What fascinates me about myths is the question What if they were true?’ How would we explain them if we assume they are true. Some would say you cannot make that assumption. But, let's step outside of our modern orthodoxy and consider why we naturally assume they are just that — myths.
We live in an age in Western society where stories of fairies, elves, trolls, angels, devils, etc., are assumed to be fantasies. That was not the case in centuries gone by. However, we have been well enculturated with the materialist worldview. A worldview that claims that nothing exists beyond the material world and therefore beyond material explanation.
After training in the sciences and earning a few degrees, I, too, believed in the material worldview. Galileo had consigned everything outside the material world to religion; the material world belonged to science. Religions have their own favourite myths, and as the Abrahamic religions swept the western world, only angels and demons survived; fairies and elves were consigned to the trash can labelled ‘ignorance’.
But the biggest impact on the materialist worldview came not from an onslaught of fairies and elves but from science itself. The material stuff of objective reality was dealt a fatal blow with the development of quantum physics, where the hard stuff we can bang our toes against, was discovered to be a construction of wispy fragments of energy, but that had no physical being except within the heart of a mathematical equation called the Schrodinger Wave Equation. Unencumbered, matter at its most fundamental levels gets around as waves of energy, and if you put your hand into the moving wave, the energy is dumped onto your skin with possibly painful consequences. The invisible becomes visible only when we interfere, and what can only be described mathematically pops into existence and bites us.
The second nail in the materialist coffin was the development of neurobiology and the recognition that the brain radically filters ‘reality’ through all our senses. Indeed, as Donal Hoffman argues in his ‘The Case against Reality’ what we perceive are akin to icons on a 3-dimensional computer.
Once we begin to give up our belief in an ‘objective’ reality, much becomes plausible about old beliefs and it is on that basis I took the plunge and wrote ‘Fragments of Silk’, which starts from an implicit question ‘What if a fairy queen did marry an early clan chief and have a child?’ How then could it come about?