Welcome to Mythic Mashup

Mythic Mashup knows a secret.

If you know how to listen, the universe speaks. Sometimes in words, more often in symbols, it leaves us a trail of breadcrumbs, practically begging us to follow its clues. Train your mind and open your eyes and you’ll see it all around you. It’s alive and whispering to us, channeling secret messages through our art, our books, our movies, our music. Step outside and you’ll see it in the sky, the ocean, the faces of animals. Or open up a tarot deck – each card is waiting to have a conversation with you.

The characters and symbols that live within a tarot deck have lived thousands of lives in thousands of places, shapeshifting and adapting, but never quite losing their essential form. The Fool lives in every wide-eyed protagonist that leaves home for adventure, or in a newly hatched butterfly, testing its wings for the very first time. The Hermit, in the single tree swaying on a lonely hilltop, or in the solo hiker watching it, deep in the wild.

Tarot is everywhere. I see it in magazine racks, recycle bins, junk mail, and children’s books.

I hope Mythic Mashup helps you see it too.

Ironically, if there’s one thing I know to be true, it’s that there’s an aspect of life that is inherently unknowable.

Even in the most constant and everyday of phenomena–mass and matter, gravity, the passing of time–a mysterious, underlying essence consistently eludes definition. We try hard to quantify it, literally tearing apart the smallest bits of our reality in order to see it clearly, but still, its true nature remains elusive. Truthfully, the deeper we try to define it, the more unknowable it becomes, each layer pulled back raising new questions and creating new problems to solve. At the base of it all, there is something about life that is outside of our perspective, our senses, our ability to understand.

Still, we are born with an insatiable curiosity and thirst for explanation. It’s inescapably human to wonder and ask questions about who we are and why we’re here. What do we do then, with a seemingly fruitless desire to know an unknowable answer? 

If we turn to any practice that studies the intangible–religion, philosophy, psychology, even hard sciences like math and quantum mechanics–the answer becomes clear. In the absence of clear understanding, we can’t say how things really are, only how they seem to be.

This is where symbols come in. What else so perfectly addresses the problem of not being able to clearly see what something is, only what it is like? We can’t tell you what time truly is, how it works, or where it exists, but we can tell you what it feels like–sometimes excruciatingly slow and steady, like a constant drip from a faucet, sometimes, like trying to hold back a waterfall, crashing quickly down, and slipping right through your fingers. 

Symbolism, and the spiritual practices that study and utilize it (tarot being one of many) attempt to make sense of the unknowable through the use of what we do understand. Sometimes, this is a simple simile–life is like a box of chocolates. Sometimes, a poetic allegory; a garden paradise and forbidden fruit, the temptation of novelty, and man’s folly in taking the bait from a snake. 

Always, using symbolism is a creative act; making sense of life through metaphor instead of data, fantasy and mythology instead of fact. 

Some symbols fade, some endure through centuries. An iPhone, and all the capital and technological progress it currently represents, may not be recognizable in a hundred years, but it still bears the symbol of the forbidden fruit, thousands of years after Eden’s origins. These are the symbols I like to play with - ageless archetypes that resonate with us on a deep, intrinsic level. The symbols that are both personal and primal, reflected in both the universal and the individual.

With Mythic Mashup, I am tapping into the unknown, giving new life to symbolism that ultimately transcends my limited perspective. The creative avenues I’m taking give me a way to ground these archetypes in the present without compromising their inherent agelessness. Collage is important here: by using a variety of found materials from different times and places, I am practicing finding the thread that makes these symbols timeless, and showcasing their ability to change and adapt based on circumstance. 

Experience has shown me that metaphor moves through Life as much as it moves through me onto the page. The more I study these symbols, and the more I flip through old magazines to find them, the more I find them unfolding everywhere, both around and inside of me. Everywhere I look, Life is creating metaphor, reflecting back my internal experiences, and foreshadowing the lessons I’ll be stepping into. 

I approach creation as a divine act, a channel for the immaterial to flow into the material, just as symbols themselves are. Through the process of creating these collages, I've found that in order to really create an end product I'm happy with, one that feels truly representative of the concepts I am trying to translate, I need to step into the energy of the card I'm creating. Take Death for example. Death was the first card I created, at a time when I didn't know which direction to move in and everything was crumbling around me. Death symbolizes endings and destruction, sure, but it also symbolizes rebirth, transformation, and new beginnings coming from the decay of the old. I didn't know it at the time, but the end of an old job and sense of direction was making way for something new and beautiful to take its place. 

Sometimes I feel like the artist, and sometimes I feel like the art, a channel for some creative force outside of me to mold and gently, purposefully, guide through a meaningful experience, the full picture of what has happened not really coming through until it's done and I can step back and look at what has been created.

I’ve found that the more we understand life in symbol, the more that Life, in turn, reflects those symbols back to us, like we are tapping into a secret language that lets us have a conversation with the unknown. Truly, life doesn’t just reflect; it guides and teaches us, builds up our trust slowly and guides us through lessons, like a loving parent does for their child.

Once you know the words, all it takes is keeping your senses, mind and heart open. I’ve found that Life is truly eager to talk to us, show us the bigger picture, and to hold our hands with benevolence and Grace. 

Through Mythic Mashup, I hope you can learn to speak with Life too. 

The blog at Mythic Mashup will be doing deep dives into the individual archetypes that make up symbolic languages, like tarot and astrology. We begin this journey with Death.