Rusty's Ghost Engine (also known as.......... Jinky Spring) asked Kate Elliott:

Hi I'm just curious to know where the ideas behind the myths in your spiritwalker series comes from? :)

Kate Elliott I wrote out an answer to this question months ago and every time I put it in here, the program refuses to accept it. Let me try again:

The mythological, religious, and fantastical elements in Spiritwalker are based on real historical religious and folk cultural backgrounds. I tried to keep traditions consistent with known practices or historical records, and in all cases I made my best effort to be respectful toward the histories and cultures of origin.

In some cases I drew on things I already knew, such as the tradition of the Wild Hunt known across Europe, and the vision (seen briefly at the beginning of Cold Magic) of a drowned or hidden land that can only be seen at certain times of the year or phases of the moon. I worked in my own explanation for how the Wild Hunt functions, which is interwoven with the underlying cosmology of the Spiritwalker universe and its conflicts between cold and fire magic (in the mortal world) and courts and dragons (in the spirit world). The image of the drowned land reflects in another way on our own world, since both Adurnam and Four Moons House exist on land that is, in our modern day, underwater but which was land during earlier and more extreme phases of our Ice Age.

The idea of a magic based on the principles of thermodynamics was conceived over the course of a long conversation I had with my friend, science journalist and anthropologist Dr. A’ndrea Messer during a visit she made to Hawaii. I was able to elaborate on and built a structure for the magic with the assistance of physicist Dr. Kurtis Nishimura. The courts and dragons are mostly of my own invention, a kind of fantasia on old stories of a Seelie and Unseelie Courts that was originally suggested by my son David. The dragon life cycle is based (roughly) on the clownfish. The dragon dreams and how they alter the spirit world and their relationship to the geography of time (thus giving glimpses of “the future”) are my own invention, but they grew out of the way everything else was fitting together, if that makes sense.

In this fantasia of Earth’s history, the Germanic tribes never develop because of an extended Ice Age. The European nation states as we know them never come into existence. Also, the monotheistic religions never develop. Years ago I read a really well done alt-history story by Poul Anderson, set in an early 20th century (I believe), that is basically about the idea that early Judaism vanished before it could become the foundation stone of Christianity and Islam and therefore these three monotheistic religions didn’t exist in the world of that story. That counterfactual speculation stuck with me and influenced my decision to write a 19th century setting in which the older Celtic, Roman, and Phoenician (Canaanite) religions remain active and alive in Europe.

I researched the syncretic religious traditions of the Roman Empire and the ways in which the Romans absorbed and re-named local gods to fit into their traditions. Christianity of course used this same mechanism, of absorption and re-naming, when it spread through pagan Europe. Basically all of the names of gods and goddesses--whether Celtic, Romano-Celtic, or Punic/Phoenician--are taken from historical accounts; I just speculated on how these religions might have survived and evolved over the centuries (rather than dying out as they mostly did in our own history) and what form their worship might take as they reached the 19th century.

In the Spiritwalker universe there has been a huge influx of immigrants from West Africa into Europe, creating a blended population. The Empire of Mali converted to Islam early in its existence and therefore I found it challenging to track down religious beliefs and cosmology of pre-Islam Mali. While I was able to find some information about the earlier religious traditions, I mostly did my best through reading about the traditions of blacksmiths (considered to have supranatural powers), djeliw (singers and storytellers, the keepers of tradition), and the cultural traditions still present today in proverbs, greeting customs, clothing, food, and social expectations of community to evoke a sense of a culture that is not grounded in European patterns.

The Taino of the Caribbean are, of course, an historical peoples who, despite what some histories tell us, were not “exterminated” in the wake of Columbus (despite the best efforts of the Spanish and later European colonists). Again I did my best to suggest what a Taino civilization might look like if it had been able to develop without the destructive influence of colonialism. Insofar as possible I used histories written by people and scholars of the region to reconstruct some basic elements of Taino cosmology. Region-wide cultural practices can be found in the Mesoamerican area, and I incorporated some of these as well. The Maya envisioned a three-tiered universe, and as far as I could discover the Taino did too, so that is the structure Cat and Bee find when they enter the spirit world in Kiskeya. As another example, ball courts are found throughout the area, including on the Caribbean islands. I walked through the ruins of a ball court at Parque Ceremonial Indigena de Caguana in Puerto Rico. These ball courts persist through time and are found in different civilizations from the Olmec to the Mexica, so clearly are important to the larger regional cultural setting.

One of the most interesting aspects in reading widely about cosmology and religion lies in finding certain symbols and structures that keep popping up in disparate traditions. One of those is the world tree which connects the heavens to the underworld through the mortal world. The world tree is found in traditions as far apart as Eurasia and the Americas. The world tree intersects with another common cosmological vision: the idea of a universe with three tiers, an underworld, a mortal world, and an over-world. To some degree cultural connections across long distances, as well as traditions that persist through time, contribute to these correspondences, but not all similar symbols or structures mean that two cultures were necessarily in contact. Human beings are pattern makers with many fundamental elements present within our human psyches, so it make sense to see similarities (as well as differences) crop up throughout human societies.

flag