Myths, magic, rituals, quests, places, people and animals; all of these elements are helping to shape the tales in my ‘Wolf Spear Saga’ series.
Horses provide us with names of people, places, mythical creatures and months of the year. ‘Marrek’ is a Cornish name for ‘horseman’; ‘Equos’ in the Celtic month of June to July means ‘horse time’; ‘Whitehorse Hill’ and ‘Vale of the White Horse’ speak for themselves; Nix and Kelpies, Rhiannon and Epona are shape-shifting creatures that drag or transport the living to the land of the dead. Places like ‘Studley’ tell us there was once an equine stud farm at that location in Saxon times.
Animals have been pivotal in assisting deities, providing tales of destiny and immortality across the world.
Think of: Athene,
the Greek goddess of fate weaving wisdom and war;
Fairy Godmother in
Sleeping Beauty, epitomising the ‘Fey’ or Crone spinner of destiny;
Serpents appear in tales from Sumerian, Hindu, Ancient
Egyptian and Norse mythologies. A thousand years before the Garden of Eden and
Genesis, Sumerian serpent-god ‘Nigizzida’ was consort of the Mother Goddess and
Lord of the ‘Tree of Truth’. ‘Kundalini’ is the serpent coiled around the ‘Tree
of Immortality’. Norse mythology has the ‘Midgard Serpent’; Egypt ‘Mehen the
Enveloper’ who enfolds the sun god ‘Ra’ during his nightly sleep in the
Underworld and ‘Ananta’ is the cosmic Hindu serpent in whose coils the gods
sleep.
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You will have to read my ‘Wolf Spear Saga’ series to discover how these influences are woven into my stories, but these and other legends, beliefs and folklore are threaded through the series in various ways, with each tale leaning towards several themes. These layers wrap my saga into real-world legends, hopefully providing access to readers and leading them gently and comfortingly into my fictional legend.
Some underlying threads may be incorporated purely by accident, perhaps where my mind delved into a subconscious ancient memory I am not actively aware of. It would be pleasant to imagine, would it not, that we all possess an element
of this ancient subconscious, bringing archetypal elements to us from deep in
our paleo-lithic historical memory?
