be treated as human? Some of the most innovative questions about the very nature of how we understand the universe have come from writers using science fiction to get at these questions in a different way.

RH: For people who want to get started with science fiction, what classic works would you recommend?

AHS: Mary Shelley is a good starting place. Frankenstein (1818) is a work of absolute genius, but I really love her less-known but equally-brilliant book The Last Man (1826); I try to foist that on people whenever I can. You can’t wrong with anything by H.G. Wells; his work stands up incredibly well. I would particularly recommend The Time Machine (1895).  I’m also a huge fan of H.P. Lovecraft, who is as much a science-fiction author as a weird-fiction or horror author; The Color Out of Space (1927) would be a good one to read first. I would also include three books that were instrumental in my own adolescence: Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950), Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), and Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (1966). These classic works give a sense of the possibilities and the breadth of science fiction.

RH: You teach classes on the history of science fiction at Belmont University. What do you cover in those classes?

AHS: There are three classes in particular, and each of them has a bit of a different perspective. The one I’ve taught most is called “The History of the Future”; it essentially looks at one hundred years of history through science fiction. We look at science-fiction texts and ask how the works reflect the concerns of the authors about their own time period. It’s a history course, but the premise is that the science-fiction authors — no matter how remote the worlds they describe, how furry the aliens, or how chartreuse the ray-gun beams — are actually talking about their own time and place and reacting to it in some way. Joe Haldeman’s classic work The Forever War (1974), for example, is set in the distant future at a time of interstellar travel. It is a story about people sent away from home to fight on the front lines. Because of the way time works with space travel, they return from the war to encounter a place that is literally a different world than the one they left, and these soldiers must suffer through the difficulty of finding their place in this alien world. But Haldeman is writing about his experience in Vietnam as a soldier, serving in the U.S. Armed Forces and then returning home to a less-than-recognizable United States. Students can learn much more from that rich text about the experiences of the Vietnam Era than they can get from reading a history textbook.

Another class I teach is called “Worlds Gone Wrong,” a class specifically on the dystopian tradition. We start with E.M. Forrester’s The Machine Stops (1909) and look at different dystopian works from the last hundred years to see the different warnings that authors have given. These descriptions of worst-case scenarios tell us about the concerns of the time periods in which they were written: totalitarian governments, moral decline, rampant consumerism, and other concerns. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), for example, discusses drug abuse and gangs and the disintegration of the cities; we look at how that book relates to the early ’90s but also to our concerns today. A lot of the students are really interested to find out that environmental concerns — something they associate with today’s mainstream media — show up quite early in dystopian works.

The third class in which I use science fiction is about the frontier and US Exceptionalism. We look at the idea that started back in the late nineteenth century with Frederick Jackson Turner called the “frontier thesis,” which suggests that the United States is unique among all other nations because it had the experience of the frontier. We bring that idea forward to consider what the frontier means in different eras in the United States’ history. Is the United States really unique? If not, why did we come up with this idea? If so, how do we look at it in a twenty-first century context? It is not strictly a science-fiction class, but we do look at works like Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) and David Brin’s The Postman (1985), as well as the science-fiction television series Firefly (2002), to think about the frontier in different ways.

RH: What about more recent science fiction? Is there an anthology or some other resource that would expose people to work going on today?

AHS: There is a great anthology series called The Road To Science-Fiction (1979-1998) edited by James Gunn. It contains six volumes, with each volume addressing a different time period. The last several volumes include contemporary stories from around the world. The series as a whole is an excellent introduction for anyone interested in the history of science fiction.

I have also found podcasts to be a great resource for recent stories. There are a number of great podcasts in speculative fiction, such as Escape Pod and SciFiDimensions. I am personally involved with a podcast run by Tony C. Smith called StarShipSofa, which spotlights new science fiction stories published in the last year or two. Tony has persuaded some tremendous authors — authors who are in a good position to shape the genre in the twenty-first century — to donate their stories. I am very fortunate to do dramatic readings of these works for the podcast. I’ve narrated stories by the likes of Jeff Carlson, Vonda McIntyre, and Paul di Filippo, among others. Last year and this year, the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) allowed StarShipSofa to run dramatic readings of all of the stories they shortlisted for their Best Short Fiction award — the highest science-fiction honor for short stories in Great Britain. (In February, I was honored to do the dramatic reading of M. Rickert’s 2009 BSFA-nominated story.) StarShipSofa will also be putting up has also just put up dramatic readings of all seven nominees for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story awarded by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).

RH: Not only do you do dramatic readings, but you also write and read fact articles on the history of science fiction. I have really enjoyed listening to those and getting some historical context on the genre. I found your articles on Francis Stevens, the Arkham House Sampler, and the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in particular to be quite fascinating.

AHS: Thank you so much! I greatly appreciate it. The other main goal of StarShipSofa, besides spotlighting new authors, is to try to rescue some the forgotten pioneers of science fiction. I hope my fact articles contribute to that end. It gives me great joy to be a part of the podcast and to shine the spotlight on authors and works I think are too important to be forgotten.

I have included links to all the books and podcast episodes Amy recommended during the interview below. You can learn more about Amy’s work by visiting her web site, amyhsturgis.com. She is currently working on what sounds like an exciting new book, The Gothic Imaginations of J.R.R. Tolkien, Madeleine L’Engle, and J.K. Rowling, for publication with Zossima Press in 2010.

[Editor's Note: The conversation above is the first part of a single interview. The second part of that conversation appeared in another issue as Native America & Speculative Fiction.]

Recommendations

• Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus. 1818.
• Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. 1826.
• Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. 1895.
• Lovecraft, H.P. The Color Out of Space. 1927.
• Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles. 1950.
• Herbert, Frank. Dune. 1965.
• Heinlein, Robert. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress . 1966.
• Haldeman, Joe. The Forever War. 1974.
• Forrester, E.M. The Machine Stops. 1909.
• Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. 1993.
• Brin, David. The Postman. 1985.
• Firefly. Directed by Joss Whedon, Tim Minear, and Vern Gillum. 2002.

• Gunn, James. The Road To Science-Fiction. Six volumes:
  • Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to Wells. 1979. Scarecrow Press: 2002.
  • Volume 2: From Wells to Heinlein. 1979. Scarecrow Press: 2002.
  • Volume 3: From Heinlein to Here. 1979. Scarecrow Press: 2002.
  • Volume 4: From Here to Forever. 1997. Scarecrow Press: 2003.
  • Volume 5: The British Way. White Wolf Publishing: 1998.
  • Volume 6: Around The World. White Wolf Publishing: 1999.

• Dramatic readings of the finalists for the British Science Fiction Associations award for best Short Fiction from the past two years are available at StarShipSofa.
  • 2007 Shortlist (Winners Announced March 22, 2008)
    • Whates, Ian. “Gift Of Joy.” Narrated by Alex Foster.
    • Brenchley, Chaz. “Terminal.”
    • Chiang, Ted. “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate.” Narrated by JJ Campanella.
    • MacLeod, Ken. “Lighting Out.”
    • Reynolds, Alastair. “Sledge-Maker’s Daughter.” Narrated by Diane Severson.
  • 2008 Shortlist (Winners To Be Announced April 11, 2009)
    • Rickert, Mary. “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment:One Daughter’s Personal Account.” Narrated by Amy H. Sturgis.
    • Chiang, Ted. “Exhalation.” Narrated by Ray Sizemore.
    • McAuley, Paul. “Little Lost Robot.” Narrated by Matthew Wayne Selznick.

• StarShipSofa will be adding added on April 2 dramatic readings of the finalists for this year’s Nebula Award for best short story. (Winners To Be Announced April 25, 2009)
  • Allen, Mike. “The Button Bin.”
  • Ford, Jeffrey. “The Dreaming Wind.”
  • Hoffman, Nina Kiriki. “Trophy Wives.”
  • Johnson, Kij. “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss.”
  • Jones, Gwyneth. “The Tomb Wife.”
  • Kelly, James Patrick. “Don’t Stop.”
  • Nestvold, Ruth. “Mars: A Traveler’s Guide.”

The first book in the series — Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta — was published in 1979. The title of the book refers to the planet Shikasta, a small and remote planet in the interstellar empire of Canopus. To make the planet useful to their interests, Canopus imported an alien species to speed up the evolution of the native Shikastan species. An unexpected astronomical catastrophe and invaders from the evil empire Shammat caused an unprecedented degeneration in the natives that nearly destroyed the planet. Canopean emissaries continued to work on Shikasta in an attempt to control the damage, but their original plans for the planet had to be abandoned. The book itself is a diverse collection of archives (direct reports from emissaries, excerpts from history books, diaries, letters, etc.) meant to give first-year Canopean students a picture of the empire’s disastrous involvement on Shikasta. Oh — and I should probably mention that Shikasta is our very own planet Earth.

In creating these archives, Doris Lessing has made use stories found in the Hebrew Bible. Two examples will illustrate her approach. First, in Genesis 11:1-8, men gathered to build a tower at Babel that would reach to the heavens. God thwarted their plans by confusing their speech, creating a multitude of languages and forcing them to spread out over the land. In Shikasta this same event is depicted as a planet-wide conference, secretly organized by the evil Shammat. Taufiq, an emissary from Canopus, reported:

All six of us attended the conference, purporting to be delegates from the extreme Northwest fringes. […] The recommended techniques […] to disrupt their speech centres […] were effective. […] Their communication systems malfunctioned, and eight main languages are now established on Shikasta. These will develop into hundreds, then thousands of languages and dialects. (101)

Second, in Genesis 19:1-29, God planned to destroy Sodom because of its wickedness. Two angels warned Lot and his family to leave the city. Lot escaped, and God then poured down sulfur and fire from heaven on Sodom and Gomorrah. In Shikasta, Lessing portrays this as a spaceship air raid. Johor, another emissary from Canopus, reported:

We went back to the cities. […] In each were a few people who could hear us, and these we told to leave at once with any who would listen to them. […] Having made sure of the safety of those who could be saved, we signalled in the space-fleet, and the cities were blasted into oblivion. (107-108)

I find Lessing’s use of Biblical narratives in this novel both entertaining and intriguing. Some scholars devalue stories from various mythological traditions on the grounds that they are half-remembered or exaggerated accounts of historical events. At first glance, it may appear that Lessing is criticizing these stories from Genesis along the same lines. However, a statement she makes in the preface of the book convinces me she is doing something more subtle:

It is possible we make a mistake when we dismiss […] the sacred literatures of all races and nations […] as quaint fossils from a dead past. (x)

I think a better understanding of Lessing’s approach in this novel can be grasped by looking at the distinction between mythical thinking and logical thinking I explored in my article contrasting mythos and logos. Though she does not use these terms, Lessing provides in Shikasta an imaginative thought-experiment meant to challenge a logos-only thinker’s rejection of these stories.

This portrayal of stories from Genesis as distorted accounts of a prehistoric human past suggests an interesting possibility. Perhaps some shred of truth has been preserved in these stories, possibly even more accurate truth than we have found through scientific and historical methods. Even if we cannot prove this is true, we can at least imagine it. In Shikasta, Lessing establishes that it is at least imaginatively possible that the sacred texts (products of mythos thinkers) preserve some scientific and historical truth that scientists and historians (logos thinkers) have not discovered. Far from criticizing these stories, her fictive account attempts to elevate them in the minds of logos-only readers — from ridiculous falsehoods to potential sources of truth.

The archives move back and forth between documents related to Shikasta’s prehistoric past and those related to its twentieth century, presenting a bleak picture of degenerated humanity. In the so-called “Century of Destruction,” a rising belief in materialism and rapid advances of technology, both results of logos-only thinking, brought about the elimination of any sense of the sacred and of transcendence, along with the depreciation of the value of human life. This way of thinking originated in Western Europe, then spread as regional fighting escalated to full-scale warfare that devastated the entire planet. Humans living under this way of thinking pursued the only good they could conceive: their own advancement, consumption of goods, and accumulation of wealth. These values affected the way people felt about one another — they had “a license to cheat, lie, and murder and [to] regard every passer-by only as a possibility for gain” (106) — as well as how they felt about themselves: “Their way of life […] increasingly saddened and depressed their real selves, their hidden selves” (91).

Once Lessing establishes the sacred texts as potential sources of scientific and historical truths, the she has prepared the way to see them as sources of spiritual truths to address these negative consequences of logos-only thinking. The spiritual truths taught by Canopean agents to the Shikastan natives can be found in places throughout the Hebrew Bible:

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:18)

“I [God] desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” (Hosea 6:6)

“[The king] must not acquire many horses for himself or […] acquire for himself excessive silver and gold.” (Deuteronomy 17:16-17)

“A righteous man cares for the needs of his animal, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel.” (Proverbs 12:10)

“Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.” (Isaiah 1:17)

These spiritual truths reflect ideas Lessing first encountered in the 1964 book The Sufis and through a subsequent friendship with the author Idries Shah; Lessing spoke often about the influence this book had on her. Shah described Sufism as a universal spiritual wisdom that transcends individual religions, a wisdom that has traditionally been communicated through parables and folktales. In drawing on the Hebrew Bible, Lessing is not arguing here for the correctness of Judaism or Christianity: she is well aware of the injustices and brutalities performed in the name of religion. Rather, Lessing provides in Canopus’s involvement on Shikasta a fictional explanation for the ideas about Sufism made popular by Shah. According to the archives, all the great religions surviving into the twentieth century were originally founded by Canopean agents for the “stabilisation of the culture, preventing the worst excesses of brutality, of exploitation, and greed” (111). Even though they became perverted, “distorted inklings of the truth remained” in them (Lessing 90).

Shikasta is much more than just a retelling of stories from Genesis from a different perspective, but this aspect of the novel is most relevant to this site’s ongoing exploration of mythical thinking. Doris Lessing understood the materialism, the greed, the injustice, and the spiritual degeneration prevalent in the modern world to be the result of logos-only thinking. She acts still today as a strong advocate for the potential of the products of mythos to address these issues.

Work Consulted

• Lessing, Doris. Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta. New York : Random House, 1979.

I find it useful when discussing this distinction to consider the Greek words from which our English words “logical” and “mythical” have been derived, logos and mythos. Both Greek words can be translated as something like “story” or “account”; mythical thinking and logical thinking both provide an account of the world, but they do so in very different ways. Those using logical thinking approach the world scientifically and empirically. They look for explanations using observable facts, controlled experiments, and deductive proofs. Truth discovered through logos seeks to be objective and universal. Those using mythical thinking, on the other hand, approach the world through less direct, more intuitive means. A person might gain poetic insights into the nature of the world by seeing a caterpillar emerge from a cocoon or watching a full moon rise as the sun sets. Truth discovered through mythos is more subjective, based on individual feelings and experiences.

To illustrate the difference between these two approaches, let me consider one of nature’s most perplexing conundrums: why the turtle has a shell. A recent article in New Scientist magazine demonstrates how the techniques of logical thinking have been applied to this question. Modern turtle shells are deeply infused with the turtles’ skeletons; observations made on turtle embryos suggested that the shell might have been an outgrowth from the dorsal ribs and the vertebrae. Bone fragments recently discovered in New Mexico, however, show that this hypothesis was incorrect. The fragments came from an ancestor of the turtle with something like the armor of an armadillo; since the rows of armored plates were not connected to the skeleton, the shells of later turtles could not have been an outgrowth of it. More experiments will be performed and more observations will be made to explain the turtle’s shell in terms of physical causes and effects.

An Aesopic fable demonstrates how the techniques of mythical thinking have been applied to this same question. In a previous article, I discussed this fable of Zeus and the Turtle in great detail: Zeus invites all the animals to his wedding, but the turtle skips the wedding because she prefers being in her own home than being anywhere else; as punishment, Zeus makes her carry her house with her everywhere she goes. We do not possess any description of the thought-process involved in the creation of this fable. We could guess that some ancient person might have observed the turtle’s slow pace and understood the turtle as downcast and humiliated, struggling under its great burden — or perhaps an observer saw in the turtle great determination in the face of life’s adversities. If a story already existed of a divinity punishing a disobedient creature, the observer may have retold the story with a turtle as the disobedient character to express the insights from this observation; perhaps the events of the narrative and the explanation occurred to the observer simultaneously. We cannot know for sure the origin of this story, but something like this strikes me as a possible development.

The academic discipline of mythology is perhaps best understood as the application of the techniques of logical thinking to the products of mythical thinking; this is nicely illustrated by the fact that the English word mythology is derived from both Greek words mythos and logos. My own discussion of the Aesopic fable fits nicely within this discipline because it is an attempt to explain the fable in a objective, historical fashion. But the reverse also occurs: the techniques of mythical thinking can be applied to the products of logical thinking. Fantasy authors often incorporate scientific discoveries and theories into their stories: Philip Pullman connects dark matter with Milton in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and Madeleine L’Engle examines the space/time continuum and the theory of relativity in her Time quintet. Many science-fiction authors have scientific backgrounds and use narratives to work out for themselves and to convey to others the mythical significance of findings in their various fields.

Many of the great advances in civilization have been the product of these two ways of thinking working together. Artists, poets, musicians, and other mythical thinkers rely on the tools and techniques of logos for their own works of mythos: in a previous article, I discussed the effects of iron tools on the art of totem-pole carving. The pursuits of logos are in turn influenced by mythos: logical thinkers have figured out, for example, how to cure illnesses and prolong the average human lifespan, but they have learned through mythical thinking to value human life enough to bother. Products of logos enable us to communicate with the people who matter most to us (even when they are thousands of miles away), but mythos provides the context for us to know which people matter and what we should say to them when we do communicate. These exchanges, interactions, and dependencies demonstrate to me that mythos and logos are best seen as complementary to each other.

Though we have inherited great traditions in both mythical thinking and logical thinking, logical thinking has risen to such prominence that many no longer realize any another approach exists. The decline of mythical thinking throughout much of the industrialized world has resulted in the unfortunate loss of a sense of transcendence and of the value of human life. Some people argue that this has been responsible for much of the devastation in the last one hundred years. (I explore this connection in an article discussing Shikasta, a science-fiction novel by Doris Lessing.) I would not argue that mythical thinking can cure all of humanity’s problems — I imagine that an equal amount of damage has been done on account of both mythos and logos — but I would argue that it is now our burden and privilege to re-discover mythical thinking and to wrestle with the proper way to re-integrate these two ways of thinking into our lives.

One of my main goals with this site is the opportunity to explore for myself this integration of mythos and logos. I will continue to publish articles that explore myths and mythical thinking: the next issue will contain an article on mythical thinking in the teachings of Jesus and one on the way modern artists and authors understand their own art in mythical terms. But I would also love to hear from you: please leave a comment below discussing your own thoughts and experiences with mythical thinking. What has led you to appreciate mythos in a logos-heavy culture? In what ways have you embraced it and what value have you found in it? How do you think we should best integrate mythical and logical thinking?

Works Consulted / Recommended Reading

• Sløk, Johannes. Devotional Language. Translated by Henrik Mossin. Danbury: Walter De Gruyter Incorporated, 1996.

Sløk approaches the issue of mythical thinking and logical thinking through the philosophy of language. (One excellent section of his book has the provocative title “The Awkwardness of Rational Language.”) He uses the mysteries related to Demeter and Persephone practiced in ancient Greece at Eleusis, a coastal city outside of Athens, as his primary example of mythical thinking throughout the book.

• Buxton, Richard, editor. From Myth to Reason? : Studies in the Development of Greek Thought. Oxford UP, 1999.

It has long been taken for granted that Greek society moved from mythos to logos in the sixth to fourth centuries BCE, culminating in the works of Aristotle. Recent scholars, however, are challenging this generalization and seeking to understand the importance of mythos throughout Greek society. This book contains papers delivered at an academic conference in 1996 exploring this theme.

• Peters, F. E. The Monotheists, Volume 2 – The Words and Will of God. New York: Princeton UP, 2003.

This two-volume series explores Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from many different perspectives. In chapter seven of the second volume, titled “Theology,” Peters uses the mythos/logos distinction to discuss the  development of theology in these monotheistic religions over a period of nearly two thousand years. He shows that both have been essential to theology, with the emphasis shifting back and forth in different times and in different religious communities.

• Armstrong, Karen. The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001.

Armstrong draws heavily on Sløk’s work to define mythos and logos. She brings these concepts into the twentieth century, exploring how these two ways of thinking are reflected in fundamentalist movements in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. She argues that these uniquely modern movements are the results of applying the works of mythos to the concerns of logos.

• Shelburne, Walter A. “Introduction.” Mythos and Logos in the Thought of Carl Jung. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988.

Although Carl Jung never used the terms mythos and logos, Shelburne argues that this distinction provides insight into Jung’s thought. The introduction of the book provides an excellent discussion of mythos and logos. The author briefly contrasts Jung’s view with two other views in an attempt to clarify what Jung would have thought about these two ways of thinking. The whole introduction nicely illustrates the difficulty of talking about mythical thinking in terms of logical thinking.

• Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. New York: Bantam, 1984.

This is a fascinating novel in its own right, but of particular relevance here is the narrator’s distinction between classical understanding and romantic understanding. This distinction addresses aspects of the mythos/logos distinction from a different angle. The narrator introduced the concept of “Quality” as a way to overcome the classical/romantic dichotomy.

He approaches the problem through the philosophy of science, and  I found his comments on the scientific method to be particularly thought-provoking: Where do hypotheses that science tests originate? Are there an infinite number of hypotheses to any given problem? Can scientific results ever be conclusive when it is impossible to test an infinite number of hypotheses?

Randy Hoyt: When did you first encounter the works of Tolkien? What impact did they have on you?

Ted Nasmith: My older sister gave me a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring when I was 14. It hit me really strongly, as it does so many people. I just loved it right from the start. It was set in the distant, romantic past, amid traditional English-style landscapes, and it was all very nostalgic, fairy-tale and storybook material. It really grabbed me. I was an art student at the time, and I started to draw pictures inspired by the book fairly quickly. That was a big turn for me: I had been drawing spaceships, cars, and all kinds of more mechanical stuff. Tolkien was a big new element in my artistic imagination.

RH: How did you get started publishing your Tolkien illustrations?

TN: The first Tolkien calendar came out in 1973. It contained Tolkien’s own artwork, but then calendars with other artists’ work quickly followed, which greatly impressed me, since it demonstrated that The Lord of the Rings had struck a resounding chord of artistic inspiration with others, too. I had already accumulated my own paintings and drawings through high school and into the ’70s. The calendars in theory provided a way for me to get my stuff in front of the publishers; it proved to be a process that required persistence, but that eventually bore fruit. My work started appearing in the calendars in the late ’80s, fifteen years after I first sought its publication.

RH: When did you first encounter The Silmarillion?

TN: I read The Silmarillion as soon as it came out in 1977. It was not nearly as enjoyable as The Lord of the Rings, but it was more of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. More images came to me through these ‘new’ legends. I deliberately included something of Beren and Lúthien or one of the other major stories for the calendars, in order to integrate more of Tolkien’s legendarium into my growing body of paintings.

RH: I imagine many people seeing those calendars would have been familiar with The Lord of the Rings but possibly not The Silmarillion. What did you hope your art communicated to those who did not know the story you were illustrating? Obviously you lose some elements like dialogue, and you are limited to a single, frozen moment: but what extra elements can artwork use that make it more powerful?

TN: Hopefully they convey the sense of enchantment, the otherworldliness and remoteness, or simply the romance and nostalgia, or the poignancy and sadness — all those things and more you can convey using color, mood, shadow, etc. Someone looking at these illustrations who is unfamiliar with The Silmarillion can definitely see there’s something going on. Even if you know the story depicted, a work of illustration can still speak to you at a deeper level. Images are powerful. Tolkien dealt with archetypal material, the stuff of dreams, and through visual images that material can tap into the human subconscious in ways that augment prose.

As I would start drawing a scene based on the written description, I would notice visual associations that I didn’t really intend or appreciate originally. These associations emphasize the sub-text or the background ideas a bit more, filling them out and amplifying them. They definitely seem to complement the written part of it. I’d often think, “This really has a life of its own, a separate validity to it.” Sometimes a person will get a strong reaction to a work of art and they will say, “That’s what I saw in my head. How did you know?” That’s an amazing compliment to an artist. If you received a comment like that once in a blue moon, it would be enough to make you feel like you were achieving a level of success, but I actually get comments like that fairly constantly in letters from fans; it’s really, really flattering.

RH: You mention images coming to you. Many authors, Tolkien included, describe their stories as something that they discover more than something they invent. Do you find that to be the case with your paintings?

TN: Yeah, I definitely understand why they would say things like that. There have been times where something just sort of came through me in a way. I didn’t overly deliberate on it: I just got out of the way and let it come onto the page. So yeah, I really relate to that kind of creative description of what happens. It is a bit of magic, for sure.

RH: Do you have a favorite piece of all the ones that you have done?

TN: That’s a question I get often. I could probably narrow it down to ten or fifteen or something. There are so many individually that are successful, for one reason or another.

RH: My personal favorite is The Kinslaying at Alqualondë from the 2004 illustrated version of The Silmarillion. Would you include that one in the list?

The Kinslaying at Alqualondë. 2004. View larger image »

TN: Yeah, that came to mind. There are a couple of things I wanted to show there. Firstly, it’s an opportunity to show a glimpse of the lost city of Alqualondë and the wonderful culture of the Teleri. The ships are described as the Teleri’s greatest work (Tolkien 86). I imagine they would have been so beautiful that no artist could truly have captured this accurately — but it’s my job and fascination as an artist to approximate it as best I can. I couldn’t imagine them any other way than each having its own character, for instance. Compositionally, the curving wharf portrays a more feminine and dynamic setting. The battle taking place was difficult; scenes with many figures interacting are not my strong suit. But you just get down and you work on it much more to make sure that it’s up to the standard level of the other parts. I used to work mainly as an architectural renderer, so I have a facility for architecture; it was interesting to try to envision Elven architecture of the First Age. What would that be? Certainly it would be exotic, all carved, elegant and otherworldly.

Then there’s the problem of lighting; the scene is under starlight with no sun and moon. The text mentions lamps on the quays and piers (Tolkien 77), so that gives you something. I played a bit with the color of the water to make it almost luminous. When you try to do as realistic art as I do, you get caught sometimes thinking you have to do it according to all the laws of physics. But this is fantasy. I have learned to take liberties to convey more than just the hard facts and the surface of things, and not to worry about someone saying, “Hey, that isn’t real.” None of it is ‘real’, although it is famously realistic to a high degree, and thus presents tantalizing dilemmas.

RH: I saw on your web site an earlier image you did of this scene, which you called a “sketch.” I thought that sketch was excellent. What’s the relationship between that sketch and the image from the book?

The Kinslaying at Alqualondë. Sketch. Source »

TN: That first color sketch was based on a thumbnail drawing of a raw impression of the wharfs, ships, and the battle. Christopher Tolkien worked with me in choosing illustrations, and I was encouraged that he expressed great praise for this initial rough image. I tried to preserve what was good about the sketch but make it more sophisticated.

RH: The scene in the sketch felt like it took place at night, but in the final illustration it really feels like it took place before the sun and the moon, before day and night existed. I often forget that the sun and moon hadn’t appeared yet, and I often picture these scenes as if they were in daylight. This illustration really drives that home.

TN: I’m glad. It’s difficult. That’s often the way you draw a scene, with that daylight impression. It may make for a nice picture, but isn’t accurately illustrating it. I used to wonder why there weren’t more great illustrations of the Fellowship traveling through the countryside as they came south to Moria, but it’s because they traveled mostly at night! The Peter Jackson movies showed the Fellowship against these wonderful landscape shots — but in the daytime. The Tolkien illustrator is often left with a serious limitation. Take Bilbo and Gollum and the riddle game: it’s pitch black except for Gollum’s eyes — not too great for an illustrator! You’ve got to take a little license on some of these things.

RH: A big theme I see in Tolkien is the interaction of beauty and sorrow, which this illustration captures really well: the beauty of the ships on the left and the sorrow of the battle here on the right.

TN: Right. That was an important part of it for sure. Somehow you’ve got to underscore this terrible kinslaying scene, the violence and obscenity of it. Paradoxically, the beautiful is that much more tragic because of the incongruity of something terrible and violent juxtaposed with it.

RH: What new projects are you working on and what new artwork should we expect to see from you in the near future?

TN: I provided all the artwork for the 2009 Tolkien Calendar, featuring landscape images from the First and Second Ages of Middle-earth from The Silmarillion. I’m also doing various commissions, mostly new Tolkien paintings; projects done recently or upcoming. Last year, I did the scene with Frodo, Sam, and Pippin meeting Gildor and the Elves in the Woody End. I always loved that scene, right from the first time I started imagining and creating the illustrations. I never found a chance to illustrate it earlier, though; I never felt I was in the right moment or something. Yet it was an immediate hit, and I was commissioned to do another version of that same piece because the first one sold quite quickly at the exhibition!

Elves in the Woody End. 2006. View larger image »

I’ve also been fortunate enough to get involved with George R.R. Martin, another amazing fantasy author. I’ve done a lot of new work in ‘Westeros,’ his imaginary universe, for an upcoming big-format reference book on his fantasy novels [see examples]. I’ve also recently accepted an offer for the 2010 Tolkien Calendar, which will feature landscapes of the Third Ages.

You can learn more about Ted’s work by visiting his web site, tednasmith.com. The 2009 Tolkien Calendar featuring Ted’s paintings of landscapes of the First Age of Middle-earth is available from HarperCollins at Amazon.com and other booksellers.

References

• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Silmarillion. Christopher Tolkien, editor. Ted Nasmith, illustrator. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

These great columns are often referred to as “story-telling poles” (Malin 104) because the multiple figures depict or illustrate a narrative. These narratives might recount recent historical events involving members of a particular family or timeless legends involving mythological characters. The Raven pole belonging to a Tlingit tribe in Wrangell, Alaska, for example, depicts a story found among various tribes that explains the origins of the sun and moon. In addition to its aetiological components, the story includes many elements similar to those in narratives from various Western traditions — the theft of fire, the trickster who benefits mankind, and even the virgin birth — and more mundane themes like the danger of spoiling grandchildren.

Long ago, the world was covered with darkness. (This story appears with minor variations in many tribes; the summary here includes details from the Tlingit tradition.) Raven grew tired of stumbling around and went in search of light. As he came near the house of an old chief, he overheard the chief talking with his daughter. Raven learned that the chief kept all the light of the world locked away in a box; predictably, he promptly devised a plan to steal that box. He transformed himself into a hemlock needle and landed in the river; the chief’s daughter became pregnant after unknowingly drinking him and in time gave birth to a son — Raven in human form. The chief loved his new grandson greatly. Raven soon began begging for the box as a toy. When his grandfather refused, Raven began crying and screaming and throwing tantrums and pleading for the box. After many days of this, the chief reluctantly gave him the box. Raven immediately changed back to his bird form, carried the box through the smokehole of the house, and placed the light (in the forms of the sun, the moon, and the stars) in the sky.

The Raven pole shown in the three photographs above contains this story. It was carved in 1896 for Chief Shakes of a Tlingit tribe, and it stood for eighty-two years before collapsing in a windstorm. After that, a replica was built for a nearby park (Stewart 104). A detailed drawing of each figure on the pole is shown below.

The top figure in the pole is the old chief from the story, sitting atop the box containing the light. The combination of human and bird-like features indicates he is a being with supernatural powers. (In the Tlingit version of the story, the chief could take either human or raven form; the straight beak identifies the birdlike form as a raven.) The second figure is his grandson Raven who stole the box; the halo around his face references the sun, which connects him with the sun he placed in the sky. The daughter of the chief is either the human figure in front of Raven or the third raven below him. (The identity of the fourth figure is much less certain but is most likely a mythological character connected in some way to this raven family.)

Among all the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, the figures depicted on the carved columns follow highly formalized stylistic rules. These rules make the characters on the poles easy to identify. Birds have beaks of an identifiable shape: while carvers have much freedom in depicting these creatures, the raven must have a straight beak and the eagle must have a curved beak. Wolves and bears look similar but can be distinguished by the shape of their teeth and the length of their snouts. Beavers always sit upright, have two large front teeth, and hold a stick in their paws. Other symbols can be added to figures to communicate further details: multiple dorsal fins indicate that a whale is supernatural, and figures with features from two forms (for example, one set of human ears and one of birdlike ears) have the power to transform between those forms.

Though these great columns are undoubtedly related to narratives, the exact nature of that relationship is difficult to define. It provides an interesting dilemma for narratological studies. Though the columns are often referred to as “story-telling poles,” the poles do not really tell a story. Someone unfamiliar with the myth of Raven stealing the light, for example, would not learn it by studying the Raven pole in Wrangell. The figures are not arranged in any chronological order like panels in a comic book would be, nor does the pole as a whole depict one particular scene from the story like a painting world. Instead, the combination of characters together seems to suggest a particular narrative — more like a montage-style book cover or a movie poster would (see examples). The narratives related to a column were most likely recited at the ceremony in which it was raised, and even those well-versed in the myths of the culture might not be able to identify with certainty the story depicted without knowing the history of that ceremony.

We do not know how long the Native Americans in this region have made such carved columns. The tribes had developed no system of writing and thus kept no records, and the columns themselves (like all wooden objects) decompose and deteriorate. The earliest evidence comes from descriptions made by European and Russian explorers and traders in the eighteenth century. The stylistic rules for the figures appear to have been already established by that time. However, the columns themselves were much smaller and simpler than the familiar columns of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most of the columns stood inside the houses, decorative but also essential components of the houses’ structure. Only a small number of poles stood outside the houses, rarely more than one or two in any given village; these were erected as memorial poles to honor past leaders. The columns at that time do not appear to have been connected in any way to the mythological narratives of the tribe.

Contact with Europeans and Russians created conditions that radically changed the art of column carving. The introduction of iron tools and the increase in overall wealth caused by the fur trade increased the efficiency of the carvers, the detail and quality of their carvings, and the demand for their columns. With these changes, the so-called “golden age” of column carving began — roughly one hundred years from the end of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. The columns began to display a much larger number of figures, which made them more apt for containing narratives. The Haida on Queen Charlotte Island first began carving these larger and more elaborate narrative poles; the practice then spread in varying degrees up and down the coast.

When commissioning a new pole, custom forbade the hiring of a carver from one’s own clan or tribal group. Preferably, the carver would come from another tribe altogether. Completing one of the larger columns of the nineteenth century could take as long as two years, during which time the carver and his immediate family would often live in the patron’s own house. The patron spent a great deal of time communicating to the carver the histories, the legends, and the myths belonging to his family. These carvers, with their many travels and exposure to stories from other clans and tribes, were perhaps the most culturally-aware members of their society. They would also compose songs, perform dances, and speak during important ceremonies. More than just carpenters or craftsmen, they had a rich understanding of the significant narratives of their culture and could then portray those narratives in their magnificent carvings in cedar.

References / Works Consulted

• Malin, Edward. Totem Poles of the Pacific Northwest Coast. 1994. Portland, Oregon: Timber Press, 1986.
• Reid, Bill, and Robert Bringhurst. The Raven Steals the Light. University of Washington Press, 2003.
• Garfield, Viola E., and Linn A. Forrest. Wolf and the Raven : Totem Poles of Southeastern Alaska. University of Washington Press, 1961.
• “The Strange Stories the Totem Pole Tells.” New York Times. 26 September 1909. (Full article available online.)
• Stewart, Hilary. Looking at Totem Poles. University of Washington Press, 1993.
• Keithahn, Edward L. Monuments In Cedar. 1945. (Full text available online.)

Images

The four images of the Raven pole in Wrangell, Alaska, come from a variety of sources.

1. The first photograph comes from the 1909 New York Times article, which is available online. View article at NYTimes.com (PDF)
2. The second photograph, taken by Edward L. Keithahn, comes from his 1945 Monuments In Cedar (page 90). All of Keithahn’s photographs from the books are available online with the full text. View page at Alaskool.org | View image file (JPG)
3. The third photograph was taken by Flickr user “brewbrooks” during his August 2007 vacation to Alaska. He has graciously made these photographs available under a Creative Commons license. View photo at Flickr
4. The line drawing of the pole comes from Hillary Stewart’s 1993 Looking at Totem Poles. View sketch at Google Books