*Edited on 11/07
*This post contains spoilers for my future novel
Like any good fantasy story my own contains prophecy. I need to workshop the lyricism of the prophecy and how it is the fulcrum of the story, how it animates the various groups involved and how, whoever wields it as prophecy so often is wielded, changes the shape of the prophecy.
First off, what even am prophecy?
Is it a kind of forecasting, prediction and tea leaf reading? Is it divination?
Who speaks prophecy? Who hears prophecy? Is it human centric?
Who is spoken of by prophecy? What is spoken of in prophecy? Is true prophecy particular or ambivalent?
This following passage is spoken by Porye the Younger, to the search party looking for Tikha. They have only in the last day or so left the mining town of Kegek, which had been a fateful town to arrive in for several reasons:
'I have a prophecy, it is not of my making, nor am I the star shining among its strange arrangement of events into a discordant upheaval of the way it is, for such is prophecy as to not tell the future but unmake the present. There shall be born of bad blood, a Son under fire moon, to quell the boiling and turmoil of bone kin, to speak as final true the quest of Long since, where worm of shadow fall to Son and Sister seek him through the flighted dream and thus Mother country comes to be free of whence long since had failed thee. Now that's all a bit of symbol jargon really but if you read the stars with this story in mind, truth begins to fall to our feet. You Esa, as told by the seekers who found this story, are the sister seeking the Son through flighted dream. You pursue Tikha Kingwolf, And Tikha Kingwolf is currently under assault by the King of Dragons. This ought be a lost cause for any who would fall prey to such a terrible turn but not for Tikha Kingwolf. I must caveat this too, for I have thought long on the ways that there is always a One, a Son, a fated soul who will liberate the many from forces of corruption who have gained a strong hold in the balancing struggle with the gift. Tikha may be a very potent individual, I know not of him, but he is not God sent. He is a timely arrival. Someone had to pick up the mantle. Someone had to fill the role that this true spell had cast upon the spiral of Time, for all things will balance and all things will unbalance again, this is simply a time of rebalancing. Even your Narduyn movement is a gesture, a wrong gesture mind you, though it is not of ilk with the Worm of Shadow Corruption, simply misguided and misinformed, and has not sought after the deepest realms of what may be truest most and for longest. Though at this time, there is only one truth, this prophecy, and all else is standing on ground that has fallen away. Tikha is the timely turning of the tides. I am here to do as I can for this wonderful group, for this fated company who seek to mark one turning point.'
That's the surrounding dialogue too. And this is all off the cuff kind of writing, from the story draft, so not final.
I figured there would be a prophetic current within the story. Currently it more or less functions like the prophecy in Harry Potter. Which is that there is indeed a person that satisfies the fateful prompt. However, this isn't quite what I intend to do with the Prophetic undercurrents.
Prophecy as fortune telling isn't what I'm going for. It's not prediction, it is a firm assessment of the times as they stand. The way things are, deeply inspected, will yield from the disciplined inquirer, such prophecy. This is how Stephen Jenkinson talks about it, "An acute willingness to be utterly taken up in a disciplined inquiry of present circumstances." He goes on to speak of the Prophet as someone who is, "[W]illing to see the world and be seized by the ordinariness of things. That's the job."
Then there is a related sense of prophecy which is what are called Prophetic Times. These particular times have seemingly been spoken of ahead of time (I'll challenge this sense of an arrow of Time in a later piece) and there is some pre-announced arrival of doom, or messiah, or mystery, probably some mix of them all. This is I think where readers might confuse a prophecy with being a prediction or of having a forecasting quality. There's the frogs from the sky and the waters run red kind of thing, which from an ecological perspective isn't all that outstanding. There's the ‘this king will fall and a man from the local tribes will rise up’, and as things go the former portion is not an impossible bet. The likelihood is, within a certain window, every King will fall. The latter part will need the keen eyes of a disciplined inquirer to catch it.
Saul, a Herder's son from the tribe of the Benjamins, was announced to Eli, the blind seer, by God as being the first king of the Israelites. Perhaps "keen eyes" is a bit on the nose with Eli but someone firmly rooted in their place and in the struggles of their people would hear on the wind that a disciple of potential would soon arrive.
He didn't depose a previous King or catch a falling crown but did remove the threat of an otherwise unbeatable foe, which endears him to public opinion and allows the prophecy to be taken up by more hands.
This is something that I heard Charles Eisenstein say to Aubrey Marcus recently about the RFK presidential campaign.
"Which Kennedy is it gunna be? Is it going to be his highest and best possible expression? That really depends on everybody else."
Prophecy here is how a public takes up the mantle of the prophecy. Someone steps up and if it fits the desire of the people, if their inner visions of the coming events match this individual who has entered the fray then they will be carried forth. If they fulfill those collective desires which come from nowhere in particular, then there will be tell of how this was pre-destined.
Where destiny and prophecy intersect I think makes for fruitful exploration. Destiny or fate is, as Stephen Jenkinson talks about it, "Now that the Gods have spoken, what will you do?" In the case of RFK, it is easier to mythologise or make larger and smaller than life, someone whose family has been so pivotal across the history of the last hundred years. Hearing RFK discuss his upbringing and the things he has been involved in, I wonder if there is actually time enough in someone's life to fit it all in. So he has this sense of being bigger in psychic stature and life experience than the ordinary person. And yet he is of course, an ordinary person, with fated undertones. He speaks and walks in a singular way. He is one of the few remaining Kennedy's. Much like the Atreides of the Dune series, he is the inheritor of a powerful name, yet he is not the King nor the president but the youngest member of that initial lineage.
RFK too has been at the centre of a female advocated plot. Paul Atreides is the best outcome of a multi-generational plan to alter the course of galactic convention, created and delicately sewn by the Bene Gesserit who are a mystical sorority back ending many of the patriarchal decisions around War and Trade throughout the Dune governmental complex. RFK is self selected through his involvement around issues of Mercury pollution in the ecosystem, its effects on Human and fish populations and the need for better regulation of polluters, was also selected by women, though not of a mystical order but Mothers of children with vaccine injuries.
In an article on the Dune Prophecy, the writer argues that in fact the book does not fulfill a prophetic tradition but rather follows Human manipulation and planning. This too is satisfied by the RFK presidential campaign.
But enough on RFK, this sense that a Prophecy comes not from Human planning but from somewhere else, the writer of the article does not speculate from where (Perhaps from God/Gods/Nature?) I think this is key to opening the discussion further.
For even in the story of Saul, Eli is a seer who is someone who knows the truth of things beyond any physical or material precedent. This is a more than humaning, an Otherwise tradition. It is not in the liturgy of official canon that Eli finds the coming of Saul. It is in listening and in the voice of God visiting him in dream, or in the gentle threshold between dreaming and waking. A place not uncommon to the weaving of potential into the tapestry of becoming.
I do not have it on authority but on faith that this is a realm smaller and larger than the Human Worlds we inhabit in our day to day and it is not exclusively a place for Humans. It is a psycho-spiritual realm, that Divine-Earthliness which is shaped like the future-present.
There's a lot of intersections of ordinary distinctions here and perhaps this is why it is seldom discussed, the ambivalence irritates most people. Doing and becoming. Undoing and never so. These things all at once make it rare that much is harnessed and ridden back to the village. Most everyone is bucked off by the wild tongue. Even that which does adhere to the corral of common speak, almost immediately is reshaped in the mouths and hearts of an audience, becomes domestic and forgets its liquid form.
Distinction weaponises the wilderness, perhaps that's why we call the gibberish of spontaneous oracular phantasm, "speaking in tongues". The ceremony is the message, in plural tongues available to all and local to the wild spirit, but the deciphering acolytes might never actually be up to the task of tuning the message to fit a cultural medium. Yet so profound is the implications of that which we cannot grasp, that it wobbles substantive reality anyhow and even the squared prophecy, made once of branching strange, carries with it the inertia of a birthed something. There will be blood, even if such an offering is not necessary. As Bayo Akomolafe calls it, "the messianic rift that tears open new dimensions of the ordinary, reintroducing it to itself."
So from here, I think we can begin to tease apart and grow anew the prophecy of my fantasy world. Prophecy is at once a thing of the moment, a thing of the future, an ordinary observation and the speech patterns of the wild spirit, which Stephen Jenkinson speaks to, “A direct encounter with the wild is most often our undoing.”
So what wildness do my characters encounter and how does the liquid form of oracular speech become weaponised by some of the involved parties?
More on this in part two.
Ryan Dickinson