Mythology (Gen, PG, Daniel Jackson)
As many of you probably know, I decided to do the drabble meme, offering to write drabbles for those who made requests. I'm not even trying to write drabbles anymore. It doesn't seem to be in my skill set. We'll just call them short stories that are low on plot. This one, the third, is for quarryquest and the prompt was 'Daniel and Joseph Campbell'.
I managed to figure out that drabbles were never going to happen in advance, this time, so I got it beta'd! Big thanks to redbyrd_sgfic, who helped me improve this greatly.
Daniel opened another box. Books-that was no surprise. Most of the boxes were books. They’d started there, probably putting off decisions about what to do with his personal effects. Packing up the clothes you saw people wear everyday was harder for most people than packing up books. He didn’t really understand that. Clothes were just…clothes. Books told everything about who you were.
Lifting the box off the counter, he carried it into the living room and put it on the floor by the sofa.
Being thought dead made for a lot of work. Good thing they’d figured out that something was wrong with their memories of Nem’s planet before everything was packed-or worse, given away. This was like moving in again and there were other things he really should be doing. He was very glad that Air Force lawyers were handling all the paperwork. Daniel suspected they didn’t trust him to explain mistaken death in a way that wouldn’t cause more questions.
He started taking out books and stacking them next to the box, trying to ignore the weird feeling unpacking the boxes was giving him. It probably said something about him that he felt compelled to examine the feeling all the same.
Were the boxes, packed in light of his ‘death’, an uncomfortable reminder of how things could have gone? No…that wasn’t it. He was pretty worried at first and even more worried about the rest of the team, but once he knew they were all right, and what Nem wanted….
Later, Nem had thought he might be ‘damaged’by the attempts to retrieve his memories. That hadn’t sounded good, especially since they were talking about his brain. He’d actually kind of hoped that damaged meant dead, because the alternative was worse. Okay, there was no getting around it-things could have gone very, very badly, but…maybe it was weird, but this wasn’t about Nem.
It wasn’t that Jack, Sam and Teal’c might not have remembered, either. Once Nem let him go, Daniel would just have dialed Earth. There would have been some believability issues, they probably would have sent a medical team through to examine him…. A couple of marines, too, just in case. He was pretty sure they would have let him through eventually, though, so what was bothering him?
Maybe unpacking boxes that people packed when they thought you were dead was too much of a reminder that when you were dead, everything you cared about went, too…. No one would ever have known what he’d learned if he’d died on Nem’s world, about the pyramids, the stargate, Abydos-oh, crap. Was this about ego? Some need to make a mark on the world before dying, to be remembered after everyone he knew was dust? Oh, that was nice. Existential hubris…. Time to get on with this, he clearly needed food and sleep.
Daniel put the stack of books on the floor and picked up the first one. ‘The Hero With A Thousand Faces’ by Joseph Campbell. Campbell certainly had a point. It was astonishing how many ideas were repeated across cultures, with the same basic structure appearing, again and again, in the myths of completely disparate groups, but…collective unconscious?
No. More like common experience and cross-cultural interference. More like the Goa’uld.
Who knew how many Goa’uld had been to Earth? How many ways they’d disturbed the natural development of cultures? Slaves moved from place to place, myths being heard by new groups and spreading, people of different cultures witnessing similar unexplainable things….
So many brilliant minds were missing essential information that would turn every aspect of archeology, history, anthology, and comparative mythology around. So much research distorted because they didn’t know the true history of not only the planet, but the galaxy.
Daniel took a deep breath. Campbell wouldn’t have known anyway, he died before they got the stargate working.
Sitting on the floor next to the box, he leaned back against the sofa and flipped through the pages.
It was hard to see how the prevalence of the hero archetype fit into his theory that the Goa’uld had something to do with common themes. When conquered by a seemingly unbeatable enemy, was the ‘hero’ an intrinsic human response, an outlet for hope? A way to see some possibility for victory when none appeared to exist?
That wouldn’t explain the repeated elements of the hero’s journey, the departure from home, adventures in an often otherworldly place, the return with knowledge…. Could these myths have been spread on purpose as a way to encourage rebellion? Maybe, but by whom-the Asgard? Omoroca? Someone else?
A paragraph caught his eye. “Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd.”
Oh, so not true…. Once you knew the myths involved real beings of power, everything changed. Mythology is never absurd when it’s about bona fide monsters pretending to be gods. The history, that’s where you found truth. It could be ugly, dangerous truth, but even before he’d known that, it was where he’d looked. You had to look at myth as biography, as history, as science.
The story of Ra might be poetry, but it was also biography, it was the history of the greatest rebellion Earth had ever known, it was the science of the stargate and ships that traveled to the stars. If they’d never looked beyond the poetry of it…. Some myths were about real evil, things that could kill you-and destroy your world.
Putting the book on the coffee table, Daniel stood and picked up the rest of the stack.
This would go a lot faster if he didn’t stop to read. There might be something important in these ideas, though, something they could use against the Goa’uld. He’d already found potential allies looking at myths outside of Egypt, like the Asgard, now Nem…. Well, he couldn’t take credit for finding an ally by reading Babylonian myths. It was more of an accident combined with forced recognition.
Just like Campbell’s heroes, they were learning by leaving their home, journeying into the unknown, coming back with new knowledge-and hopefully, power. They’d even done the part about dying and coming back to life.
Daniel smiled as he put the books on a shelf and shook his head. Yeah, right…. Heroes….
I managed to figure out that drabbles were never going to happen in advance, this time, so I got it beta'd! Big thanks to redbyrd_sgfic, who helped me improve this greatly.
Daniel opened another box. Books-that was no surprise. Most of the boxes were books. They’d started there, probably putting off decisions about what to do with his personal effects. Packing up the clothes you saw people wear everyday was harder for most people than packing up books. He didn’t really understand that. Clothes were just…clothes. Books told everything about who you were.
Lifting the box off the counter, he carried it into the living room and put it on the floor by the sofa.
Being thought dead made for a lot of work. Good thing they’d figured out that something was wrong with their memories of Nem’s planet before everything was packed-or worse, given away. This was like moving in again and there were other things he really should be doing. He was very glad that Air Force lawyers were handling all the paperwork. Daniel suspected they didn’t trust him to explain mistaken death in a way that wouldn’t cause more questions.
He started taking out books and stacking them next to the box, trying to ignore the weird feeling unpacking the boxes was giving him. It probably said something about him that he felt compelled to examine the feeling all the same.
Were the boxes, packed in light of his ‘death’, an uncomfortable reminder of how things could have gone? No…that wasn’t it. He was pretty worried at first and even more worried about the rest of the team, but once he knew they were all right, and what Nem wanted….
Later, Nem had thought he might be ‘damaged’by the attempts to retrieve his memories. That hadn’t sounded good, especially since they were talking about his brain. He’d actually kind of hoped that damaged meant dead, because the alternative was worse. Okay, there was no getting around it-things could have gone very, very badly, but…maybe it was weird, but this wasn’t about Nem.
It wasn’t that Jack, Sam and Teal’c might not have remembered, either. Once Nem let him go, Daniel would just have dialed Earth. There would have been some believability issues, they probably would have sent a medical team through to examine him…. A couple of marines, too, just in case. He was pretty sure they would have let him through eventually, though, so what was bothering him?
Maybe unpacking boxes that people packed when they thought you were dead was too much of a reminder that when you were dead, everything you cared about went, too…. No one would ever have known what he’d learned if he’d died on Nem’s world, about the pyramids, the stargate, Abydos-oh, crap. Was this about ego? Some need to make a mark on the world before dying, to be remembered after everyone he knew was dust? Oh, that was nice. Existential hubris…. Time to get on with this, he clearly needed food and sleep.
Daniel put the stack of books on the floor and picked up the first one. ‘The Hero With A Thousand Faces’ by Joseph Campbell. Campbell certainly had a point. It was astonishing how many ideas were repeated across cultures, with the same basic structure appearing, again and again, in the myths of completely disparate groups, but…collective unconscious?
No. More like common experience and cross-cultural interference. More like the Goa’uld.
Who knew how many Goa’uld had been to Earth? How many ways they’d disturbed the natural development of cultures? Slaves moved from place to place, myths being heard by new groups and spreading, people of different cultures witnessing similar unexplainable things….
So many brilliant minds were missing essential information that would turn every aspect of archeology, history, anthology, and comparative mythology around. So much research distorted because they didn’t know the true history of not only the planet, but the galaxy.
Daniel took a deep breath. Campbell wouldn’t have known anyway, he died before they got the stargate working.
Sitting on the floor next to the box, he leaned back against the sofa and flipped through the pages.
It was hard to see how the prevalence of the hero archetype fit into his theory that the Goa’uld had something to do with common themes. When conquered by a seemingly unbeatable enemy, was the ‘hero’ an intrinsic human response, an outlet for hope? A way to see some possibility for victory when none appeared to exist?
That wouldn’t explain the repeated elements of the hero’s journey, the departure from home, adventures in an often otherworldly place, the return with knowledge…. Could these myths have been spread on purpose as a way to encourage rebellion? Maybe, but by whom-the Asgard? Omoroca? Someone else?
A paragraph caught his eye. “Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd.”
Oh, so not true…. Once you knew the myths involved real beings of power, everything changed. Mythology is never absurd when it’s about bona fide monsters pretending to be gods. The history, that’s where you found truth. It could be ugly, dangerous truth, but even before he’d known that, it was where he’d looked. You had to look at myth as biography, as history, as science.
The story of Ra might be poetry, but it was also biography, it was the history of the greatest rebellion Earth had ever known, it was the science of the stargate and ships that traveled to the stars. If they’d never looked beyond the poetry of it…. Some myths were about real evil, things that could kill you-and destroy your world.
Putting the book on the coffee table, Daniel stood and picked up the rest of the stack.
This would go a lot faster if he didn’t stop to read. There might be something important in these ideas, though, something they could use against the Goa’uld. He’d already found potential allies looking at myths outside of Egypt, like the Asgard, now Nem…. Well, he couldn’t take credit for finding an ally by reading Babylonian myths. It was more of an accident combined with forced recognition.
Just like Campbell’s heroes, they were learning by leaving their home, journeying into the unknown, coming back with new knowledge-and hopefully, power. They’d even done the part about dying and coming back to life.
Daniel smiled as he put the books on a shelf and shook his head. Yeah, right…. Heroes….