by Mindi Meltz.
In the beginning, the Ancestors tell us, the Hummingbird and Wye People were one. All were descended from the same Ancestress. Why did some break away, and become another People apart from us, who could no longer understand the languages? It happened during the time when the Sky abandoned us.
After the Hummingbirds bound the Earth and the Sky together, and each entered the other and They made love every Rain Season forever after, the Sky one day grew restless. The Earth was once everything to Him, but now She was broken by love, and He could not see Her wholeness so easily as before. He wanted to journey off into the beyond, to seek adventure beyond Time. So the Earth, because She loved Him, let Him go. He promised to return. But He did not: not for a long time.
In His absence, the Earth despaired and withered into dryness, a great drought overcame Her, She could no longer remember the touch of Rain. The Sun, only a pale memory of the love that once warmed Her, drifted off into white oblivion, and the Moon paled. All the world turned cold and barren.
These times were so bleak and desperate, Creatures for the first time since the awakening of the world began to Die. The first Creature to open the door of Death was Jaguar. I will show you what to do, she said, and she climbed down into the deepest nest of the mountains, curled up in the last moist soil, and died. At first no one understood what had happened. They called and called her to wake. Then her body gave off a new scent, and the Earth began to devour her. They saw that from this rich place where the Jaguar’s body had turned to black Earth, new Trees and Vines were born. Then all the Creatures and Plants understood that by dying, they would sacrifice themselves for the Earth. They would feed Her and give Her new life, and in this way She would be able to renew Herself forever, and feed them in turn. The Earth, in the voice of Jaguar, said Take of my body as you have given me yours, take me in and be filled. So the Creatures ate of the plants, and they ate each other, and this was a new kind of love-making, which kept the world alive. In this way we learned how to become Ancestors, to die and to pass into the deep realm, to pass then again into the bodies of Plants, then into the bodies of Animals and People, so that we would continually be reborn, and be always wiser from the journey.
At this time, Rhiannon, the Fairy of Death, who sometimes takes the form of Jaguar, was born. And all Creatures agreed to the sacrifice she demanded. Even the Birds, who spend their lives in the Air, still give themselves to the Earth in the end.
Yet also at this time, some of the men left us. Perhaps there were women with them, too, or perhaps the women were born of them later—perhaps the Sirenian creation story in which woman is born of man, which we always laughed at in the Jungle, was true for them after all, by some twisted, inverted magic—but somehow when the Elders spoke of those who left us, they always spoke of men.
They left because they were bitter at the loss of their Father, the Sky, and they did not want to sacrifice themselves, they did not want to surrender and die. They did not want to suffer with Sickness or feel the pain of the Jaguar’s teeth or cramp with starvation and fall down into the Vines and turn to soil. They wanted to find a new world, better than this one, where such a surrender would not be necessary.
Where exactly they went, we do not know. Whether they climbed to the tops of the tallest Trees and tried to jump up into the Sky Realm, we do not know. Or whether they tried to walk upon the Sea away into the horizon, we do not know. But we know they refused to surrender. Because they could not bear to know that one day the Jaguar might devour them, or one year the Fruits might not ripen, and because they knew that predators must always eat and someone among them was always going to die, in order not to live in terror they decided they would take control of death. Each year, they would sacrifice one of their own, one that they chose—a man or a woman or a child—to Rhiannon. That way, they reasoned, she would eat her fill, and the rest would be safe.
But it is Rhiannon who decides who is taken, not men. Rhiannon was so angry at their arrogance, she wanted to destroy them, but the Earth, in Her compassion, swallowed them up instead.
Then these people became no longer like people. They lived inside the cave of the Earth’s belly for hundreds of years, where no sound or scent or sight or touch ever reached them. They forgot how to feel. Their skin lost its pigment and became pale like Orchid roots which are smothered in the pockets of Trees. That pigment, the color and passion that had once made them Human, became lava that erupted far above them and made the Ho Volcano. For a long time after, the Earth continued to spew their lost richness, and spread it over the land, so that years later when they emerged, they would have to farm their sustenance by effort from Her skin, to regain the strength and spirit that was once a part of them.
In that Dream of Darkness, they had only their memories and imaginations to guide them. And they were given one gift of magic to make up for all they had lost, though it was a terrible magic, not one that anyone would choose. It was the magic of the Written Word. It was a magic of describing things that could no longer be seen or felt or sensed in any way, a language that could only be read by the mind. They forgot all that came before. They forgot the Jungle, they forgot the Fairy realms, they forgot the name of Rhiannon, they forgot what they had been.
When the Earth finally tired of having them in her belly, she belched them up out of the Volcano, and they lived on in a new, dry world, taking their food from the soil by violence without feeling it. They were still ignorant, and they still made sacrifices to try to keep themselves safe from death, but now they sacrificed other Creatures instead of themselves, to keep death from touching them at all. Now instead of saying they were sacrificing to Rhiannon, or to the predators they feared—because they hated the Earth who had swallowed them—they said they were sacrificing to an angry, all-powerful Man-God. They worshipped that god. They thought they were making the sacrifices to appease him, so that they would live forever.
But they lived in sorrow: they lived the sorrow of the Earth’s eternal yearning for the Sky who had left Her, and when they yearned for God, they yearned for Him—their Father who had abandoned them. They no longer spoke with their hands and their bodies, for these gestures could not be seen when they had lived in the darkness, and so they had forgotten how to read them. They spoke only by words, and they made their world by words.
The Wyes, of course, will tell of their origins differently. They will say that Writing was a gift given to them by their god, that they were chosen by him, that they are blessed. They will say that their people have been scattered by hardship and violence, living not only in Zara but in Sirenia, and across the Sea on island countries we have never seen, and that their Word is all that ties them together, their book of sacred Words. They will speak of it with pride. But what People is still Human, whose identity is made not of place, not of green land and speaking leaves, not of singing Monkeys or flashing feathers or Owl Moon-stories, but of scratchings on paper?
They die anyway, like all people, and they forgot this: You cannot control the darkness of Rhiannon. And you must perform the sacred rites, for in the heart of the ritual, you are always safe. When the Birds are singing up the Sun in the morning, that is one time that Snakes and Jaguars never get them.
(excerpted from The Ritual of Forgetting, first book in the After Ever After trilogy)