Guest Blog: Francesca Forrest

[alanajoli]

I've had the pleasure of corresponding with Francesca Forrest (asakiyume) since we met in the comments of the athanarel community and on sartorias's live journal. When Francesca was announced as one of the other writers to be featured in the Coyote Wild young adult issue, I was incredibly excited to meet her all over again--this time through her fiction. Her work has been also featured on Three Crows and in the recently published Lace and Blade 2 from Norilana Books.

By following her live journal, it's clear to me that Francesca sees the world in beautiful ways, and she's able to capture that world view in her photography and her prose. About a month ago in the comments on my journal, we got into a conversation about the nature of how people see the world, culturally, impacting more than just their myths. Apparitions and mythical creatures are certainly culturally specific, but other ideas--like concepts in medicine--are also bound to the worlds they come from. Francesca's guest blog contribution riffs on that theme and applies it in a broad spectrum. I'm delighted to host her words here. Thanks, Francesca!

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As a child, I was a religious syncretist. I tried to reconcile each new religion I learned about to the others, so as to be in a state of grace for all possible faiths and deities. It wasn’t long before I realized that this was a hopeless task. The effort and the failure left me with a profound curiosity about the fact of multiple, mutually exclusive truths, however. I see the pattern in lots of places—in politics, in medicine, in philosophy.

I was mentioning to alanajoli a book called Medicine and Culture, by Lynn Payer, that examines these different truths in medicine. Depending on whether you’re in England, Germany, or France, how your ailments are diagnosed will vary. Theoretically, medicine is a fairly objective science, and yet the liver ailment that you receive medication for in France may not even be acknowledged when you cross the border into Germany, but the Germans may uncover a heart ailment. What’s true, medically, in one place just isn’t, elsewhere.

It’s not surprising that usually, you find people adhering to the truths that they know. If you know the ailment is in the liver, because you’re in France, then that’s what you treat. In the spiritual realm, Portuguese or Croatian children may see apparitions of Mary, but Kazakh and Kirghiz kids probably won’t.

This doesn’t always hold, though. In mid-nineteenth-century China, Hong Xiuquan, a would-be civil servant who studied the requisite Confucian classics diligently but who still didn’t manage to pass the civil-service exams, had a vision in which Jesus Christ came to him and told Hong that Hong was Jesus’s younger brother. Hong then founded the heterodox Taiping sect of Christianity and led a huge rebellion against the Qing dynasty.

Or, how about a more peaceful, small-scale example that I recall hearing about on the radio back in the very early 1990s: A pair of English (or possibly American or Australian; I can’t recall) explorers were traveling into the interior of Borneo in the 1980s, visiting groups of people who had very little contact with the outside world. They stayed in one such village, where the foundational spiritual belief was in a great tree of life, on which everything had a place, in relationship to everything else. During the course of people’s lives, they might dream about this tree, and when they did, they would get a tattoo to mark their spiritual progress.

Well, while the two explorers were staying there, one of them had just such a dream. He talked about it most feelingly, talking about perceiving all these different animals and birds, all on the tree, all in relation to him and to each other.

So, sometimes we do cross out of our own truths and into other people’s. I find that very comforting, somehow.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the glowing introduction! I still (and continually) can't get over my good luck, being together with such wonderful writers between the (electronic) covers of Coyote Wild.

Have you heard of Anthology Builder? When the stories' rights revert to us (or maybe they already have? I should look at the contract), it would be fun to all upload our stories there--then we could create a print anthology of the issue. ... Or I wonder if MacAllister Stone would do a print edition of that issue...

[faerie-writer.livejournal.com]

This is fascinating! Would make an excellent concept to spin a story around. :)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Oh, that was so lovely!

[alexfiles.livejournal.com]

I love how you think. Reminded me of the research on how very small groups of people sharing not only the same culture but a very closely similar life and geography (specifically, aboriginal tribes) frequently dream the same dreams at night. That's always felt like a clue to some deep understanding of myth, but I've never quite decided what ;-)

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Oooh, dream sharing is a lovely idea. I'd link it to Barfield's original participation, but I think pdlloyd's reference to Jung is certainly applicable. I wonder if that idea is mentioned in Do Kamo, which is one of the anthropology texts I keep *meaning* to read...

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

What a wonderful thing--and it would make a lovely story. Shared dreaming--kind of like what happens at the end of Lathe of Heaven, but different too....

[sin-agua.livejournal.com]

This a fascinating topic, one I could chatter on about all day. Varying views of medicine are particularly interesting - I didn't realize diagnoses varied so much from one Western country to another.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Neither did I until I saw that book!

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

This was very cool. I have to think more before I say more, though.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

Hi! Bounced in from asakiyme's journal.

As a child, I was a religious syncretist.

That's very cool. So many religious share values, and even beliefs or texts, that it can be disconcerting to realize the ways in which their differences separate them. I heard someone on NPR speaking about this (I can't remember if this was an interview, or Talk of the Nation, or something else); he said that there is one universal, or almost universal, rule that is shared by the world's religions, that being The Golden Rule, which Wikipedia disambiguates to the ethic of reciprocity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethic_of_reciprocity).

You've added another book to my growing to-read list. *g* Even though I knew that people in the US may have very different views of medicine and that those views may be connected to their cultural outlook, and also that people in different parts of the world may have different approaches to medicine, I've never put these together in a truly coherent way. This sounds like a fascinating look at the subjectivity of medicine.

Interesting to see the ways in which people respond to the culture around them, even when it's not the one they grew up in. The people who share similar dreams makes me think of Jung's collective unconscious.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

I agreed with your thoughts about Jung above--the collective unconscious certainly has something going on here (though I'm initially inclined more toward Owen Barfield). :)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

By weird coincidence, another person on my friends list, cinda_cite, also mentioned Owen Barfield the other day.

Owen Barfield is rising up from the collective unconscious :-)

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

I had two conversations about Barfield today, too, but I was congregating with mythologists who were trained like I was (one of whom was my myth prof), so that's really no surprise. Saving the Appearances really is fabulous.

I need to get back to reading cinca_cite--I think I was friends with her old journal.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

I just skimmed Owen Barfield's Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Barfield). *sigh* So many interesting almost-research threads to follow, so little time. It never occurred to me, though it makes perfect sense, that there might be a connection between the Inklings and Rudolf Steiner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Steiner). My oldest attended a Waldorf school for a year or two, before we moved away. I loved the sense of calm and love that pervaded the classrooms there and my son was probably happier there than at any other school before or after.

To get back on topic, I need to read more of both Jung and Barfield before I can make any coherent reply. *g*

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Hurrah, another Barfieldian in the making! :) I've not read as much Steiner as I'd like, but we discussed how Barfield drew on both Steiner and Goethe in my myth courses. I really need to finish How to Know Higher Worlds one of these days.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

Where did you go to school? I would have loved to take classes on myth.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Bard College at Simon's Rock. (http://www.simons-rock.edu) Tiny tiny school in the Berkshires. It was a fabulous educational experience. :)

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

It looks pretty cool. I was impressed the multidisciplinary approach I sensed from the website.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

When I was there, they were very concerned with having faculty who were primarily excellent teachers, and secondarily published academics--something I always appreciated. I'm not sure if that's still the philosophy, but it's something I still believe in. :)

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

It does rather seem the most appropriate approach to an institution of higher learning, doesn't it?

[randyhoyt.livejournal.com]

Carl Jung, in developing his views of archetypes and the collective unconscious, drew on Adolf Bastian views regarding “elementary ideas” and “ethnic ideas”. According to this view, some elements (“elementary ideas”) of culture, religion, etc., are ingrained within us human beings and are universal; other elements (“ethnic ideas” or “local ideas”) are products of our particular environments and differ from culture to culture. I first encountered this distinction in Joseph Campbell’s work, who in turn drew heavily on Carl Jung. Campbell’s most popular work is The Hero With A Thousand Faces, which he said is about similarities in different mythologies. His later and more thorough series, The Masks of God, he said is about differences. He relies on Bastian’s distinction quite heavily in this series.

I think this distinction is incredibly useful when discussing religious syncretism. How much of religion is elementary ideas? How much is ethnic ideas? Perhaps religions can’t all be reconciled exactly, but can common ideas be abstracted? Will there be a fully functioning religion left if the elementary ideas are abstracted? Or would you just have abstract doctrines that wouldn’t really work for anyone? Are there even any truly elementary ideas?

I just finished an intriguing book on Sufism: The Sufis by Idries Shah. (I’m reading the book because it heavily influenced Doris Lessing, whose science-fiction novel Shikasta completely blew me away!) Shah describes Sufism, which is a form of mysticism most often associated with Islam, as a form of theosophy; Wikipedia defines theosophy like this:

Theosophy is a doctrine of religious philosophy and metaphysics [...] [that] holds that all religions are attempts [...] to help humanity in evolving to greater perfection, and that each religion therefore has a portion of the truth.

I have more questions than answers on this matter, but it interests me a great deal.