This theory may throw the proverbial monkey wrench—no pun intended toward understanding the mechanics of traveling between worlds as it relates to the ape descendents— into humanity. Has humanity developed with pan-dimensional abilities from mice? As suggested in Gaiman’s InterWorld, we can open the In-Between with our minds— but is it because of mice, a Creator Being, or mushroom spores? This theory may then further put in jeopardy your understanding of the masterful use of narrative language by Adams and Gaiman, which may assist you to enter another dimension. Whether it is true of your Earth, or another version, then all of the previous discussion isn’t worth a load of dingo kidneys and humanity’s intelligence and ability is not the product of a Creator Being, not of mice, but of unidentified aliens who have spread their magical spores throughout the cosmos.
This ends my update for The Guide with concern to Neil Gaiman and Douglas Adams but still begs the question: What version of the Earth, or realm of Dream, are you from?
____________________
1 The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash (WSOGMM) found with the pages of Adams’ Mostly Harmless, “…is the sum total of all the different ways that exist of looking at thing, or more specifically, all the different probabilities that exist through which you could look at things…[it] is a metaphor created to help people better understand a part of the complex concepts presented by the complicated web of probabilities (parallel universes, one could say) presented by created…”
http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Whole_Sort_of_General_Mish_Mash
This is also referred to by the Doctor (10th) as “a Big Ball of Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey…stuff.” 2 This version of the Earth may no longer exist, depending upon which universe, or dimension, you currently inhabit.
3 Since you, the reader, exist in the time and space you do, the version of the Guide that is being updated is not the future, second, and more powerful version of the Guide created by Infinidim Enterprises for the Vogons (see The Guide for a definition of what a Vogon is), which stretched across all dimensions, perceived everything, and had unfiltered perception. Since there is much wrangling of physics to do here, in order to understand first how I know this since The Guide Mark II exploded and destroyed all versions of the Earth and we both are scratching our heads as to why we exist at all— we shall leave it as part of the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash.
4 Mythcon 35 Guest of Honor Speech http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/35/speech 5 Not Kitsune Books, you ask? Mega Dodo Publications is the Galactic Publication Overseer that optioned Kitsune Books to unravel the quandaries that lie within the being calling himself “Neil Gaiman,” as explained in great detail within the present volume you now hold.
6 A bit of sympathy for any confusion. Adams wrote a book about a book, which narrates itself in different versions—with different outcomes. Adams wrote a radio play that became a book that became a television series, interspersed with more books, a film, and more radio series—oh and comics too—all of which differ. If you happen to own an actual Guide, then you may understand a bit more than the average Earth-bound being.
7 Gaiman, DON’T PANIC, 142.
8 Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 568.
9 Neil Gaiman hitchhikes through Douglas Adams’ hilarious galaxy (Interview by Kathie Huddleston). http://web.archive.org/web/20040216101052/http://scifi.com/sfw/advance/24_interview.html 10 Mega Dodo Publications and Neil Gaiman are still wrangling the legalities of his use of “DON’T PANIC,” which as you may know is boldy displayed in large friendly written letters upon the front of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
11
12 Many of these offers came from such esteemed publications as PlayBeing, Mega Dodo, and Eccentric Gallumbits.
13 See note 9.
14 Gaiman, DON’T PANIC, 141.
15
16 Gaiman states of Adams, “But I do think that everything Douglas did that was really successful consisted of trying to explain the world to the world.” I felt such praise is also applicable to Gaiman. (Huddleston Interview).
17 Carpenter, Letters, 188.
18 (Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 728). The god being of the inhabitants of the planet Lamuella.
19 Adams, The Ultimate, 228.
20 If you absolutely have need to consult an intellectual guide on Neil Gaiman and his consorting with gods, then please refer to the brilliant chapter by Harley Sims in the present volume. 21 The question of What is Real? is as problematic as a Vogon Fleet circling your planet to make way for an Interstellar ByPass—neither of which will be dissected at the present time.
22 The narrative version, often paperback edition, by Douglas Adams, “not the galactic, large pocket calculator sized version having upon its face over a hundred flat press-buttons and a screen about four inches square, upon which any one of over six million pages can be summoned almost instantly and comes in a durable plastic cover upon which the words DON’T PANIC are printed in large friendly letters.”
23 (Gaiman, Don’t Panic, 158)
24 Adams, The Ultimate, 349.
25 In A Game of You, the fantastical realm Barbie travels to is simply called “The Land.” 26 Gaiman, Game, 36.
27 The author of this chapter does sincerely hope the reader is able to gain some clarity on the matter of which he writes because Mega Dodo Publications and the police of Jazzlebrix Minor have threatened to throw him in the Total Perspective Vortex, which lies between a fairy cake and cranky old woman, if he does not.
28 Gaiman, Fragile, 193, italicized for emphasis.
29 See Sims in the present volume.
30 This introduction can be found by searching Gaiman’s website/journal at http://journal.neilgaiman. com /2008/04/remembering-douglas-1.html
31 See Jones’ chapter in the present volume.
32 Gaiman, Preludes, 16.
33 Gaiman, Preludes, 16.
34 There is an abundant amount of material available on Kabbalah, which gives this basic premise of the Tree of Life. See works by Aaron Leitch, Israel Regardie, Dion Fortune & Aryeh Kaplan. 35 Gaiman & Reaves, InterWorld, 179.
36 Adams, The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts, 73.
37 Adams, The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts, 73, 82,
38 Gaiman, Mythcon 35 Guest of Honor Speech: “I came to the conclusion that Lord of the Rings was probably, the best book that ever could be written, which put me in something of a quandary…I wanted to write The Lord of the Rings. The problem was that it already had been written…”
39 Gaiman & Reaves, InterWorld, 63, italic stress my own,
40 Carnell & Leialoha, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Authorized Collection Graphic Novel, 130.
41 Adams, The Ultimate, 128.
42 Gaiman and Reaves, InterWorld,157, second italic stress is my own.
43 Gaiman and Reaves, InterWorld, 118.
44 Adams, The Ultimate, 48.
45 Gaiman notes: “Also, I think I have slipped into a parallel universe in which everything is reversed.”
46 And again: “There was a very odd moment in the middle of reading the Dame Darcy interview at Bookslut.com where I thought I’d slipped into a parallel universe….”
47 And not for the last time: “Bill Stiteler sent me this link to a set of photographs from a prallel universe….”
49 Gaiman, DON’T PANIC, 241.
50 Gaiman, DON’T PANIC, 186.
51 Gaiman, Neverwhere¸ 135.<
br />
52 Adams, The Ultimate, 20.
53 Gaiman, Neverwhere, 24.
54 Gaiman, Game,36.
55 Gaiman, Doll’s House, 195-197.
56 Gaiman, Doll’s House, 202.
57 Gaiman, Neverwhere, 59.
58 Gaiman, Neverwhere, 66.
59 Gaiman, Neverwhere, 314.
60 Gaiman, Neverwhere¸253.
61 Gaiman, A Game of You, 51
62 Gaiman, DON’T PANIC, 40.
63 Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge.
Consorting with the Gods: Exploring Gaiman’s Pan-pantheon
Harley J. Sims [Mister Pinkerton:] “There’s a theory that for a human to be killed by a god is the best thing that could possibly happen to the human under discussion. It eliminates all questions of belief, while manifestly placing a human life at the service of a higher power. Where do you stand on this theory?”
[Carla:] “I--I don’t believe in God.”
[Mister Pinkerton:] “You don’t have to believe in God. But what about gods? Eh? The plurality of powers and dominions. The lords and ladies of field and thorn, of asphalt and sewer, gods of telephone and whore, gods of hospital and car-crash?” [Carla:] “This is crazy.”
—The Sandman: The Kindly Ones1 It is unclear whether Carla ever learns who Mister Pinkerton truly is; in the same panel where he declares his identity, the young woman is engulfed by the conflagration that kills her. Like Low Key Lyesmith in American Gods, Mister Pinkerton of The Sandman is a pseudonym for the Old Norse trickster-god Loki, a being who, as Neil Gaiman postulates and Odin specifies earlier in The Sandman series, is properly “the child of giants, but Aesir [properly Æsir, the dominant clan of Norse gods] by right of blood-brotherhood.”2 In both The Sandman and American Gods, the machinations—and, ultimately, the manipulation—of Loki serve as engines of the plot, involving the gods and spirits of numerous traditions ancient, modern, and invented.
In this involvement, no single work of Gaiman’s is incompatible with another; in Sandman as in American Gods, Anansi Boys, Neverwhere, and Stardust, deities and creatures from various mythic and folkloric traditions—European, Middle-eastern, African, Asian, North American, and others—coexist and interact, all ageless if not immortal, and bearing different attitudes towards their fall from popular belief. From a Lucifer who quits Hell to play the piano, to a Thor who blows his head off out of depression, Gaiman portrays both an otherworld and an underworld of fallen idols and icons, an alternate über-reality where the deities born to peoples continents away and historically unacquainted with one another now rub shoulders as surely as they do in modern dictionaries of gods and myth.
Gaiman’s particular approach to mythological tales and figures exemplifies what is perhaps the dominant impulse of modern Fantasy—the desire to explore the imaginary on its own soil. Gaiman treats the stuff of myth as possessing a hypothetical reality of its own, a reality to be developed as an active explorer rather than reiterated as a passive reteller. The purpose of that exploration is, in turn, to add grand, new dimensions to preexisting material, reinvigorating ancient texts and icons with modern relevance even as the original material elevates Gaiman’s own creations. Through this symbiosis, Gaiman places himself upon the web of story, spinners ever poised, never a witness but always a weaver. In doing so, he sets an example of the most decorous manner in which to engage imaginative material— imaginatively, but invested with the sense of reality that makes any and all things believable. This chapter will examine some of the elements, implications, and achievements of what might be called Gaiman’s mythism, in particular those of his magnum opus Sandman series. Projects such as Neverwhere, American Gods, Anansi Boys, Stardust, the Death graphic novels, and various shorter works are effectively treated as tributaries and offshoots, if not as evidence of a world shared with and established by The Sandman.
Gaiman’s works illustrate his method in many ways, but no more so than with his vision of a cosmic backstage where the deities and spirits of all cultures and historical periods continue in secret to influence human affairs. Such a backstage might be called a ‘pan-pantheon’ and whose pertinence to Gaiman’s portrayal of the gods is fitting. The word ‘pantheon’ seems to have been adopted into the English language twice, once in the fourteenth century and again in the seventeenth.3 Both times it came from Latin sources, though the word is Greek in origin: pántheion (πάνθειον) (from pan [παν] ‘all’ + theîos [θεîος] ‘of or sacred to a god’ [θεός]). According to extant literature, the word had meanings ranging from “all embracing divinity” (cf. modern pantheism) to, as Aristotle used it in his Mirabilia, a “temple or place consecrated to all gods.”4 Its first documented use in English refers to the Roman Pantheon and other sacred buildings of its sort,5 where all the deities of a people are identified and honored. The second time the word entered English, it was in the context of theological debate, and referred—most familiar to the modern sense of the term—to “[a] habitation of all the gods; the assemblage of all the gods; the deities of a people collectively.”6 Though this definition appears preemptive and allembracing, it was common practice from the beginning of its use to specify pantheons by region or religion, distinguishing the Roman Pantheon from the Greek, for example, even though the ancient and Classical worlds saw much adoption and conflation of deities among peoples.
More importantly for our purposes here, and as John Clute has observed, “[p]antheons are part of the furniture of much genre fantasy,”7 involving fantasy writers’ use of historical deities, as well as the invented deities of Secondary worlds. The Valar of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Secondary world Arda are often referred to as a pantheon,8 while the gods of Wizards of the Coast’s pulp-fantasy series Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms are routinely catalogued in sourcebooks as the pantheons of Krynn and Faerûn, respectively. While a person might refer to the plurality of pantheons in Gaiman’s works in terms of a single body—The Sandman pantheon, for one—the term pan-pantheon (‘all of the collections of deities’) has here been adopted to emphasize Gaiman’s particular plurality, and most of all its inclusive and open-ended basis in imagination.
Though it is clear from the first appearance of Cain and Abel in The Sandman story “Imperfect Hosts” that Gaiman’s narratives embrace numerous mythical and spiritual traditions, the word ‘pantheon’ itself appears several times in Gaiman’s works, most notably (and aptly) in The Sandman title The Season of Mists. In this volume, Dream has unwillingly inherited the keys to Hell—as Death calls it, “the most desirable plot of psychic real estate in the whole order of created things”9 — prompting the god, figures, and personified archetypes of the multiverse to come soliciting. At the banquet on the first night of their arrival, Loki describes the Shinto deity Susano-o-no-mikoto (Susano-wo)10 as “a lone member of his ancient pantheon.”11 Later, in a private meeting with Dream, the Japanese god himself explains that “[t]he gods of Nippon […] are expanding—assimilating other pantheons, later gods, new altars and icons.”12 These particular gods and pantheons are not always represented or made clear as the assemblage awaits Dream’s decision over the future of Hell. A white-bearded figure in a pointy, star-spangled hat—the classic Renaissance wizard, possibly Merlin, or Prospero13—mentions to his literally-faceless companion that he is “surprised not to see a representative from the Greek gods here.”14 He might well have said ‘pantheon,’ for it is clear by this point that the gods and figures are organized by original civilization rather than, say, their particular ministry or sphere of influence.15 For example, Loki explains to Odin that Susano-o-no-mikoto is “a storm god, like your son [Thor],”16 but Thor and Susanowo appear either unacquainted with or uninterested in one another, suggesting that, as with the murderous new gods in American Gods, and like political parties in non-coalition governments, only one cabinet has jurisdiction somewhere at any one time.
The deities, god-like beings, and supernatural figures that appear or are mentione
d in Gaiman’s works number in the hundreds, and are listed and indexed online, in many books, and elsewhere. To attempt to reproduce such a resource here would be redundant, but it would also misrepresent both the pan-pantheon and the inclusiveness of Gaiman’s imaginary world. Even when they appear in droves, as in The Sandman volumes Season of Mists and The Wake, as well as in American Gods, these mythical figures are as much allusion as presence, their names effectively hypertext linking them to the traditional bodies of story from which they derive.
Encounters in The Sandman with Calliope, Orpheus, Hades, and Persephone necessarily evoke the eight other Muses, Zeus, Hera, Hestia, Poseidon, Demeter, Hercules, the Titans, and potentially everyone else in a dictionary or other collection of Greek myths, relatively few of whom are actually portrayed in the world of The Sandman, yet all of whom must be up to something elsewhere. Whether with Ishtar of the Assyro-Babylonian pantheon, Anansi of the African Ashanti people, Czernobog of prehistoric Slavonic belief, or several other sole specimens of assumed pantheons such as Easter,17 Gaiman employs both well-known and hardly-known figures, and in mutually beneficial fashion borrows from their mystery and tradition even as his own narratives promote and develop them as individual characters. Such involvement is not restricted to the figures of ancient, defunct, and obscure religions and pantheons. To represent the Angel Islington in the London Below of Neverwhere, Aziraphale the angel of the Eastern Gate of Eden in Good Omens, and the celestial representatives Dumas and Remiel in The Sandman is to recruit the living lore of the Abrahamic holy books and their apocrypha, material in which—along with forces such as Order and Chaos18—many millions of people in the industrialized world still believe. Such recruitment goes hand-in-hand with Gaiman’s use of historical figures such as Maxmilien Robespierre, Shakespeare, Marco Polo, and Caius Julius Caesar Octavius, though it should be acknowledged that, compared to more political comic-book writers such as Alan Moore and Frank Miller, Gaiman’s involvement of real-life figures and affairs, at least in outwardly real-life contexts, is quite modest. His major players are celestials, infernals, and other outsiders—beings largely immune from, though potentially influencing, the day-to-day affairs of the human mainstream.
The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman Page 12
