Entheogenisis

It’s that time again:  Scifi Theatre with Uncle Tom and Uncle Dan!

After AZTECH and A Head Like on Easter Island, Tom went all trippy with Entheogens.

Tom:

What if people used to see and interact with fairies, demons, mythological creatures not because they used to be around and are extinct, but because the humans were taking neuroactive drugs that were allowing them to interface with a slightly phase-shifted dimension where these things exist(ed)?

So it’s not like they’ve gone extinct or faded from our world, but that’s the impression we have because we’ve lost that pharmaceutical connection to their realm.

Dan:

The first thing that came to my mind reading this was entheogens. The second thing I thought was holy crap, Tom has solved the conceptual block in the urban fantasy story I want to write.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about urban fantasies that take place in North America and the fact that they generally ignore Native American mythology in favor of European. Not that that’s a bad thing (write what you know), but what if mythological beings travel with colonists about as readily as animals and plants (or less readily, since we transplanted many natural organisms intentionally)? What if, as European Americans, all our stories prime us for dealing with supernatural creatures we will never meet, while we are left horribly vulnerable to native mythology. What if that native mythology is further thrown into disarray by introduced “species,” as well as the virtual disappearance of the humans who knew how to deal with them?

The main character of the story has trained himself to be a shaman by piecing together bits of family lore and guesswork, and, with the help of Tom’s entheogens, can negotiate with angry spirits.  His work is largely unappreciated except by his buddy, the stray kami he collected from the former site of the Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America in Stockton, California.

Tom:

Sounds good, Dan! I’m glad I could provide a piece of the jigsaw to help solve your plot puzzle here…You know, I haven’t read them, but I guess Orson Scott Card did a fantasy series based on a similar premise of European-meets-North American supernatural….er….ness. I’m not sure to what extent the plot converges on what you’re doing here–from what I’ve seen and heard I don’t think it’s too similar. I guess this all overlaps a bit with the “noospheric seeding” concept.

I actually have quite a few regrets about that one, I mean about the way I presented the idea there…I was aiming for something at a higher level of abstraction, more like David Brin’s “memetic space” as depicted in that second Uplift series; but I was rushed for time when I wrote it and ended up falling back on more stereotypical mythological contrivances as a kind of shorthand to communicate the idea–to its detriment, I feel, based on the kind of discussion thus generated and the criticism I received regarding (~Nighzmarquls’ criticism stung especially because it struck so close to my own misgivings about the whole thing). Ah well, maybe I’ll revisit it one of these days.

–Anyway, tangent. The other thing I was thinking was Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, where the human colonists living in the towns and cities founded by the extinct Martians begin to think like Martians, take on their cultural characteristics, speak in their language, etc.–to the point where their original identities and culture have been “overwritten” by the sort of psychic race-and-place memory of the original civilization.

Just to bring things full circle, I remember reading the suggestion once, somewhere, that a similar process was responsible for the Mormon religion–that it was the psychic overlay or residue of American Indian myth influencing the imported Christianity of the European colonists. But don’t quote me on that, because I can’t begin to remember where I read it, lo those many years ago. : p

As far as overwriting cultures go. Ooh. What if that started to happen in our world? Something (ghosts? aetheric resonance? vestigia?) makes people repeat actions or thoughts previously undertaken on the real-estate they inhabit. Whatever cultural practices were most common over the longest time in a particular area end up dominating. It would be an interesting way to discuss nativism and cultural purity, as well as the nature of culture and free will.