Part 1: The War Begins

I have said over and over that there is a story of the world I will get around to telling one of these days. This is that day. This story will be severely, almost ludicrously, abridged, but I will try to hit the highest highlights. Before I begin, however, I need to make the case that there even are highlights, because we’re very mixed up about that nowadays.

A World of Story

I don’t have time to argue the point here, only to state it as an assumption. So here it is: the world we live in is not a world of gradual, creeping, inevitable, trending change. It is not ruled by impersonal, inexorable forces plodding down the timeline and gradually coalescing into vaguely-recognizable things.

We live in a world of story, of adventure, of sudden turns and watersheds. We live in a world where one man’s split-second decision can decide the fate of a century, where one powerful written work can change an entire society, where an individual can come from seemingly nowhere and sweep a nation off its feet. We live in a world where individual people and events make a real difference. And that is why the story of the world can be a genuine story surrounding individual people and events.

Now, on to the story.

The One

Once upon a time, there was nothing except the One. He has various names in various cultures; in Egypt, he is the maat, the underlying orderer of nature; in China, the Tao, the honored ancestor of all things; in Greece, the ontus on, the supreme source of goodness. Goodness, particularly in its highest form, love, is a creative force, and so the One made a world.

It was an unstained world, warmed by sunshine and full of laughter, a place of unpolluted wonder, uncurbed adventure, and abounding life. Its trees were nearly sentient, its animals nearly conscious, and its king and queen like a god and goddess on the earth, the sole human regents of this blessed realm and its treasures. But the war had already begun.

The War

Humans, you see, were not the first beings the One made. First, he made spirits – mighty, powerful spirits not bound to the physical plane as we are, spirits that do not age or die and cannot be killed, beings of enormous power and wisdom. And some of these spirits were evil.

The leader of their number was called at first Light-Bringer, but he became a bringer of darkness on the earth and the great enemy of all things good. It was his pride that warped him, that made him despise all things that were not his own and pervert light and life in his attempt to be free of their Source. He drove a great rebellion in the heavens, leading many of the spirits in a fiercely-fought war against their brethren, the likes of which would dwarf all our warfare combined. Finally, he and his followers were cast out and came to earth, swearing eternal revenge. So the war began.

Many stories are told of the coming of evil into the world of man. There are common themes, whether we speak of Psyche and Pandora or Ivan and Kaschei the deathless, whether we speak of Eve’s fruit of renewed life in Eden or Iduna’s in Asgard. There is a single rule. And there is an evil sort of curiosity, a breaking of trust, an act of disloyalty, that causes the hero to break that rule and bring down disaster and wrath, not only on himself but on the world. All these stories are echoes down through history of the truth. There was a single rule. It was broken – and with it the world.

The Catastrophe

If the world were a logical system, a mathematical equation or a philosophy seminar, this would make no sense. But the world is full of wild and wondrous things, and it follows a logic of its own, a logic we recognize instinctually as story logic. How does a five-year-old know how a story she’s never heard before is supposed to end? We are born story-tellers and story-hearers, because we are born story-livers. And this is the story.

Thus it is that we are enmeshed in this war, the war behind the wars, the war that has spilled all the blood of all the centuries, whether that of the fallen patriot, the child-soldier, the gang member, or the suicidal teen. Thus, our world is wracked with chaos and conflict, with hate and anger and self-loathing. The war is fought at once on the global stage and in every human breast.

Thus, we inherit catastrophe, and the rest of the history of the world is of the return from that catastrophe. But there has always been hope, however long-hidden. Even before the dreadful curse was spoken from heaven, a prophecy was also spoken – a prophecy of a mighty warrior, a king, who would come and fight with the great enemy and crush his power – though at great cost. For millennia, whispers of the coming rescuer grew, and yet when he came, he was completely unexpected.

But that, of course, is what next week’s post is about.

“A Cavalry Charge” by exit78 is licensed under CC PDM 1.0