The King’s Story Reaches the Village

You sit down after a long morning tending the flocks on the rocky hills. Your goats have had their fill of the tender green grass of spring. Now it’s your turn for some warm wine and cheese. Yet there is something more that interests you as you approach the village campfire. Men are talking, their voices loud. For a moment, your hands move to your slingshot, but there is another type of excitement; you rush forward. They are talking about the new king; some of them served under the proud, old, one-eyed king and bear both the honor and scars from his victories. You see your father among them and your uncle too. You still remember the many winters you spent huddled with your siblings and asking your father about the time he fought against the Sacred Band of Thebes. The men who broke the Spartans at Leuctra and, in turn, were smashed under the iron phalanxes of Macedonia. Your uncle carried stories from the wild country to the north, the hard years he spent hunting the Thracians through their mountains, storming their hill-forts one bloody ridge at a time.

The men turn towards you; they know you want the reason for the excitement. Your father places a hand on your shoulder and smiles, his eyes almost watery. The new king wants revenge against the Persians. He promises to avenge the burning of temples more than a century and a half ago, to recover the honor that all Greece suffered at the hands of the invaders. Not only a punitive expedition, but also a promise of liberation for our cousins trapped under the cruel eastern satraps in Asia Minor. You know this is a moment where you have to decide. To be left behind and live as a shepherd, feeding off the aging tales of your family, or go out and carve your own warrior’s tale. You smile back at your father. There is really no choice. Your only fear, not coming back with such great stories as he had.

The Making of a Companion

Your back burns, your arms feel numb, and your legs ache. Marching through dusty Macedonian roads, carrying pounds of grain, arms, and armor, takes its heavy toll on you. Days and nights pass, in one cycle of marching, pitching camps, drilling endlessly with hundreds of others, cooking, sleeping, and doing the exact same thing tomorrow.

You serve with men from your land, cousins, neighbors, friends. All together in one unit, raised from your region. Some have heard the stories; others come for the tradition of serving; many look for opportunities for wealth. One day, a few officials come into the camp; their bronze armor shining in the sun. You have never seen such wealth before; only the proud helmet of the first man is worth more than your village.

The eyes of your comrades go wild; they know this is a moment of great importance. You start to feel their anxiety; your heart sinks, and your stomach tightens. You curse having eaten so much porridge a few hours ago.

The officials are on foot, and an older man is close to them. Dressed in a white wool cloak. His beard and hair are clean and well kept. His eyes hold a deep gaze, and his expression is calm, an island of serenity amid a stormy sea.

The oldest in the group steps forward and orders you all to form up. Your commander echoes his voice, and as quickly as you can, you move into position.

You can feel the eyes of the officials dart from one man to the other; you now understand what sheep feel as the wolves circle them during a winter’s night.

Another yell breaks you out of the trance; “Pick up your spears, don your armor, move into battle formation!” You have drilled this hundreds of times. So many times under the blazing sun, cold rain, or battering winds. You do not falter. A forest of long spears stands now before the officials; you proudly hold yours, feeling like you could pierce a cloud.

“March forward!” You and the other 255 men move as one. Your feet shaking the earth, dust clouds gathering behind you, your hearts beating as one. A fearsome beast of men, wood and iron, a forest of death no foe could beat.

A few maneuvers follow: left, right, forward, and back. All done in perfection.

You see one of the officials approach the eldest; he smiles, and in his smile you see a long scar from temple to chin.

Silence replaces the shaking and marching. All of you stand together. And the seer gestures; a young acolyte brings forth a lamb.

Your heart sinks again; you know the gods will now decide the fate of you and your brother in arms. “Oh, Heracles, lord of strength, hear me; let them find me worthy,” You whisper to yourself.

The only sound is the death throes of the lamb, as its throat is slashed and its belly opened. The seer picks up the entrails and holds them towards the setting sun. An eternity passes; 256 men hold their breath. A pine cone falls from a close-by tree and nearly makes you jump.

His eyes are like fortresses, barred and gated. You can’t even begin to know what the seer thinks. Then he speaks with the voice of thunder. Silence, then uproar; the gods have found you all worthy.

The officials move forward; they stand in the center of the formation and ask you to turn towards them. We speak for the king himself! You are now no longer common men; you are now part of the king’s army. And not slaves or mercenaries, as other nations practice. You are now part of the king’s companions! Welcome, foot companions to the army of Macedon! May your victories be worthy in the eyes of the gods, and forever recited by men.

The officials move, clasping each man's shoulder, and in return the soldier bangs his spear against the ground.

You feel your eyes tear up as you see the officials approach you. He smiles when he sees your tears and clasps hard against your shoulder. The simple act of banging your spear against the ground feels like the proudest moment of your life. A sound you will never forget.

A man to your right gasps and then whispers; a few others join in. You follow their eyes. On a hill, a lone rider has been watching you and the men. His gleaming bronze armor catches a few reflections of the dying sun. His fair hair crowns a proud head, but you can’t make out more details from such distance. “Must be Apollo himself!” a young farmer to your left whispers.

The figure rides away as you and the rest break up formation and join together in singing praises to the gods.

The City of Myth

You thank the gods for a crossing beyond peaceful. The beautiful blue waters, in a close strait, offered no resistance, just like the Persian navy. Thirty-seven thousand of you cross unopposed. The feeling is almost intoxicating. A hero embarking on a sacred quest and about to face the monsters lurking beyond home.

The king has the attention of thousands of eyes as he aims his spear. His ship is approaching the shore fast. He does not throw it immediately, but waits for a moment. You do not breathe, you do not blink, you can only hope. A swift move, and the spear is flying, like a hawk. It arcs and falls, striking the land hard, burying itself deep. “This is a spear-won land!” he shouts and jumps ashore, armed and armored, the first to step into enemy land. Thousands of shouts answer his call. Your voice among them, a song of conquest with thirty-seven thousand voices rising behind it.

You follow the young golden king into the mythic city of Troy. Disappointment hits you, and you strain your neck trying to glimpse great towers and mighty palaces beyond what you see. There are none. This is a smaller town than expected. Ruins, Greek houses, and Persian administrative buildings huddle together in the place of heroes. The king has great plans for today, so he allows most of you to rest while he and his closest companions take part in sacred rites and honor Achilles.

You rush to make the best of the rest, as your comrades do, singing, dice, fires. Flatbread and cheese and wine, and the wine cut too thin, the way it always is. Your shoulders still remember the crossing. Under a gentle sun you eat well in the first hours of a war against the most powerful empire on earth.

The merrymaking grinds to a halt. Gasps echo in the newly found silence. You rub your eyes once, then again. An ancient hero, a being of legend, is walking among you. Achilles himself is gracing you with his presence. Some men fall to their knees. Others lift their palms, signaling respect. Realization hits thousands of men at the same time as the figure removes his ancient helmet to show himself as your king. For a moment there was no denying it. Time broke. The greatest of warriors walked the sands of Troy again.

The First Blood

The march is cruel under the spring sun. Red poppies cover the fields as you and your comrades continue your journey east. There are still no signs of the enemy. For a moment, your mind wanders: are those fields just flowers, or are they omens of blood-soaked battlefields to come? You shake your head and push onwards. The sun is dropping towards the horizon. Then the halt order. You freeze. Far ahead in the column, the scouts are talking with the officials.

The enemy is close; the entire army and you start to march again, now the excitement mixing with fear. It feels like an eternity, every step taking twice as much time to hit the ground. The army feels like it’s slowly drifting forward, like a lazy river.

You hear the bronze trumpet ahead, and then close by a reply, followed by another far behind. The enemy is in sight. The Persians are waiting for us. The thought flashes through your mind. Are these the legendary warriors who burned Athens, fought the Spartans at Thermopylae, and sought to conquer the entire world?

You look to your left; a young farmer whom you befriended during training looks at you, his eyes sheepish and slightly frightened. You nod and smile to ease his feelings. A few men to the left and forward, your cousin marches proudly; he is larger than you and older too. You find some comfort in knowing he will be there too. You take another look; you are surrounded by men from your region, a few from your village, and some with whom you share blood.

No matter what happens, we will face it together; the idea brings peace to your mind, like a cool waterskin on a fiery summer day.

The march stops. A river in front of you and across the river, more horses than you ever thought could be assembled. The setting sun is glistening on their shields. Their fine tunics and shining helmets show off their wealth and power. And even more, the last rays of the sun catch a few reflections: gold bracelets and gold collars. A wall of horses and finely dressed men awaits a couple of stone throws away.

The order is given; there will be no waiting. Battle formations now. An iron-tipped and steel-hearted tide is crashing into them.

The trumpets echo, the dust gathers, and thousands march. Your heart begins to pound. Hard. Your vision narrows to the few meters in front of you. You gulp again and again. Your throat feels tight, as if a Persian was already trying to strangle you.

The first arrows sizzle above; you look up. The entire phalanx is holding the spears at the right angle, the middle and last rows forming a sort of canopy that shields your unit from the enemy projectiles. Your spear too forms part of this protection as you hasten your step to keep the rhythm. You are still in the middle, closer to the right edge than the center.

You wonder if you will end up in the front row at some point. You dread the thought of finding yourself there for a second and feel your stomach knot.

Water splashes as you hit the river, the fresh water calming your burning legs, calming your fiery nerves. There are other units in front of you, but they haven’t engaged the enemy yet.

Then the arrows and stones cease to rain. And you hear it. Hundreds of screams, the sounds of men and horses smashing into each other. Of iron and bronze. And a moment later, the first death screams, the first pain yells.

You look to your sides; no phalanx is fighting in the river. The dust clouds rising up in front of you tell the story. A cavalry unit charged in a diagonal line across the river. And pushed the enemy that was waiting for you and the rest of the infantry to cross.

A trumpet sounds. This time it is harder, more desperate, less melodious. Your commander yells, “The king is surrounded! March fast, hasten the step!”

You listen to the words, yet they make no sense. The king. He engaged the enemy first. He rode ahead of us. He stopped the arrows. He is the first to fight.

Now they are trying to kill him. You growl; men to your side yell. The entire companion infantry pushes forward hard. And a sea of spears falls upon the Persian horsemen, washing them away in droves.

You are not yet engaging the enemy, yet you begin to step over broken shields.

Then blood, dead men strewn across the field, horses limping away. Others agonizing.

You keep pushing, trying to keep your eyes forward, never looking down.

You see them riding to the side, the horse companion, the most noble of warriors from your land, the personal guard of the king. They look relieved at seeing the main army stand with them.

The horsemen, many of their rich tunics now slashed or bloodied, begin to pull back. Tentatively at first. And suddenly one of their leaders gallops away. His purple tunic flapping in the wind as he unceremoniously flees into the east.

That’s the signal they were waiting for, and the once proud wall of horses dissolves into the growing night. Only a scattering of weapons, shields, golden jewels, and dead bodies remain in their wake.

They never stood a chance.

The trumpet breaks the illusion. Once more into battle formation. Once more, get ready to face the enemy. You have been pushed to the third row now. Much closer to the killing field.

Your eyes deceive you. What are they doing here?

In front of you, there are no Persians. But a Greek hoplite formation. Standing against your king and his army. Against the true hegemon of all Greece. They do not budge or retreat, but hold their ground fiercely.

And so you march and push forward; your cousin is next to you now. Your spears are longer than theirs, and they are tired, surrounded, and far away from home.

Yet they still do not surrender. You see their shields gleaming in the sun. And you stab forward. You lurch with all your strength.

And you hit the target. But not where you wanted. Not a clean hit in the chest, but too low; the man you just hit looks around, dazed, panic setting in. You pull the spear back.

He grabs his belly. Black blood flows. His hands try to stop the bleeding.

He looks everywhere, his eyes begging for help, any help.

There is none. He disappears into the lines, pulling back to safety.

Your cousin looks at you. And nods. “He’ll be dead in a couple of days.”

You try not to listen, but to hold the spear again. And a last gathering of dust behind the enemy lines spells the end of this battle. And the beginning of the massacre.

The stubborn Greek hoplite, once a proud mercenary company for the Persians, is surrounded by all sides, pressed by the phalanx on the front and hammered again and again by the charging elite cavalry.

Their leaders shout, clearly in plain Greek. “We surrender; give us mercy!” Tens of thousands hold their breath in silence. Your eyes watch the battered but alive figure of your king. His helmet sliced, his scalp still bleeding.

“No quarter, no mercy for traitors,” he shouts back. Iron tips press them on all sides, iron swords cutting them down. Javelins and stones fall on them. Their screams and their gasps fill the air.

Less than half of them survive, and you see rows and rows of empty eyes on bloodied faces as they are led away, as prisoners, as traitors.

You still don’t understand. And look away. “Why would they serve our enemies? Why wouldn’t they join the rest of Greece and Macedon on our noble mission?”

The questions still echo in your mind in the camp that night. The songs and feasting quiet them for a moment, but in your tent, once silence rules again, they return, again and again, like a charging line of cavalry.

You can only hope; answers lie deeper to the east.

For now, one thing is certain. This story will live on lyres and harps for many years to come.

The Story You Never Chose

Storytelling builds empires and buries them too.

There is not enough gold for a king to pay a man to charge into a wall of spears. A good story can make him volunteer for the front rank.

A powerful story needs to do two things at the same time… Draw a line. One side for us. And the other for them.

The line needs a ritual to be meaningful. An initiation that shifts identity.

Having the new recruits bang their spears and receive official recognition. Donning the armor of an ancient mythic hero. They all change how a person sees themselves and how the world sees them.

Alexander understood the power of storytelling, and he used it to conquer half of the known world, all before the age of twenty-five. The tactics and strategies were how he won the battles; the stories he told were how he got the men to follow him into war.

The story’s foundations were laid by his father and, a century and a half earlier, by Persian aggression. He took the pieces in front of every Greek and Macedonian, and shaped them into a coherent tale that could be repeated ten thousand times without losing a single word.

That’s how thousands of young farmers and shepherds took up arms and submitted themselves to grueling marches, drills, and battles. And while they were inside that story, they could not hear the other side.

Even when they were speaking their own tongue, begging for mercy. A traitor is an enemy who used to be us.

There were no questions of hatred. There was only a question of belonging.

The shepherd never knew he was living inside a story. Most days, neither do you.

In the end, you are either handed a story to follow, or you tell your own.

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Not the evil antagonists. They are cruel, heartless, and magnetic. A dark, mysterious allure. An aura you can’t quite pinpoint, yet it still drags you in.

Like something in the dark that knows your name. Like a face you almost recognize. Like meeting your own eyes in a dark window.

You turn off the TV. But the feeling still nags you. The villain should have won. The thought flashes back, uninvited.

They Reached First, and the World Made Them Pay

The Light-Bringer

You see them huddling in the dark, cold nights. Shivering figures, men, women, and children, trying to fight the cold by staying close. Their breaths mingle together. They chew some cold, almost frozen, meat, a prize from the last hunt.

Your pity is too much; these creatures are suffering, freezing themselves, fearing the creatures of the night all around them. And your people have the power to save them. To give them a fighting chance. Hope. Light.

You present your case before the king. He half-listens, then his stern answer makes it clear. No help will come for those wretched ones. You shake. Not with cold. Rage, burning deep inside you.

Another night covers the land. They are still huddling together, their arms around each other. Forming a wall against the elements, but an imperfect one. Then you notice. You see it first. One of them has stopped shaking. They close in on him, desperate hands reach out and start shaking him. There is no reply. Then the sobbing begins, echoing deep into the night.

You have seen enough. You will not stand this cruelty anymore. If you are to become a thief, then let the heavens know. A thief you shall be, but one that brings salvation to the poor souls shivering down below.

Prometheus paid a heavy toll for bringing fire to the first humans. Forever chained to a rock, with an eagle eating his liver for all eternity.

There is a price to be paid for being the first to reach out. Bringing light to others has a heavy price. And good intentions are not good enough when a king feels slighted.

You don’t feel its beak or claws first. But its feathers rustle against your skin as the eagle perches on you. They feel light, like the caress of a shy lover.

Then the creature bites hard, again and again, the pain mixes with the warm feeling of your blood. You strain against the chains, and they barely move. Eternity lies ahead of you.

The Marked One

You are first among the people. The whole world is for you and your family to divide and conquer. You work hard, tearing the vines with their cruel thorns, breaking the hard virginal earth and planting seeds. All under the blazing sun. You feel your brow dripping, but the satisfaction of a hard day and of earning sustenance, one plant at a time, more than makes up for it. Your brother looks at you, his innocent smile, a joy in the wilderness. You raise the digging stick and let the crude shape fall upon the earth, again and again. You will have to make something better, you think. Someday.

The sacred day has come. You have chosen the finest of your crops, the most succulent of vegetables, the fairest of wheats, and the freshest of fruits. They are your pride. They are the fruits of your labor. And they couldn’t be better.

You and your brother slowly approach the altar, your eyes downcast, the offerings are given, with as much respect and piety as a human being can muster. The voice echoes and booms. And strikes you like thunder on a clear night. Unmistakable, terrible, and frightening. And it carries the weight of rejection for you. Your offer has been deemed unworthy. All the effort, all the pain, all the sweat that watered that hard earth. For naught.

Your brother’s offering is praised; the voice speaks highly, golden and soothing. Unlike your turn, this one is light. While your brother is praised. Your face hardens as the last blood of the lamb slowly drips through the altar’s stone. You remember the first time the thorns stuck into your hands and forearms; you remember feeling warm, wet, and in pain, dripping onto the dust. The smell of earth mixed with your own blood. All under the blazing sun.

You grab the stone. Black and heavy. You raise the rock and let the blunt shape fall upon Abel, again and again. He will smile no more. There will be no going back. The blood of the lamb and the blood of Abel mingle. The sun watches and almost immediately begins to dry up the gore. The earth sucks up the blood, opens up to drink deeply of the life it has been given.

A moment of silence, not even the rustling of the wheat stalks, about the field where your brother’s blood was spilled. The eerie quietness makes you leave. Alone you walk.

You hear the voice. The entire world shakes when he speaks. You know what will happen, your parents told you the story of their own punishment. He asks what you feared the most. And you do not reply, for he already knows what happened. But you ask, your speech heavy with all your rage, pain, and sorrow. Your voice trembles a little bit. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The curse strikes you. The pain beyond unbearable. Then coldness. Alone and far away from your field, your family, and your god. You beg, not for any of them back, but just to not be slain like a jackal upon a farmer’s field.

Out of the Exile, a World

East of Eden, you wander. Birds keep silent as you walk. Animals run away from your path. Then you see it. A field, open, spacious, and beautiful. You know you will never be able to till one, so you sit in the shade of a Date Palm. You ponder for a moment, and as you do, you see them in the distance. Other humans. Made in HIS image. They are lost and not of your kin. Slowly, you approach them, fear nests in their eyes when they see your mark, but then you give them something that beats back their fear. Hope.

You start to organize them; you are older than most of them, wiser in a way, and your words carry the weight of a man who has spoken to god. No longer you till, no longer you plow, no longer you rip out the painful thorny weeds. So your skills turn to organization and planning. Soon, a few huts start crowding around yours. And people begin to flock, looking for protection and sustenance. Mud houses are built, and under the blazing sun, bricks are dried. As the place begins to swell with people, more ideas gather, and more opportunities arise.

A young woman is surrounded by onlookers close to the city’s gate. They seem enthralled. Her smile, sweet as honey and milk, flashes as her eyes dart around the crowd. Then you hear it. Soft, haunting notes from the strings she plucks. And her voice following close by, like a hunter stalking a gazelle.

In all your years, you had never heard such combined beauty; then one of her notes trailed off, almost like a cry. And you remember, you know too well, what a cry sounds like. You walk off, leaving the crowd that has just begun to join in, with their own voices.

A crowd follows you as you enter the house. Inside, it’s hot; your eyes go wide, and the crowded room gasps. An old man is pulling up a new material and slowly shaping it with a hammer. The object takes up form; it becomes sharper, longer, and a straight point makes its use clear. Not a tool, not a decoration, but the first weapon.

Time passes, and you walk the now crowded streets. Animals and people make way for you, even bowing. Sound echoes in the many fiery workshops, where tools and weapons are forged during the day. At night, another one, even more pleasing to the ear, the sound of strings and flutes, followed by laughter.

You step onto your house's terrace, surveying the scene. You have built a place for thousands to live and prosper. Arts and crafts unknown to your parents fill this new world, making the day’s work easier and the night’s more joyous.

Then you see him. A young shepherd is taking his sheep home. He is joyful as he herds the animals. A tear falls from your eye. And regret swallows you, as the night envelops your city.

You Called It Wisdom. It Was Fear.

Pure fear.

That fear is what we common mortals feel when we’re faced with the same extreme emotions that gods, titans, heroes, and biblical characters wear without flinching. And when we see the darker parts of our own nature flaunted proudly by a villain, something stirs deep within us.

Villains are the most entertaining part of any story because they show us a whole part of ourselves every piece we’ve had to hide, amputate, and minimize. Rage. Impulsiveness. Ambition. When we read or watch, we see the antagonists flaunting exactly what we keep buried. They wear it without fear or remorse. We hide it with shame.

That’s why, halfway into a book or a film, something in us leans forward and asks how interesting it would be if the bad guys won just this once. No last-minute Deus ex, no final effort or power of friendship. Just the cold, calculating victory of the more powerful, more interesting villain. You’ve felt it. Some part of you wanted him to win.

And here is the twist. These two, the thief and the murderer, are the least dangerous company you will keep in this series. The rebel is the easiest confession to make because everyone has wanted more than they were given and has felt the cage. This is the shame you can bear to look at.

The ones still coming, you buried deeper, and for worse reasons. By the end, you’ll be asked to recognize yourself in the parts you’ll swear you don’t have.

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The Hundred Faces

You and your companion walk through an ungrateful country. Darkness has fallen over the land, and the olive trees look like gnarled arms reaching towards the heavens. The dusty road has proven tiresome. Countless doors you have knocked on, and only cold rejections or silence have answered. Now, a little ahead, in a bend across the road, lies the humblest shack you have seen today. A small, tired, mudbrick house, with a few missing tiles on its roof. The faintest smile forms in your companion’s face. You approach and stop yourself mid-swing; your regular knock would be too hard on the rickety poplar door. A lighter tap is almost immediately answered. Out comes an elderly couple, their kind eyes and smiles greeting you even more than their words. They eagerly gesture for your companion and you to get inside, all but grabbing you and carrying you themselves. Their cramped house has an earthen floor where a lean goose looks at you puzzled. “Please, sit comfortably,” the old man says as he runs into the pantry and comes back with smoked pork and bread. And in turn, wine, olives, and cheese are served on a humble wooden tray. The wine never seems to end, to the amazement of the old couple. The old woman snatches up the goose, while her husband begs for forgiveness for having been such poor hosts. A divine hand stays the knife on the goose’s neck.

You and Hermes were no mere travelers. Enraged by the houses that had shut their doors, you drowned that whole ungrateful country under a single flood and spared only the one shack that had opened to you. You raised it into a golden-roofed temple, and granted the old couple the boon they asked: to die in the same hour, so neither would mourn the other. When the hour came, you made them two trees from a single root, leaning together.

The same test waits in every land. The traveler, the hermit, the beggar at the door.

In India, both great gods test mortals in humble shapes. Vishnu comes to King Bali’s court as Vamana, a begging dwarf, asking only three paces of land and, granted them, strides across the entire cosmos in three steps.

Shiva wanders naked as Bhikshatana, the Supreme Mendicant, begging with a skull for a bowl, and the skull is one of the severed heads of Brahma, god of creation.

Old and New Testaments alike show the importance of tending the visitor, with the three at Mamre visiting the great patriarch Abraham.

Abraham, resting in the heat of the day, sees three strangers at the edge of his camp and runs to them, bowing to the ground, hurrying Sarah to her baking, killing his best calf for men he has never met. They are the Lord and his angels.

Finally, in Matthew 25, a radical turn occurs. The stranger might not just be god in disguise out to test them, but the test has already happened:

⁴³ I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

⁴⁴ Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

⁴⁵ Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

Power Blinds

You have been shut out of the last village; their doors were closed on your face as the sun was bleeding over the horizon. Dust floats in the last reddish rays. And the tall, heavy doors of the prosperous village remain motionless. You start walking again, following the road deeper into the hinterlands. The path becomes narrower as the night darkens. The trees also become more populous, crowding the sides like peasants in a city, flocking to the streets to watch a king stroll. The cold is setting in, following the darkness closely. Then you smell it ahead, burning wood. A small fire, but a fire nonetheless! You pick up your pace, and soon enough, a rising column of smoke stretches black against the dark blue of the sky. A few more steps, echoing in the night. You see the village, far smaller, a few huts huddling together as if scared of the bigger world. Not standing tall and proud and demanding respect. Rather, almost kneeling, among the far taller trees. You approach the first door, and a dog barks, then a few more join in. You slowly knock on the greenish door, and for a moment, silence. Then it opens, the warmth rushes forward to meet you, and the smell of a stew too. The peasant looks at you, stops for a moment, smiles, and gestures for you to enter, while the rest of the family hurries to greet you. It is always this house. A thousand doors, and you read them now before you knock: the tall ones stay shut, the bright halls bar themselves, and only the houses with nothing left to guard ever swing open. You used to think it was kindness. It is not kindness. It is that a man with a throne to protect cannot afford to see you…

Wealth and power have a way of needing walls, and not only the stone kind. A man with much to lose learns to keep the world at arm’s length, to bar the gate and weigh every stranger before letting him in. But the god at the door asks only to be let in, and a man who has spent his life learning to keep things out has forgotten how to open. The same walls that guard him from the thief guard him from the divine.

The powerful eye learns to read status in a glance: the cut of the cloak, the weight of the rings, the way a man holds his shoulders. It sorts the room before a word is spoken. And the god comes wearing nothing; it can read no rings, no cloak, no bearing, only rags. So the eye does what it was trained to do. It passes over him. And there is no more dangerous thing in the mortal world than a being of absolute power but no apparent status.

The Price of Walls

You sit down in your sofa chair, a new season just dropped, and a burrito bowl has been delivered. Nothing could be better on a Friday night. You check that the drinks and condiments are perfect as the ta-dum plays on the TV. Then you hear it. The faintest buzzing sound to your right. A phone is vibrating. Your phone. You sigh so hard it’s almost a hiss. You pick up the humming little distraction, and on its screen, a sentence “Are you up? Can we talk?” You look at the screen for one more moment before you slowly turn it off. You sit down again and unpause the TV. On the screen, an old man chained between two fires lies in front of you. The prisoner looks straight at you with one gleaming eye.

Beside you, the phone buzzes once more against the cushion. You do not look down.

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Titanic Hunger

You are a being of power, might, and immortality, in an age before mortals knew even fire. You are more than that; you are the child of the ruler of all. Yet you are hidden away as soon as you enter existence, straight from the belly of your mother, into exile, to a lonely island, bathed on all sides by a warm sea.

The island is a refuge as much as a prison, yet it is a better fate than what your brothers and sisters have endured, being devoured by their own father, swallowed whole, lying inside his primordial guts in the darkness.

You grow up inside a cave, and as years pass, you know what needs to be done, what prophecy must be fulfilled. Your mother spoke those words in a way you will never forget, her voice trembling, as the dread and weight of the words filled the cavern.

The reason for the prophecy was you. The child fated to do to him exactly what he had done to his own father, for he too had risen by the sickle, had cut down his own maker to seize the throne. The blade he feared was the blade he had already swung. You were not a new horror loosed upon the cosmos. You were the old one, come round again.

You rush back to face your father and force poison into his throat. The dark titan is forced to disgorge all your siblings and a stone wrapped in clothes, the very thing your mother gave in your place, swallowed whole without a glance.

This is the beginning of war, long and deadly, shaking the very foundations of all that is known, until, a decade later, you are crowned king of the gods, triumphant, and Olympus becomes your palace.

Time devoured the things it helped create, yet time makes devourers out of the devoured.

The Grieving Goddess

You sit down at a table surrounded by the most beautiful, powerful, and supreme beings. You smell the sweetest, yet softest fragrance known; it does not overstay, but rather softly lingers. Nectar, the drink of immortality, is sought across the world, from the Aegean Sea to the mountains of the Hindu Kush; humans can only dream of it.

One sip of the fragrant drink, sweeter than honey, softer than milk, and death becomes a forgotten fear.

And among the divine company, you place your eyes upon him, a genial man, a charismatic king and son of the ruler of the gods, who won his way into the seat of the gods, thanks to both his noble lineage and honeyed tongue. He reaches out again and again for the divine drinks and foods.

He thanks the gods and promises an even greater feast in honor of them as he leaves; even then, you notice how his empty words do not ring true.

Another night, you move with the speed of thought as you meet with Hermes. His sorrowful eyes tell you everything you need to know before a single word is uttered: your own daughter, the light that brought hope and beauty into the world, has been snatched.

In the cold claws of the lord of the underworld, she lies, as much a prisoner as a wife. You can feel your immortal soul grow cold. The vast green world has turned into freezing darkness as your pain drives you almost blind.

The night of the feast with the king is here, no longer in Olympus but in the mortal world, yet there are only bleak images, memories, and ideas in your psyche. How much you miss your dearest Persephone! The world feels dead to you, a corpse devoid of any joy, movement, or energy. A veil of grief is upon your eyes.

You sit down among the gods, going through the motions, dragged by them into this banquet, just moving along like a sacrificial sheep follows the shepherd who takes her into the temple.

Your eyes feel so dull, so painful. Goddesses don’t cry often, but when they do, their grief falls like melting ice, and their sorrows drown out everything like the springtime torrents.

The food is here, and in your pain, you cannot even make out what’s in front of you, move like an animated statue, and be done with it, you think.

You hear cries, divine cries, and see the dread in the eyes of the entire gods' assembly, looking straight at you. You instantly drop the piece of meat you were eating, and the realization hits you with the force of a titan. Human flesh, a child’s shoulder, a child… and you, who would unmake the world for your own, have just consumed another's son.

The gods remake the boy at once, all but the shoulder. That, you had already taken. So they give him one of ivory: smooth, white, and cold as the world your grief had made. He will live, and grow, and that ivory will catch the light at every table he sits at for the rest of his days, a small bright proof of the one moment you were not there.

You were not cruel. You did not hunger, or test the gods, or set this table. You looked away, once, into your own pain. And that was enough. Tantalus could not deceive the gods. He could only deceive the one who wasn’t looking.

A boy walks the earth in ivory. Proof that absence can do what malice cannot.

The Eternal Serpent

The blazing sun parches your face as you hurry across the white limestone tiles. It is a sacred day, and you know you must not falter, not even for an instant, as you approach the temple complex. The guards hail you, and you climb the stairs and enter the chamber where they expect you.

The smell of incense and resins, meant to purify the place, reaches you fully now, and you recognize the fragrance of myrrh. It is too strong for your nerves; you feel you might be sick, and knowing what a grave transgression that would be only pulls the knot in your stomach tighter.

You steel yourself, mindful of what the day asks of you. The air grows less thick with the scent as the corridors darken, lit now by small oil lamps rather than the blazing sun through the high windows. The shifting shadows become almost a comfort; you have seen them before, and you know they belong to the rite.

They are already waiting, the priests who watched you take your trials, and who will now oversee your purification before you may become a full priest of Ra.

Your eyes wander to a carving: a snake devouring its own tail. Intrigued, you wonder why the most feared of all creatures has been given a place inside the temple.

The older priest, shaved smooth as his office demands, meets your eyes the moment he notices your attention, and the faintest smile crosses his lips as he takes the chance to instruct.

“That snake is not the great devourer who attacks Ra on his daily voyage, as he carries the sun. That beast was born of the primordial waters, never to satisfy its hunger, only to consume and destroy.”

His words are full of contempt, almost spiteful, as he speaks of the great enemy of all that exists. He gathers himself a moment before going on.

“This snake within our temple is not such a being. It does not hunt, nor seek to devour the sun; it seeks itself, not out of hunger, but out of eternal renewal to encircle and protect the whole of Ma’at. Remember that difference.”

His words echo softly in the chamber. You take one last look at the symbol before you, the lesson as fresh now as it will ever be, and your eyes soften as you turn back to the papyrus and let your learning continue.

The Fire Still Burns

The voices rise in unison as the last tale is told, a mythic echo that pushes darkness away by naming the maw that lurks in it. A great devourer of gods, felled by his own fated child, a grieving goddess lost in sorrow eating another’s child, and finally a serpent of hope, teaching how death is not the end with one single motion.

The warmth of stories shared, even with so many macabre twists bringing a little of the outside's darkness inside the circle, yet that seems to only make the fire shine a little bit brighter, the voices sound a little more melodious, and the food taste better.

The dark still holds its open maw, the monsters still seek to devour, but myth has given us a voice that not even time can fully silence.

What is named and understood can never hold as much power as that which lurks unseen and unnamed. The power of myth lies in shining the light upon every monster and closing the mouths that would otherwise eat us whole.

A spark flies from the fire; it slowly rises against the dark canvas of the night sky. For a moment, it looks like the smallest of suns.

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Other times, those could have been the last words that people said, as enemies or predators fell upon them.

But so many times, the shadows that moved vanished as soon as they were seen. The thing that caused them was called a ghost, a goblin, a man-eating beast of legend.

In myriad tongues, by innumerable names, so many now long-forgotten.
And yet they share a single nature. They are the monsters — the non-human, the malevolent — the others who carry with them our own capacity for evil, cruelty, and cunning.

The Minotaur: A cosmic punishment

You are alone in a labyrinth; the dim light of your torch barely shows the moss-covered Cretan limestone walls. They surround you; they feel as if they are pressing on you, slowly crushing you. Then you stop, your heart sinking, not because you saw something or heard something. You smelled it. The unmistakable smell of a bull, and something else, blood.

The Minotaur was a being born of the transgression of divine law. Minos received a white bull from Poseidon, after asking for it as a show of the god’s favor. Then, upon receiving the creature, he marveled at its beauty and decided to keep it rather than sacrifice it. The universe was moral, and transgressing its law meant suffering. Poseidon made Pasiphae, wife of Minos, fall in love with the bull, and from her, the Minotaur was born. A half-human, half-bull beast, a living example of the hubris of a tyrant.

This being was beyond the realm of empathy and understanding, relegated to a geometrical prison and forgotten by most; even today, you won’t hear anyone say, “I’m feeling like such a Minotaur today.”

The Minotaur could not be us. He had no human face, and his origin was cosmic, two layers of distance between us and the monstrous other.

The Manticore, the Medieval Man-eater

You sit down on a cold bench in the scriptorium of your monastery, close to the window to catch the last lights of the afternoon, you open up a manuscript, and you shudder. There lies a being of pure evil, a monstrous creature far from the grace of God. You pick your goose feather quill and begin your copying by drawing its cursed, smiling face.

Medieval bestiaries were not simple descriptive encyclopedias. They were moral, they had the imprinted soul of Christian Europe as much as the ink upon the parchment.

The manticore had a special place. Unlike the dragon, who could sometimes be reasoned with and, in a few tales, was even a force for good, the manticore, whose Persian name means man-eater, was pure cruelty, voracious hunger, all of it housed in a mocking human face.

You did not notice its lion’s body first, or even the spike tail, but the three-rowed smile in a face that could otherwise pass for a person.

Medieval times brought the monsters closer, but they are still the inhabitants of faraway, mysterious lands; the monstrous other lies in bestiaries copied from older texts and adapted by the medieval imagination into symbols of the danger that comes from straying from the kingdom and the church.

Dracula, the Courteous Murderer

You follow Dr. Van Helsing across a soaked, bleak Victorian London street, the smell of smoke and horses still lingering in the foggy metropolis. He turns around when he notices you are shaking, from a mix of the chilly weather and the prospect of facing an ancient evil at night. He clasps your shoulders, calls you a good and true friend, and says:

"We have on our side power of combination — a power denied to the vampire kind; we have sources of science; we are free to act and think; and the hours of the day and the night are ours equally. … We have self-devotion in a cause, and an end to achieve which is not a selfish one."

Dracula by Bram Stoker, Chapter XVIII

The monster is now closest. He has invaded your city, he masquerades as a regular, law-abiding citizen, and he preys on the blood of your people at will. He steals your fate and can condemn you to an eternity as his servant, as a being denied the gates of Heaven. From dark and distant lands, he came, and to conquer is his goal.

The Victorian fears of the outsider were made crystal clear with Dracula, a being of ancient evil, who mastered dark and mysterious arts, even attending a Magic School presided over by the Devil himself. And the heroes oppose him, with the full power of science, backed by a strong devotion to doing God’s work and the love they hold for each other.

They are pure, strong in their unity, and clear in their goal; even in the grim dilemma they found themselves in, they have reasons for joy and camaraderie. Dracula, even though it’s a Gothic tale, is also quite heroic and hopeful. Even though British Victorian society was far from perfect, they still held a strong faith in God on the one hand and an optimistic hope for science on the other. Van Helsing even takes the time to bring up superstitions, too, into the fight:

“All we have to go upon are traditions and superstitions… Yet must we be satisfied… because, after all, these things—tradition and superstition—are everything

Dracula by Bram Stoker, Chapter XVIII

It is hard to imagine a time when protagonists could wield such complete powers, leaving nothing outside the realm of the possible. Their initial skepticism quickly breaks down after witnessing the horrors, and they bring the full range of possibilities to bear in their fight against evil.

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Zombies, Infected, and other mindless monsters

You crouch in a boarded-up, lightless, abandoned second floor of a store. You just finished eating a cold can of peas. With renewed strength, you crawl towards one of the less closed-up windows to peek outside, even for a second. You see a vast horde on a main street, slowly shuffling away, a current like one from a river of rotting former humans. You despair as you miss the comforts of your previous life and dread turning into another contagious member of that inhuman march.

The zombie, or infected, is a former human, a victim of a disease, be it a virus, a bacterium, or even a fungus. It has lost its individuality and its power of reason. The very things that our modern world calls the truest expressions of being human.

Even if the cause is materialistic, close, and grounded, no longer haunted by the paranormal, we find the most abject terror in conjuring new versions of the diseases that plague our world

The common thread of darkness

The monsters we once feared have been getting closer. From a being trapped in a labyrinthine world, a victim of cosmic retribution, to a fantastic creature in an exotic land, to finally the supernatural invader, to the zombie, a former human who lost its humanity to a plausible natural cause. The monsters no longer must haunt us with a supernatural cause and a distant origin; they are now our neighbors, friends, and family turned into mindless beasts.

The stakes have also been changing, becoming deeper, more personal. Once a Greek hero facing the Minotaur would only have to worry about being gored by the beast. A medieval knight exploring the Manticore’s realm would be devoured whole, his clothes and equipment gone with him. Dracula’s victims' souls were at stake and an eternity in hellish existence. Finally, the zombies take away our whole self, reducing us to a mockery of our life, with only the worst possible parts remaining.

Not only have monsters been pushing on, approaching us, but they have also raised the bet over and over.

Why we still need the monstrous other

We wouldn’t be human without monsters. We need to point into the darkness and call out the beings who are the opposite of us. And we need to recognize that we can become just like them if circumstances press us hard enough. The monster is both the outside that makes the inside legible and the warning that what is inside might be outside-shaped if we let it.

Every healthy culture has known this and built specific practices to keep the conversation alive.

In the medieval European village, the Devil had a name, and his servants had specific shapes. The Black Mass could only be officiated by a fallen Catholic priest; even the inverted ritual required the form of the original. And the village did not sit idly while darkness encroached: processions wound through the streets, bells rang from the steeple, prayers warded off what walked at the edge of the firelight. They had not banished evil. They had given evil a calendar, and evil that has a calendar can be met.

In Algonquian tradition, the Wendigo did the same work in a different register. When someone hoarded food while his community starved, or took too much for himself during the long winter, that man could be named Wendigo. The naming was a moral diagnosis dressed as a story, the community’s way of pointing at a real failure of a person, and reminding the rest of the dangers that can cause them to err.

What both traditions understood and what we have forgotten is that naming the monster is the act that contains it. The villager who can name the Devil can refuse him. The community that can name the Wendigo can intervene. The hero who can name the Sirens can lash himself to the mast. The monster gives the tragedy, the moral failure, the worst possible part of being human a clear name. And the unnamed monster eats you in your sleep, it grows in the unspoken and unchecked, until it has devoured everything.

For thousands of years, this was the work the monstrous other did for us. And now, over the last century, we have decided that we don’t need that anymore.

What Hunts Us Now

Have you felt a creeping dread at moments that should be full of respite? Is anxiety haunting you worse than the Devil haunting a lonely frontier’s pilgrim cottage? A feeling of restlessness worse than a Celtic farmer hated by the fae?

That’s the price we have paid for losing sight of the monsters.

We become incapable of naming evil. Of giving it shapes we could understand and fight. The result is a life in constant fear of something that’s unnamed, unaddressed, and certainly not faced together.

The monsters are still out there; we just made them nameless and, in a way, far more dangerous.

They have become the exclusive domain of horror movies, video games, series, tabletop roleplaying games, and other media, because conscious culture refuses to name them aloud.

There is yet another catch: not naming and pointing has caused us to let the monsters become faceless haunts; that’s one of the great tragedies.

There is a solution, not to go back to the olden times, but to name the fears, evils, and shadows that are part of our collective unconscious. To bring them to the light, and give them a shape that serves us again. It’s not an easy fix, nor a fast and clear solution, but that’s also part of why it’s so necessary in a world obsessed with the quick and simple.

This is the work the old cultures did, and we have stopped doing it. This is the work that has to be done again. There is no other path back to a world we can stand inside of.

And maybe then, we could find that lost part of ourselves again, and see how the shadows that haunted us are not so terrible once we can name them.

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Trees are whispering in the wind. They sing songs in a language older than you, older than your kingdom, older than your people. The singing gets harder as the night begins to slowly creep over the horizon. The red dusk feels like a wound inflicted on the Sun, and it’s slowly bleeding out. You can smell the damp soil and myriad resins being carried away from the woods, almost like invisible tendrils stretching in every direction.

Forests mean danger. Forests at night are the stuff that terror is made of. One day, your uncle went looking for a goat in the forest and was never seen again. Your village has stories about bandits, poachers, and wild men living deep in the woodlands.

And those are the most human of dangers you could meet in a clearing. Then there are the creatures from the other side, beings who lurk far away from people’s eyes, whose nests and lairs are in the thickest parts of the wilderness.

They do not forgive a trespass.

The forest is not friendly. It was never meant to be. It is where the story begins, or where the story visits, almost never where the story ends.

Endings are the domain of civilization, of great banquets, castles, and towns alive with celebration and joy. Not the whispering of trees in the night.

Where the Old Stories Begin

Villages have walls, fire, and people. All of this together means safety, comfort, and a sense of commonness. In stark contrast, the forest lacks such comforts, and they are quite lonely. Their existence as wild places, where nature rules and humans have to navigate with care, makes them rich in potential for Myth and stories, both of bravery and of utter despair.

There is a woven pattern across Europe, where ancient forests become such an integral part of stories that they pretty much are characters in themselves.

Hansel and Gretel would be a very different tale if it took place on a warm tropical beach instead of in the haunting depths of the Germanic Dark Forest. And that’s because at their core, the woodlands are places where nature shows its raw power. The green tapestry woven by thousands of living beings depicts non-human architecture, coexistence, and communal life.

And yet the stories the people of those forests told themselves were not about coexistence. They were not even about beauty. They were about the wood as the place a human being went when something terrible was about to happen.

Hansel and Gretel are taken into it by their own father. Little Red Riding Hood walks into it and meets the wolf, who has eaten her grandmother. Vasilisa is sent into it at night, alone, to fetch fire from a witch with iron teeth. Snow White flees into it with the huntsman’s mercy in her ears. Sleeping Beauty’s castle waits inside it, behind a hundred years of thorns. The hero of every Russian tale rides three days into the temnyi les, the dark wood, before anything worth telling happens. The knight of the French romances rides into the forêt sauvage and loses his mind.

These are not the same story. They were told by different people in different centuries to different ends. The Russian peasant did not know the German storyteller. The German storyteller did not know the French troubadour. None of them sat down to coordinate a tradition.

And yet they all begin in the same place. The edge of the wood.

This is beyond any coincidence; it is a clear hint of a deeper layer of our collective unconscious.

Why? Why do the oldest stories of so many different peoples agree on this single point that the wood is where the story begins, never where it ends? Why is it always the trees? Why never the marketplace, never the hearth, never the king’s hall, except as the place the hero finally returns to?

Because the storytellers knew something. Something modern life has tried very hard to forget. The forest is not an obstacle; the forest allows the story to grow, branch out, and flourish.

The Descent Before the Ascent

Spiritual traditions went deeper into the woods.

Buddha begins his journey in a royal palace, in one of the most prosperous civilizations on earth. His story as a prince starts at the most radically opposed place from the forest, yet it is in the forest that he achieves illumination, under the Bodhi tree. The mundane offers protection but brings no answers to the deepest human questions; the forest offers the opposite: no safety, but a true encounter with the deepest layers of ourselves.

Wilderness, from the Hebrew Midbar (מִדְבָּר), sometimes translated as desert in the Bible, is an open, savage land where civilization no longer holds sway; though topographically different from European forests, it accomplishes the same. It strips us of the usual tools and distractions of our daily life and forces us to confront a darker part of our world.

After his baptism in the Jordan, Jesus is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. The Greek verb is ekballei, the same word used for casting out demons. He does not choose to go. He is thrown.

He fasts for forty days. The number is biblical typology: Moses fasted for forty days on Sinai before receiving the Law; the Israelites wandered for forty years in the same wilderness; Elijah walked for forty days to Horeb. To enter the Midbar for forty days is to enter the place where Israel’s identity has been forged again and again, by hunger, by terror, by the voice that speaks out of the dryness.

And there, the devil meets him.

Three temptations. If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread. Jesus refuses. Throw yourself from the pinnacle of the Temple the angels will catch you. Jesus refuses. I will give you all the kingdoms of the world if you will fall down and worship me. Jesus refuses.

Each refusal answers a specific seduction. The body turns the dead world into food. The spectacle makes God prove himself by saving you publicly. The power to accept dominion over the world by accepting its prince as your god. These are the three doors out of the wilderness that look like exits, and are not.

The devil leaves him. The angels come and minister to him. He returns, and his ministry begins.

The angels came. The devil left. He returned. Changed.

Dante Alighieri also begins his journey in the forest. He is midway through life. The straight way is lost. The wood is his despair. What he discovers there is that the route to heaven runs through hell.

Only from this place can he approach the gates of hell. The Comedy walks down before it walks up Inferno, then Purgatorio, then Paradiso. Three books coming together to form one clear metaphysical direction for the human soul. And the forest is the initiatory space that allows the soul to begin the wonder-filled journey.

The Wood Was Always Within

Darkness ahead, rotting trunks side by side with mighty trees reaching for the heavens. Since the first stories, the forest has been the heart of all that the waking mind can barely look at.

We filled it with beings, beasts, and dangers, some real, some that had been moving through human dreams long before they had names.

The forest is not a representation of the unconscious. The forest is the unconscious, externalized, walked, lived in for ten thousand years before we put it inside our skulls and called it psychology.

We have shrunk the forests. We have pushed them farther and farther from our cities. We have cleared them, paved over them, fenced them in, and reduced them to managed parks at the edges of towns where children visit on weekend hikes. We have, by every external measure, won the long war between the village and the wood.

But the forest was never only the trees.

The forest that Hansel and Gretel were led into by their own parents. The forest Vasilisa was sent into at night to fetch fire from a witch. The forest Dante woke up inside, midway through his life, with no map and no path, that forest never left us. It went where it had always also been. It went underground. Into the dream. Into the strange grief of a life that has every external good and is still not at peace.

It still lies deep within. Waiting for the next story to begin.

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The Figure in the Forest

Why was our wildest side everywhere for centuries, then suddenly forgotten?

You could see him in every village, castle, and town emblazoned on shining shields, in wooden engravings, even carved into churches. Across Europe, something primal and ancient had stirred, and the collective unconscious had allowed a being to emerge from the primordial forest into the European imagination.

The first picture you saw in this article is a work by Schongauer, and the wild man here is a little different. He doesn’t wear the fierce expression of many of his cousins; instead, he is almost melancholic. His body is not reflexive but dynamic, full of energy, and covered in a great deal of hair. He carries a deadly weapon in the form of a club, proving even wild men can wield tools, and a heraldic shield signaling that he stands within the feudal order.

The image might seem unusual now, but for three centuries it raged across Europe like a wildfire. Cards, churches, tapestries, shields, manuscripts, these were the homes of wild men art, as much as the forests they were meant to inhabit.

He was a constant presence in places like the Moulins Cathedral, protecting the building as a gargoyle, or, more mundanely, appearing as a playing card used for gambling and entertainment in taverns and courts.

In carnival, men from across the Alps would dress as him, wrapping themselves in savage cloaks of moss, pelts, and leaves, storming through villages in wild processions. The Krampus still echoes this animalistic ritual form today.

The Krampus is no accident. Of all the wild man’s modern descendants, he is the one who has stayed closest to the forest, and it is no coincidence that he is also the one who has survived. Because the wild man stands at several thresholds at once.

He represents a human side in deep contact with nature, yet wields a tool, even a crude one, that sets him apart from any animal. He stands between modernity and the Middle Ages. And he carries the legacy of the pagan satyrs, fauns, and other forest creatures into a Christian world.

The Shadow of the Civilized Man

A lit fire, strong walls all around, surrounded by civilization, the modern European man lived, and in that newfound comfort, he looked out at the brooding forest, being chopped down to make way for fields, villages, and pastures. And in those receding primeval woods, he saw a figure emerge.

The shadow of a past not as distant as we would imagine, one that resonated with raw, primal power, unashamed by the customs of society.

This creature represented the repressed energies that man had lost through urbanization. In art, there was an attempt to tame him aesthetically, but the impulse ran deeper than the conscious mind and was almost impossible to suppress.

The taming was hardest when it was most elegant, as in heraldry, where the wild man was locked in the steel cage of feudal hierarchies and made into a symbol of aristocratic power. This was perhaps the clearest attempt by the conscious side of Germanic culture to capture the creature and turn him from a dangerous, outside-of-society being into a useful symbol of civilization.

Still, almost like a real creature of the forest, he sometimes resisted the taming. One of the most brutal of these moments was the Bal des Ardents, the Ball of the Burning Men. The king of France, one of the most powerful figures in Europe, and five of his closest companions dressed as wild men for a court ball in Paris. Yet tragedy struck, almost like an omen of the danger of inviting powerful forces without fully understanding them.

The king and his similarly attired companions all perished in flames, victims of a stray torch that turned the light-hearted feast into a tragedy. The fires ravaged them as their costumes ignited; one can imagine the desperate attempts to stop the flames, almost a cruel mockery of the planned dances. A night meant to celebrate life became an infernal danse macabre, the king dying in front of his wife.

Yet this was only a minor delay in the wild man’s career across European art. Barely a decade had passed before he was again a centerpiece. Because what he reflected was not only what man had left behind, but what he still wanted. Freedom from the confessional. Freedom from the contract. A body that did not need to be governed because it was already at home in itself. The medieval mind, hemmed in by ritual and rank, could look at this hairy figure and feel, for a held breath, that some part of the self had never signed any of those papers.

He is not gone. He went deeper into the forest

Archetypes are very hard to kill. Some might say impossible. They don’t live regular lives, paying taxes and commuting. They exist in a deeper layer beneath culture, geography, and time, but also stretching across them all, like a forest running through mountains, rivers, and valleys. Being out of the spotlight does not mean these figures have lost their strength; on the contrary, they may be gathering their power deeper in the forest of our collective unconscious.

In our time, most of us have traded the smell of ripening wheat in a warm harvest season for offices, service floors, and factory lines. Our forests are at their smallest. The wild side of our psyche may be forgotten, but it is not gone. It is not happy working 9-to-5, and it is ready to return with a nomadic strength our sedentary life is no longer built for.

And live he does. In the Alpine region, he still rages as the Krampus, a figure who brings fright and terror to children and some adults alike. He is frightening, yes. But not only because of the fierceness in his countenance. He is frightening because he still lives somewhere beyond the holidays, deep in our inner forests, waiting to venture past the edges and invade our civilized life.

He carries terror, yes, but also a power to survive without any external help. An inner quality the Latin called indomitabilis: untamable. A quality so clear that not even kings could make the archetype bend to them without paying the ultimate price.

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There’s a stretch of the Atlantic I keep going back to. Last time I went alone, at dusk, and stood on the sand for a long time. Nothing happened. A gull crossed the wind. The waves kept doing what the Atlantic does, arriving, arriving, arriving. And something in me, some old circuit I had forgotten was wired in, started humming. Not a thought. Not a feeling, exactly. More like recognition.

For a moment, I understood why my ancestors believed the sea had a god.

The World They Took From You

From the moment you were born, one idea was drilled into your mind. The material world is the only world. No magic. No spirits. The rivers and mountains are not alive; they are geology. Everything has already been explained, and what hasn’t will be eventually explained by someone in a lab.

This is not the world our ancestors lived in.

They lived in a world full of life, replete with mystery and abounding in meaning, where every brook and creek held a spirit or a god. Where forests breathed. Where the land they walked on was as alive as they were. And at every corner, there was a Saint or Spirit willing to protect you, bring you health, or guide you home.

The modern world didn’t come alone; it came with antibiotics. With childbirth, that stopped killing half the mothers. With the knowledge of how to produce food and goods on an unimaginable scale, and with the ability for me to write this and for you to read it across whatever ocean or continent sits between us. These are not small things. A child who would have died at two now lives to eighty. Only a fool waves that away.

But every trade has a cost, and we haven’t yet realized what we gave away.

What Was Lost

Meaning used to be embodied, not sought. The question what’s the meaning of my life? would have been more alien to someone in the 7th century than an iPhone 17 blasting Mr. Beast videos. Meaning wasn’t a problem to solve, a secret to be found, an answer to a lifelong question.

It was as clear to them as the sky on a summer day, all encompassing like the fresh air they breathed, and as expected as the seasons.

The cosmos was ordered, and your place in it was defined. Community was thick family, shared work, shared stories, shared dead. The story you were born into, with its gods and saints and spirits, was already there when you arrived, and you stepped into it the way you stepped into language.

And there was the other side. Contact with it wasn’t rare. It was just Tuesday. Goblins in the pantry, brownies by the hearth, a saint you talked to when you lost something, a place to remember and honor those who came before, with a few candles and their favorite foods as an offering. Even the household, the most civilized, most human-controlled space we have, was shared with the invisible world.

The hermits, the ones we now picture as lonely, were the least lonely of all. They were on talking terms with God. The further away they got from civilization, the closer and more intimate they got with the divine.

The Loneliness We Invented

Loneliness is the poison that seeps out of our material success. Not ordinary loneliness. Humans have always missed each other. I mean the metaphysical kind. The sense that the cosmos is vast and indifferent, and you are a fleck inside it with no one listening. That loneliness is a modern invention. It did not exist for most people for most of history.

I want to be honest about the other half of this, too. The enchanted world was not a garden. It had demons as well as friendly gnomes. It had witch trials, plague read as divine punishment, and a bad crop could mean starvation for your entire family. The same cosmology that gave people meaning also gave them terror. Anyone who romanticizes the old world without looking at this has to look harder.

We did not cure terror by killing enchantment. We cured some of the terror with medicine, law, and science. The enchantment was killed separately, and we are still not sure why.

What To Actually Do

We can’t go back. The structure is too deep, and the fight against modernity would cost us the very time and attention we need to recover anything. So what follows is not a program for returning. It is a program for smuggling things back in.

Put one thing on a shelf. Not a full altar, not yet. One photograph of someone you loved who is dead. A candle in front of it. Light it on their birthday and when you miss them. I am serious about how small this has to start, because the small versions are the ones that survive.

Pick one river, or one tree, or one hill, and go to it. Not once, but often. Enough that you start to know its moods. The enchantment does not come from believing the tree has a spirit. It comes from paying attention long enough for the question to stop demanding an explanation.

Eat with the same people every couple of weeks. Not a dinner party, nothing too fancy. The same people in a relaxed, intimate mood. This is how the dense community our ancestors had actually functioned, not through grand gatherings but through shared repetition, for years, decades, and generations.

Read one old story slowly. Not a novel. Something that carried people through their lives for centuries, a Bible book, a sutra, the Odyssey, a saga, a folk tale, whatever has a claim on you. Read it the way they read it: fully present, out loud, and many times.

Stop looking at your phone so much. The flatness of the modern world is partly real and partly the result of staring into a rectangle engineered to overwrite every quieter signal. You cannot feel the ocean through a screen.

None of these are too big, but they are big enough for a great start. That’s the point. The old world was not built out of grand gestures. It was built out of repetition, the same candle, the same meal, the same story, the same walk, until the repetition carved a groove deep enough for meaning to pool in it.

The world was never dead. We just stopped lighting the candles long enough to see it.

What did you lose that this reminded you of?

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They are among the shortest creatures in the mythical world. Easy to overlook. Easy to lump together with gnomes, dwarves, or fairies as if they were all interchangeable inhabitants of some vaguely enchanted forest.

They are not.

Goblins are deeply connected to the earth. Chthonic and dark. Their realm is the shadow moving between trees, the creak and groan of a house during a winter night, the sound you hear when you’re alone and suddenly aren’t sure you are. They are creatures of thresholds, not quite nature spirits, not quite demons, not quite anything you can pin down comfortably.

And here’s what modern fantasy erased: they were helpful. Befriend a goblin, and it would protect your household, guard your travels through unfamiliar land, and keep the darker things at bay. In Scottish folklore, they were household spirits, the invisible members of the family known in so many Indo-European traditions.

A presence that helped or hindered, depending on the relationship it received. Leave an offering, show respect, and the goblin will work alongside you. Ignore it, disrespect it, and you meet the other side, the petty, relentless, vengeful side that humans know all too well.

This is an archetype with teeth. A powerful trickster who compensates for size with cunning, much like early humans hunting game far larger than themselves through clever tactics and patience. Dark, resourceful, and capable of real damage. Not evil. Dangerous. There’s a difference.

Then we domesticated it.

In 1872, George MacDonald, one of the most influential figures in the history of fantasy, the writer who would inspire both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, published The Princess and the Goblin. It was one of the first modern portrayals of goblins as small, grotesque, and simply malevolent. Creatures to be outwitted and overcome. Not negotiated with. Not respected. Defeated.

Tolkien took that template and further crystallized it. By the time Dungeons & Dragons assigned them six hit points and a rusty short sword, the demotion was complete. The goblin, once a chthonic force of nature, became a Level 1 enemy.

Green-skinned, hunched, frightened. The smaller, pettier cousin of orcs and other beings that at least got the dignity of being feared.

A hundred and fifty years of fantasy fiction, and one of the oldest archetypes in human storytelling became cannon fodder.

Why does it matter what happened to a mythical creature?

Because the old world had more depth. More life. More truth.

Our ancestors experienced the world as a living tapestry, multifaceted, breathing, dangerously alive. There was life within every rock, stone, tree, brook, river, and mountain. They lived in wonder, yes, and sometimes in fear of the things that shared their world. But also with respect for the place they inhabited and the forces — seen and unseen — that inhabited it alongside them.

Now we believe we know everything. That every single thing around us is inert matter. Not living, but dead. And with the death of the world around us, something inside us has gone to sleep.

But here’s what the goblin teaches, if we’re willing to listen:

When we demoted it from household spirit to cannon fodder, we didn’t just lose a creature. We lost a relationship. The old world didn’t merely believe goblins existed; it believed you had to negotiate with the dark, small, clever forces in your life. Leave an offering. Show respect. Acknowledge that the thing under your floorboards had power, even if you were bigger.

Modern fantasy says: kill it, take the XP, move on.

Modern life says the same thing. The small dark feelings. The petty impulses. The clever survival instincts that kept you alive when you had no power, we treat them like goblins at a gaming table. Something to clear out on the way to the real quest.

And that first part about being real friends? I didn’t lie. The relationship was real.

Are the goblins real, too? That’s still for debate.

But the old stories knew better.

You don’t kill the goblin. You befriend it, or you pay the price.

Do you think we have been unfair to goblins?

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The place where the land stops, the place where all maps end, and just beyond it, magic, wonders, and death.

In 1810, Caspar David Friedrich exhibited Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea), which captures what countless people have felt: a tiny figure, drowned by the boundless sea and sky.

When it was first shown, viewers did not know how to look at it. No ship, no tree, no story, just a man and an ocean that swallowed the canvas. Heinrich von Kleist said looking at it felt “as if your eyelids had been cut off.”

The painting unsettled them because they had already begun to forget what it was depicting.

The allure of a boundless, primordial, non-human, something. That needs no explanation or goal; it just exists.

The ocean has also been seen as a living force that can provide sustenance and wealth. In West Africa, among the Yoruba, the Atlantic was first the domain of Olokun, an Orisha who, according to legend, could grant great wealth and prosperity.

After the enslavement and with the development of African diaspora religions, Yemọja, or Yemanjá, came to represent the ocean and became one of the most venerated orishas on the American side of the Atlantic, while in Yoruba lands, it still retains its role as the Orisha and protector of many rivers.

The ancient Greeks could imagine the genealogies of gods and the invisible particles that composed all matter. But what lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the boundary Heracles himself had set at the western edge of the world, they would not cross.

Beyond the pillars was Okeanos: not an ocean as we understand it, but a Titan. The great world-river that encircled all known land. To sail past Gibraltar was not to enter unfamiliar water. It was to leave the human world entirely and enter the body of something older than the gods themselves.

The warning carried across centuries in a single Latin phrase: non plus ultra. Nothing further beyond.

For the Norse, Njord ruled the sea as the patron of fishermen, bringing wealth from the waters. And uniquely among the gods, he was prophesied to survive Ragnarok, returning home to the wise Vanir when the rest of the pantheon fell. The ocean's god outlasts even the end of the world.

Read it forward, and the prophecy looks different; the next age would belong not to whoever ruled the soil, but to whoever could cross the water.

And crossed we did. First caravels in the late 1400s, then steamships raced across its surface in the 1800s, and now countless cargo ships move goods and resources in a day that the old world consumed in a decade.

We gained the world at the price of the horizon.

The Atlantic used to be the horizon, in its strongest sense, a boundary that we couldn’t cross and a limit to what we could claim. Beyond it lay the unknown, the unknowable, and the mythic.

Now the horizon has turned into a shipping lane, and the unknown lies in Wikipedia pages waiting to be filled.

And that takes us back to a monk watching the sea. A figure at the edge of the world.

There is a feeling we can all understand when our breathing goes quiet, and our chest softens as we watch the ocean on a still day. Something vast outside us meets something vast within, and for a moment, neither needs to be explained.

That feeling is what the ancients knew. It is what Friedrich painted. And it is what we have been slowly forgetting.

Mythic Echo is about remembering.

Every echo needs a voice to start it.

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