Forget about sitting on a cloud - when you’re dead you are going to work! Hard! The Bishop of Durham is an erudite man and has spent a lot of time studying the texts of his religion, and he’s put some interesting thoughts on the topic of the afterlife (from a Christian perspective) to Time magazine.

As an environmentalist and someone who’s been regularly involved in political activism, one of the big gripes for me is when right wing, evangelical Christians use their religious perspective to justify doing nothing about saving the world…and in some cases to stand back in the hope of armageddon in other countries.

The Bishop of Durham not only says they’re wrong, but if they want to be true to their religion they need to be doing the opposite - protecting the globe and not bringing devastation to Middle Eastern countries being somewhere near the top of the list, as Heaven is not going to be up there - it’s down here.

If you’re not all bored at the possibility that a genius like Da Vinci makes his work operate on numerous levels, read this.

Yesterday I gave a very successful lecture at the world-famous Tate Britain art gallery in London, entitled ‘Myth, Memory and the Art of Richard Dadd’. The event was a sell-out, and also pretty ground-breaking on several fronts. I was one of the first – if not the first – genre writer to be invited to the Tate to give a lecture for one of their rightly-acclaimed study days. And personally, it was one of the most high-profile appearances I’ve made.

I only have praise for the staff and academics at the Tate who treated both myself, and the genre, with a great deal of respect. Before the lecture, the audience toured the gallery to see Dadd’s work and many took the opportunity to ask me about my opinions on the artist and his work. After that I gave the lecture, touching on not only my interest in Dadd and my novella about his most famous painting, ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke’, but also about other authors influenced by Dadd – Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Angela Carter, Robert Rankin and more. We followed this with an at times intense debate with an art historian about the meaning of Dadd’s work, and a couple of readings from The Fairy Feller novella.

The novella has gone from strength-to-strength since it won the British Fantasy Award four years ago. The limited edition by PS Publishing has nearly sold out, and the added attention from this Tate event has created interest from across the world. Now I need to find a mainstream publisher interested in reprinting it as part of a collection so it can reach a wider audience.

[cross-posted]

(Apart from economic and military superiority, of course.)

America has become the world’s leader because of all nations it has understood and utilised mythology.

Stupid people will tell you that it’s what you say that counts. Clever people will say a picture is worth a thousand words. The best and most effective communication is non-verbal, and it’s something the Founding Fathers understood very well. Oh, they had a way with words too - the US Constitution remains one of the greatest pieces of philosophical writing. But what they really gifted to their new nation was an understanding of why mythology was so vitally important to ancient cultures - because it transmitted simple ideas directly to the subconscious where they could take root and spread.

This kind of communication has unbelievable power. Competing philosophies - however well expressed - simply don’t stand a chance. Marx and Lenin could speak endlessly with eloquence, but the minute one American leader saluted before a fluttering flag, they were doomed.

The mythology of America is now so entrenched we barely recognise it is a mythology. But wherever you are in the world, you know what the US is all about…without discussing it, without even thinking about it. This mythic element is so rooted in the nation, it’s been developed for the last 230 years not by successive governments, but by the people. It’s responsible for the global success of US movies and TV, and food and drink, for the mythology is encoded in every single product, driving that economic power.

Britain understood this in the days of the Empire, but no longer. Hitler grasped it, and understandably Germany will go nowhere near it again. No other nation today is empowered by mythology, for good or bad. The ideas they represent are weak and untethered.

Fantasy readers will appreciate this for fantasy deals in the currency of symbolism. It is dream-fiction, where symbols live and breed, as opposed to the shiny, hard fact-fiction of SF. In ancient times, when all fiction was fantasy fiction, mythological, symbolic communication was the only game in town because it was so effective at passing vital, life-lessons down the generations.

The rapid decline in the cachet of the US Government around the world in recent years is directly attributable to this. Opinion surveys reveal that across Western nations there has been a massive shift towards a negative view of the US leadership - 90% opposed in the UK, across the political spectrum - from what appeared to be an entrenched positive view. Put simply, when you have communicated an idea so effectively and powerfully for two centuries, any actions in opposition to that idea are instantly laid bare. You can’t hide them behind rhetoric and real politik.

But that is a hugely positive thing. The mythology abides. It crushes weaker philosophies, even when those philosophies attempt to wrap the mythology around them. That is why those opinion surveys reveal that the same people who dislike what America is doing in the world are still drawn to the ‘idea’ of America.

(Cross-posted to LJ, MySpace and JoR)

All writers are privy to a big secret. They rarely talk about it among themselves, but when someone foolishly raises it, there are embarrassed smiles and nods and a few mumbled words of agreement. The reason is simple: to admit the big secret would mean admitting intellectually dangerous things to yourself and to risk the rest of the world calling you a crackpot.

So I’m going to tell you about here.

Writers are deeply troubled about the genesis of their stories. Not only that, they have nightmares about the reality of said stories, and their meaning and potency beyond the words on the printed page.

To illustrate, I’ll give you some examples from my own work. In World’s End I wrote about the main characters visiting Glastonbury Abbey where they uncovered secret knowledge encoded in the design of the ancient Abbey’s floor. Due to the vagaries of the way I work, I’d already semi-written this scene before I went to Glastonbury to conduct the research on the detail of the setting. While I was there, I came across a book which discussed how secret knowledge had been encoded in the Abbey’s floor, but the knowledge and much of the pattern had been destroyed in a fire almost a thousand years ago.

Now I had never come across this before. I swear I made it up. It’s just coincidence, right? It’s the kind of thing that could have happened, so no reason why it shouldn’t have happened.

Except the same thing happened again when I was writing Darkest Hour: something I was convinced I made up, came to light while I was researching Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh.

And it happened again during the writing of Jack of Ravens. Three times I have written about real things that were completely beyond my knowledge.

Most writers will tell you this happens all the time during the creation of a story. Stephen King has spoken (in On Writing, I think) about how he has come to consider his creative process more like archaeology: how the story is already fully-formed somewhere and he is simply digging it out of the sand.

Other authors have told me in very concerned tones about how what they have written has somehow started to affect the ‘real’ world. Graham Joyce speaks eloquently about near-supernatural happenings on a Greek island that echoed the story on which he was working, House of Lost Dreams. Robert Graves has written about the strange pile-up of coincidence and synchronicity during the writing of The White Goddess when books would mysteriously fall from shelves, open on the correct page with the information for which he had been frantically searching for days.

Both Alan Moore and Grant Morrison have spoken about the use of the imagination during the writing process as an act of magic, and it’s difficult for many writers not to believe that. Strange, irrational things happen during the creative process. There’s a sense of tapping into something else, and once tapped that something else coming into your life to haunt you for a while.

So now I’ve got this out into the open I’d be interested to hear about the experiences of others…

“Myth is about archetypical characters that are used to speak about deeper values of the human experience,” said Chopra. “Myths are ‘collective stories’ from the people of the time trying to understand their own self,” said Morrison.

Comics legend Grant Morrison goes head-to-head with iconic writer Deepak Chopra on modern myth and superheroes as the new gods, at the San Diego Comicon.

If there’s one theme that runs through all my fantasy tales, it’s this: nothing is as it seems on the surface.  A superficial glance suggests the novels deal with Arthurian legend and Celtic mythology in a modern setting.  But the conceit is that those old stories are a secret code for the truth that lies behind them.  Sometimes one character or myth or idea can represent two very different things, which is actually something that runs through the old Celtic legends.  For example, King Arthur is a man (but not ‘King Arthur’) and also a great magical power - and if that sounds complicated, read the books.  It really isn’t.

That’s because we’re dealing here with very powerful archetypes, the secret language of the unconscious.  But that’s another blog entirely…

Our ancestors always hid codes in popular stories, as this well-researched blog shows.

The gods in my books are not quite the gods you find in the old Celtic legends, either.  I won’t go into who or what they are, but from time-to-time I do want to touch on some of the legends behind the major ones appearing in Kingdom of the Serpent.

Niamh is one of the central characters in the myth sequence I’m creating.  In the Celtic legends she’s the wife of Conall Caernach.  She became the mistress of Cuchulainn while she nursed him back to health from war-wounds.  Niamh tried to prevent the great hero returning to battle, but the witch Badb cast a spell on Niamh so that she wandered away into the countryside.  Badb then assumed Niamh’s form and told Cuchulainn that he must return to war.

In my story, Niamh also carries the title Queen of the Waste Lands.  In Arthurian legend, the Queen told Perceval of his mother’s death, and was one of the women on the barge that bore Arthur away after his last battle.

All of that is code for what really happens…

Everything we learn about myths when we’re kids suggests that they’re set in stone, somewhere in the deep past.  But myths and legends, like fairytales, are mutable.  Try tracking the various iterations of Robin Hood down the years - from nature spirit to anarchist to Royalist and back.

But what are the myths of the 21st century global culture?  That’s not a rhetorical question - I’d be interested to hear.  IN the seventies, Harlan Ellison published one of my favourite collections - Deathbird Stories - in which he examined the gods of the 1970s world:the god of TV, cars etc  It’s an intense collection of stories and had a powerful effect on the young me.  I don’t know if the tales stand the test of time as I haven’t read them in a while, but they certainly shaped my thoughts and my writing.

So where are our current myths taking us?  I think in the mythosphere we’ve certainly got percolating terrorism, the net, of course, and a growing environmentalism which is oddly harking back to prehistoric myths while remaining essentially now.  Serial killers made a brief appearance in the nineties, but they just didn’t have the legs to become truly mythic.

These are the things I ponder when I’m supposed to be writing…

The Government doesn’t want us to know the risks of identity cards.  I wonder why…

They can already track us by our mobile phones and credit cards.  They can read our emails and listen to all our phone calls.  And they can watch us on the network of CCTV cameras. You’d think that would be enough…

If you’re happy about giving up your liberties, fine.  If not, many people are asking questions right now…

This may sound completely off-topic, but really it’s not.  The theme of control and who has power over our ability to live the lives we want has run through all my writing since I started getting published.  It’s most clear in Age of Misrule, if you consider the Tuatha de Danann, the Celtic golden-skinned gods, as a symbol.  Their subtle manipulation of humanity for their own ends is almost as destructive as the full-on machinations of the demonic Fomorii.

If we don’t take control of our own existence, somebody else will.