Wordcatcher (33 page)

The atmosphere of myth that surrounds and permeates our lives; the source of the sacred stories and images that tell how it all began
. Coined by former
Time
magazine art critic, eminent mythologist, and all-around
bon vivant
Alexander Eliot,
mythosphere
is a brilliant invention, reflecting a lifetime
of reflection about myth. “We’re all aware,” Eliot writes, “that [the atmosphere] surrounds, protects, nourishes, and energizes the world ‘out there.’ The
mythosphere
does all that too, but for the world ‘in here.’” It was thousands of years in the making, he adds, and exists in our psyches as stories that “ineffably touch the heart.” They are part of the cultural air that we breathe, and can help us reconnect to a dimension outside time and space. For this reason, myths have “shuddering relevance,” and in most ancient cultures
myths
have been regarded as truer than so-called fact. During the Renaissance, artist and scholars breathed deep from the
mythosphere
and helped revive Western culture. In the modern era, novelists, poets, and film-makers have tapped the
mythosphere
to help liberate their creativity and explain the dynamics of their psychology. For these reasons, and many more, Thoreau said, “
Myth
may be the closest man has ever gotten to truth.” By that he meant psychological truth, the mother of all stories, the truth of the soul. Again, Marina Warner: “Writers don’t make up myths; they take them over and recast them. Even Homer was telling stories that his audience already knew.” Companion words include
mystery, mystagogue, mythomania, mythopoeia, mythmaker.

Mythosphere (Alex Eliot)

Righteous retribution
. We all have felt its sting; we even may have stung someone else with it. It’s human nature, or should we say, superhuman nature? The word hails from the Greek
nemein
, to distribute, apportion, which gave rise to
lot,
and
allotment
.
Nemesis
was the goddess of vengeance, the daughter of Zeus and Hera who embodied something more than pure revenge, closer to karma. She represented indignation at the injustices of the world, and was depicted as the bitter relative who ruined so many weddings and relished so many funerals that the invitations stopped coming. In Greek myth she is the embodiment of the avenging spirit, a quality that arises from the depth of her bitterness at being treated like a second-class goddess. Thus,
Nemesis
was the “distributor” of justice, she who gave what was “one’s due,” their “lot in life,” which came to mean “your number is up,” as in allotment
hunting, or in your fated death or punishment. By the 16th century
nemesis
came to mean “retributive justice,” one’s fate if one has lived dangerously or selfishly.
Nemesis
is the strange cousin in the attic of Narcissus, with his attendant narcissism, and gives birth to the psychological condition called
nemesism
, an obscure but valuable word that embodies inward negative feelings, a kind of cosmic soul rust. British novelist, short story writer, and playwright Brian Aldiss defined science fiction for all-time when he wrote that it is primarily the story of “Hubris clobbered by
Nemesis.”

Night walking, studying; guiding one’s way through the night.
A gift for the young, a curse for the old. Nightly companion words are as numerous as the bats escaping caves at dusk:
noctiflorous
, blooming at night, not just flowers but night writers and night scoundrels;
noctuary
, a place for nighttime studies;
noctivate
;
nocta-collector
;
noctivagator
, one who wanders around at night;
noctiphobia
, fear of the night;
nightertale
, the nighttime, the whole night long; and the wondrously named
acronicta noctivaga
, the Night-Wandering Dagger, a dragonfly of British Columbia and the Yukon. Finally, consider the
night-blooming cereus
, a flower that blooms but once a year, in the middle of the night, when only the
lucubrators
, those working by candlelight, are still awake, relishing the darkness. Henry David Thoreau
immortalized the feeling when he wrote, “I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.” The Hungarian photographer Brassaï was a notorious nightwalker, shooting the gaslit Paris streets and its brothels, cabarets, and all-night cafés. His close friend Henry Miller wrote of his visit to the Hotel des Terrasses, where he pored for hours over the “nightly harvest of photographs which were spread about the pieces of furniture in Brassaï’s room.”

Mythic homesickness
. The word was coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, an Austrian medical student, who joined two Greek words,
nostois
, return, and
algos
, pain, to describe the longing for home of Swiss soldiers stationed in the mountains. But Homer used a version of it in the sense that many of the stories-within-stories of his epic poem, the
Odyssey
, were inspired by the
nostos
, the homecoming stories, or the
nostoi
, the popular tales of sailors’ homeward bound journeys told and retold in ports all around the Mediterranean. His
hero
, Odysseus, spurred on by the memory of Penelope’s arms, the loyalty of his dog, the face of his son, defied the gods to “get home again” after the ten-year war against Troy: this panorama has been absorbed by English as
nostalgia
. Though often derided as sentimental, the real thing is a tidal pull of feeling, an undulating wave of emotions that can be triggered by a whiff of burning
leaves, a ballgame on a radio, an accent, a taste of home cooking. As if derision weren’t enough, in 1844 Dunglison reduced
nostalgia
to an “affliction produced by desire to return to one’s country, commonly accompanied by slow wasting and [which] … may speedily induce death.” Thus, a word as many-leveled as the ruins of Troy, the painful urge of a fierce desire to go home again. Who says you can’t? We do it every time we feel
nostalgic
, whether for the past or, as physicist Stephen Hawking says, for the future, which is his definition of synchronicity. When we do get home, we’d best be ready, because as Will Rogers reminded us, “Things ain’t what they used to be and probably never was.”

Conveying divine power
. A mystical word revived in our time by the German scholar Rudolf Otto, from the Latin
numen
, a divine power or spirit that brings life or guidance—a hint of the spirits that dwell in nature, and one aspect of its original and transcendent meaning of a “nod” of the gods.
Numen
refers to the spirits or geniuses that dwell in a place and have the potential to inspire creative efforts, and
numinous
refers to the sacred essence, the supernatural dimension, magical forces, in dramatic contrast to phenomena that can be apprehended by the senses.
Numinous
describes the otherwise inexplicable power emanating from a megalithic site in Brittany, or a painting of a storm at sea by
Turner, that reveals a
presence
in nature and that touches a
presence
in us. Figuratively speaking, Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst or the temples of Bali may be said to be
numinous
if they fire our imagination. In one of my favorite books,
The Star Thrower
, the anthropologist Loren Eiseley evokes the
numinous
without ever actually using the word: “As we passed under a streetlamp I noticed, beside my own bobbing shadow, another great, leaping grotesquerie that had an uncanny suggestion of the frog world about it. … Judging from the shadow, it was soaring higher and more gaily than myself. ‘Very well,’ you will say, ‘Why didn’t you turn around. That would be the scientific thing to do.’ But let me tell you it is not done—not on an empty road at midnight.” That’s
presence;
that’s
numinous
.

To render obscure, darken, make unintelligible
. A dusky word to suggest the murkiness around twilight, the witching hour, the time when the gates were locked all over the world for fear of what might come knocking. A 16th-century word that emerged from the Latin
obfuscare
, to darken, from
ob
, over and
fuscare
, to make dark. Figuratively speaking, from the camel markets of Beersheba to the hog markets of Wall Street,
obfuscation
is a timeless marketing ploy that allows things to be sold in a shadowy way, a deliberately befuddling manner. Confounding companion words on the dark side include
fusky
, darkened, and
obfuscatrix
, Alexander Theroux’s terrific coinage to describe Gertrude Stein, writer of polysyllabic novels. The moral of this word story is simple: Sedulously eschew
obfuscation.