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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