Girl, Superstitious

 

Here we are the middle of October coming up on my favorite holiday and the topic this week is awesome. Not that I thought so at first. At first, I was stumped. Like my fellow word-whores, my first thought was for black cats, ladders, the number 13... I write witch characters and they don't put much credence into such. I was left with, 

What am I going to say in this weeks post?

But I am wonderfully positioned in the middle of the week and my fellow word-whores have also been, as always, inspirational with their posts. Jeffe and KAK talked about superstition as belief, as faith. Therefore, a prophesy, perhaps.

I write about that aplenty.

My main character, Persephone Alcmedi, comes to learn that she is the fated Lustrata--with a myriad of other names, She Who Walks Between Worlds, the Witches Messiah, etc. No one is quite sure what it means to be the Lustrata exactly, as there are various schools of thought on that legend. And there would be in any diverse world, wouldn't there? 

The vampires have this myth/legend/ about her:

Lustrata walks,
unspoiled into the light.
Sickle in hand,
she stalks through the night
Wearing naught but her mark and silver blade.
The moonchild of ruin, she becomes Wolfsbane.

     She becomes Wolfsbane? Sounds like the vamps interpret this as if she's gonna be on their side and put the waerewolves in their place, huh? But Seph's boyfriend, Johnny, is a waerwolf. She's not so thrilled about the prospect of bullying him and his pals.

The waerewolves believe in her too. Johnny wrote this song:

A pure-blood witch, a caster of spells
An element master and ringer of bells.
As impurity rises from under the world
The dead above ground, diseases unfurled.
Call upon her, upon the witch of old,
Delivering justice, voicing truths untold,
Fauna and flora’s mighty daughter
The Purifier! The Lustrata!

     Hmmm. Those Dead above ground, diseases unfurled  and  Delivering justice sounds like of like the waerewolfs might be thinking ill of the vamps and interpreting this as if the Lustrata is going to be on their side in putting the vamps in their place.

Little by little, book by book, Seph comes to believe that she is this foretold individual, but that doesn't automatically make her the culmination of the oracle's story. It is the growing into that legend, becoming it, that the series is about. She's a little different in each book, earning the title piece by piece, with her power and her connection to Hecate.

So, now that I think about it, thanks to Jeffe and KAK, my whole series is based on a superstition, complicated by 1.) the varying theories about that belief and 2.) the character's own non-acceptance/degrees of acceptance of this belief.

So, Superstitions: Writing to a stereotype or tapping unmined gold?

I say that in making up your characters, their world and their destinies, what they believe in--if anything, and why, and how it impacts them and those around them, is absolutely like tapping unmined gold.