The Mystery Feast: Thoughts on Storytelling

Good stories tend us towards clarity and transcendence.

Storytellers, reclaim your power to shape the future through stories. You are descendants of the bards and the wonder-workers.

Our age is lost in sensational tales. Without genuine mystery, the mystery of art, a story will not linger in the imagination.

We want to travel the untravelled road. We should learn to tell untold stories; stories that wander off the high road; stories like roads untaken. This is the only cure for the despair that all the stories have been told, that there are no new stories under the sun. All the high road stories have been told, but not the hidden roads stories that lea

In the world of good stories everything is linked by surprise. There only the unpredictable is logical. The laws of the world of stories operate inversely to those of the world we call reality.

Stories have also been used for evil. They have been used for the denigration, the demonisation, and the extermination of peoples.

Imagination dreams that which knowledge makes real. It could be said that imagination is the proto-reality.

they come from beyond, from some uncommon living, ever-evolving, universal storehouse of wisdom.

The true danger of stories is that they tend to bypass reason. They can bypass intelligence and go straight to the subconscious. Why else have very intelligent people in the past believed such absurd things about other races?

The historian deals with the past, but the true storyteller works with the future.