Essay: Inner Mythos 101
Dec. 30th, 2019 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeInner Mythos 101
Series: Essay
Word Count: 3000
Summary: Once upon a time, there was a girl who fell in love with a Story.
Notes: This was the winner of this month’s Patreon poll! Special thanks go to vladdraculea, whose initial posts on the subject inspired all of this. We hope that more plurals share their experiences with mythos in general, and inner mythos in particular, because there’s so much to say and so much we don’t know. Clearly our experience is only one of many, and there’s a whole range of things (like shared mythos) that we know nothing about!
When we were kids, we had a Story.
We’d been making up stories since kindergarten, but the capital-S Story was different. For solid years, we worked, dreamed, and breathed it. Other projects died away—finished or dropped—but the Story remained. We still write and sell much-changed forms of it under the title of Infinity Smashed, but we won’t be using that title here. Infinity Smashed is the fiction project. The Story is the mythos.
We know other plurals with Stories too, quite a few—especially in soulbonding, which sees plurality through media, imagination, and creativity. But medical multis rarely talk about them. Madison Clell is one of the exceptions, and when we emailed her about it, she said, “Ahh, so I’m not the only one?! That’s hilarious.”
So Stories don’t seem to be uncommon in plurality, just undiscussed. But why do we have them? What are they? And what do they do?
We can’t fully answer those questions on our own. But maybe we can get the ball rolling.
What Is Mythos?
We think that Stories are a form of mythos. And to define that, we’ll pull Daniel Blair Stewart’s explanation from his 1992 essay, “Science Fiction as Mythos”: “a mythos [is] a body of stories that explains our human relationship to the Universe. Our mythos embodies our beliefs, the knowledge, vision, ideals, even the purpose of our entire civilization. Additionally, a prerequisite for any myth is that it be entertaining.”
Plural Vladdraculea gives a more personal description with an invaluable proviso: “It's a story that is so deeply meaningful and so very much a part of you, that it can sustain you when you're in the depths of depression or grieving a tremendous loss, or even when deciding whether to go on or not.”
So, for our purposes, that’s a mythos: it comforts in the worst of times, inspires in the best, and entertains in the dullest, educating throughout.
Most folks probably get their mythos from the usual places: religion, classical mythology, and legend. We’ll call those conventional or traditional mythos. But other folks get mythos from weirder places, such as for-profit pop culture or idiosyncratic psychological detritus. The former case, we’ll call pop mythos, and the latter inner mythos, though obviously there’s a lot of overlap. (Our Story was originally a massive crossover fanfiction that lost all its identifying sources over time. So it’s a pop/inner mythos hybrid.)
Why do some folks favor one source over the other? And why did our mythos contribute headmates and chunks of headspace, instead of passively inspiring and informing?
Why Not Conventional Mythos?
Our Story sprouted from a kludge of childhood influences, mostly speculative fiction we read between the ages of 8 and 14. But those books were written for profit, not spiritual fulfillment. Why would we or anyone else turn to them?
When it came up in conversation, our friend KC suggested that for some folks, weird mythos steps up when conventional mythos fails. This might be especially relevant for folks who religion, culture, and family reject—like abuse survivors, the disabled, queers, and weirdos.
As children, we didn’t know that old stories are constantly reinvented and sanitized to fit modern norms. All we knew was that in the versions we were told, people like us only existed (if at all) as monsters and villains. If myths reflected the world, what did that say about our place in it?
But sci-fi and fantasy opened their arms to us. Both genres had heroes strange and alien, a yearning to escape or transcend the “normal,” and our favorite books treated difference as a natural (even joyful) part of a living, growing universe. In a world of aliens, robots, and queer castrated unicorn metaphors, we didn’t even seem that outlandish!
And there was no priesthood of Piers Anthony, no magi of Mary Brown, just fans. If we read the book, we were in.
Obviously, some fandoms have tried to build their own hierarchies, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they have religious vibes. “Canon” was originally a religious word; “fan” is short for “fanatic.” Fanart is icons—both digital and religious. We refer to authors’ claims, not stated in the work itself, as “word of God” coming from “the Powers That Be.” Fans have passionate arguments about interpretation and what is canon or not, which sometimes escalates to bitter fights. “One True Pairing” is tongue-in-cheek… and at the same time deathly serious.
Comparing religion to fandom is often used to disparage both, but I think both pull from the same source. Our search for transcendence, meaning, and community don’t disappear in a secular society; it just goes underground. Think of the screaming ecstasies fans have for their favorite band, and it’s not hard to understand why fandom cults like Scientology or the Bagenders came to be. Even the most commercial of fiction profits when emotionally resonant, and “I passionately care about this story and characters” isn’t that far from “I’m having a spiritual experience.”
We might’ve gone that fandom route, but didn’t. Instead, we took everything we liked, ditched what we didn’t, and duct-taped it all together into something ours own.
This came with a downside: our mythos relied on us to make it. That made it godawful, and not just because of lack of skill. It was too tailored to us, and we were too invested to edit effectively. (We’ve seen this happen to other, far more successful writers. See: Laurel K. Hamilton’s relationship to her Anita Blake series and character.) It also provided a road map to any abuser clever enough to realize that they could use the Story to shortcut to intimacy with us: “You love this thing? I love this thing too! Obviously we’re meant to be!” (Fortunately, nobody did.)
But there were big benefits to our “big lumpy deformed baby.” External mythos, since it relies on an outside creator, always ends. But ours continued as long as we worked on it; since we never stopped, it never ended. It was forever growing and changing along with us, so we never got bored or disenchanted.
Good thing, too, since it started coughing up headmates.
Plural Mythos
If a plural has a mythos, chances are it takes on a more active role—providing headmates, headspace, past life stuff, and so on. But there’s probably more overlap with singlet mythos than people think. Joan of Arc famously claimed angels and saints were talking to her and got burned at the stake for it. Guardian angels, ancestor spirits, possession, all could be interpreted as plural phenomena, though the cultural context and conception is usually very different. Plural soulbonders tend to see it through creativity (“I loved this story so much it came to life”); medical multis from a medicalized or trauma perspective (“I’m mentally ill due to abuse”); religious folks would see it as… well, spiritual (“My granny in heaven is talking to me”). We ourself have waffled back and forth between creative and medical lenses for years. But had we been religious or had more conventional mythos, would we have seen things differently? Would our plurality have found a different framework, maybe a religious or ancestral bent?
Obviously there’s no way to know. A pop/inner hybrid mythos is what we got, so that’s the form our plurality took, or at least how we interpreted it. And our headmate roster seemed to reflect the hybrid vigor of our Story. Just as the Story stopped being recognizable as fanfiction, so did our headmates stop being recognizable as fictives.
For example, take our headmate Mac, the johnny-come-lately. He was a character in the Story, though an extremely minor one, but that character was inspired by a guy named Corporal MacKenna from a book called Pyramid Scheme. The two Macs have barely any resemblance to each other now, but had our temperament slanted more towards classic fandom, might we have gotten a headmate of Corporal MacKenna instead?
It doesn’t seem improbable. And although medical multis and soulbonders have had their turf wars in the past, and even though we sometimes seem to be viewed as “respectable” because we don’t have “tumblr sparkledog headmates,” it seems appropriate that in us, the difference is negligible, mostly perceptual. In 2007, Mac effortlessly passed as a soulbond or fictive; now the lines in the sand have changed, and he doesn’t. Who knows how he’ll be seen in another decade!
Still, not all of our roster came from Story or fiction! Some split off our original girl in response to violent events; others are mysteries. Why the mix? Again, we think hybrid vigor was at work.
As the abuse in our family cranked up to speed, it consumed more and more of our internal roster and functions. Headmates created by abuse focused on dealing with it—and had never lived any other way. Unspeakable horror is easier to survive when it’s ordinary, so we didn’t think of those events as evil. We just said, “this is how the world works, so let’s just deal with it.”
That was fine when it came to surviving eternal hell. But if we ever wanted to escape that hell, we needed to know there was more out there. We needed people to say, “this is terrible,” who didn’t accept unspeakable horror, who modeled a healthier, happier way of existing. We needed fresh blood.
The Story stepped up. It remained a wellspring of optimism and joy, and it incubated new headmates, giving them their own histories and traits separate to our own. This handicapped them: if the vessel hadn’t learned their skills, they couldn’t use them. But they could more easily think outside the family box. It’s no coincidence that Mac was one of the first folks here to see our family for what they were. He was one of the earliest, strongest pullers for getting us to leave, to the point that our father even referred to him as “the one who hates me”!
Story headmates like Mac ran to support roles, performing all kinds of psych CPR to keep us alive. And because they came from our beloved, trusted Story, we learned to love and trust them as well… which taught us to extrapolate to corporeal people.
The Story allowed us to beat a rigged game. Our family saw it as a mere hobby, so never tried to destroy or distort it. It modeled care, love, and hope, gave us something to believe in and rely on. Even the darkest drafts told us, “you were here, this mattered to you, we can survive this, there is more and better out there.”
It saved our life. As mythos is designed to do.
Faux Mythos
Talking to a couple of multi friends, another discussion of Stories came up. These Stories were temporary constructions that faded once they fulfilled their purpose, which was to give folks a way to deal with their plurality without admitting it existed. Madison Clell depicted it as headmate Adriene saying, “We’re going to do the Epic Sci-fi story! […] I tried and tried to write it down as a kid, but it was terrible! Now I can see that I was doing it alone! Duh! But NOW, with your extra energy and brains, we can do it!” (pg. 79) Everyone else snickers, and Adriene's headmate Lisa responds, “You're just gathering the FACTS, now! Soon we can write the entire story of us!” (pg. 80) That story becomes Cuckoo.
Zyfron describes something similar going on with themselves: “[Zee] started having input on this particular story and basically wrote a character to express herself. In hindsight she had ‘tried on’ at least two other characters in the story before connecting strongly with the new one. Within just a few weeks of fronting fully for the first time, though, she was seeing her story as a but [sic] of an embarrassing origin story and not really identifying with it very much” (personal communication, 2019/09/20). “It helped Zee to find a way to express herself and a way to identify herself through a character.”
In Clell’s and Zyfron’s cases, the Story seems to have been more of a mask than a mythos. It was a little different for us, since headmates like Mac truly did see themselves as coming from the Story; it wasn’t just a mask. But our torrid amour with our Story did calm down once we admitted our multiplicity to ourself and started dealing with it.
And that was a good thing. When we were adolescents, we loved our Story with teenage drama and agony and all-encompassing obsession. Now we have a quieter, gentler relationship with it, like long-married adults who have grown accustomed to each other’s presence. It’s less exciting to read about… but it’s way healthier.
Which meant now we could write Infinity Smashed and share it with others, without setting ourself up for disappointment.
Mythos as Intimacy
So far, we’ve talked about mythos as an internal, individual thing. But what if it’s shared? We’ve never experienced this ourself, but obviously religions with many believers exist! And some of our friends have talked about shared inner mythos—role-play groups, for example.
These mythos can be built together from the start (“Wanna campaign together?”) or from someone joining in later (“I love your fanfic! Can I write a follow-up?”), sometimes much later (the New Testament). The relationships involved can be hierarchical (leader to followers), egalitarian (friends drawing each other’s characters), even somewhat randomized (a GM flunks a dice roll that was imperative to the story she was building). Regardless, these mythos became important forces in folks’ lives, for better or worse… and sometimes people mistake a shared love of the mythos for a deep relationship.
There’s joy in creating and loving together. Friends have told us about their years-long Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, which became a safe place to be and deal with the world. But here’s the thing about stories: everyone gets something different from them. One person’s loathed character is another’s favorite. People role-play for many reasons, and some mix badly. When folks mistake loving a mythos for loving each other, they’re confusing a story for a person. And even if undertaken with the best of intentions, it’s doomed to fail.
Our Story never became a shared mythos. It was too fecal and sesquipedalian. Of its few readers, maybe three liked it, and they didn’t like it for the same reasons we did… certainly not to the degree we did. And thank god for that! We were isolated, desperate for connection, but at the same time terrified of it… because we associated connection with violence. We used the Story as both representative and intermediary. We foisted it on anyone who’d listen or read, desperate to find the people who’d understand its importance, who’d see its goodness, who’d love us—er, it.
One boy we knew read the first twenty pages and pegged us immediately. He said, not unkindly, “this is about you, isn’t it?”
It felt like he’d seen us naked, read our diary, and pounded us with X-rays, all at the same time. We blustered and bluffed (“No! Haha! How could you ever… think that…”) and never showed him the rest. When the opportunity for connection appeared, devoid of pretense, we couldn’t take it. Relationships with books felt safer than relationships with people; they were certainly more familiar.
All I can say is, thank goodness we weren’t into role-play; that immersion would’ve played on our worst tendencies.
Mythos Malware
Any mythos can be exploited. It’s why Scientology exists. But plurals with mythic workings are even more at risk, I think, because their mythos directly connects to their headspace or roster. Manipulate the mythos, and you manipulate them.
Common in plural circles is for someone to claim to visit the world of the mythos or have headmates from it. Others try to merge the mythos into their own or the corporeal world through constant real-time role-play. I cover that in “Your Princess is in Another Headspace” and “Body Hopping Headmates,” so if you want to know about that, go read those instead. (And if you want to see the most extreme version of this, read Cultiples #2: The Fandom Cults of Draven.)
Other folks don’t try to barge into the mythos itself, but try to control it from the outside, insisting they know how it “really” works, claiming to have visions of new additions to it, or offering constant “helpful improvements” that serve their own interests. When in doubt, lock them out. In our opinion, giving someone this level of internal access should be restricted to folks who’ve been close, good, trusted intimates for at least a solid year—long enough for them to show their true colors and for closeness to come the old-fashioned way, not through mythic manipulation. Opening your mythos (if done at all) should never be how intimacy starts; it should only ever be the effect, not the cause.
Another common breakdown, which doesn’t require another person, is when the plural goes down the rabbit hole. The mythos takes over more and more until it’s a substitute for corporeal life… or considered superior. (This is especially applicable to closeted folks of all stripes, who might only get to be themselves as their characters.) This is a common phase to go through in times of change or isolation, but when it becomes chronic and feels like the only place that’s safe to exist in, that’s a red flag. Ditto grades, jobs, or paperwork sliding because of the Story taking precedence.
At the worst end of rabbit-holing, someone can become convinced that their mythos has some cosmic truth, far disproportionate to reality, or that it needs to forcibly replace the corporeal world. This is often accompanied by drug use or psychotic break. It’s scary. Don’t go there.
A lot of mythos malware comes from isolation and loneliness. The only way to avoid it is to build open, honest relationships with as many good people as possible, so that the mythos doesn’t have to carry the load. A daunting task, to be sure. But a mythos can’t replace the corporeal world. And you can’t be close to people if they never know who you are.
The Start of Something Beautiful
A mythos inspires, educates, and entertains. It can supply headspace and headmates. In the darkest days, it can bring survival and succor. And it can do all of it without having any artistic merit whatsoever. How cool is that?
Our Story will be twenty years old this February. And though we don’t need it with the fierce desperation we used to, we will never stop working on it, building it, loving it. The Story will always be there, laughing in the face of professional pride and artistic aspiration. Cobbled together from psychocultural detritus, it promised us a bigger, better world through adaptation, endurance, and joy in the everyday. It’s the golem, not the god; the rat and roach, not lion or lamb.
It is forever ours. And we are forever its.
Sources:
Clell, Madison. (2013). Cuckoo [play]. San Francisco: JUMP! Theatre and Green Door Studios.
Stewart, Daniel Blair. (1992, summer). “Science Fiction as Mythos.” Green Egg Vol. XXV, No. 97 (Summer 1992) 8-9. Ask us if you want a copy.
vladdraculea. (2016). There’s more... [Dreamwidth post]. Retrieved from https://vladdraculea.dreamwidth.org/19409.html
Glossary:
Soulbond: A headmate from media, ranging from a character who seems to “write themselves” to someone who takes part in communal life and controls the communal body. Can also be from media created by others (“outsourced,” like Bugs Bunny or Othello) or media or characters created by the system in question (“insourced,” such as someone’s role-playing character, fanfic character, etc.).
Soulbonding: The process of having soulbonds, and the relationship between soulbonder and soulbond/s. Coined by Amanda Flowers sometimes between 1996-1999.
Soulbonder: Someone with headmates from media.
Series: Essay
Word Count: 3000
Summary: Once upon a time, there was a girl who fell in love with a Story.
Notes: This was the winner of this month’s Patreon poll! Special thanks go to vladdraculea, whose initial posts on the subject inspired all of this. We hope that more plurals share their experiences with mythos in general, and inner mythos in particular, because there’s so much to say and so much we don’t know. Clearly our experience is only one of many, and there’s a whole range of things (like shared mythos) that we know nothing about!
When we were kids, we had a Story.
We’d been making up stories since kindergarten, but the capital-S Story was different. For solid years, we worked, dreamed, and breathed it. Other projects died away—finished or dropped—but the Story remained. We still write and sell much-changed forms of it under the title of Infinity Smashed, but we won’t be using that title here. Infinity Smashed is the fiction project. The Story is the mythos.
We know other plurals with Stories too, quite a few—especially in soulbonding, which sees plurality through media, imagination, and creativity. But medical multis rarely talk about them. Madison Clell is one of the exceptions, and when we emailed her about it, she said, “Ahh, so I’m not the only one?! That’s hilarious.”
So Stories don’t seem to be uncommon in plurality, just undiscussed. But why do we have them? What are they? And what do they do?
We can’t fully answer those questions on our own. But maybe we can get the ball rolling.
What Is Mythos?
We think that Stories are a form of mythos. And to define that, we’ll pull Daniel Blair Stewart’s explanation from his 1992 essay, “Science Fiction as Mythos”: “a mythos [is] a body of stories that explains our human relationship to the Universe. Our mythos embodies our beliefs, the knowledge, vision, ideals, even the purpose of our entire civilization. Additionally, a prerequisite for any myth is that it be entertaining.”
Plural Vladdraculea gives a more personal description with an invaluable proviso: “It's a story that is so deeply meaningful and so very much a part of you, that it can sustain you when you're in the depths of depression or grieving a tremendous loss, or even when deciding whether to go on or not.”
So, for our purposes, that’s a mythos: it comforts in the worst of times, inspires in the best, and entertains in the dullest, educating throughout.
Most folks probably get their mythos from the usual places: religion, classical mythology, and legend. We’ll call those conventional or traditional mythos. But other folks get mythos from weirder places, such as for-profit pop culture or idiosyncratic psychological detritus. The former case, we’ll call pop mythos, and the latter inner mythos, though obviously there’s a lot of overlap. (Our Story was originally a massive crossover fanfiction that lost all its identifying sources over time. So it’s a pop/inner mythos hybrid.)
Why do some folks favor one source over the other? And why did our mythos contribute headmates and chunks of headspace, instead of passively inspiring and informing?
Why Not Conventional Mythos?
Our Story sprouted from a kludge of childhood influences, mostly speculative fiction we read between the ages of 8 and 14. But those books were written for profit, not spiritual fulfillment. Why would we or anyone else turn to them?
When it came up in conversation, our friend KC suggested that for some folks, weird mythos steps up when conventional mythos fails. This might be especially relevant for folks who religion, culture, and family reject—like abuse survivors, the disabled, queers, and weirdos.
As children, we didn’t know that old stories are constantly reinvented and sanitized to fit modern norms. All we knew was that in the versions we were told, people like us only existed (if at all) as monsters and villains. If myths reflected the world, what did that say about our place in it?
But sci-fi and fantasy opened their arms to us. Both genres had heroes strange and alien, a yearning to escape or transcend the “normal,” and our favorite books treated difference as a natural (even joyful) part of a living, growing universe. In a world of aliens, robots, and queer castrated unicorn metaphors, we didn’t even seem that outlandish!
And there was no priesthood of Piers Anthony, no magi of Mary Brown, just fans. If we read the book, we were in.
Obviously, some fandoms have tried to build their own hierarchies, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they have religious vibes. “Canon” was originally a religious word; “fan” is short for “fanatic.” Fanart is icons—both digital and religious. We refer to authors’ claims, not stated in the work itself, as “word of God” coming from “the Powers That Be.” Fans have passionate arguments about interpretation and what is canon or not, which sometimes escalates to bitter fights. “One True Pairing” is tongue-in-cheek… and at the same time deathly serious.
Comparing religion to fandom is often used to disparage both, but I think both pull from the same source. Our search for transcendence, meaning, and community don’t disappear in a secular society; it just goes underground. Think of the screaming ecstasies fans have for their favorite band, and it’s not hard to understand why fandom cults like Scientology or the Bagenders came to be. Even the most commercial of fiction profits when emotionally resonant, and “I passionately care about this story and characters” isn’t that far from “I’m having a spiritual experience.”
We might’ve gone that fandom route, but didn’t. Instead, we took everything we liked, ditched what we didn’t, and duct-taped it all together into something ours own.
This came with a downside: our mythos relied on us to make it. That made it godawful, and not just because of lack of skill. It was too tailored to us, and we were too invested to edit effectively. (We’ve seen this happen to other, far more successful writers. See: Laurel K. Hamilton’s relationship to her Anita Blake series and character.) It also provided a road map to any abuser clever enough to realize that they could use the Story to shortcut to intimacy with us: “You love this thing? I love this thing too! Obviously we’re meant to be!” (Fortunately, nobody did.)
But there were big benefits to our “big lumpy deformed baby.” External mythos, since it relies on an outside creator, always ends. But ours continued as long as we worked on it; since we never stopped, it never ended. It was forever growing and changing along with us, so we never got bored or disenchanted.
Good thing, too, since it started coughing up headmates.
Plural Mythos
If a plural has a mythos, chances are it takes on a more active role—providing headmates, headspace, past life stuff, and so on. But there’s probably more overlap with singlet mythos than people think. Joan of Arc famously claimed angels and saints were talking to her and got burned at the stake for it. Guardian angels, ancestor spirits, possession, all could be interpreted as plural phenomena, though the cultural context and conception is usually very different. Plural soulbonders tend to see it through creativity (“I loved this story so much it came to life”); medical multis from a medicalized or trauma perspective (“I’m mentally ill due to abuse”); religious folks would see it as… well, spiritual (“My granny in heaven is talking to me”). We ourself have waffled back and forth between creative and medical lenses for years. But had we been religious or had more conventional mythos, would we have seen things differently? Would our plurality have found a different framework, maybe a religious or ancestral bent?
Obviously there’s no way to know. A pop/inner hybrid mythos is what we got, so that’s the form our plurality took, or at least how we interpreted it. And our headmate roster seemed to reflect the hybrid vigor of our Story. Just as the Story stopped being recognizable as fanfiction, so did our headmates stop being recognizable as fictives.
For example, take our headmate Mac, the johnny-come-lately. He was a character in the Story, though an extremely minor one, but that character was inspired by a guy named Corporal MacKenna from a book called Pyramid Scheme. The two Macs have barely any resemblance to each other now, but had our temperament slanted more towards classic fandom, might we have gotten a headmate of Corporal MacKenna instead?
It doesn’t seem improbable. And although medical multis and soulbonders have had their turf wars in the past, and even though we sometimes seem to be viewed as “respectable” because we don’t have “tumblr sparkledog headmates,” it seems appropriate that in us, the difference is negligible, mostly perceptual. In 2007, Mac effortlessly passed as a soulbond or fictive; now the lines in the sand have changed, and he doesn’t. Who knows how he’ll be seen in another decade!
Still, not all of our roster came from Story or fiction! Some split off our original girl in response to violent events; others are mysteries. Why the mix? Again, we think hybrid vigor was at work.
As the abuse in our family cranked up to speed, it consumed more and more of our internal roster and functions. Headmates created by abuse focused on dealing with it—and had never lived any other way. Unspeakable horror is easier to survive when it’s ordinary, so we didn’t think of those events as evil. We just said, “this is how the world works, so let’s just deal with it.”
That was fine when it came to surviving eternal hell. But if we ever wanted to escape that hell, we needed to know there was more out there. We needed people to say, “this is terrible,” who didn’t accept unspeakable horror, who modeled a healthier, happier way of existing. We needed fresh blood.
The Story stepped up. It remained a wellspring of optimism and joy, and it incubated new headmates, giving them their own histories and traits separate to our own. This handicapped them: if the vessel hadn’t learned their skills, they couldn’t use them. But they could more easily think outside the family box. It’s no coincidence that Mac was one of the first folks here to see our family for what they were. He was one of the earliest, strongest pullers for getting us to leave, to the point that our father even referred to him as “the one who hates me”!
Story headmates like Mac ran to support roles, performing all kinds of psych CPR to keep us alive. And because they came from our beloved, trusted Story, we learned to love and trust them as well… which taught us to extrapolate to corporeal people.
The Story allowed us to beat a rigged game. Our family saw it as a mere hobby, so never tried to destroy or distort it. It modeled care, love, and hope, gave us something to believe in and rely on. Even the darkest drafts told us, “you were here, this mattered to you, we can survive this, there is more and better out there.”
It saved our life. As mythos is designed to do.
Faux Mythos
Talking to a couple of multi friends, another discussion of Stories came up. These Stories were temporary constructions that faded once they fulfilled their purpose, which was to give folks a way to deal with their plurality without admitting it existed. Madison Clell depicted it as headmate Adriene saying, “We’re going to do the Epic Sci-fi story! […] I tried and tried to write it down as a kid, but it was terrible! Now I can see that I was doing it alone! Duh! But NOW, with your extra energy and brains, we can do it!” (pg. 79) Everyone else snickers, and Adriene's headmate Lisa responds, “You're just gathering the FACTS, now! Soon we can write the entire story of us!” (pg. 80) That story becomes Cuckoo.
Zyfron describes something similar going on with themselves: “[Zee] started having input on this particular story and basically wrote a character to express herself. In hindsight she had ‘tried on’ at least two other characters in the story before connecting strongly with the new one. Within just a few weeks of fronting fully for the first time, though, she was seeing her story as a but [sic] of an embarrassing origin story and not really identifying with it very much” (personal communication, 2019/09/20). “It helped Zee to find a way to express herself and a way to identify herself through a character.”
In Clell’s and Zyfron’s cases, the Story seems to have been more of a mask than a mythos. It was a little different for us, since headmates like Mac truly did see themselves as coming from the Story; it wasn’t just a mask. But our torrid amour with our Story did calm down once we admitted our multiplicity to ourself and started dealing with it.
And that was a good thing. When we were adolescents, we loved our Story with teenage drama and agony and all-encompassing obsession. Now we have a quieter, gentler relationship with it, like long-married adults who have grown accustomed to each other’s presence. It’s less exciting to read about… but it’s way healthier.
Which meant now we could write Infinity Smashed and share it with others, without setting ourself up for disappointment.
Mythos as Intimacy
So far, we’ve talked about mythos as an internal, individual thing. But what if it’s shared? We’ve never experienced this ourself, but obviously religions with many believers exist! And some of our friends have talked about shared inner mythos—role-play groups, for example.
These mythos can be built together from the start (“Wanna campaign together?”) or from someone joining in later (“I love your fanfic! Can I write a follow-up?”), sometimes much later (the New Testament). The relationships involved can be hierarchical (leader to followers), egalitarian (friends drawing each other’s characters), even somewhat randomized (a GM flunks a dice roll that was imperative to the story she was building). Regardless, these mythos became important forces in folks’ lives, for better or worse… and sometimes people mistake a shared love of the mythos for a deep relationship.
There’s joy in creating and loving together. Friends have told us about their years-long Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, which became a safe place to be and deal with the world. But here’s the thing about stories: everyone gets something different from them. One person’s loathed character is another’s favorite. People role-play for many reasons, and some mix badly. When folks mistake loving a mythos for loving each other, they’re confusing a story for a person. And even if undertaken with the best of intentions, it’s doomed to fail.
Our Story never became a shared mythos. It was too fecal and sesquipedalian. Of its few readers, maybe three liked it, and they didn’t like it for the same reasons we did… certainly not to the degree we did. And thank god for that! We were isolated, desperate for connection, but at the same time terrified of it… because we associated connection with violence. We used the Story as both representative and intermediary. We foisted it on anyone who’d listen or read, desperate to find the people who’d understand its importance, who’d see its goodness, who’d love us—er, it.
One boy we knew read the first twenty pages and pegged us immediately. He said, not unkindly, “this is about you, isn’t it?”
It felt like he’d seen us naked, read our diary, and pounded us with X-rays, all at the same time. We blustered and bluffed (“No! Haha! How could you ever… think that…”) and never showed him the rest. When the opportunity for connection appeared, devoid of pretense, we couldn’t take it. Relationships with books felt safer than relationships with people; they were certainly more familiar.
All I can say is, thank goodness we weren’t into role-play; that immersion would’ve played on our worst tendencies.
Mythos Malware
Any mythos can be exploited. It’s why Scientology exists. But plurals with mythic workings are even more at risk, I think, because their mythos directly connects to their headspace or roster. Manipulate the mythos, and you manipulate them.
Common in plural circles is for someone to claim to visit the world of the mythos or have headmates from it. Others try to merge the mythos into their own or the corporeal world through constant real-time role-play. I cover that in “Your Princess is in Another Headspace” and “Body Hopping Headmates,” so if you want to know about that, go read those instead. (And if you want to see the most extreme version of this, read Cultiples #2: The Fandom Cults of Draven.)
Other folks don’t try to barge into the mythos itself, but try to control it from the outside, insisting they know how it “really” works, claiming to have visions of new additions to it, or offering constant “helpful improvements” that serve their own interests. When in doubt, lock them out. In our opinion, giving someone this level of internal access should be restricted to folks who’ve been close, good, trusted intimates for at least a solid year—long enough for them to show their true colors and for closeness to come the old-fashioned way, not through mythic manipulation. Opening your mythos (if done at all) should never be how intimacy starts; it should only ever be the effect, not the cause.
Another common breakdown, which doesn’t require another person, is when the plural goes down the rabbit hole. The mythos takes over more and more until it’s a substitute for corporeal life… or considered superior. (This is especially applicable to closeted folks of all stripes, who might only get to be themselves as their characters.) This is a common phase to go through in times of change or isolation, but when it becomes chronic and feels like the only place that’s safe to exist in, that’s a red flag. Ditto grades, jobs, or paperwork sliding because of the Story taking precedence.
At the worst end of rabbit-holing, someone can become convinced that their mythos has some cosmic truth, far disproportionate to reality, or that it needs to forcibly replace the corporeal world. This is often accompanied by drug use or psychotic break. It’s scary. Don’t go there.
A lot of mythos malware comes from isolation and loneliness. The only way to avoid it is to build open, honest relationships with as many good people as possible, so that the mythos doesn’t have to carry the load. A daunting task, to be sure. But a mythos can’t replace the corporeal world. And you can’t be close to people if they never know who you are.
The Start of Something Beautiful
A mythos inspires, educates, and entertains. It can supply headspace and headmates. In the darkest days, it can bring survival and succor. And it can do all of it without having any artistic merit whatsoever. How cool is that?
Our Story will be twenty years old this February. And though we don’t need it with the fierce desperation we used to, we will never stop working on it, building it, loving it. The Story will always be there, laughing in the face of professional pride and artistic aspiration. Cobbled together from psychocultural detritus, it promised us a bigger, better world through adaptation, endurance, and joy in the everyday. It’s the golem, not the god; the rat and roach, not lion or lamb.
It is forever ours. And we are forever its.
Sources:
Clell, Madison. (2013). Cuckoo [play]. San Francisco: JUMP! Theatre and Green Door Studios.
Stewart, Daniel Blair. (1992, summer). “Science Fiction as Mythos.” Green Egg Vol. XXV, No. 97 (Summer 1992) 8-9. Ask us if you want a copy.
vladdraculea. (2016). There’s more... [Dreamwidth post]. Retrieved from https://vladdraculea.dreamwidth.org/19409.html
Glossary:
Soulbond: A headmate from media, ranging from a character who seems to “write themselves” to someone who takes part in communal life and controls the communal body. Can also be from media created by others (“outsourced,” like Bugs Bunny or Othello) or media or characters created by the system in question (“insourced,” such as someone’s role-playing character, fanfic character, etc.).
Soulbonding: The process of having soulbonds, and the relationship between soulbonder and soulbond/s. Coined by Amanda Flowers sometimes between 1996-1999.
Soulbonder: Someone with headmates from media.
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Date: 2019-12-31 03:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-31 07:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-31 09:47 pm (UTC)Lor
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Date: 2019-12-31 10:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-31 04:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-31 07:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-31 04:59 am (UTC)I have a long, tender, somewhat torrid personal history with personal mythos (which is a great term), and it's really... something, to see someone else really delineating some of what goes on there.
Full disclosure: I have been quietly orbiting the plurality community for something like fifteen years now, and initially it was because I wondered if I had plural tendencies. I have had characters forever, who have grown and shrunk in utility and intensity over the course of my life. I converse with some of them in my sketchbooks. I no longer think this is anything like true plurality; I think it's a coping mechanism in a brain that came installed with deeply overactive mirror neurons and a propensity for emotion and narrative. I love my odd proto-headmates, my brainbeasts, but there is not really enough to them to be discrete people.
I think whatever tendencies I initially had were reinforced when I discovered online roleplay. I was, god, like 12. I always came at it from an emotional angle: after a character got set up proper, I'd be able to get in a headspace and respond, rather than the analytical or literary kind of roleplay I later found out other people do. This led to some really transcendent experiences -- but also some really unhealthy fixations and some badly confusing relationships. It's hard to relate to another person when you're speaking mostly to the character they play, and it sucks when you realize you would miss the character more than the person if you stopped talking to them.
It was a real learning curve, negotiating boundaries both internal and external when it came to RP. I think by my early twenties I'd largely learned that it was best if I didn't form deep friendships with the folks I RPed with, because things got strange and blurry if I did. (As an interesting note, the RP community on Dreamwidth has largely internalized that lesson too, in a way that the RP chatrooms and forums of my youth hadn't. There's a huge emphasis in DWRP on IC/OOC divide. I think it's healthier in some ways, though it also villainizes people who become invested in the stuff they're RPing, which is a bit sad.)
But also by then, I had met my wife in a writing community, and we had spent years RPing and developing our own internal mythos.
"There’s joy in creating and loving together. ... When folks mistake loving a mythos for loving each other, they’re confusing a story for a person. And even if undertaken with the best of intentions, it’s doomed to fail."
I fixated, via my oldest and most intimate character, on certain parts of a story my wife was developing. She welcomed me in. The connection was heady. It was fun and feeding and deeply emotional, and of a different flavour than our real-life emotional exchanges. It felt like being in two kinds of love. I don't think we ever mistook mythos for a relationship -- not truly -- but for a while there, my focus in particular was unhealthy. Part of it was getting to share a story with someone -- for me, sharing narrative works with her was an act of deep intimacy. I felt lucky to be drawn into her mythos. There still isn't anything quite as heady to discover that she'd written a little piece, of our characters, for me; I don't think anything else is quite like that sense of dual-layered love-language.
But it broke bad. In the end we had different ways of engaging with our respective mythos, and my grasping want for more involvement drove her further and further from the stories we had been sharing. It hurt, and so I grabbed more, and so she pulled away more... in short, it actually messed us up pretty badly for a good handful of years. RP became a toxic thing. We lost the ability to share stories, and where it hadn't before, it began to really hurt to see her sharing stories with other people.
I think it only didn't break apart because I'm stubborn, she's patient, and we're both flexible people. We've been to counselling, and we're still picking apart where narrative sits in our relationship, with no real answer yet. I think the idea of loving a mythos together is what's important to me. It's why my wife and I do NaNo together: NaNo is a deeply intimate narrative experience, but it also has clear-set boundaries and expectations. I have begun to keep the core of those characters that mean the most to me, just to myself (which is a bit odd, as one sprung from a shared mythos scenario. It's like he can't go back to his childhood home, which is a strange feeling). It seems the best when they don't rely on someone else's input in order to thrive.
For my own part, I'm still coming to terms with how much my own internal mythos means to me. So, thank you, I guess -- it really means something to see someone else put words to it, particularly to how intimate it can feel.
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Date: 2019-12-31 07:40 pm (UTC)(It was part of why this essay was so hard to write; I was having to find ways to describe and explain stuff that seems to be really, really nonverbal and emotional and hard to discuss. Especially since people view it in a billion different ways, most of which I don't know!)
Kinda glad we never ended up with a shared mythos. It sounds super-high reward... but also super-high risk, and everyone we know who's had one fall apart has described it as devastating.
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Date: 2019-12-31 10:21 pm (UTC)"Super high-risk" is pretty accurate. It felt remarkably like losing touch with a friend when I'd drift away from RPing certain characters with certain people.
Re: soulbonding, I haven't dipped into the evolving notions of that part of the community in the last several years, but where and when I learned about it, it was largely a mode of thinking that assumed that what was happening was external to oneself. I'm pretty comfortable with the notion that, however I engage with these couple particularly vivid characters, it's all a function of the internal mechanisms of my human brain. I would suppose that 'soulbonding' is the closest thing to what I experience, but I'm not strictly comfortable with -- ironically -- the mythos that seems to be a part of soulbonding.
It's a case of Venn diagrams; these notional people that I check in with now and then are their own circles within the wider circle of myself, where it seems like plurality and soulbonding imply some area where the people don't overlap. There is, of course, ambiguity, but I'm getting comfortable with ambiguity.
Re: the difficulty of articulating mythos, it might be interesting to put together a survey of sorts, for people who identify as having their own mythos. I know I would love to see how different folks articulate this intensely personal phenomenon.
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Date: 2019-12-31 10:53 pm (UTC)it might be interesting to put together a survey of sorts, for people who identify as having their own mythos. I know I would love to see how different folks articulate this intensely personal phenomenon.
Aw man. It'd be interesting, but I'd have no idea on how to even go about framing the questions without it becoming tainted by my own preconceptions!
--Rogan
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Date: 2024-04-03 12:36 pm (UTC)[Akira]
Hello can you hide this comment? ^^ It is no longer accurate.
And Hikaru's comment after it? Thank you in advance ^^
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Date: 2024-04-03 02:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 07:56 pm (UTC)[Akira]
Thank you ^^
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Date: 2019-12-31 10:04 am (UTC)So we succeeded in convincing ourselves for a long time they were right about us imagining the abuse, along with telling ourselves that our interactions with each other and our feelings of coming from somewhere other than the front, from existing canons or from our own stories, were unhealthy fantasies. But it kept leaking through anyway. (And our stories were definitely nowhere near as detached from us as we wanted to think they were.) We weren't able to start fully allowing ourselves to engage with mythos stuff until we got older, first in the soulbonding community, then in the general plural community, and then Istevia finally smashing the block on the "we are not of this world" feeling, because we were sinking into a really bad psychological state from thinking we had to identify with our birth culture and society for the sake of social justice and white guilt. (Also from our gender issues, which she smashed the block on too, but that's another thing entirely.)
But when I think about it, there really isn't any reason two people or systems have to have the exact same kind of history to share a similar experience, after all. So I'm pretty sure we're talking about the same basic types of experiences, or really similar ones, yeah, even if they came in a different order and with different motivations in the beginning. (Though, there definitely was a thing where we went through a succession of fronters who started out identifying with or as certain characters, even characters who weren't for stories so much as "the person I wish I could be.")
...Speaking of Istevia, she actually was inspired by your writing this to post a thing about the concepts of personhood we use in system, both human and non. I don't know how meaningful or relatable it will be to you guys, but it's here if you want to read it.
...Well, actually, when I think about it, it probably an important point for a lot of us, not just her. Personally, I think of inner mythos as playing a role similar to religion or spirituality, only I have the same problem Istevia does of "what I mean by this isn't what most of Western society means by it." For me (and for her, Nina, and our subsection of the system in general), spirituality is a thing that's defined through understanding your place in a network of relationships. I mean, we believe in things that most people would more or less consider supernatural, but the main focus of religion or spirituality is on finding the most rightful ways to live in the world as we understand it to be, rather than questions of where it came from, why it exists, if this world is just a corrupted version or reflection of a perfect one, etc. So in that sense, our spirituality is our world or mythos or whatnot, whatever its actual origin or nature is, in that it's the source of those values for us.
I've actually been working on a post about what happens when your relationship with a story becomes unhealthy, and how to make it healthy again, because that's a thing that several of us have struggled with over the years. I was mostly thinking in terms of what happens when you identify yourself too heavily with a canon version or get too invested in the outcome of a canon, resulting in the kind of thing where someone from an external canon gets obsessed with watching it even though they say it causes them great pain. And I mean, like, we've been in that place before, where someone found their canon to be very painful but we couldn't break away from it, because at the time, they didn't know what would define them if their canon didn't. So we know firsthand that it's a bad thing, and that it's possible to keep a relationship with your canon while saying "that's not the way my life actually went."
But you can't really talk about unhealthy relationships with stories without eventually bringing up what happens when outsiders are the cause of the unhealthiness, when someone tries to get into your story. And using shared fandom as social glue resulted in a lot of friendships that fell apart under stress, when we were bodily younger. Besides the ones you listed, we've also experienced having someone say they're "a fan of your story," when your story is the origin of one or more people in your system, and then blurring the line between the story versions and the real people. It's weird and bad and icky.
The other bad thing we've seen is where someone talks a big show about their world or mythos, about how great it is, maybe how superior to this world it is, and more or less demands credit for how great it supposedly is-- then doesn't act anything like you would expect someone from a pacifist culture, or whatever, to act, and the headmates they talk a big deal about seem to have mostly Informed Abilities. I mean, not about being restricted to what the body has learned at front, but like someone being talked up as a great diplomat and then turning out to be a terrible one.
(...Also Istevia has some more quotes she wanted to post, about tricksters, in response to some of your last few paragraphs. But I'm not her, she's gone to sleep already, and I should take the body to bed too.)
-Saffron
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Date: 2019-12-31 07:53 pm (UTC)(Though, there definitely was a thing where we went through a succession of fronters who started out identifying with or as certain characters, even characters who weren't for stories so much as "the person I wish I could be.")
Rogan: Oh man, I didn't even get to COVER that. One of the hallmarks of us alters was, we kept trying to make each other into characters AND FAILED MISERABLY EVERY TIME. It's a huge part of our records, these tiny fail-stories where we're like, "Obviously I have this character named Rogan or Gigi or whatever, so they MUST have a story WHY ISN'T THIS WORKING?!" Falcon also got folded into the Story, despite not being from there at all--it's like this weird hilarious fictional version of him that was never true, far as we know.
the main focus of religion or spirituality is on finding the most rightful ways to live in the world as we understand it to be,
Mac: I can go with that! Because I was never all that interested in the deeper theology, more religion as community and folks coming together to do the right thing.
I've actually been working on a post about what happens when your relationship with a story becomes unhealthy, and how to make it healthy again
???: That'd be super interesting!
we've also experienced having someone say they're "a fan of your story," when your story is the origin of one or more people in your system, and then blurring the line between the story versions and the real people. It's weird and bad and icky.
Mori: Yeah, it's part of why we try really hard to put a strong line between Infinity Smashed, the fiction project, and the Story, which nobody gets to read. When me and Biff came back, Rogan had a huge OH NO reaction, because he felt like now he'd been blurring fiction and reality with people, so we've tried not to do that and to keep it apart. (Since god knows, Draven loved blurring the two .)
someone talks a big show about their world or mythos, about how great it is, maybe how superior to this world it is
Mori: Lolyeah. The way we see it, the Story was... I dunno. It was the difference between Static Shock and Batman: the Animated Series, if you ever saw those. Both shows take place in the same universe, both depict rough stuff, but Batman is so much DARKER and GRIMMER in tone and color palette, while Static Shock has bright colors and a sense of optimism even as it depicts gang violence and drug abuse. The content isn't actually all that different, but the tone and treatment of it are real different.
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Date: 2019-12-31 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-31 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-03 12:24 am (UTC)The second is the basis of A Heroic Moment, with the self-insert not as a POV character.
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Date: 2025-04-24 04:29 am (UTC)Have you ever heard of maladaptive daydreaming? It's not at all well-studied, but I swear by its existence; learning of it was a textbook "this term I've never seen before describes me to a T" moment for me. I've seen people use the term "immersive daydreaming" for the non-maladaptive version. (There's a level of intensity, and a subjective sense of difference that I can't really describe, that still differentiates it from normal daydreaming.)
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of crossover between multiplicity and immersive daydreaming. Both can be trauma responses that primarily affect those who are imaginative and prone to dissociation. I wonder if they're - for lack of a better word - common comorbidities that end up interacting with each other.
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Date: 2025-04-24 02:33 pm (UTC)Man, this post is old, I should try this concept again now that I have more research and knowledge under my belt...
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Date: 2025-05-02 08:26 pm (UTC)I imagine that for some people, headspace may come with a similar "this is definitely different from normal imagination, but it's difficult to articulate how" thing going on. And now that I'm thinking about it... when I'm really in the zone, my daydream doesn't feel real, but it feels more real than normal imagination? Maybe headspace is something sort of similar to that, but a few steps to the side and dialed up to a 10.
Can you (still) immersively daydream about stuff that's pure fiction/separate from Infinity Smashed? Or can that mechanism only be used for headspace/otherworld interactions (now)?
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Date: 2025-05-02 10:59 pm (UTC)Sneak: I... I don't know! o_o We... don't really need/desire to? Like, we mentally plan stories and stuff we're working on, but it's not the all-encompassing immersive stuff from when we were kids, and it's fully under our control. We maybe sometimes get, "oh, what a surprising neat idea!" but we don't really get things like the characters going rogue anymore.
For us, the big difference is when it starts doing things we don't want, or asserting its own agency. And these days, that just doesn't happen outside of headspace and otherworld stuff. (Those things also seem to run without us consciously fueling it or paying it attention.)
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Date: 2025-10-01 01:44 pm (UTC)Something something Snapewives:
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Date: 2025-10-20 04:26 pm (UTC)