The Devil Made Me Do It: Creativity as Daemon

by

Jodie Forrest

            In my life, "novel gnosis," a numinous, mysterious or unexpected flowering of wisdom or intuition associated with writing fiction, falls into more than one category:

insights about the psyche;

personal and general truths about the creative process;

and some synchronicities that are difficult to classify.

            The first two areas, psychology and creativity, are intimately linked. ­As writers often do, I'll start by talking about reading.

            Writers tend to be voracious readers. When I first discovered the work of the Swiss analytical psychologist, Carl Jung, the human psyche and human condition made more sense to me. Not making sense as in "right:" rather, as in "more comprehensible." I didn't glean the meaning of life from Jung. Precious few if any of my problems were solved. Maybe—maybe—I avoided some mistakes thanks to seeing life partly through Jungian-colored glasses, but I made and make plenty of goofs nonetheless. Still, that discovery of Jung's theories was and is invaluable, illuminating, fascinating, a Rosetta Stone breakthrough in my understanding of human beings, such as it is.

            I'm not a psychotherapist. I have a highly interested layperson's knowledge of this branch of psychology, supported by reading, many seminars, and some time spent in Jungian analysis. Any mistakes I make in discussing Jung's theories are entirely my own.

            What speaks to me in his work, and how does it relate to writing fiction?

            First comes the idea that a common anatomy of the psyche exists, just as there's a common anatomy of the body. The vast majority of us are born with two eyes, one nose, two ears, 206 bones, etc., that both vary and combine in an enormous diversity of ways to form each individual. That's the common anatomy of the body.

            Name a human type that every culture shares to some extent. Mother. Father. Trickster. Lovers, taking risks to be together. Tyrants, crushing and controlling everyone they can. Innocent ingenue. Hero, soldier, healer, artist . . . Those human types are called archetypes.    Think of them as the common anatomy of the psyche. They form patterns and wield influence in our psychological makeup, patterns or scripts that vary in power according to our genetics, culture, era and upbringing. They also vary according to the strength and health of our individual egos. To some extent, ego strength seems innate, although it can be improved. People with basically healthy egos who grow up in crazy-making families often turn out "saner" than people with fragile egos who grow up in better-functioning families.  

             What kinds of archetypal patterns exist? Emotional, characterological, developmental, behavioral . . . Physically and psychologically, some of those patterns are recognizable. Like stock characters in the commedia del arte, they may be predictable to some degree. The less that someone has truly become his own person, and the more that someone is influenced by and reflexively reacts according to his upbringing and culture without stopping to think for himself, then the more his behavior may follow archetypal patterns. Think of what story lines typically unfold from the encounter of an Innocent and a Trickster, or the interactions of a domineering patriarch and his rebellious adolescent offspring. These archetypal patterns, the common anatomy of the psyche, are visible through the lenses of cross-cultural folklore and world mythology. And fairy tales. And stories.

            I write fantasy and other genre fiction. When mulling over ideas, fantasy writers often like to follow where Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm brothers have led. Or Aesop or the Mabinogion, Homer or Snorri. Why? Because traditional fairy tales, not Hollywood's sanitized versions, contain an ancient repository of accumulated folk wisdom about human nature and the nature of life. Life is often hard and unfair. Some people are toxic; others are predators. It's psychologically necessary to individuate from Mom and Dad, although it can be difficult, and the type and degree of individuation needed differ from person to person.

            Cautionary themes and classic human dilemmas in fairy tales resonate in the deep psyche. Forewarned can be forearmed. Hear enough tales about Coyote's swindling some wide-eyed young maiden, and you just might be more careful when the next silver-tongued devil shows up. Read enough stories in which helping an animal aids the hero later on, and you may absorb the importance of staying close to your instinctive side, of not losing contact with the natural world, of not treating yourself like a machine.

            Witches? Evil stepmothers? Meet the archetype of the Bad Mother, the devouring, destroying face of Yin energy. Dark Lords? Darth Vaders? The archetype of the Bad Father.

            Mermaids? Selkies? They can represent a man's elusive anima, his inner feminine side. When he's too unaware or heedless of her, she can appear as a creature of the water, water that symbolizes the unconscious. A poor widow's only son, young, good-natured and naïve, sets off in the world to seek his Fate? The Quest motif, both inner and outer: leaving home, seeking a treasure, finding oneself.

            How do fairy tales and Jungian archetypes relate to crafting fiction? I used to joke with my analyst that one reason novelists write is to create and populate an imaginary world where they are God, a world completely under their control.

            "Not completely," she would murmur with a Cheshire-cat smile. "Your unconscious is involved with the process."

            At first I didn't believe her.

            Well before I formally learned to paint, she asked me to draw or paint every day, especially images from my dreams, or just to lay down whatever colors appealed to me at the moment. Some of my characters showed up in my drawings. Sometimes I didn't realize I was sketching a character until I was finished.

            Jung asked his patients to paint and draw. Art therapist Jane Adams wrote about Jung:

            He discovered that if he encouraged his patients to paint what they felt and saw, the healing awoke, it took charge of the patient who began to open doors. Dr Jung found         it had little to do with himself as therapist. His job was to lead his patients to the   underground stream, on which they floated paper boats. Art therapy was born. It is for ourselves, each one, to contact the unique inner mystery which unites us.

             Creativity and the unconscious are profoundly intertwined.

            Intuitive or expressive art therapists encourage their clients to paint without erasing or correcting anything, without starting over, without letting how they feel about the painting stop them. To paint whatever comes to mind without censoring it in any way. Realism, quality and skill don't matter. There's no way to do it wrong. Unlike studio art, in art therapy, how the client feels about the painting and its content is what matters, particularly when the client feels stuck or doesn't like her work. When that happens, the therapist discusses those emotions with her. "Intuitive painting is a mainline to the unconscious," says a good friend who's an art therapist with a degree and a clinical practice in psychology. Freud called dreams "the royal road to the unconscious."

            I've learned that most forms of creativity, including writing, are roads to the unconscious, although some of them travel there more directly than others. Writing fiction isn't the same as uncensored painting. After a first draft is completed, good writing requires rewriting. Fiction isn't painting, but they are both creative acts; writing is just somewhat more under the artist's control. Writing a novel is like painting or dreaming on paper: The author's unconscious commingles with plots, characters, themes, images, settings . . .            

            Dreams, fairy tales and fiction: All can be interpreted. If you write stories, sooner or later you learn that themes in your fiction often relate to themes in your psyche and your life, to issues that you've worked through, and to others you have yet to recognize as yours.

            Until you spot them staring up at you from the page.

            Jungian theory not only helps me detect those issues, it also assists with the creation of plausible characters. I think about what deep archetypes and their behavioral "scripts" lie beneath a character's personality. I imagine how those scripts conflict with or support other characters' agendas, and in what situations those scripts might come into play, succeed or fail.

             When I started writing my trilogy set in Nordic-Celtic ninth-century Europe, I wanted to explore the mythology of both sides of my heritage: half Norwegian; a quarter British Isles; and a quarter mixed French-Canadian / Native American blood. What did I learn about my unconscious and myself from writing The Rhymer and the Ravens and its sequels?

            I realized how uneasily my ethnic mix lies within me: My fiction is bristling with half-breed characters. One of them is half Saami, the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia who roam with their reindeer herds. I wrote the novel introducing that Saami character years before a DNA test revealed that I have some Native blood, although I'd half-suspected it. I learned that blood is powerful and so, I believe, are our ancestral memories and the mythic world view of our ethnic backgrounds, all simmering near the surface of the alchemical alembic in our psyches.

            Examples? Long after I'd written The Rhymer and the Ravens, I discovered that the name of my Norwegian immigrant grandfather's original home meant "CrowIsland." For my half-Saami, half-Swedish shaman character, I used the surname that Immigration forced my grandfather to change when he arrived in America. At the time, I thought that surname meant "bread-maker." After publishing the third novel, The Bridge, I learned it might also mean "bridge-builder."

            My analyst was right. I learned that my unconscious isn't just part of the writing process; it is deeply involved in my fiction. It's told me so. While I was writing the trilogy, I twice had a dream in which I was strolling down an airport concourse and spotted a group of my characters huddled around a few tables pushed together in a lounge. In the dream, it felt perfectly normal to happen upon three ninth-century Scandinavians, five Saxons, a pooka in horse-shape, two small winged Elves sans clothing, a six-fingered lake-Elf, some royalty from Elfland's Celtic kingdoms and a powerful Air Elemental, all conferring intently in an airport lounge.

            Delighted to see them, I started to join them. They immediately broke off their discussion and said, "Go away! You're not supposed to be here!"

            "But . . . I'm the writer."

            "Not now. Go away! You're not supposed to know any of this yet."

            A wise novelist pays attention when her characters get uppity in waking life. Who was I to argue with them in the dream world? "Okay," I said cheerfully. "See you later."

             Since I wanted the Norse gods to be so familiar that I could write about them as if they were close friends, I steeped myself in Scandinavian lore. I spent some time with modern Norse pagans: Asatruar, the followers of Asatru, who honor the old Norse gods and the earth-centered rituals of their ancestors.

            Never did I get the impression that Asatruars believed that a massively built, exceptionally strong god named Thor was hovering somewhere overhead, a red-headed, red-bearded god who wielded a magical hammer named Mjollnir that produced thunder in our world, a god who rode in a chariot drawn by huge goats. Yet Thor felt deeply meaningful to those Asatruar with an affinity for him. For the Asatruar, the gods possessed a psychic reality, a bit like archetypes but something more, whose particular type of wisdom and better qualities could be inspiring.

            I felt the most affinity for the chief Norse deity Odin, god of writing and poets as well as of magic and the warrior-dead, and for Freya, goddess of love and beauty. She has her own connections to death. Half the men who die bravely are Freya's, not Odin's, and she gets first pick of which heroes and warriors spend their afterlives in her hall.

            Imagine my surprise when, four years after I published the trilogy, neither Odin nor Freya came to me in another important dream.

            That night, I'd suffered a severe asthma attack and traveled by ambulance to a hospital 50 miles away. Emergency room personnel ended by medicating and discharging me, yet I was terrified. I didn't know how long it would take to recover, or if I ever would. I dreaded still more asthma-related restrictions of my daily life. Most of all I was scared of another episode. Asthma can be fatal, while the biochemistry of impaired breathing produces the physical sensations and reactions of fear. The more frightened we are, the more shallow our breathing can grow: a vicious circle. My oxygen-starved brain was flooded with that fear, even though I knew the meds should be more than strong enough to stave off another attack.

            Laboring to breathe, exhausted and petrified, I finally fell asleep, to dream that I was breathing normally as I stood on a rocky path along a cliff under a full golden Moon. I heard something clattering. When I identified the sound as the kind of hoof beats that unshod cloven feet might make, I felt awed, and suddenly the air seemed charged. I turned to see Thor's goats pulling a cart along the cliff straight toward me. In the cart sat Thor himself, radiating energy, power and good will.

            Thor: god of courage and strength; a robust god beloved by farmers because he sent storms to help water their crops; a straightforward god beloved by ordinary, hard-working men and women, with none of Odin's mystery and secrets and dealings with the dead. With a prodigious appetite for living, Thor was a major defender of the gods and humanity from the Frost Giants' forces of chaos and entropy. A salt-of-the-earth, wide-shouldered god, hearty and approachable, Thor made a formidable ally.

            After the goats halted beside me, Thor said that I'd been brave about the asthma attack, that I would recover and be fine, and that he would help me. The implication was that he would help me in general, not just with being courageous while I regained my health. My dreaming self felt taken under his protection and comforted.

            Do I believe that a living, three-dimensional, magical entity, a god named Thor, appeared in my dream and promised to help me? The short answer is "Not literally." I think that researching and writing the trilogy helped me tap into a pattern of archetypal energy—Thor's, the Strong Man, the no-nonsense Protector—whose traits I sorely needed to access in myself, sick and frightened as I was.

            The act of creation both is and is not a mysterious process. Creativity possesses so many facets that they're hard to see all at once, from either inside or outside the creative act. Where does it come from? The imagination. The unconscious. Inspiration. Serendipity.

            From all of the above and sometimes more. I suspect that repeated and sustained acts of creativity come from a drive experienced at least as much as a need than as a simple desire. From where does such a drive arise?

            Jung called it a creative daemon: a creative energy, housed in a particular psyche, that must produce or create something to express some aspect of that person's Self or soul. Energy is defined as the capacity to do work. Creative energy, then, must do creative work. Psychologically, daemons are kissing cousins to a Biblical notion I'll paraphrase here, that if we bring forth that which is within us, it will save us, but if we don't allow it to come forth, it will destroy us.

            If you have such a daemon occupying significant territory in your psyche, you'll feel far happier, more energetic, centered and fulfilled if you work with it to satisfy that creative urge on a frequent, regular basis. Let your daemon out, and it will reveal you to yourself and, in so doing, it will save you. The real you, the deep, authentic you. It doesn't matter whether you're "talented." It matters that creative self-expression makes you feel alive and whole.

             Musicians tell a story that bluesman John Lee Hooker's mother was grumbling about why he was so obsessed with playing music. Defending his son, Hooker's father told her, "Because that boy got a devil in him, and he can't keep it all pent up inside. He got to let that music out."  

            Sometimes, as with prodigies, a powerful daemon arrives early in life and overwhelms us with demands for expression before we've matured. Think of Mozart, writing concertos and performing for the courts of Europe by age six. His domineering father pushed and encouraged his genius, but if Mozart's own daemon hadn't already been alive and kicking, his music probably wouldn't have been written. When a daemon is strong enough, it can "borrow" energy from the rest of your psyche. If that happens, it may rob Peter without paying Paul, particularly if the person's ego is sufficiently young or fragile that it's ill-equipped to win turf wars with the daemon. Mozart, one of the world's foremost musical geniuses, died a pauper. A musical genius, yes, while down-to-earth budgeting apparently lay beyond his grasp.

            Creative daemons are not all so potent as Mozart's, but they all want to live and breathe and act in the world, and they need your cooperation to do so. Let them push you where they want you to go, but don't push them where they don't want to go. What does that mean? Allow a story to find its own course, like a river carving its channel. Let the image into the painting; it appeared for a reason.

            Perhaps my favorite quote about writing fiction comes from an interview with Stephen King.

            "What made you choose to write horror novels, Mr. King?"

            "What makes you think I had a choice?"

            His daemon specializes. Some of us are born with more than one of them. My second one paints. Gradually, I learned that I need to create with words or images on a regular basis. If I don't, my daemons may try to pre-empt the only raw material I'm giving them, my life, and "write stories" by creating Drama in it. If I don't have a story or an art project in process, I feel thwarted, incomplete, moody, and emotionally congested. No matter how difficult the rest of my day is, if I write or paint for at least an hour, even in four fifteen-minute chunks, I feel upbeat and energized.

            Creativity, I have learned, heals, invigorates and sustains me.

            Writing fiction has taught me to trust the creative process. If a new character suddenly popped into my head and insisted on appearing in chapter three, I used to fight back. I'd worry about exactly how I should insert him in the plot, whether I should stop writing and revise, and whether the new character was upstaging the other ones. Now I let the newbie in and turn him loose, because I've learned that he's bringing something to the story that I'll need to use in chapter seventeen or eighteen. He just hasn't told me what it is yet.

            Writers often teach with truisms. Show, don't tell. Use adverbs sparingly. You must write. You must finish what you write.

            I've learned that the last maxim doesn't always apply. The premise is sound: you learn a lot from finding and fixing the mistakes that prevented you from finishing a story or a novel. You learn how to write yourself out of corners as well as into them. But if your Muse only spins her wheels for a few sessions in a row, stop working on that piece and have a talk with yourself. Maybe your daemon specializes too, and you're trying to venture outside its territory. Perhaps you need to fix an earlier mistake, or your daemon might have changed her mind about what you're writing.

            Or you might have changed yours.

            After the trilogy, I was eager to write a novel about a thirteenth-century heretical sect that flourished in southern France, northern Spain and Italy: the Cathars. The spirit/body split that pervades most of Christianity was central to the Cathars, who have some parallels with the Gnostics. Cathars believed that this imperfect world was not made by God, but by the devil. Cathars believed that the perfect human soul, made by God, was more or less imprisoned in impure matter in this lifetime and those following, unless that soul embraced the Cathar faith and stopped adding to the chain of reincarnation in this fallen world.

            Cathars came in two flavors: the "perfect," who'd taken an oath in a Cathar sacrament called the Consolamentum, and the believers who hadn't taken it. You could take it at any time, including on your deathbed, and retake it if you'd broken any of its promises. Perfects ate no meat and took vows not to lie, not to kill, not to accumulate riches and not to have sexual intercourse, which could trap more human souls in flesh. Perfects traveled the countryside in missionary pairs, preaching the Cathar doctrine and trying to help people in any way they could. Although people called them the "good men," they weren't only men. Women could be Cathar priests and bishops and missionaries, while in southern France, unlike in the north, women could own property.

            Ascetic Cathar perfects preached that the Catholic Church was under the sway of impure doctrine and should give money to the poor, rather than acquire wealth and build churches. Besides the threat the Cathars represented to the authority and influence of the Catholic Church, which was practically its own nation-state and a formidable player in thirteenth-century Europe's power structure, money could be made and land taken by men willing to hunt down the Cathars as heretics. Since they spoke against paying tithes or the Crown's taxes, both the Vatican and the French monarcy were ready to make an example of them. Men willing to fight in the King of France's "Albigensian Crusade" against the Cathars were promised land, titles or money in the temperate and fertile South. Mercenaries came from northern France and well beyond her borders.

            Perched atop a tall, narrow, rocky peak called a pog in the local dialect, the mountain chateau of Montségur in southern France was one of the Cathars' last strongholds. After Montségur was beseiged for months, the attacking army managed to bribe some villagers to show them the harrowing path that the locals used to scale the sheer back face of the pog at night and smuggle food to the chateau. After Montségur finally fell in March, 1244, hundreds of perfects and believers—and some of the garrison who'd defended the chateau and were profoundly moved by the Cathars' faith and courage—refused to recant and were burned to death.

            I visited Montségur, after climbing up to the small ruined castle on the pog. Its roof is gone, but you can peer through the sentrys' narrowed windows in the thick stone walls, and contemplate the cistern's remains. Hundreds of beseiged Cathars lived there for months in a space smaller than a medium-sized office suite. Before the seige, many perfects resided in tiny huts on the pog. The air was very still that day, and the sun would set fast behind purple hills. I was silently wishing that the chateau walls could talk when my French friends and I were joined by a local resident, who remarked unprompted that he wished the walls could talk.

            I wanted to give those walls a voice and write a novel about the Cathars. I read about them in English and French. I studied pictures of Montségur and the Cathars' other chateaux-forts, their strongholds in southern France and northern Spain. A legend persists that the Cathars smuggled some sort of treasure out of Montségur after it fell, during the three days to prepare to die that they had requested and been given by their conquerors.    

            But I didn't want to write about treasure. I wanted to write about the gap between the believers and the perfects, about why someone not on his or her deathbed might take the Consolamentum. About people who struggled and suffered to follow the teachings of Jesus as they appear in the Scriptures. About how Western history might ­have differed if, instead of being eradicated, the Cathar church had flourished with its belief in reincarnation and its non-violent, generous and egalitarian values.

            I wanted to write such a novel but try as I might, I simply couldn't. No plots appeared. I had a good setting researched for the Cathar era, and a good modern setting in the Cathar region of France. But no characters appeared either, although they typically arrive first with me. I knew better than to venture where my writing daemon wouldn't go, but I wondered why my enthusiasm for a Cathar novel had dwindled.

            Years later, I realized why. I was in a gradual and subterranean process of working through what I believed, a slow coalescing of my own spirituality.

            About ten years after my intense research on the Cathar novel I never wrote, I took refuge as a Buddhist. Buddhism has no good/bad, spirit/matter, God/Devil split, although both faiths agree that life is painful. For Cathars, that pain exists because the Devil created the world and our bodies that trap us and keep us from our spiritual home in God. For Buddhists, the First Noble Truth states that life is inherently full of suffering. Its root cause are attachments and aversions arising from the ego's ignorance of the actual, empty nature of reality, the ego's belief that we have or are a separate self. For Cathars, we evolve through different lifetimes toward union with God, until we finally free our pure spirits from the prison of the impure body. For Buddhists, we all have Buddha-nature: we're intrinsically good, but our Buddha-nature is obscured by our ignorance. We evolve through different lifetimes until we experience everything that our apparently-embodied existence could entail and grow weary of it, and until we learn enough about Buddha's teachings and meditation to remove those obscurations and achieve enlightenment.

             I have a feeling that trying and failing to write a Cathar novel helped me slowly clarify a few things that I don't believe, which in turn helped lead me to what I do. Ursula K. LeGuin has said that when she wants to figure out her opinion on something, she writes a novel about it. I think I understand what she means.

            In my non-novelist life, I'm a professional astrologer. For over thirty years, I've interpreted my clients' birth charts. I've read astrology books since I was eight years old, and its language is so familiar to me that I use it as one tool to study events and people. Astrology consists of far more than popular culture's Sun signs or daily horoscopes. It resembles a complex personality theory that considers the ten planets and the nodes of the Moon (where the plane of its orbit crosses the plane of the zodiac) as parts of the psyche. Planets and nodes can fall in any of the twelve signs, which color the nature and motivations of the part of the psyche represented by that node or planet. They can also fall in any of the twelve houses, which affect the behavior of that part of the psyche and the life circumstances in which it most often operates. Moreover, astrologers also interpret the relationships (aspects) among the planets, formed by their relative placements in a chart.

            Birth charts, then, are as varied and individual as fingerprints. As varied and individual as people. Carl Jung once said that astrology contained all the psychological knowledge of antiquity. Astrology is why I started reading Jung.

            Astrology is geocentric, earth-centered, and very related to seasons on the earth. Some people say that astrology is hooey because the zodiac has "moved backwards over time," and therefore an Aries is actually born on a day when the Sun rises into the starry backdrop of the constellation Pisces, which precedes Aries.

            Apart from the fact that the whole universe is in motion, the zodiac hasn't gone anywhere. We have.

            The earth's axis wobbles as it rotates, like a spinning gyroscope as it slows down. As it wobbles, the axis points at a different sign of the zodiac approximately every 2,200 years. You've probably heard that we're entering the Age of Aquarius, and are perhaps less likely to have heard that as we enter it, we're moving "backwards" out of the Age of Pisces. The earth's axis is slowly shifting in its wobble until it will point at the stars of the constellation Aquarius on the spring equinox, and no longer at those of Pisces where it started to point at roughly the birth of Jesus.

            Again, at about the time people started writing down astrological observations that survived, Aries was the constellation forming the starry backdrop where the Sun rose on the first day of spring, the constellation where the earth's axis pointed on the spring equinox. To a geocentric, earth-centered astrologer, Aries symbolizes the energy of spring, not the zodiacal constellation bearing that name. Astrology refers to the seasons on the earth, not to the constellation where the earth's axis points. A form of geomancy, astrology interprets the apparent, to-the-naked-eye arrangement of the planets around the horizon of the birth place when someone is born: hence, the birth chart. Like a dream, like a poem, like a novel, a birth chart can be interpreted by someone who's learned the language of astrology.

            I wanted to draw up some natal charts for my characters. Charts reveal a lot about what archetypes most influence someone's psyche and how those inner scripts might interact, as well as about what archetypes are least familiar to that person. But birth charts require accurate birth data, and I didn't know exactly when and where my characters had jelled enough in my mind to be "born."

            I soon realized that I could pick a birthday for Tomas the Rhymer, the main character, regardless. Part of the trilogy's plot rests on the scaffolding of actual events in late ninth-century Europe. Some of the characters are real people who participated in those events. I knew approximately how old Tomas was on those dates. I knew his birth place and the general outlines of his chart. I set out to cast one that gave Tomas the Sun and Moon very close together in Pisces in the twelfth house, with Gemini the sign rising in the east, meaning that Tomas was "born" within a few hours after sunrise, on a new Moon between February 20th and March 20th in 851 A.D. That's all I knew, and those were the only astrological configurations I wanted to find.

            To my astonishment, the entire chart could well have belonged to Tomas, not just the Sun, Moon and rising sign, which are a birth chart's three most important symbols. A passionate nature and a complicated attraction to strong, intense, mysterious, elusive women? Check: Venus conjunct Pluto in Aries in the twelfth house. Appears scarier from a distance than he actually is in person? Conflicts over his niche in society and the necessity of defending it? Bingo: Mars overhead in the tenth house of public identity.

            The chart was real: That moment in time and that location on the planet both existed, and the planets did appear to be arranged around that place's horizon in that particular way. But the person for whom the chart could be interpreted, like a poem or a dream, was imaginary.

            Space requirements won't allow me to go into more detail here. However, I showed Tomas's chart to several astrologer friends who had read the trilogy, and explained how I'd constructed it: by looking for a Piscean new Moon a few hours after sunrise where Tomas was born in 851 A.D. My colleagues had the same reaction I did:  "Good grief, that could BE Tomas!"

            I knew the Sun, Moon and Ascendant of most of the main characters, but Tomas's was the only chart I set out to cast in its entirety. I have no explanation how or why this chart so fits an imaginary character.

            It got weirder: The Elves' Prophecy's plot needed an eclipse to happen in a certain part of Britain in the fall of a particular year, ideally close to Halloween. I was going to use artistic license to invent an eclipse, but when I indulged a whim to look up the eclipses that occurred there that autumn, guess what? There was an eclipse there on Halloween. I have no explanation for that either.

             When I moved to California, it grew weirder still. About eight years before relocating, I'd begun a novel about a half-Indian man (half-breed characters again) named Joe Stuart. He played electric bass. He was being haunted by what might be his totem animal or might be something entirely Other. Very ambivalent about this experience and what it might mean, Joe met a psychic / astrologer and rented an apartment from her, partly because she was the only other person who'd ever seen the animal who was following him.

            Flash forward eight years. A few months after I'd setttled in California, I met a guitar-and-bass-playing man who's part Indian, probably from a tribe neighboring whatever Iroquois nation figures in my ancestry. He looks strikingly like my mother's brothers, and my Native blood comes from her. He and his girlfriend and I all felt a friendly connection immediately when we met, a "click" as if you've known someone a long time and are picking up where you left off. Interested in astrology, my friend's had many psychic experiences and is exploring that part of himself after some years of ambivalence about it. We talk shop a lot. And his name?

            Joe Stewart. Same name, different spelling.

            There are differences between the living Joe and my fictional one, of course, but the similarities, especially the name, astonish me. Also, I started writing about the fictitious Joe before I discovered I have Native blood and before I had any intention of moving. I haven't finished that piece, because my daemon became too insistent about working on my current novel instead and I listen to my daemons, especially when they get bossy.

            All of these and other instances of novel gnosis, too numerous to mention here, reinforce my belief that the world and our psyches are vastly and mysteriously interconnected in ways we don't completely understand. I don't know what knowledge will accompany my creative process in the future, but I'm sure that I won't be as surprised by it as I once was, and even more certain that I need the process and will benefit from the revelations it brings.