“To the Mountain!”

Unpacking a major holiday festival in The Village of Strong Branches’ real-world influences.

Right now, we are coming upon the final part of a holiday called the Anthesteria. If you are a pagan or polytheist and worship the Greek Gods, and if you’re not drawing from Wicca, chances are that you are also in the middle of celebrations.

For everyone else, it’s a celebration of Dionysos and, in the time and place the holiday arose from in Ancient Attica, it was at once a celebration of the wine-casks’ opening, a first flowers festival, and a festival related to the dead. It has a lot of layers, all existing at once, like a jar filled with fluids of different densities that oscillate and swirl yet remain slightly distinct.

Much of the imagery I drew from for the seasonal shift in The Village of Strong Branches is related to things I notice during the Anthesteria. It usually happens in February or at the beginning of March, depending on the lunar calendar — the light is lengthening, yet we have blustery, blustery, blustery storms frequently occurring during the holiday itself. Outside, the trees are bare, and when it rises above freezing, everything smells like wet earth. I didn’t even see flowers during the Anthesteria until maybe last year when one of my orchids started blooming at this time. It’s a white and purple one, beautifully relevant to Dionysos. There are many elements of the ancient holiday that don’t make sense for me as a single, atomized person worshipping at my single, atomized shrine. I also don’t drink alcohol. So I often will do hot cocoa or water for the offerings. Most of what I do is chant to prayer beads and read hymns while incense burns. On the final day, I do a prayer for my ancestors.

Strong Branches takes place during the seasonal shift from winter to spring. The opening of the novella is for a festival of the dead, sacred to the Goddess Lilinbaðụ (Lee-leen-BADTH-uh). It draws from that focus on the dead and some of my feelings about Persephone and Hekate and other Goddesses associated with katabasis experiences. Paradoxically, the direction for the remainder of the novella is moving up: from lower latitudes to upper ones, from lowlands on the sea to terraced mountain and plateau farmlands.

The direction up makes sense, perhaps, only if you know that my favorite prayer to read to Dionysos is from Euripides’ Bacchae in the Grene & Lattimore translation, page 158, which I’ve marked with a small stub of folded metal owing to how often I need to come to the page. “Blessed are they who keep the rite of Cybele the Mother,” one line reads. The prayer itself is short. On the facing page, however, in italics, are the words “to the mountain! to the mountain!” — which is where the women in Dionysian frenzy are. My Keð and her sister Tantas go up.

So, The Village of Strong Branches has caught a vibe with the Mountain Goddess, and with the unsettled, just-opened-jar quality of the Anthesteria, a liminality drawn from so much pouring out and coming together before it separates back out again into well-defined layers of density.

The Muses, who in the Platonic tradition have a relationship with how we are habituated from childhood through culture, inspire us from these well-worn grooves of behavior to write whatever stories may occur to us. It’s important to be saturated in beautiful myths and stories and songs to prime the environment to take up the foundations of a good polytheistic story like ink being sucked up into a brush, with enough self-discipline to avoid feeling pressured by certain prevailing circumstances to twist stories into what they are not or become too self-conscious of being an example. When someone is self-conscious about it, or when the paradigm of a work comes out of focus, the writing doesn’t flow, and it becomes tacky and sticky. I have a lot of gratitude for being raised in the environment that I was raised in, praying to the God and Goddess in the backwoods, because it gave me the priming to know how to write stories like this — regardless of how the story itself is, I know that I got right how to write speculative fiction that doesn’t confuse Gods with their wooden icons.

There are ways in which we, as authors, can separate ourselves and be separated from our work, and then there are ways in which it is impossible.

Ever since its publication, I have not thought about The Village of Strong Branches and the Anthesteria until it is too late to write something in a timely enough manner for this be relevant to a creative writing blog post. However, this year, it seems, luck was on my side.