Ishtar in Brief Lives is another ancient deity. Yet unlike Odin, who retains the same mythic persona found in traditional Norse mythology, Ishtar struggles to adapt to a contemporary world that no longer values what she represents. A former lover of Dream’s absent brother Destruction, Ishtar is a stripper in the modern world. However, she was once the powerful and complex Assyro-Babylonian goddess of fertility, love, and war: a divine being who gave life and took it away, straddling the uncanny crossroads of desire and death. Ishtar describes temple sex in Babylon to her mortal friend and fellow stripper as a ritual that was a “terrifying experience for both the women and the men, where they gave themselves to lust and the unknown.”4
In the modern world, Ishtar is reduced to living cheaply off of her sexual attributes to achieve the weak form of worship “generated by money given for lust.”5The small pieces of paper now used to acquire goods and services have little in common with what was once considered wealth: grains, fruits, vegetables, and animals, as well as objects shaped by skilled human hands in exchange for food and other highly valued items. Now, all that exists of this economic fusion of nature and culture is a chain of increasingly abstract symbols: scraps of paper that stand for gold, which is a precious metal that once represented the sun, which is a celestial body that is intimately connected to the cyclical products of chthonic fertility. In our current monetary system, both Ishtar and the urban audience for whom she dances are far removed from the sacred sexual rituals that were once associated with the riches of the earth.
In contrast to the diminished Ishtar, Lucifer in Season of Mists is a strong entity from a contemporary belief system who openly challenges his traditional role in myth. A charming but ruthless fallen angel from Christianity, a being whom even Dream fears, Lucifer simply decides one day to abdicate his position as monarch of Hell. “Ten billion years I’ve spent in this place,” Lucifer complains to Dream, “That’s a long time…and we’ve all changed, since the beginning. Even you, Dream Lord. You were very different back then.”6
Lucifer questions his well-established role as the villain in Christian mythology. “You know,” he says of his rebellion against God, “I still wonder how much of it was planned. How much of it He knew in advance.”7 Rejecting his place in what appears to be a cosmic puppet show, Lucifer yearns for a more mundane form of existence: “I could lie on a beach somewhere....Learn how to dance, or to play the piano.”8 Gaiman turns inside out the Miltonian Lucifer of literature who declared that it was “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Mocking both the fearsome Satan of Christianity and the grandly tragic anti-hero of Romantic literature, Gaiman’s Lucifer craves an almost comically ordinary life, but one that, unlike his traditional role as the deifier of God’s will, may truly be open to endless possibilities.
The Lucifer that emerges from the pages of Season of Mists reflects a society that embraces both the scientific Big Bang and the JudeoChristian Genesis. He does not hesitate to put his own mythic status under a microscope, so to speak, coolly dissecting his myth’s contradictions and sentimental values with the precision of a scientist. Yet he seems to relish his act of meta-rebellion with the fervor of a true religious believer. He is, ultimately, a postmodern mythic being: a creature of myth who laughs at his own paradoxes and rejects his own mythology.
By the end of the series, the archetypal Dream dies in The Kindly Ones, making way for his successor Daniel. The child of two DC Comics superheroes, Daniel gestated in the world of dreams and is therefore a spiritual son to Dream. Though Daniel is as attentive to his responsibilities as his predecessor, we find in The Wake that he is kinder and gentler than the grave and often pitiless Dream. Daniel is the embodiment of the compassion that gradually developed in Dream as the series progressed. In a sense, Daniel is the same Dream, but from a newer perspective, just as the Greek Rhea was a different type of earth-mother from her predecessor, Gaia. Throughout The Sandman, readers are shown that the mythical beings of various cultures and even the seemingly fixed archetypes that underlie those mythic beings can (and sometimes must) change.
The theme of modern mythic adaptation is central to Gaiman’s novel American Gods, where the supernatural beings of the Old World must reconfigure themselves to suit the needs of the relatively newer culture of the United States, a country based chiefly on capitalistic principles rather than the agricultural or martial values from which the older gods drew their authority. For example, Anubis, an Egyptian god associated with the world of the dead, survives in the modern world by co-running a funeral parlor that caters to those who have been marginalized by racial discrimination— like the dead, their existence lies outside of the official social and economic system.
In American Gods, readers are introduced to Mr. Wednesday, an Americanized incarnation of Odin. (The term for the middle day of the week is derived from the name Wotan, the Germanic version of the Scandinavian Odin.) Acting as an employer and a mentor to our protagonist, Shadow, the Americanized version of Odin excels in the arts of the con man, amplifying the subtler trickster qualities associated with the Norse god who is identified with both wisdom and warfare. Mr. Wednesday has adapted the skills found in traditional myths of Odin to fit the cunning and cutthroat business practices that are often required to succeed in a capital-driven culture.
Quick-witted and fierce, Wednesday is the first to alert the gods of the Old World who have settled in the U.S. about the growing danger they face. They are at risk of being obliterated by “gods” who have little or no connection to traditional mythic systems: “of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon.”9 The sneering teenage boy who represents the Internet refers to religion as “an operating system”10and tells Shadow “we have fucking reprogrammed reality.”11 These new gods are lead by Mr. World, a mysterious figure who appears to represent the growing globalization brought about by recent advances in technology.
Some traditional gods answer Wednesday’s call to arms, while others resist. It is not until Wednesday is assassinated by Mr. World on television that the old gods fully realize the threat the new gods pose to them. With the martyred Wednesday as a symbol of their righteous cause, the traditional gods declare war on the new gods and a bloody battle ensues. The battle is brought to a standstill midway when Shadow reveals the truth of what he has discovered to both sides: Mr. World is actually Loki in disguise. Wednesday’s death had been a ruse. Fearing their own weakening power, Loki and Wednesday had been working together from the start in order to bring about a massive blood sacrifice of gods that would empower the two of them. Their con slyly made use of the terror of obsolesce that runs deeply through old and new gods in the U.S. — the one thing that unites the two warring sides. “There was arrogance to the new ones,” Shadow observes, “But there was also fear. They were afraid that unless they kept pace with a changing world, unless they remade and redrew and rebuilt the world in their image, their time would already be over.”12
It is no wonder that Loki is able to successfully assume the role of Mr. World in American Gods. A trickster god who is strongly associated with chaotic acts is, indeed, a fitting symbol for the clash of cultures and the general cacophony brought about by ever-changing societies in a globalized world. With its host of old gods struggling to remain relevant in the face of radical change, and its portrayal of new “gods” (automobiles, television, the Internet) who tear down tradition because they fear their own looming demise, Gaiman’s American Gods offers readers a glimpse into a future of mythology that may have already started.
While the bloody war in American Gods eventually halted through Shadow’s intervention, the over-arching issue of mythologies threatened by rapid cultural change remains unresolved. According to Ray Kurzweil, rapid cultural change will only accelerate in the coming decades. Kurzweil is an American inventor and entrepreneur who first began tracking the relationship between technology and social change when he realized
that, to be successful, his inventions needed to make sense in terms of market forces.13 In The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil explores the role of cultural change from the perspective of the development of human-created technologies, which allow people to extend their physical and mental capabilities through tools that are subject to a faster cycle of evolution than either the human body or brain, neither of which has changed drastically over tens of thousands of years.14 Kurzweil foresees a time in the very near future where the pace of technological change will be so rapid due to the Law of Accelerating Returns (similar to Moore’s Law) that human life will be radically altered ―and continue to be altered ever after at an exponential rate. Changes that had once taken place over the course of centuries will take place in decades, and changes that once had taken place over decades will be seen in a matter of weeks. Over the next fifty years, we will see technology evolve in manner that will be the equivalent of ten thousand years of progress,15 which predicts that by the middle of this century, the emerging technologies we have today will be integrated into our brains and bodies, allowing us to:
1. Amplify the cognitive abilities of the human brain
by augmenting our relatively slow biochemical neural connections with high-speed electronic implants, resulting in greater pattern-recognition skills, memory storage, and overall thinking.16
2. Radically redesign our internal and external body parts, entirely replacing the digestive tract, for example, with nanobots in the bloodstream that can provide the precise nutrients we need.17
3. Overcome most forms of death thorough genetics /18 or nanotechnology,19 which will prevent or reverse damage to the body caused by illness, injury, or aging.
4. In essence, the distinction between humanity and its technologies will cease to exist as we use our technologies to expand the boundaries of what it means to be human in terms of intelligence, physical attributes, and longevity.
If Kurzweil is correct about the massive effect that accelerated technology will have on human life, it follows that cultures will be transformed as well since culture usually acts as the balancing point between stability and change. Myths are a part of that balance. As we have seen, myths do change, but they also provide a sense of continuity that softens the impact of drastic fluctuations. Yet, if myths shape and support culture, what happens when cultures around the world evolve so rapidly and continuously that a multitude of traditional myths can be rendered irrelevant almost overnight, while newer myths may be overturned long before they can take root? Will the very notion of myth itself eventually become obsolete? Not necessarily. However, like our ideas of what constitutes “humanness,” our conception of myth may have to be expanded in the future.
William Irwin Thompson suggests that the dominating format of cultural knowledge in a hi-tech society in the near future will not be the oral epic poetry of agricultural-warrior communities or the printed textbooks of industrial mass production, but will be Wissenkunst: the kaleidoscopic play of information.20 Steven Johnson contends that such a shift is already underway. He describes the rise of “meta-shows” in the 1990s: self-referential television programs that would “riff, annotate, dismantle, dissect, and sample.”21 Shows like Mystery Science Theater 3000, Pop-Up Video, and The Daily Show marked the beginning of a new type of television program, one that offers multiple and simultaneous “lenses” with which to view reality. One could watch a movie and at the same time watch as others watched and deconstructed the movie; one could enjoy a music video and read informative (and often ironically humorous) text about the video that popped up in little “—” as the video played on the screen; one could view the news stories of the day and concurrently get a parody of those news stories. While the medium through which these shows were projected, relatively old (television), the content, a hybrid of “metaphor, footnote, translate, and parody”22 was new, belonging to the age of digital and multimedia. It is the Cubist’s vision on how to handle the data overload that is omnipresent in an age of increasing information saturation; everything is viewed from multiple angles simultaneously.
Gaiman’s approach to myth is a logical extension of the multifaceted information processing Johnson describes, and may foreshadow where mythic storytelling is headed. Gaiman’s narratives often combine traditional myths from diverse places and times with divergent and convergent interpretations of myth. The role of interpretation and its place in mythical thought should not be underestimated. Thompson argues that when one interprets mythology, the interpretation itself becomes a piece of mythology, “a story in which old gods wear new clothes.”23 To illustrate: Gaiman’s postmodern Lucifer in The Sandman, who defiantly walks away from his own mythology, owes much to nineteenth-century Romantic works like William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” where Milton’s seventeenth-century Satan in Paradise Lost is reinterpreted as a bold and fearless iconoclast who denounces the tyrannical authority of God. Blake, however, ignored the second half of Milton’s epic poem in which the beautiful and powerful former angel gradually degrades into an impotent, slithering serpent, in accord with Satan’s contemptible status in Christianity. Milton, in turn, based his epic poem on the Christian reinterpretation of the Hebrew story of Genesis, where no creature akin to the Devil exists. The deceptive serpent in the Garden of Eden is itself a Hebrew reinterpretation of the revered Sumerian serpent that was intimately connected with cyclical nature; like the earth goddess, the serpent was believed to periodically die and be reborn when it sheds its skin.24 The modern mythologies we know today are built upon a series of nested reinterpretations — both religious and artistic — that reflect the societies of their times.
Gaiman often fills his fictive space with a mixture of traditional mythic content, oblique allusions to myth, and a wide variety of past and present mythic interpretations to create a new type of myth, one where all the angles of a myth can be viewed simultaneously, like the facets of a jewel (e.g., Death in The Sandman in her many forms in many cultures). To heighten this effect, Gaiman sometimes employs an inter-textual or hyper-textual connection between his short stories, as can be seen when juxtaposing the haunting “Nicholas Was…” and the whimsical “Sunbird.”
“Nicholas Was…” is a very short story (less than half of a page). The events in the tale revolve around the Winter Solstice (usually around December 21). Today, the Winter Solstice may be identified with the birth of the Christian Jesus and the gifts of a commercialized Santa Claus (from the Dutch version of St. Nicholas, Sinterklaas). However, the Winter Solstice is also the longest night of the year, when the sun reaches its nadir in the sky. After this dark period, the sun is “reborn,” heralding the coming of spring with days that grow progressively longer.
As befitting the longest night of the year, the beginning and ending of “Nicholas Was…” lie in shadows. The reader never discovers the heinous crime for which the white-bearded and “older than sin” main character is being punished, or why this “sobbing” figure, who wishes for nothing more than death, is forced to leave gifts for sleeping children at night.25 The ominous dwarves to whom he is enslaved speak a cryptic language and perform disturbing rituals that remain a source of mystery to him and the reader. “Nicholas Was…” is not really a story; rather, it is a fragment of a story that is evocative of the macabre origins of the modern Santa Claus.
The modern Santa Claus can be traced back, in part, to the Roman Saturn, an agricultural god whose Greek counterpart was Cronus. Saturn was the patron god of the Saturnalia, a festival that was celebrated from December 17 to December 24, and culminated with a special feast on December 25. In Roman mythology, Saturn was associated with the sun in its cyclical passage through the underworld (hence the term saturnineto describe someone with a gloomy or melancholy temperament). During the Saturnalia, a Lord of Misrule was elected from among the lowest ranked to represent the solar god in his underworld form.26 This elected individual was accorded great honor throughout the weeklong celebration until his sacrifice. Though evi
dence of actual killings in this context is debatable, it was believed that if one sacrificed the Lord of Misrule, one sacrificed the darkness and disorder he symbolized, thereby allowing the new year to enter a purified space.27
The Santa Claus-figure portrayed in “Nicholas Was…” is the opposite of the youthful sun, represented by the newborn Jesus and the sleeping children who are gifted with objects that symbolize the riches of the earth in spring. Santa Claus/Nicholas is the sun at its nadir. He is the old year, weakened by winter and darkness: a sacrificial being that is forced to endure cold gloom and bleak despair again and again into perpetuity so that the nascent sun can be born.
The multiple forms of duality present in “Nicholas Was…” (old age and youth, darkness and light, want and abundance, ancient and modern) are amplified when the tale is placed beside Gaiman’s other solar short story, “Sunbird,” in which the Summer Solstice (usually around June 21) is pivotal. For some today, the Summer Solstice is associated with the birthday of John the Baptist (a New Testament prophet who foretold the coming of the messianic Jesus). However, the Summer Solstice is also the longest day of the year, when the sun is at its highest point in the sky. After reaching its zenith it will “die” in gradually shortening days as summer turns into autumn.
Gaiman’s “Sunbird” is set in an unspecified modern era. The tale focuses on the members of the Epicurean Club, an eclectic mix of friends who are dedicated to finding new and exotic things to eat, such as fruit bat, frozen mammoth, and Patagonian giant sloth. When the story opens, the club members are in a rather dejected mood because they realize that they have consumed every exciting dish imaginable and there seems to be nothing left, until Zebediah T. Crawcrustle reveals that there is one type of food they have not tried: the Sunbird, which can only be caught in Egypt at noon on the Summer Solstice. This elicits great enthusiasm.
The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman Page 31