In trying to write this story the way I truly want to I have to keep untangling myself from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. His (selectively curated) idea that all myths are a basic variation on one myth. The one where the individual triumphs, slays, obtains something and saves the world. Like many things I encountered in my study of literature at university, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey excluded me by gender. (If you’ve heard me go on about Moby Dick forgive me for repeating myself but it kept happening!!!)
Being the rebellious type, I always thought “well fuck them I’m going on my hero’s journey too.” But the thing is, as Sharon Blackie writes in If Women Rose Rooted Campbell actually left a bunch of things out and the shape of our journeys must be our own.
So I find myself out here in the ocean of imagination trying to untangle Campbell’s fishing nets from my legs. The pull to have our Erna act as saviour in any way as some principle of the narrative as if it’s the only way for a story to go. (A little ironically of course because one of the purposes of spreading Christianity at this time was to be saviours of souls…)
I think the Hero’s Journey is over. It has to be. The mythic quest or journey has to be imagined now collectively, even when it is in the subject of the past. Are things better, gentler, more connected for the unnamed masses of people around you or was it just for you? Did you learn you could kill a gorgon without understanding that the gorgon played a role in the world beyond your comprehension?
Blackie writes about the new kind of mythic journey:
"This path forces us first to examine ourselves and the world we live in, to face up to all that is broken and dysfunctional in it and in our own lives. Then it calls us to change – first ourselves, and then the world around us. It leads us back to our own sense of grounded belonging to this Earth, and asks us what we have to offer to the places and communities in which we live. Finally, it requires us to step into our own power and take back our ancient, native role as its guardians and protectors.”
So many of us are looking to be inspired to connection. And I think women have to start writing the new stories because in the division of patriarchal labour we were given these tools to hone. It’s not that all men don’t have them, just like women can lead, be selfish, or go to war, but systemically the skills of connection are often closer to hand for us and my goodness how the world needs them!
So in my story I want to think a lot about Erna coming from what here in Canada we are trying to reconstruct through reconciliation. What if it had gone right? Even for a while. How would that have looked and been? What if her work made more space in the world for ideas and skills and support than championed the domination of one way?
“There might be one god, but there are a thousand ways to meet them.” Books, idols, nature, love, death, music, ritual. She wants to observe and record ALL the ways humans do it, not from a Royal Geographical sense of superiority, but from complete joy. Show me! Wow! That’s amazing! Who does that work for? Imagine a slice of the world where enthusiasm was unchecked and curiosity is a strength that creates spaciousness, not the thing that unleashes suffering.
I see my god in your god. Do you see it too? Is her adjacentism (I made that up) versus conversion. She’s not interested in making everyone believe in one thing, but to use the lessons to BE a collective idea. To be caring for each other and the more than human world. Caretaking for each other and the lessons of the deep past that others have kept alive. She sees the opportunity for the “new” or “modern” that she brings to augment and expand the possibility for everyone. She doesn’t seek to replace.
In a bigger way I guess our story might be one of how 12 or 13 people can read the same lessons, hear them and do VERY different things with them. Columba is tied in the power and control of his upbringing. That by making people more like him he can use them to power his machinery of making everyone believe what he believes. He honestly believes it is in their best interest. That the only way forward is christianity and the teachings of the christ AS HE INTERPRETS THEM. He sees Rome rising in riches and power and knows that if they do not also rise they will not have a place of power in the world.
Our yet to be named man across the loch sees it very differently, there is no need for that power in his world. He is uninterested in gaining it and refuses to play in Columba’s games. But that cloistered-ness makes the people and their beliefs ultimately vulnerable to extinction.
Erna can live with a foot in both places and her journey is to find a way to keep more than one thing true. To remind land and sea that they are on the same planet. She is the the remarkable, rare space between, the Machair.