Magic Elephant

I don't have a plot yet. But I'm making progress on the engine that drives it.

First conceit is that magic and gods are real, but human understanding of them is incomplete. This sounds like a reversal of my previous "no out of context problems" but it really isn't. The elephant is part of the of the world but each culture has hold of different parts of it.

And this is culturally appropriate. Ecumenical is the wrong word to use of early cultures but in the ancient world it isn't uncommon for pantheists to be entirely open to the idea of other gods. Just...less powerful gods than their own. And I have yet to research how the Mycenae look at magic, but I've been reading a collection of stories from Ancient Egypt and there is a strong theme that human understanding of the ways of the gods is incomplete.

So it will work to have a supernatural force/entity/whatever that each of my characters...and the various cultures encountered...describe in different ways that even they realize are incomplete. Even as they try to find a fit within their own mythologies.

The key is probably to avoid having the "thing" be recognizable to modern eyes. That is, it isn't a dinosaur or a crashed space ship that the locals are spinning their own take on. It is something that is best described in the terms used in the story.



Personified Chaos* is where I'm going right now. Possibly a natural force as well; something that directly causes the mass migration of peoples (aka drought, frost, plague, whatever)**. Whatever personification there is, is entirely there so it can be sought, chased, and fought. Because yes, in both Egyptian and Greek mythologies the gods can be challenged (even if they tend to win in the end.) Gods were driven from the field in the Trojan War. Nefrekeptah stole the Book of Thoth (but Thoth quickly had his revenge). The child mage Se-Osiris visited Duat with his father, and returned safely.

But remember this is the fading of an age. The gods are losing power; soon enough (give or take eight hundred years) Roman poets are going to be spinning tales of hen-pecked Jupiter and otherwise turning the gods into (still erratic and dangerous) figures of fun. Just as the Witch-King of Angemar could fall to a human woman with a sword, it remains thematic that the Big Bad of this story could be taken down by a self-doubting mercenary with a weapon of meteoric iron.

(Yeah -- I don't know yet if I can justify it or how well it works but I can't help thinking of the funerary dagger of Tutankhamen -- which is by the way a really gorgeous piece -- and the actual documentation of iron smelting as early as 800 BCE. And, yeah, Sokka's Space Sword. Not that the latter achieved anything magical, unless you count the armband of the same material he gave to Toph...)

(It is also interesting to look at the local take on meteoric iron. It isn't seen as a gift from the gods, or rather, no more so than springs or seed grains or the annual flooding of the Nile. The available writing is pretty much; yeah, some iron fell from the sky, and we used it to make jewelry.)

Thing is...when I look at the idea of personified chaos, coming out of the Carpathians, possessing people, causing plagues of rats, I keep getting resonances of Vampire lore. Which is as I said exactly what I don't want to do. Or, that is, it is a helpful subtext only in that it works within the local mythologies and doesn't allow the readers a superior distance of, "Oh, those foolish ancient people, it's really a vampire."

A similar problem is facing me for myth-making. I very much want the idea that hundreds of years later the poets will be telling stories based on what happened. The Trojan War is available as an example of a real incident of the not-so-distant past that is being mythologized as they watch. But it seems a similar class of mistake to tie anything the characters do too directly to a single myth known in our time.

Pity, because the idea of Pandora and her jar is exactly that sort of candle to light the darkness I want to end with.



*Actually, to be more specific, it is the current idea that the Bronze Age Collapse is best understood in terms of system theory. It is an emergent effect from existing forces. Even if my planned usage veers parlously close to the popular misconception of Chaos Theory, as exemplified in Jeff Goldblum's mutterings in the Jurrasic Park movies.

**I'm very tempted to do a riff on a genocidal god story told of several different figures; in the Amarna period it was told of Hathor. The key bit being blood mixed with beer spilled on the ground; in the myth, a trap for a god, but in this story, some sort of scarlet blight on the staple crops....