Preferences for fantasy over reality?
Adam Maclean, alchemy researcher and expert has a blog:
http://www.alchemywebsite.com/weblog.html
A few days go he mentioned seeing Polanski's film "The 9 gates", which I also caught on tv. It is about a book allegedly written by the Devil which turns out to have 3 copies surviving, and the attempt by a mad book collector and a mercenary collecting agent to find out the secret behind the 3 books. The agent is Depp, and the main focus of the story.
Anyway, the 9 gates are woodcuts of fairly dull scenes, and Maclean writes:
It amazes me that there is such interest in the general public in the idea of there being mysterious ancient manuscripts, and yet little interest in my own investigation and research into the actual manuscripts and obscure books of strange emblems, that are difficult to locate and access. ... The next in this series which I am preparing at present is a Card Game of Logic from the 16th Century created by Thomas Murner. Sadly, there is little response to these items and almost no sales. It amuses and yet dismays me that so many people seem interested in the fantasy of strange obscure manuscripts, and yet almost no one wants to see the true original material. If one searches the internet for the Ninth Gate images, you can even find people who seem to believe this is an actual real work ! What a strange cultural world we live in, where the contrived attracts a million times more interest than the real. I suppose I have to live with that reality.
My question is, why do people prefer the fantasy stuff? Is it because the originals require more work to understand? Or perhaps meddling with original stuff feels wrong, but yet this can't be the case given how many people mess about with religion, write fanfic etc.
We see something similar within re-enactment, or rather on the outer edges of it - people want to dress up as braveheart to act out their fantasies, yet somehow wish to make them respectable by claiming historical relevance. So perhaps people start from the fantasy, and it is much easier to make it up subsequently, rather than do research into the actual history?
But on the other hand there is demand for factual history, the tricky bit which I am struggling with myself is how to make it comprehendable and communicable to modern people, and accurate at the same time.
Maclean has produced reproductions of many alchemical and hermetic manuscripts over the years, including recently one called "The Aurora consurgens", an early 14th century German manuscript, which features such odd pictures as a three faced moon jousting against the sun, the sun being on a lion, the moon mounted on a gryphin, and the moon being female and seemingly riding side saddle, albeit without a saddle. I suppose my challenge would be to introduce such real weird illustrations into a story...
Edited to add - it occured to me that the simple explanation is that people just don't know there are weird original things out there. Having had everything pulped and spoon fed to them, or in the case of fantasy the tropes are so old they're zombies, they don't realise there was a rich original soil beneath all the metal.
http://www.alchemywebsite.com/weblog.html
A few days go he mentioned seeing Polanski's film "The 9 gates", which I also caught on tv. It is about a book allegedly written by the Devil which turns out to have 3 copies surviving, and the attempt by a mad book collector and a mercenary collecting agent to find out the secret behind the 3 books. The agent is Depp, and the main focus of the story.
Anyway, the 9 gates are woodcuts of fairly dull scenes, and Maclean writes:
It amazes me that there is such interest in the general public in the idea of there being mysterious ancient manuscripts, and yet little interest in my own investigation and research into the actual manuscripts and obscure books of strange emblems, that are difficult to locate and access. ... The next in this series which I am preparing at present is a Card Game of Logic from the 16th Century created by Thomas Murner. Sadly, there is little response to these items and almost no sales. It amuses and yet dismays me that so many people seem interested in the fantasy of strange obscure manuscripts, and yet almost no one wants to see the true original material. If one searches the internet for the Ninth Gate images, you can even find people who seem to believe this is an actual real work ! What a strange cultural world we live in, where the contrived attracts a million times more interest than the real. I suppose I have to live with that reality.
My question is, why do people prefer the fantasy stuff? Is it because the originals require more work to understand? Or perhaps meddling with original stuff feels wrong, but yet this can't be the case given how many people mess about with religion, write fanfic etc.
We see something similar within re-enactment, or rather on the outer edges of it - people want to dress up as braveheart to act out their fantasies, yet somehow wish to make them respectable by claiming historical relevance. So perhaps people start from the fantasy, and it is much easier to make it up subsequently, rather than do research into the actual history?
But on the other hand there is demand for factual history, the tricky bit which I am struggling with myself is how to make it comprehendable and communicable to modern people, and accurate at the same time.
Maclean has produced reproductions of many alchemical and hermetic manuscripts over the years, including recently one called "The Aurora consurgens", an early 14th century German manuscript, which features such odd pictures as a three faced moon jousting against the sun, the sun being on a lion, the moon mounted on a gryphin, and the moon being female and seemingly riding side saddle, albeit without a saddle. I suppose my challenge would be to introduce such real weird illustrations into a story...
Edited to add - it occured to me that the simple explanation is that people just don't know there are weird original things out there. Having had everything pulped and spoon fed to them, or in the case of fantasy the tropes are so old they're zombies, they don't realise there was a rich original soil beneath all the metal.