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.)

The strangeness of this adventure is something the Murry twins are not prepared for at all. They are self-described skeptics, “not believing in anything that can’t be seen and touched and proved one hundred percent” (105). Unlike Meg and Charles Wallace, the twins are very down-to-earth, practical problem-solvers, without an interest in theoretical physics or mystical runes. Yet, somehow, quite by accident, it happens: one moment they are standing in their father’s laboratory, and the next moment they find themselves in a burning desert, being rescued by someone named Japheth, a name they do not recognize at first as belonging to one of the sons of Noah. Later, when Sandy and Dennys finally hear the name “Noah,” they remember the basic outlines of the story from Sunday School. “I wish I had a Bible” (105) one of boys remarks — but a Bible would just be the beginning of what they need to understand the world that L’Engle has created, which draws on a wide range of extra-Biblical sources, including the Jewish and Christian apocrypha, the Kabbalah, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, to name just a few.

Most notably, this Biblical world is populated not just by humans and animals, but also by celestial beings, the seraphim and the nephilim. The seraphim are those celestial beings who are still in touch with the god El, and who are living on Earth by choice. They have the ability to transform from the state of matter into energy, and they are also able to travel through time. The nephilim, on the other hand, have turned away from El, and are condemned to remain on the Earth, having lost many powers which the seraphim still possess. The nephilim are led by Eblis, and unlike the seraphim, they consort with mortal women, who bear their children, a strange intermingling which is mentioned in the Book of Genesis (6:1-4). For the conflation of the nephilim and the fallen angels, however, L’Engle has drawn upon the Book of Enoch and other apocryphal texts.

In addition to going beyond the bounds of the Bible, L’Engle has also probed the gaps in the Biblical text itself. For example, one of the most important questions she asks is about the daughters of Noah. We know that the sons of Noah and their wives were saved in the Ark with Noah and his wife, but does that mean that the daughters of Noah — for surely, he must have had daughters — were drowned in the flood? Both Sandy and Dennys fall in love with Yalith, one of the daughters of Noah, and her fate provides one of the most important dramatic subplots of the novel. Noah has been told by God that he cannot take Yalith or any of his other daughters on the Ark, nor can he take Sandy and Dennys, who have become like members of the family. So, not only do the boys need to find a way to return home, they must do so before the floods begin.

To devise a way to return home, the boys rack their brains to understand something of their parents’ experiments in theoretical physics, a topic that had not been of any special interest to them before. From sharing their memories of those experiments and from talking with the seraphim (who have some knowledge of theoretical physics themselves), the boys realize they need to make a quantum leap, crossing from existence into non-existence and back into existence again by means of virtual particles. In Noah’s world, these virtual particles exist in the shape of unicorns, mythological creatures inspired by quantum theory, beasts which “have to be believed to be seen” (290). Thus building on the notion of the implied observer in quantum physics, L’Engle turns the twins not just into observers but into believers, which allows them to harness the paradox of the virtual particles in order to return at last to their own world.

By using theoretical physics to provide access to this Biblical world, L’Engle manages to reinvigorate the Noah story, which had meant little to the boys previously. Hearing the story in Sunday School had left them only with “vague memories,” something about “God being angry at the wickedness of the world, and sending a flood, but telling Noah to build an ark and bring the animals on. And then there were terrible rains, and finally a dove brought Noah a sprig of green, and the ark landed on Mount Ararat. Not much of a story unless you were part of it” (161). By stumbling into their father’s experiment in particle physics, the boys do get a chance to become part of that story, and to meet Yalith, one of the daughters of Noah. You will not find this remarkable virtual woman in the pages of Genesis, unless — like L’Engle — you have the wherewithal to read between the verses. As for the fate of Yalith when the flood waters came, I’m not going to give that away: you’ll have to read the book to find out.

Work Cited

• L’Engle, Madeleine. Many Waters. 1986. New York: Square Fish, 2007.