Exploring Coming of Age

This is a bulleted list of excerpted notes from the article “Unriddling the World: Rites of Passage” Tales by Terri Windling. The complete article can be found at The Endicott Studio of Mythic Arts in the Forum section.

This article spoke to me because it was about rites of passage and the changes we go through in our lives. Recent events in my life had some changes I needed to adapt to quickly. It doesn’t matter what your age, you go through different cycles of rites of passage.

A journey through the dark of the woods is a motif common to fairy tales: young heroes set off through the perilous forest in order to reach their destiny, or they find themselves abandoned there, cast off and left for dead.

The western road is one of trials, ordeals, disasters, and abrupt life changes-yet a road to be honored, nevertheless, as the road on which wisdom is gained.

Myths of descent and rebirth connect the soul’s cycles to those of nature.

Myths have a way of doing this, whispering at the edge of consciousness in the stage of life when they’re needed most.

What we do need is to remember that fantasy (even more than other kinds of fiction) is a rites-of-passage literature-whether its themes are based on collective battles or on private, individual ones. The best fantasy is rooted not only in myth but in life experience--while the worst draws
experience second-hand from film, television, and other books.

As fantasists, we must look to the quests, ordeals, and trials that form (as Susan Cooper says) the shape of our own imagination and all its unconscious preoccupations. Through myth, symbol, and metaphor, the true fantasist transforms the personal into the universal--creating stories that not only entertain but provide the mythic tools we need to face the ordeals, the monsters, the wolves, of our modern age.

”I see much current Fantasy and SF in full retreat from real human needs,” writes Ursula K. LeGuin. “Where a Tolkien prophetically faced the central fact of our time, our capacity to destroy ourselves, the present spate of so-called heroic fantasy, in which Good defeats Evil by killing it
with a sword or staff or something phallic, seems to have nothing in mind beyond instant gratification, the avoidance of discomfort, in a fake-medieval past where technology is replaced by magic and wishful thinking.”

Yet the magic of our human heritage, formed by centuries of stories, dances, songs, sacrificial ordeals and ritual acts, is evoked, not manufactured-the science lab is not going to help us here. Magic is a symbol, a metaphor, an integral part of a mythic belief system-and of the mage, or shaman, or storyteller’s relationship with the numinous world. Take myth away, and the magic in a fantasy book is nothing more than special effects, or LeGuin’s phallic staff of wish-fulfillment.