The Magic of Stories

“For every evil, there is a greater good. For every innocent, there is a protector. For every legend, there is a hero.”
The Mark of Kri

In the end, we’re all stories. Blood Red Dreaming is a game of stories, a dangerous game for dangerous people. Blood Red Dreaming is built around Alan Moore’s assertion that language and story are magick in themselves. If there’s an afterlife, which I disbelieve, then there are precious few ways of reaching back from afterlife to life with a status update. Once breathe is gone from our lungs, and the fire out in our brains, synapses still; there is nothing left of us among our friends and family other than our stories. Or rather their stories. Their stories of us. And that’s the only thing anyone can guarantee as an afterlife. We will be the stories told by those who choose to remember us.

I do not know my great grandfather’s name. But I know he fled from his home in Finland during the first World War. Finland was under Russian occupation and Finnish boys were being conscripted to the front lines to die for glorious Mother Russia. My great grandfather borrowed a Swedish friend’s passport (this was the days prior to photo ID) and fled Finland under a false name. He entered the United States through Ellis Island, and then mailed the passport back to his friend, changed his name and moved to Western Canada and started a new life. And he did this all, knowing only two words of English: ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. I have no idea how accurate or inaccurate this story remains. The story was told to me by my mother. She based her understanding of it on her mother’s story and the other details she could unearth. My grandmother based the story upon the tales told to her by her father, my Great Grandfather. I do not know how much of the story has changed. I do not know my Great Grandfather’s name. But I know his story. And I have told it countless times to friend and family. This is his afterlife, his story continues on because I tell it. I hope that when I die, I will have left a story- even if only one- worthy of being retold across generations.

This is the engine that drives Blood Red Dreaming.

Alan Moore and My particular Madness

“Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal.”
Alan Moore

We tell stories to make magic and transform the world. According to Alan Moore, “Language comes first. It’s not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven’t got language, you can’t be conscious.” Language should amaze us. Humans can give other people their thoughts and their memories. I can open a book and hear the thoughts of Plato or Musashi Miyamoto or Black Elk in my mind. Language allows our ideas to become immortal. Humans use language to create virtual universes inside their minds. Humans use language to share those universes with other people. We can share the universe in our mind with people yet unborn! Your ideas can survive your death. Language renders us immortal. You have heard stories that are thousands of years older than you. The dead speak to you across the millennia. They speak through their immortal words, passed down by the power of language.

“There are two worlds we live in: a material world, bound by the laws of physics, and the world inside our mind, which is just as important.”
Alan Moore

Try to imagine the world inside your mind without language. The task is possible, but difficult. Humans use language as a tool. Humans use language to interrogate the world around them. But they also interrogate the world inside them. Language enables us to tell stories to create meaning. Language enables us to impose meaning upon a mechanistic universe. Language enables us to transform facts into message. Language transforms events into story. Language transforms the herd into the tribe.

I have read authors describe the impact the Internet had on culture and civilization. Language had an impact like Mars striking Planet Earth. Language as a tool enabled humanity to revolutionize how we lived on planet Earth. Language made us human, stories made us human. Alan Moore has pointed out that Language and Magic are identical twins, if not one thing entirely. The history of civilization itself supports Alan Moore’s theory.

We express language through speech and song. We express language through text and sign language. We use language to show love and express hatred. We use language to debate and philosophize. We use language to write laws. Nations build their legitimacy on declarations of independence, bills of rights, and constitutions. Sacred texts sit at the core of a majority of modern religions. We use language to build science and religion. We use language to craft culture. We use language to be human. And why?

Because without language, we are dancing bags of protein and water. Because with language, we birth gods and craft castles in the sky. With language we build cathedrals and coliseums. With language we build planetariums and cure pandemics. With language we liberate people and land men on the moon. With language we write ‘King Lear’ and ‘I know why the Caged Bird Sings.’

Without language, we are an awkward hairless ape. With language, we are poets and heroes.

A simple question with an impossible answer drives our monkey minds. Why did this happen? Why did this happen to me?

And our minds provide an answer. You proved unworthy. Destiny selected you. Luck was against you. You sinned against the Gods and they punished you. You defied your fate and changed your destiny.

Meaningless, and yet also the opposite. The universe shows no sign of caring about us or our little corner of the universe. We came into being due to impersonal cosmic providence. A suitable planet spun around an unremarkable star at an acceptable distance. The planet contained enough water and raw material, and chemistry did the rest. The Universe stretches at least fourteen billion light years in all directions. We do not sit at the center. Nothing intended us to exist. If we choose not to write stories. Because the universe sits immense and cold and uncaring, before us. The universe provides no meaning. The universe provides no solace. But with stories, we can provide our own meaning. H.P. Lovecraft introduced the world to the genre of Cosmic Horror. The foundation of comic horror sits upon a few assumptions. In The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, Lovecraft wrote that, “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

But with language and by telling stories we can defy the indifference of the universe. Prophets build religions around the creation of meaning. They craft meaning to defy the void that roars in our faces every day. We birth gods and monsters. We craft angels and demons. And through these supernatural beings we tell a story that gives meaning to our lives. And thus we make magic.

“The one place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind.”
From Hell, Alan Moore

But again, why do humans do this? Because the infinite worlds inside our stories and inside our minds give us comfort. Because these hidden universes create a continuity between individuals. Because these stories extend forward through time. The story lives as the bones of the storyteller bleach in the sun. A human who joins a story becomes part of a larger being, an older being. The story looks like a god to our small mortal human minds. But we are a part of that god. The story contains us, and our family, and our friends and even our ancestors.

We are our stories, even as those stories outlast us and grow beyond us.

“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

MY POINT EXACTLY.”
Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

Terry Pratchett’s Rising Ape

Evolved for Journey

Evolution is adaptation to local circumstances through natural selection. Humans have been nomadic for all but the last ten thousand years of the estimated two million years since Homo Habilis began the whole human experiment. As such, evolution has selected for a human brain that understands and remembers repeated journeys as generation after generation of humans followed the migrations and the changing seasons across the globe.

Evolved for Tribes

Humans have lived in cities for less one percent of the time they’ve been human. Population was difficult to concentrate for most of human history. Hunter-gatherers and small scale gardeners cannot support the population density of a city. And so evolution shaped the human mind to interact and remember family members and small groups of families which made up the nomadic band or tribal group.

Evolved for Pattern Recognition

Few people would dispute that humans sits at the top of the food chain. Firearms and spears, bows and slaughter houses, traps and fishing trawling; humans have climbed the food chain on the bodies of species rendered extinct by industrialization. But this is a recent development. For the majority of our time in the arms of evolution, we human beings have sat in the middle of the food chain. We have needed to be watching both for food and for things that saw us as food. And so, evolution shaped our minds into a pattern recognition superpower.

Evolved for False Positives

The result of natural selection building humans an overactive pattern recognition is that we see phantoms everywhere we look. Tigers walk in the clouds. Faces appear in tree bark. Rabbits dance on the face of the moon. Pattern recognition kept us alive, but the trade off is that it continues to bedevil and confuse us. But even this bizarre apparent weakness was something we were able to put to use.

Language as Magick

Evolved for Symbols

Aleph, the the first letter of the Semitic abjads, is generally believed to be borrowed from an Egyptian Hieroglyph of the head of an ox. Our ability to see patterns in everything, allowed an enabled us to build a library of symbols that we now use to transmit information across miles and through millennia.

Evolved for Story

Nomadic peoples needed to remember the seasonal routes that the tribe would take. And so the human mind evolved to remember the points on a journey. Likewise, living in small groups, the human mind evolved to recognize the names and faces of one hundred to two hundred people, and to remember the web of social relations and interactions of those people. Journeys and people, characters and plot. Evolution primed us to invent storytelling as we know it.

Story as Magick

I want to start with an unprovable assertion.

We became human when we began telling stories. We continue to be human through the continued telling of our stories.

This is unfalsifiable. I know. This statement is not testable. And this statement resists disproval. I disdain an idea that resists testing. I dislike that which somebody could not disprove. So why would I start with this statement? The flippant answer is that this is how religions begin, and I am in the business of religion. The accurate answer humans base worldviews on axioms. An axiom is a idea we decide to accept as true to have a place from which we can examine the rest of the world. Christianity accepts as axiom that humans are born sinful. Capitalism accepts as axiom that profit is success.

But, accepting something as an axiom does not mean that idea has no explanation. Christianity explains the sins of humanity using the story of original sin. So what is my explanation?

Humans differentiate from other animals through our minds. Our brain is so large that our children are born premature compared to most other mammals. We remain helpless through early childhood, where most other mammals do not. If we were to gestate until our brain finished growing, our skulls would be larger that our mother’s pelvis. What does our brain do? Why would evolution select for this prolonged childhood vulnerability? Social intelligence. The tribe. This is the answer. Humans can survive helplessness in childhood, because of our social strength. Humans spent over forty thousand years as a nomadic tribal species.

Our memories have evolved to recognize the rest of our tribe. We recognize faces and remember the social hierarchies. We learn and remember the relationships of the other members of our tribes. Our memories have evolved to remember journeys. Thus the tribe can traverse the nomadic path it walks year after year. Our minds see connections, even where none exist. Our minds see patterns, even in randomness. Our brains find meaning. We build that meaning around the things our brains are our good at: people and journeys.

People and Journeys: that sounds like a history of the tribe. That sounds like a story. The human mind is novel in its ability to extend beyond the human skull. I don’t mean this in any psychic or supernatural way. You can debate such things among yourselves. I mean that we transfer memories to other people through stories. I mean that we encode our thinking in books and tablets and television shows. I mean that we create a group hive mind. Through the creation of culture we create a shared memory. Through the creation of political or religious organizations have created a shared cognition. We have externalized our minds, merged them and expanded them. We are cyborgs. We were cyborgs when Sumerians first pressed reed to clay tablet. We were cyborgs when Neolithic humans first painted meaning upon cave walls.

And we did this all by telling stories. There are stories you know which a mother taught to her child forty thousand years ago. The human story lives on past any one human. The human story is the thing that makes us human, because human made it to create the idea of what a human is.

Nothing is more human than a story. Nothing is more story than a human.

Story predates religion. Story predates politics. Story is sacred.

The Dreamtime of the Australian Aboriginal mythology depicts the ideas that some things of spiritual dimension exist outside of regular time or ‘everywhen’, to steal from anthropologist William Edward Hanley Stanner. Traditional Australian spiritual practises include walking song lines and singing the necessary songs to hold the world together. The writer, Alan Moore, argues through much of his more esoteric writings that story itself is magic, quoting everything from the bible to hermetic writings of such occult figures as John Dee. Grant Morrison talks about his encounter with his own fictional creations that he invented to act as fiction suits for himself to transform his life by dragging the fictional version of himself into the ‘real world’.

What does all this mean? Probably not much yet. But the short answer is: fiction is a place. ‘Once upon a time’ is an incantation to open a portal to a timeless land. When this book calls gods, or magick or demons and many other things fictional, do not for a second think that we mean something tricky or fancy. We do in indeed mean fiction in the classic sense of the word. But also do not imagine that just because something is fiction that means that it is not real.

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