Had a weird epiphany this morning on my way to work. The shower, driving on the way to work... why can't these things happen when I'm at home sitting at the computer?

Anyway, some few weeks ago I bought some back issues of Parabola magazine on EBay. Parabola comes out quarterly and is one of the publications that Prof. Campbell specifically recommended. So I've begun collecting back issues and reading the current issues. Anyway. I was reading one of the back issues this morning before work. Each issue is centered on a theme, and this one was on Masks and Metaphors. I was reading an article on these masks used by Balinese topeng dancers to portray the characters of their plays. These characters are archetypal characters from their mythology, and yet the mask makers sometimes specifically carve the masks to resemble real local people, sometimes as a parody of them but mostly to give the characters relevance in the current world. The article said that the actors will spend many hours simply meditating on the masks after they're made, internalizing the character and the mythic, archetypal meaning of it in the stories they perform.

Okay, so I put the magazine down and got in the car to go to work, and on the way it occured to me in a visual flash: the Green Man image from the old pagan days and then the image of the face of my character Trouble from the Zulu-5 stories. With these images and what I had been reading, it came to me that a cyborg is the modern equivalent of the old Green Man images. The Green Man represents the personified lifeforce of the forests, a manifestation of the forest itself, drawn from and composed of the living greenery it represents. The cyborg is made of the stuff of his world in the same way, built of metal and circuitry and sensors, the face is shaped of the stuff of its world. Where the Green Man represents the embodiment of the lifeforce, the god concept, of the forest, the human brain within the cyborg represents that same lifeforce embodied as a human mind. Both are the animating principles in the masks.

You can't have a mythology unless you have symbols that speak specifically to your place and time. It's the same archetype, but this is a modern symbol that speaks to modern people, here and now. A cyborg is the personification of our world now. It's a synthesis of man and machine, a symbiotic relationship between man and machine. The human brain can't live without the machine to sustain it, and the machine can't live without the human brain animating it. And as our world is composed now of technology and will only become more so in the future, this is the symbol that personifies both the aspiration and the fear of what humanity will become.

So, yeah, I'm writing mythology.