The Art of Mythmaking

35: New legends of Minos

Photo by Nicole Avagliano on Pexels; ID: Stars against a dark sky

What if there was no Big Dipper in the night sky? Legends and fairy tales from the constellations alone fill books and our dreams. There’s Scorpio season and the many supposed attributes of individuals born under that sign. Toss it all out. What mythology would we create on a new planet? How would spirituality change if there was no creator giving us fire or law? Would Minos be a promised land granted to the chosen?

I’ve been thinking about the new traditions that would be created in the few hundred years of the planet Minos’s history¹. One I imaged was a grieving ritual where the mourner would have a space to express the range of their emotions under the care of special practitioners. It is not merely because it’s a progressive society, but that it understands the release and processing of grief can help one heal in many ways. Perhaps it would come from the first to carve that space out. Perhaps there are signs of mourning or the development of new language to conceptualize it. That’s all possible.

Here’s one of the first Minos myths.

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Alma Torres sat on the bed with a tiny, swaddled baby bordered by her crossed legs. She stared down blankly, sensing the hovering nurse at the door. She turned to the wilted figure, then back at the silent child she bore just hours ago.

“You can keep them for as long as you like,” the nurse said finally.

Alma nodded mechanically, searching the fibers of her hospital gown and scratchy sheets for answers. None came. Warm morning light spilled onto the bed and  danced in glittering pools on the baby’s face. She could scarcely imagine how lonely and cold the morgue would be. How dark. The baby belonged nestled against a caregiver’s skin, folding open like a flower at daybreak.

“Someone should be in to see you—“

“Please leave,” Alma said curtly.

The nurse bowed out of the doorway and disappeared amidst the beeps and chatter of the ward. Alma sat still, almost waiting for some sign of life that would not come.

Discharge came a day later and she was wheeled down a sterile corridor toward her boyfriend’s idling car. She stood up and turned to the nurse, grasping both the woman’s hands in hers.

“Kara, you and the others did everything you could and I wanted to thank you.”

Kara’s face began to crumple with fat tears forming on her lower lids.

“Someone else will be the first.” Alma turned away and shuffled toward the opening doors and did not look back.

That night Alma slept little. She volleyed from dream to delusion to nightmare as her body ached for what she’d lost. Her body felt more empty than ever. Tiring of shifting through incomplete sleep phases, she instead put on her shoes and wandered into a lonely stretch of rolling plains far beyond her house. The crescents of Janus and Tophi sliced the rich, black night sky and their light patted the ground before her.

The scalloped and undulating borders of rock peaked from the horizon. Alma had never seen it before and lumbered with the weight of her still swollen and downtrodden body toward the structure.

She reached gray, speckled rock, sculpted smooth from rushing water and layered like sheets of paper. It lay cracked open from tremors. She ran a trembling hand over it, poking at its dimples and soft, crumbling craters. Outside, the night was alive with the chittering of insects and nocturnal birds. If not for the moons, she would have trudged through a penetrating blackness. Alma inched inside the structure and coursed a labryrinth of passages before reaching a clearing. Above her was a natural skylight where silver beams kissed her face.

Alma sat in the center of the clearing, crossed her legs, and breathed in the sticky warm air of the cavern. The sound of water softly pelting rock from deep underground was a metronome to her meditation. She swayed and rocked her weary body as the tears came steady from shut eyes.

From in her belly rose a deep grief she could not contain. A fire in her chest welled and lapped inside her. She clenched her pelvis, drew in gulps of air, and let out a shattering wail. She drew out each painful pang, each dashed hope, and threw them from her lips with louder and louder wails.

A sound tickled Roger’s ear and he blindly groped at the sheets next him. He awoke with a start and called out for Alma. He didn’t know how long she’d been gone. He tensed as he stumbled into the bathroom to find it empty. Roger charged into the living room to find an open front door. He frowned, straining to recognize the unusual night sounds, then went slack with recognition.

He sat on the porch of the house listening to the wails carried on gentle winds. The moons had sunk below the horizon and beyond the light of his front room was a velvet veil of onyx night. Roger sat and quivered, shaking lose his own pain. Alma was alone somewhere in the dark, cocooning the way she always did when injured. He knew she would come back and be changed.

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Alma was the first woman to give birth on Minos. She had come to the planet and met another emigrant while getting established. A medical facility had been built but there was no finished maternity ward until she found out she was pregnant. Right or wrong, the planet imbued her with their hopes. It was a proof of life, proof that the planet could be home and humans could thrive. When Alma’s baby, later named Iris, died during childbirth, more so than the community, but Alma herself was crushed. She had let the world down and could not escape the guilt and shame.

She wandered that night into a unique rock structure on a path she seemed destined to walk and released her pain. She emerged a few days later quiet and contemplative. Roger left her in her state, caring for her needs and keeping silent. Then one day, Alma began to laugh. She laughed loud and long. Then she looked at her partner and told him all she’d come to know about grief and what she had yet to know.

A devout and dedicated man, Roger answered, “Amen” to her most poignantly stated idioms. He recorded them and asked if he could share with other mothers who were fearful of their own impending births. Alma became known as The Mother. The First. As she gathered circles of women who would hear her insights, they responded “Amen, Ma.” Over time, the word shortened to aihma. In context, it is a consolation, an assurance that wisdom and comfort are coming. It is the first native Minoan word and sets the foundation for The Wailing Ritual, a therapeutic practice of complete release.

So friends, this is how myths are made, one story of struggle and triumph at a time. This is also how language is made, where words move², are melded and minted. It’s a marriage of concepts and events that form the nighttime constellation legends.

What myths would you create?

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1. Episode four of “Ithaka” details the first voyages to Minos.

Ithaka: Chapter Four

2. Words on the Move by John McWhorter is an excellent linguistics book on the origins and semantics of language.