In my mytho-poetic novel, the Phantammeron, I have tried to “create myth” using imagery, poetic prose, and abstracted story elements of my Christian and Pagan past to convey to the reader and writers that writing can go beyond our shallow Modern Tropes.
As I’ve talked about, writing novels and fantasy stories no longer has to be about character development – heroes, sex, power, relationships, marriage, and money. Most Modern Western novels and stories, when broken down, follow the same story arc and “heroic winnings” of a central protagonist whose successes are achieved in the end through some sacrifice or achievement, playing off the readers own sublimation of Self onto those figures.
This is a very old Greek and Western form of story arc we continue to repeat over and over in books and movies without understanding. Mytho-poetic writing, as I’ve talked about in my YouTube lectures, is a new idea I’ve had since the 1980’s, whereby the writer “breaks free” of Modern story telling and the unconscious act of their own needs, frustrations, and desires planted into their book characters. Instead, we have the chance now to break free of those old forms and supersede them by rediscovering the wealth of symbols, images, myth, and spiritual references in the unconscious mind through myth-making.
The act of writing then explodes onto the page as a newer, fresher, richer experience through the writing of the reader’s own cultural personal mythological narrative and spiritual insights. In the Phantammeron I placed many mythological images rich with references from religious imagery I had experienced in ancient mythological texts.
The Christian Dove
In my fantasy novel, Phantammeron Book One, a Dove called Hu appears. Hu is taken from the ancient word for God in Hebrew. The Jehu or Hu is an ancient reference to God as messenger. It has been used for almost 2000 years. You will remember in the Bible the dove that came to the ark or the dove of peace. The dove forms a construct in Western culture to the belief that our Creator comes from heaven at times, sending humble beasts or events (rather than bold messiahs and prophets) to deliver messages to us. All this comes from even older religious texts found in Sumerian stories, Zoroastroism, and Egyptian myths. As such I use animals and Nature as examples of mythological beings in my novels, which trigger in me and hopefully my reader memories of those same animals in older childhood religious stories and myths. But in truth the Dove is a spiritual reference to the soul in flight to truth, the humble and fragile connections we have to life, and the messenger of the higher mind that imparts knowledge of the lower mind’s mysteries.
In describing the Dove Hu in my book, I build a small mythological reference to a being made from the spirits of two other beings in the book, thereby going beyond realism in my novels and tapping into the irrational spirit of the reader. This type of irrational story telling is CRITICAL in breaking free of Modern Realism’s stale and artificial limitations now evident in many modern books. The use of myth then taps into the paths of our lower brains that readily accept the spiritual dimensions and mystery of Creation and Life conveyed in irrational story telling, which despite science lives yet in our brains as a way to cope with the great unknown behind the meaning of our lives (which science can never answer).
The Dove Hu is described in the novel as a being formed of the Heart of the Great Mother and the spirit of one of her children, holding them to her breast, “these two chained together as truth and fidelity, formed themselves into a gray dove.” That dove she then sent out to find her son in a part of the book where one of my characters describes the history of a prior world that was destroyed, thereby creating a self-referential myth back upon itself. The dove of Hu then is enshrined as a being of importance since it will reappear in later novels as a symbol of Hope and undying Love.
The Dove Hu will appear in my third book coming up as one of the Mana, the animals of the forest created by Ava. For it is they for whom the Forest of Phantaia was originally made. As such Hu will continue as a representation of an ideal through myth; of a creature designed to lead those willing souls to a better place and as a symbol of divine hope sent from God.
For that is the beauty and joy of writing Myth. Our personal images supersede ourselves and take the form of semi-religious textual symbols and transcendent archetypes of the soul that stir us and lead the reader towards vast explorations of their inner minds and its meaning beyond the Modern roles and wealth building that consume us in 2020 Modern Western Culture. For only Mythopoeia can serve us grandly in a way that fulfills our deeper spiritual selves and allows us to transcend the nature of our modern lives today.
– the Author
