for the love of divinity
I've been doing a lot of research into the symbolism in animals and nature. It started after I got this idea for a story which all started after reading American Gods. I didn't want it to BE American Gods though, which can happen if you're trying to write something fresh off of reading someone else's work. At first it was researching Native American culture and religion because I wanted my main character to be Native American. It was a deliberate choice based on the lack of Native Americans in the media but also because I've always appreciated the respect Native American cultures give to nature and the animal kingdom. Why would you need some kind of human shaped being to worship when there are better things like the sky and the mountains and the very essence of creation itself?
Then as the story fleshed itself out more I got into animal symbolism, what various types of animals mean to me and how they could be made into characters like Anansi the the spider god or the animal spirits in Princess Mononoke who looked over their forests. I started to think about how in some religions (I can't remember if it was Hinduism or something else) people could be reincarnated as bugs or plants and that everything has a spirit and a purpose.
The Banyan tree, for example, is a symbol of divinity for many cultures, especially India. If you read about these trees, their absolutely incredible. They can cover land that spans a small forest with branches that extend into the ground and roots that reach up into the sky and fashion themselves into trees so that you could walk through this whole swath of land but really only be underneath the canopy of the same exact tree. How cool is that?
Avatar was a generically scripted film but I really dug the idea of trees as gods, of nature as this divine force that is not only the warden of our knowledge and spirits but the source of our strength. In many ways they are like that because our world's rainforests are what's shouldering 80% of our carbon load annually. Without them we'd be dying in our own exhaust. Trees live ridiculous amounts of time. The Sunland Baobab, for example, is around 6,000 years old.
We humans make ourselves out to be this crazy awesome epitome of creation but there are so many things out there more expansive, wonderful, and fascinating than us. We just don't realize it because it's near impossible for us to see beyond the predicaments of human existence.
Then as the story fleshed itself out more I got into animal symbolism, what various types of animals mean to me and how they could be made into characters like Anansi the the spider god or the animal spirits in Princess Mononoke who looked over their forests. I started to think about how in some religions (I can't remember if it was Hinduism or something else) people could be reincarnated as bugs or plants and that everything has a spirit and a purpose.
The Banyan tree, for example, is a symbol of divinity for many cultures, especially India. If you read about these trees, their absolutely incredible. They can cover land that spans a small forest with branches that extend into the ground and roots that reach up into the sky and fashion themselves into trees so that you could walk through this whole swath of land but really only be underneath the canopy of the same exact tree. How cool is that?
Avatar was a generically scripted film but I really dug the idea of trees as gods, of nature as this divine force that is not only the warden of our knowledge and spirits but the source of our strength. In many ways they are like that because our world's rainforests are what's shouldering 80% of our carbon load annually. Without them we'd be dying in our own exhaust. Trees live ridiculous amounts of time. The Sunland Baobab, for example, is around 6,000 years old.
We humans make ourselves out to be this crazy awesome epitome of creation but there are so many things out there more expansive, wonderful, and fascinating than us. We just don't realize it because it's near impossible for us to see beyond the predicaments of human existence.