All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 29, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:03:22
Edition 380 - Gabiann Marin

Australian author/screenwriter Gabiann Marin on the real-life impacts of Ancient Mythology in today's world...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Being recorded at the back end of a slightly fraught week here at The Unexplained, we've been launching the new website.
A lot of good response to it.
There have been a few issues, some people saying that the show is no longer available or not available in the same way via their usual podcast providers.
Adam Cornwell is working on that.
But crucially, if you see any technical issues that we need to know about and maybe we haven't spotted yet, then please can you email through the website, Adam?
There is a webmaster address there and he will be able to sort things out and get back to you if a reply is needed about what is going on with that.
If you want to contact me with ideas about the show, any ideas, any thoughts about the show, you can contact me through the contact section of the website.
There is a direct address there as well if you want to use that and I will get to see all of your emails.
Thank you for them.
Urgent email from David in Bodrum.
David, nice to hear your story, also your guest suggestion.
Thank you for that.
And I wish you well, David.
And you asked for a shout-out on the show.
So you ask.
I deliver.
David in Bodrum.
I hope all is going well there for you.
Okay.
If you want to contact me, like I say, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
I know I always say that, but it's always very, very useful.
No, we're not keeping a dossier.
We're not keeping an FBI file on you.
It's just nice for me to know.
Right, the guest on this edition of the show, slightly unusually, this is a show that I've had in reserve that I've actually failed to put out up to now.
And I apologise to the guest because of this, Gabian Marin in Sydney, Australia.
We're going to be talking about her book to do with gods and goddesses and their influence on popular culture and all of culture.
So we're going to be hearing from Gabian Marin in this edition of The Unexplained.
This edition, unreleased until now, was recorded, I think, last October or November.
So you'll get the references at the beginning of it to autumn, which of course it isn't now.
And it's just been sitting in my archive for the last couple of months and I've been meaning to put it out.
So Gabian, my apologies to you, but the show is coming soon.
So brand new website, brand new dawn for the unexplained.
It is a work in progress.
We'll build in other features.
We'll massage what's there, but I think we have the bones of what's right.
Now, if you're hearing shows, that's good.
If you're not hearing shows in the way that you need to be hearing shows or the way you used to hear shows, then we need to hear from you.
As I said, you can contact Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot, my hard-working webmaster, through the contact section of the website.
There is a webmaster contact section there.
Thank you very much for all of your feedback.
You know how vital it is.
All right, let's get to Sydney, Australia, a couple of months ago, it has to be admitted, and Gabian Murin.
Gabian, thank you for coming on the show.
You're welcome.
You know, I always get a bit of a kick, and I know it's just because I'm old-fashioned, when I'm able to talk in pretty much broadcast quality in my humble surroundings to somebody who's so far away.
You know, it's the start of our day, and it's autumn here in London.
And I know in Sydney, it's probably a beautiful spring day.
Go make me feel terrible.
Well, no, it's night here.
So it's, but we've just set a daylight savings, so it's only just gone dark.
All right.
Okay, because I'm morning time here.
And of course, I think we have something like 10 hours between us or maybe something like that.
That's right.
You're a time traveler to me.
Yes.
And you're in the future already.
So, you know, time travel does exist even when some people say it isn't.
Talk to me about you then, because you've written various books in this sort of genre.
I have.
Well, I started off working in television, actually.
But over the last, well, probably 10 years or so, I've been writing children's books mainly.
And then I'm actually doing a PhD on mythology.
And so I've always loved it and always been interested in it.
And all my books are sort of based on it a little bit.
And so Rockpool, when they were looking for a writer for the Gods and Goddesses and Monsters and Creatures book, just said, do you want to do it?
And I said, yes, I do.
So I have done a lot of non-fiction histories for kids.
So it was kind of nice to mix that up with this book and to look at some of the real life history and some of the real life elements to mythology.
We're going to talk mainly about gods and goddesses here.
And I wonder why you think they have any relevance today to the life that we lead here and now.
Because to a lot of people who lead their busy lives and are addicted to their smartphones, these are just stories.
That's true, but I think stories are what are powerful.
And I think mythologies are the best stories.
Mythologies are the stories that last.
And I think as people, we're always looking for meaning and we're always wanting to feel like we matter.
And so mythologies give us a place in the universe.
And even if it's not current, like there is a difference between a mythology and a religion, I think.
But what mythology does is it allows us to understand that there was a history for us and give us a way to contextualize that in a modern way.
Because the mythology doesn't date the way that history does.
Well, that's true.
And also, I suppose, if you have some kind of important moral message or some other message to get across, what a great way to do it, to wrap it up in a story, in a fable, and then present it that way, because that way it's easier to transmit.
People can retell it from generation to generation, I guess.
Well, that's right.
And they can change it.
So as moralities change and societies develop, the stories they tell shift.
And I think that's what's fascinating about the Gods and Goddesses book for me was seeing how so often it would be the same story, but just told in a slightly different way with slightly different characters.
Right.
So all of that suggests that there might be, if we look at the paranormality of it, you know, there might be a conduit here through these stories, through these legends, through these myths, by which people can connect to something else, or maybe they're connecting to a power within themselves.
But, you know, there is no doubt that over the generations and the centuries, people have thought that they could invoke whatever God it may be.
And some of them would tell you that those invocations had power for them.
Yes, and I believe they do.
I think there is, I think no one can argue that there is not a power outside of human beings and outside of things that we understand.
If you call it science or physics or we've tried to label it different things and we've tried to understand it, but I don't think we ever really have wrapped our minds around it.
And I think the closest we get is when we start thinking about these other creatures, these other mythical versions of us, which is essentially what gods and goddesses are, that can somehow understand and control these things.
That's incredibly powerful.
And it makes us feel a little less powerless, I guess.
Feel that power, I think.
Because I imagine if you're living in the ancient world, God, if you're living in this world today, it is possible to feel powerless.
It's possible to feel lonely and isolated.
And how great if you can call on something that might be able to give you a bit of a helping hand or at least help you make sense of it all.
Well, I was having a really interesting conversation at a conference I was on about gods and goddesses and mythologies.
And we were talking about the recent thing of deifying celebrities and how there is kind of like cult-like status around people like Beyoncé and Lady Gaga and that kind of idea.
And I find that fascinating because I think, you know, in 200 years, people are going to be reading Who magazine and going, oh, look at these incredibly powerful beings that people worshipped back then.
And who were they and how were they able to bring so many people to them?
And I had exactly the same thought while I was prepping for this conversation, preparing for this conversation, that these days, people, they think they don't have the time for anything like this.
But if they look into their own lives, they're maybe addicted to the latest episode of The Kardashians, or they are total music fans and they've got to go and see Ed Sheeran or whatever it might be.
And in a way, maybe it is a manifestation of the same kind of thing, just brought up to date.
I think it's true.
And I think our need to do it never goes away, which it just, you know, whoever we populate it with changes slightly.
My personal sort of thought is I think the greatest power on the planet is the power of nature.
And I think what we're really doing is we're trying to wrap our head around that and understand how that works.
And as time goes by, originally we really removed that from ourselves.
And then as time progressed on, we started to see ourselves as agents of nature.
And then we lost that.
And I think we're going back to that now.
I think we're trying to find a way to connect to that.
Because we've disconnected ourselves so far from everything that we were.
And so, you know, there's been a massive reinvigoration of kind of nature religions, which I find really fascinating.
Yeah, I once interviewed a guy in London who was fascinated by, I mean, ultimately, it consumed him because he became too intense about it, but fascinated by the power of trees.
And if I look out of my window now, it's an autumnal sunny day.
The trees are beginning to turn golden here.
But if you, and most of us don't stop to think, we just don't have the time.
But if you stop to think, what put all of that there?
And those trees there are hundreds of years old, what put all of that there?
And how do I fit into all of this?
And those are big and scary questions when you start to ask them.
You know, I am a small part of the firmament that they are part of, if you see what I'm saying.
And that's when you begin to start asking these big philosophical questions.
And that's when it can get scary and lonely.
And that's where you start to need to find a way to explain it all.
Maybe.
I think that's right.
And some of the myths around gods and goddesses that I love the best are the ones where the gods and goddesses come and they change people into natural formations.
They change them into rocks and trees.
And there's something in that about us reconnecting to the world around us.
And those sort of stories only happened after we started building kind of cities and civilizations and moving further away from the natural world.
So they really do talk a lot about what we're missing, the thing that's yearning in us.
Yeah, no, and I think that speaks to an awful lot of this desire and demand for something that may be fulfilled by, as you say, the nature beliefs that people are re-enlivening these days, that kind of thing.
So look, this is not a big and heavy conversation about mythology.
This is a conversation about practical questions that if you burrow down into your soul, I'm talking to my listener here, but if you burrow down into your soul, maybe in those quiet moments, we've all asked them.
Let's work our way through the book then.
And one thing that comes out from it is that, you know, gods are not only benign.
You know, we have to remember that gods are not only munificent creatures, munificent creations who can provide you with ways out of your problems.
They can also be warlike.
They can also be aggressive.
Yes, definitely.
And I think quite often they can be quite dismissive of us, which is also quite extraordinary when you think about that.
But yes, they're certainly, they can be quite cruel and petty and jealous and all the things that we can be.
And I think that's why we love them because they give us ways to kind of connect to them at a more emotional level.
They're a magnified version of us, maybe.
Yeah, I think some of them are.
I think there are some that aren't.
But again, it goes back to the civilization and what it valued.
And you can tell what a civilization valued based on the mythology and the deities they created.
It's quite extraordinary.
At the beginning of the book, you talk about sun worship, effectively, the sun god.
Why do you think that early people looked to the sky, saw this great thing that gave them light and heat and allowed them to grow crops and gave them their very existence?
But why do you think they went from acknowledging this thing in the sky to deifying it?
I think because they started to want to have a bit more control.
Once you deify something, you create a relationship with it.
And that relationship could be, I can pray to it and hopefully it will bestow kindness on me.
If I do the wrong thing, I will be punished.
So I think particularly as we started becoming crop growing and we started to rely a little bit more on sort of sustaining bigger tribes and bigger families, we needed to really understand the weather a lot better.
We couldn't just move around as much to follow it.
So I think there was, and also it was such an obvious thing.
It was so obviously there and big and powerful.
And we could see its effect.
It burnt our skin.
It gave us fire.
It helped the crops grow.
It kept us warm.
So all of those things, we wanted to understand them.
And the way to understand it was to have a relationship with it.
And through history and through that relationship, are there examples of actual people who have invoked the power of the sun and actually got a result, if you see what I'm saying?
I think there are people who believe they did.
I certainly, the sun god, or sometimes goddess, it was most often a god.
Because it could be kind of tracked, right?
So you can work it out in time, how long it takes to go across the sky, you can work out seasons based on it.
There was a way to kind of live your life in a way that you got a good result from that.
So there was that practical aspect of it.
But I think there was also, and I think there's a real truth in this, if you focus on something, you give it power.
And that power manifests in your own life.
So every religion in the history has understood this.
And I guess we most commonly call it the power of prayer.
But it's that idea of focusing our mind on something.
And that power of focus creates, for want of a better word, magic, right?
And again, we don't quite understand why that's true, but it is.
So I think there definitely are situations where the power of positive thinking, the power of prayer, the power of positivity, the power of, in the worst case, the power of cursing, has results.
Even the power of cursing.
Yeah, I think so.
And you talk about voodoo.
We can talk about voodoo a little later, but you talk about that.
Your own country, your own beautiful great big chunk of land, I say down there, but it's all relative.
We're up here, you're down there.
Australia.
Of course, you have your Indigenous peoples there who were connected to nature in a way that the people who came later were not.
That's absolutely true.
And I think Europeans who came to Australia, we're still, and I've got a lot of different heritage, but quite a lot of European heritage.
And I think even now, European people aren't comfortable in Australia.
They're not comfortable with the land, particularly in the way that the Indigenous people are, but just generally, a lot of our myths are about why the land is going to kill us.
Whereas that's not true for Indigenous people.
And I think that's a really big disconnect.
There isn't as much stuff in the book about Indigenous beliefs as I would like, and that's because there are very particular protocols and respects here about how you discuss and talk about the dreaming.
And I want to be respectful of that.
So we tend to try and let Indigenous people tell their own stories here, wherever possible.
Well, that's a good thing, I have to say.
Okay, from some gods, the gods and goddesses of China, some of the most ancient, and those who had suppression, of course, applied to them during the communist era.
Yeah.
So talk to me about them.
Yeah, that's a really interesting thing because China like large land masses sort of everywhere.
And I think a little bit about Australia as well, although we had a different history.
But when you try and unify that, when you try and bring a whole lot of different dialects and custom groups and language groups and family groups together, who each have their own gods, the way to do that is to incorporate their gods together, right, and build a shared mythology.
And that's what originally happened with the Chinese gods.
There were very different sort of ideas and they sort of came together in a very complex and sort of interesting and interweaved kind of mythology.
But when the communists came in, when they first came in, they stopped all religion.
And that was just this whole kind of idea of not wanting another set of values or set of social norms that go up against communism.
In other words, competition.
Yeah.
And you kind of understand that most kind of political as opposed to cultural religious groups do that.
They'll oppress religion, whereas when a new religious group comes in, they'll incorporate it.
So it's just a different way of achieving the same aim, really.
So in a way, the great leaders of communism, the early leaders, including Chen Men Mao, they were akin in some ways, you think, to the great gods that people worshipped and believed had power before?
I think, well, it's sort of interesting, actually, because there's a wonderful myth around Kim Jong-il, who's the North Korean guy.
And he, and this is something the Egyptians did too, that he directly connects his lineage to the gods.
So he doesn't say you can't have those gods, he's saying I'm one of them.
We are all deities.
We are all kind of immortal in a way.
And that's a really interesting thing.
And it's a very Asiatic thing.
Egypt did it.
Certainly a lot of the original Chinese emperors did it.
And they would kind of link themselves through this mythology to the gods as their ancestry.
Mao didn't do that.
He was very specific that he wanted to cut that kind of off and build a kind of much more practical, pragmatic kind of address of who your leader is and make it much more about humans.
But it didn't work.
And so then the Communist Party had to let the religions back in because for some reason people just needed them.
They couldn't put a non-spiritual aspect to replace a spiritual one.
And in your book, there's a lot of discussion about the Chinese gods and beliefs and the pictorial representations of those and the power that people felt and feel that those gods have.
Absolutely.
And I think the symbolic kind of connections, again, it's another really interesting thing, right?
So in Buddhism, there's actually a tenet that you shouldn't actually ever have a depiction of Buddha.
But if you go into any Buddhist temple anywhere, there are thousands of them because we need them.
And in fact, in the corner, just two arm lengths away from me, I have a wooden carved Buddha given to me on a broadcast that I did from Thailand many years ago.
And it's something that I treasure and keep here.
Yeah.
And the Thais are incredibly devout Buddhists.
And I lived in Thailand for a period of time.
And the way that Buddhism is there is different to China and India where it originated.
But there's a real kindness kind of aspect in Thailand that I love.
I think it's really beautiful.
But they would consider themselves completely devout Buddhists and yet they kind of break that rule.
Right?
No, you're not allowed to have a Buddha, but of course you can.
Because by having it there, again, you're focusing that power.
And of course the biggest statues, possibly with the exception of the Jesus, the Redeemer in Rio, are Buddhas.
So, you know, there's something about putting these gods and goddesses into big monuments.
And we've done it for as long as we could do monuments, really.
Back to China.
We're only just really these days, because China in many periods has been closed off to the rest of the world.
We're only coming to understand, we're scratching the surface really of China now and our understanding of it.
People's belief in gods and deities before the communist era.
Because China is such a vast country and is so very different from the cold north all the way down to the tropical south and all points east and west and in between those things, did people believe different things in different parts of China?
They did.
They did.
And there was a very strong matriarchal kind of belief in northern China.
Many more goddesses.
There were the nine goddesses who were incredibly important.
Whereas as you sort of got down more into the sort of east-western area, there was a bit more of an animalistic kind of idea.
So there would be more around the nature, around the actual topicology of the place.
But it was very localized, right?
So it was about what did they engage with on a daily basis.
So yeah, we see the sun, right?
Everyone sees the sun, but quite often we want something that is, you know, powerful and close to us.
So a river or a mountain.
There's still a very strong, particularly in some of the hill tribes of China, there's a strong matriarchal power structure.
So of course that makes sense that it's being reflected in these strong female goddesses.
So yeah, it absolutely depended on where you were and what the seasons brought you and what your lifestyle was like.
But as I said, as sort of Buddhism and Taoism before Buddhism was very good at collecting this stuff up and kind of weaving it into a bigger mythology.
And so we haven't lost a lot of them, but they've changed context.
Looking across through Tibet and onto the Indian subcontinent, Of course, India has rich traditions.
And, you know, here in the other corner of my room, I've got a picture of Lord Shiva.
And, you know, there are devotees of various deities in India.
And, you know, to this day, people certainly believe that those deities have very real power in their very different ways.
But, you know, they're colorful and they're in many cases benign and beautiful and giving.
Talk to me about India today.
So India is a really interesting one.
So India is one of the few strong religious traditions that are current that have a polytheist idea, which is more than one God.
So the monotheist, which is the Abrahamic stuff, so Christian, Judaist, and Islam, kind of move towards one defining God.
Buddhism kind of did a little bit, although Buddha is not technically a god.
But India kept that idea.
And again, that says a lot about the diversity within India, right?
So everybody needs a God that reflects them in some way.
And I think one of the problems with the monotheist stuff at the moment, the reason that it's struggling a bit, is because it doesn't represent enough people.
So the Hindu gods and goddesses are fantastic.
I didn't get to do them in my book because we made a decision to try to not talk too much about people's current religious traditions.
The exception to that is voodoo a little bit.
But the reason we did that was because I wanted to be able to talk about the historical stuff without necessarily getting into the theology.
But it is.
India was the birthplace of Buddhism.
It was the birthplace of a lot of the traditional Chinese deities.
The monkey god originally came from India.
Then it spread through Indonesia, China, Japan.
So it's always been a place of very strong spiritual traditions that can bring up deities that are incredibly powerful for a lot of people.
And still in India, and we will move on from India in a moment, but still in India, the great belief in the sun, the power of Suria, the sun.
And again, if you look at India and it's a very agricultural kind of economy, it is a vast landscape and there are a lot of people who are living in subsistence levels.
So again, that sense of the sun is incredibly important.
But the sun, I don't think the sun's got a way for anyone, right?
I think the Jesus myth is a sun myth, right?
Jesus was definitely a real person.
There's no question he was a real person.
But a lot of the stuff around him was borrowed very heavily from sun god stories.
Osiris is the most obvious one with the resurrection stories.
But there's a lot of really interesting kind of connections around why the sun, the thing that disappears and then reappears, right?
There's magic in that.
It plunges us into darkness and then saves us again.
That's a really profound thing and it's a basis of hope, right?
So any, wherever you see a real love of a sun deity, there's that real kind of sense of hope and that sense of darkness will pass.
And I think that where you have a lot of struggle, particularly against nature, that's a really important thing for people to believe.
If we move to the Greeks and the Romans, though, we get a different kind of slant on all of this because yes, there is the anchoring into nature, but there's also the great belief in the power of oracles and seers, people who supposedly can see the future or maybe even shape it.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I think it happened a little bit earlier with the Sumerians too, but it was really the Greeks that cemented this idea that somehow human beings would have some kind of direct conduit to their deities.
Their deities would engage with them in a very specific direct way.
And Sears and Oracles was one of the ways that they could do that, right?
So they could connect and get messages.
And the gods and goddesses could come down and engage with you.
And you might not know that they were them, right?
They might be in disguise, but they would then reveal themselves.
So there was this sort of sense.
And what that did is it gave the Greek people permission to explore.
It gave them permission to kind of be a bit more godlike themselves and try and understand things rather than just say it's in the gods and goddesses hands.
And that's why we had this incredible burst during that time of education and exploration and philosophy and mathematics and science because that kind of connection allowed people to feel a little bit more worthy of asking questions.
And I think that's really powerful.
That's part of the reason I think the Greek gods particularly, and we call them the Greco-Romans because the Romans just adopted them pretty much.
They're the ones that have really resonated even with modern audiences because that's what we as human beings, we are curious beings.
So having those kinds of deities are very, very popular for us.
Right.
Okay, and here, in my part of Europe, of course, we have the Norse gods, very colourful, possibly reflecting the fact that light is terribly important there.
They've either got a lot of it, or depending on the time of year, they've got none of it.
They get beautiful phenomena like the northern lights, which display if you go anywhere north of the north of Scotland here and then up into Scandinavia.
So their traditions are very rich.
But do they have the sort of power that other gods have in other cultures, if you see what I'm saying?
Yeah, it's a really interesting thing.
So the Nordic gods were one of the first to not be immortal, which essentially meant that they weren't just automatically going to be eternal.
They had to work at that.
And one of the ways they did that was there was a garden, the garden of Aydan, who, and she was a goddess that minded this garden and it was full of apples.
And these apples had to be eaten by the Nordic gods to keep them alive.
So every few centuries they had to eat these apples and they were very, very precious, obviously.
But that's a really interesting thing because these are then gods that are aware of mortality.
And a lot of the culture of the Vikings was around kind of that sense of death.
And one of the most heartbreaking myths is actually a Nordic one, which is the story of Baldor, who was the most beloved child of Odin and Frigg.
And Frigg loved him so much, she went around to every single creature in the world, every plant, every animal, every rock, every stream, and made them promise they wouldn't kill him.
So she was trying to get an immortality for him because she knew it wasn't just a given for them.
But she missed the mistletoe for some reason.
I don't know why.
No one knows why.
And so he was killed by a spear that was dipped in mistletoe.
And so there was this incredible story of loss.
And it's the first time you really get that for a deity, that sense of death.
And of course there's Ragnarok, which is the death of the gods, which is a very strong Nordic tradition.
Again, they know they're going to die.
It's been prophesized to them.
They're told it's going to happen.
And so they're waiting for that prophecy to happen.
So it's a very different kind of way of thinking.
And that is reflected a lot in the Viking idea of death and honour and warfare and warriors and the honour of death.
And a very, from what we seem to see here, quite a bloody culture, a culture of conquest.
I mean, we experienced that here in the UK.
We had the Vikings here.
They came to places like the eastern shores of the UK, in the north, and across in the Isle of Man, bringing fire and the sword and conquest.
Ultimately, that was their background.
That was their belief.
That's right.
And they were absolutely conquesting kind of a civilization.
They were also, however, a very strong trading nation and a very strong nation about, they didn't build empires, right?
What they did was they kind of went and occupied things and took stuff.
And that's where we get the kind of the raiding parties, right?
And does that filter back from this belief that the gods themselves are finite?
They don't go on forever.
They die.
So if you're going to die and they're going to die, you have to live every second that you're here and make the most of it and have an absolute blast and get what you can, take what you can, be what you can?
Yes, although there was a very strong morality in the Vikings.
So there was a real sense of what was an honorable death.
And so murder was not an honorable death, right?
Or it was not, you know, if someone murdered someone, that was not okay.
But if they killed someone in battle, it was.
And so there was a very clear distinction between those things, which was very interesting.
And there was also a much more equality between men and women in the Viking way of looking at things.
Gender roles definitely were a thing, but there wasn't that sense that the women were less.
In fact, some of the most powerful of the deities were women.
So there was a real kind of...
So when they went off on raiding parties or when they went off and attacked others who didn't have the same beliefs and didn't believe in their gods, they didn't treat them the same, which is why they could be so ruthless.
But I think that's true of pretty much any civilization that has a very strong core of itself and its identity, which the Vikings did.
But they certainly were very warlike, yes.
And are there people there who maintain those beliefs now?
You say that some of these things are coming back in modern culture.
I'm just wondering if there are people in Nordic nations who perhaps call to that tradition.
It certainly has been incorporated into a number of what we call neo-pagan ideas.
So a neo-pagan belief system is one that has looked at the non-Christian, non-Abriatic kind of ideas and incorporated some of that into their belief systems.
Druids are incorporated into this quite a lot.
Certainly the Viking, the Nordic gods are.
The Celtic gods, which are a kind of a continuation of the Nordic gods, they're incredibly influenced by them, which as you said is because the Vikings were in there, right?
We're coming in.
And so a number of these stories are very similar.
When you get to Ireland and Scotland and Wales and Britain, they incorporated some of the Nordic stuff.
So there definitely is beliefs in these deities, but not in their original form because it's not the same civilization.
So they have to change.
But there certainly is that idea that gods don't have to be finite.
And in fact, gods can be they can have feet of clay.
They can be fallible.
And that's very much a Greek.
And then the Nordic one sort of, again, it's a timeline.
You can see how they're kind of influenced by each other as trading routes spread and people started to incorporate other people's ideas.
A lot of cultural appropriation.
Yeah, well, that's the picture that I'm getting, that it's not just one solid timeline.
Various civilizations have borrowed bits from other civilizations and they've tended to borrow the bits that help their story to stand up and sustain, it seems.
That's right.
And if you're empire building like the Romans, right, so whereas the Vikings weren't doing that, but the Romans definitely were.
So the Romans took back stuff from Brittany particularly and incorporated that into the Roman stories.
Really?
Well, there's something, I mean, if you watch Monty Python and they do that, what did the Romans ever give us?
Then we get the long list of improvements to our lives that the Romans gave us, like running water and sewerage services and stuff.
We actually gave them something.
Yeah, absolutely.
But we gave them that because they understood if you understand what people believe in and you can feed that back to them, you're not so othered.
And therefore, you're less likely to be an enemy.
And therefore, occupation or empire is going to be more peaceful.
And the Romans were kind of the first to allow people to have their own belief systems under their empire.
So this is not occupation.
This is assimilation.
This is a very smart culture.
Yeah, it kind of is.
I mean, but if you're having an empire that's that big, you can't be everywhere.
You can't do it entirely by force.
You can't do it entirely by the rule of the law.
You can't do it entirely by the picture of the emperor on your coinage.
It has to be inside people.
It has to be inside people.
It has to relate to what they think is truth, right?
So if your gods are really, really different to their gods, there's going to be a problem.
But if they can see, oh, actually, that's quite similar, or those stories are being incorporated and assimilated and then fed back.
And that happens over time.
Like, they weren't doing it, you know, straight away, but over time.
And that's why the Roman Empire lasted as long as it did, because it was actually able to do that.
There is real mysticism here, though, in this story that you chart.
I mean, here, where we had the Celts, and, you know, my ancestry is Celtic, you know, we have the power of nature again as part of this, but also curses.
There's the curse of, do I pronounce this right, Macha or Makka, the nature spirits?
Yeah, yeah.
And the fairies, right?
And the little people.
I'm going to do a whole new whole book on fairies because they're fantastic, because they come from the Celtic deities.
But essentially, there is this idea that if you do wrong, there is punishment, right?
So, and that's true of any deity.
But the Celtic ones really personalized it in a really interesting way.
And the reason I love the story of Makkah is she gives them a chance to do the right thing.
She gives them a couple of chances to do the right thing, and they don't.
And so she curses them.
So it's not an act of just belligerence.
It's an act of you're making a choice.
And you know the choice you're making is wrong, but you think you can get away with it.
You can't.
You think you can get away with it because I'm a woman and I have no power and you're a king, but you're wrong.
You're misunderstanding who I am.
And I think there's something really powerful in that for people to kind of see that actually no one's really powerless.
And yeah, there's a long history of curses and, you know, people giving, Because he touched his daughter, who he loved.
And she died and became a statue.
So there is this kind of idea that you can make good choices.
And if you don't make them, there is a consequence to that.
And all of that looks into the Old Testament.
If you look at the Old Testament, of course, vengeance was wreaked upon those who did bad.
Yeah.
And there's a sense of justice in that, right?
We want to feel that there is justice in the world and that there is a natural justice.
That when people do the wrong thing, there is a consequence for that.
And I personally believe there is.
Well, I wanted to bring this to your personal beliefs because you said at the beginning of this, I believe that there is a force and a power.
So we've talked about the stories, we've talked about the myths and the legends, but you actually believe that these things tie into something that's real.
Yes.
The difference, I think, for me is I don't really care what it is.
I don't necessarily feel the need to name it or create a whole organized religion around it.
I'm fascinated when people do and I love exploring when they do because it's really interesting the way that that happens.
But across all of these things, there's one defining element and that is that there's some sort of energy, some sort of power that has an effect.
It affects us, it impacts us.
And we spend our lives trying to Work ways to make that impact positive as opposed to negative.
And I think the more we understand things, and again, my personal belief is in nature.
I think nature, I think there is a design in nature.
I think nature is cruel and ruthless, but it's also incredibly kind and forgiving.
It sustains us, but it also kills us.
There will be enormous controversy about this, but there is always a huge debate among those who may say climate change.
And we've just had another report in the week that I record this that say that we need to be making real big changes, certainly up here in Europe, to the way that we live our lives.
Otherwise, there is going to be a significant rise in the temperature and we're all going to pay a price for that.
I mean, there's no doubt about it.
In my lifetime, the weather that we get year on, year in is different.
You know, it's different.
It was colder when I was a kid.
It seemed to be, you know, there was more clear weather and we had more snow, certainly, when I was a kid.
And maybe these are just natural cycles and everything will repeat again.
Or maybe there's some kind of permanent change, as the scientists certainly tell us.
And, you know, we seem to need to heed these things.
But it's controversial.
Do you think that the power of nature is kind of being reflected in this way?
I think we will not beat nature.
If we do enough damage, there is no option for nature but to protect itself.
And if it has to protect itself from us, it will kill us.
The earth is not going to explode.
It's not going to disappear.
It's just going to get rid of the things that are hurting it.
Like any natural force will do that.
If a dog has fleas, it will try and get rid of the fleas, right?
If the fleas aren't too bad, it'll kind of put up with them.
Because it understands, all right, well, you know, there's some sort of semiotic relationship going on.
But once those fleas become too bad, then something happens, right?
So I think that's what we're seeing.
I think there's no doubt that there is climate change.
I think the controversy is what's causing it.
Whether it's us or whether it's a natural phenomenon or whether we can do anything about it or not.
I think that's where the argument kind of sits.
My personal belief is we should be listening to the weather.
We should be listening to the natural ebbs and flows of things and working with it rather than against it.
Because working against nature never works.
It doesn't care that much about us.
So we're one of many species on this planet.
And that's a big thought, isn't it?
And will have been through history.
It's a huge thought for people to take on board that actually we are not the apex of the triangle.
We're not the peak of everything.
We are part of the circle of life, to coin a phrase.
Yeah.
And I think we're not even a particularly essential part of it because we don't provide food for anything, really.
I mean, nothing eats us.
So if we kind of got chopped down a bit, I don't think we will ever go completely extinct.
The way dinosaurs never went extinct, they just evolved into something else, particularly birds, right?
But it's a very arrogant idea that somehow we are imperative to this planet and that this planet is ours.
And you were saying before about the Indigenous Australian kind of belief.
They have a really beautiful belief that they are stewards of the lands, not owners of them.
And I think we could learn a lot from that.
Well, you know, I have to stand in the middle and have a balanced discussion on things, but you get no disagreement from me on that.
We are stewards of what we have.
I've left this to the last.
There will have been people listening to this, if they have, and some of them have thought that it's way too philosophical and it's, you know, they're not interested.
They want to hear scary stories.
When you discuss voodoo, there are scary stories of plenty.
I'm not sure they're scary stories.
I'm not sure voodoo is a scary thing, any more scary than any other.
I think, actually, I've got the feedback from a number of people that the Aztec stuff is actually the stuff that's really scary.
I mean, they did some pretty horrific things.
I think the thing with the voodoo and what I was trying to do in that chapter, because it is the exception to the rule, right?
So there are still practitioners and open practitioners of voodoo or voodun as it is called.
So I was very aware of that and I did want to kind of, and I'm the narr about putting it in, but the point of putting it in was to talk about the migration.
How exactly what I was saying before, how a set of beliefs can move into a completely new civilization, a completely new context and survive in a way.
And that's what voodoo does.
The idea of curses is absolutely connected to voodoo.
Again, I think a bit unfairly, because as I said, curses have been in all of them.
But because voodoo is a little bit closer to us and because people are actually practitioning that, we're a bit more scared of it.
Well, yeah, people tend to use the word voodoo here and think it just means doing bad things to people and casting spells.
And there is a certain amount of that.
We know.
We've seen documentaries on TV and we've read about it in magazines.
But also, you know, voodoo, as you say, is about transcendence trances.
Yeah, well, voodoo is a very strong spiritual idea, right?
So again, that idea of being very close to your deity.
And I guess in voodoo, it really does.
There's a tradition of possession, of the idea of somebody actually being a vessel for one of the lower, which is their deities.
And so the lower can possess or take over somebody's body and get them to do acts for that deity.
So the deity and the person become one.
Now, of course, in horror films, that's been used brilliantly, right?
Because they've talked about really negative deities that have come in.
And there are some.
But if you kind of understand where it comes from, so it comes from the slave trait when the Afro-Caribbean people were essentially enslaved, had no power, and there was a lot of anger.
And so they wanted really strong, really vengeful gods to help them.
And so, of course, from a European point of view, those gods are going to be scary.
They should be because they're in direct reaction to a lot of stuff that was not okay.
But there are some really beautiful Vooduloa who are incredibly kind and clever and skillful and jovial and fun.
But they're obviously not going to be as popular in a popular context, popular cultural context, because there's nowhere really to place them.
And excuse my ignorance.
Are there people today in those cultures, in those civilizations who use voodoo for good effect and actually claim to get results from it?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, there are.
And I mean, I can't speak for those people because that's not my practice.
And I know there are people who practice this and know a lot about it.
And there are a lot of kind of discussions around what voodoo is and whether it is a practice or whether it's a religion or whether it's a magical tradition or what it is.
And I think the practitioners would absolutely say it's a religion and that it has a very strong tradition and rules and moral codes.
And it is very much about hope and strength and joy and celebrating life.
And I think that it has probably been given the greatest disservice in popular culture.
I've actually, writing that chapter, I got a little bit of pushback on it because people are practicing it and they said, look, you're not a practitioner.
Why are you talking about it?
And I did think a lot about, do I have the right to have that conversation?
But I do think it is something we should be talking about outside of horror movies.
Because it is, it's a beautiful tradition in a lot of ways, but it's not mine.
So it makes it hard to compile a book then if you can't talk about a subject.
Well, that's right.
It's an overview.
And there's a lot of controversy even within the people who practice.
There's a lot of differing, like anything.
People have different opinions on what can and can't be done.
And there is a whole group of people who believe that the cursing is not part of the practice and that is something that is not done by people who are true voodoo or voodoo practitioners.
And I think there's that, you know, from their point of view, that's true.
I think there are other people who think about it and use it in that way because they're using it in a different context and they might call it a different thing.
Some of these traditions that you talk about have died out or have waned over the centuries.
Voodoo is one of the ones that haven't.
Why is that?
Why do some stay strong and why do some fade over time?
I think because voodoo is more recent.
So, you know, when you're looking at the Greco-Roman stuff, you're looking at thousands of years ago.
Voodoo, you're looking at, you know, a century, a couple of centuries, when it sort of really started to take off in the 19th century.
So it hasn't, it's still relevant for people, I think.
I think there is a power in it for people to identify themselves and give themselves a way again to connect themselves to deity.
It's very strongly connected to the Christian tradition.
The saints particularly are very incorporated into voodoo ideas.
So it has its roots in another religion that is still incredibly strong and powerful and revered.
So I think that's the main reason.
I think it's misunderstood to a large extent, but the people who do understand it and follow it, I think they see no difference between it and Christianity, except it's their way of understanding that Christian idea as well as the African traditional practice that they've brought from their ancestors.
Is what you're telling us in this book that materialism, which is what we have now, and we can see the technological society that we've got, this is what we've made, maybe failing.
You can certainly see that in the growing numbers of poor people and the disparity of wealth and all the rest of it.
And that we need to be looking back to traditions like these?
Is that what you're saying?
I think that's what people are doing.
I don't think they're necessarily just looking back at those traditions.
I think they're looking back at a whole lot of stuff from the past.
There is a nostalgia around a lot of things at the moment because I think for the first time people don't see hope in the future.
They see hope in the past.
And that's really new for us.
There was a survey done in Australia about whether people thought their children were going to have a better life than them or a worse life.
And it came back worse life.
And I think that's the first time that's been true for a very long time.
So people are seeing kind of like A cliff that we're going towards.
And I suppose if they investigate an air accident or any kind of accident or mishap, they look at the records what happened before this.
So if we think that our society, and I have half a feeling that this may well be happening, is in the process of some kind of rebirth, maybe recreation, possible collapse first, we have to look back on the past to see if there's anything we can learn from it.
Yeah, I think that's true.
And I think what's different about our current, because I don't think we're in a state of collapse.
I think we're in a state of crisis.
And crisis means you can still do stuff.
So there's still stuff you can happen.
There's still hope in that.
But I think we're such a disconnected world.
The world has got smaller, but more disconnected.
So while globally we're smaller, our communities are far more fragmented.
And so people are trying to connect.
And that's what gods and goddesses have always done.
They've connected people.
They've given them a shared experience.
And so that's why people are looking for that.
But they're not necessarily looking for the ones that aren't helping them.
So they're trying to find the case.
This one's not working, but it must be.
It's selective about it.
I get it.
Yeah.
And it's a very Western thing.
We do.
We cherry pick.
We do.
We pick and mix the kind of thing we like.
And I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing because I think what that does is, again, it lets us understand what's going to work for this new phase that we're in.
And there may be some stuff from the past, there may be some stuff that we haven't discovered yet.
I was having a conversation with someone at a book launch for this book and he was talking about aliens and aliens were, you know, why weren't the aliens in the book as a god and goddess.
And I thought, that's really interesting.
That's a different kind of point of view.
I hadn't really even thought about that.
But then I looked into it and there's this whole kind of subculture of people who believe in aliens as deities.
So that's, you know, it has a whole tradition and a whole lot of stuff.
But you've probably got to look at ancient Egypt, for example, where there are depictions of that which may be space creatures.
Well, that's right.
And the Mayans disappearing was kind of, you know, one of the big theories around that is that they were taken up by, you know, an alien civilization who rescued them.
There's a whole lot of this.
It goes back quite a while, but it's a very interesting kind of idea.
And I think as we go, and those sort of stories started happening, as we started to push more into space and we started to go to the moon and we started to go into space and started to talk about colonizing Mars and sending stuff to Jupiter and all of that kind of stuff, we started to think a bit more than, you know, it's no longer just hell, earth and heaven.
It's now hell, earth, or heaven's now space and space is massive and what's in there.
And it's all very interesting.
Gabriel, we're out of time.
Thank you very much.
For those who are interested, what is the title of the book and how do people find you online?
Oh, okay.
So it's called Gods and Goddesses and it's part of the supernatural series.
So there's a whole lot of books if you're interested in supernatural things.
This is the third book in the series.
It's available pretty much through any good bookshop, but you can also go to Rockpool Publishing and you can buy it directly online and they'll ship it to you.
And you can look up me, Gabian Marin.
I've got author pages on Facebook and you know you can always just find me.
I'm pretty, there's no other Gabians.
There's only me.
I just put that into a search engine.
First time I've come across a Gabian.
I know, it's crazy.
First time I can get a Gmail account for the moment.
Gabian a Gmail.
I think you could do it on your first one.
Gabian, listen, thank you very much and have a good night in Oz.
Thank you so much for letting me come and talk to you.
Take care.
Gabian Marin, I'll put a link to her work and her book on my website, the new website, www.theunexplained.tv.
And thank you to Adam Cornwell for his work on that.
And as I said at the beginning of the show, if you have any technical issues with the new website, please go to the contact section.
You will see a way to contact Adam there.
I think it's webmaster at the unexplained.tv, but it'll be on the website.
You can also contact me directly with your thoughts and suggestions, as ever, about the show.
Thank you very much.
So, more great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained until next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained Online, and please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, especially now, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection