“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
W.B. Yeats
I started with a rather simplistic backstory when I started writing The Palantir. I hadn’t written any fictional stories since high school, so I wanted to keep it simple. Thus, my first drafts were of a middle-grade adventure story that started in one of the spookiest cities in the U.S. (Salem, Ma.) and had ghosts. That was it.
But I tend to ask lots of questions. I want to understand why things work (except for any electronic gadget and how-to instructions). I tend to like complex tales (e.g., I think Dune was a fabulous book). So, I started adding bits and pieces to the story. First, it was pirates, then magic, then a Mayan setting, which led to adding historical characters for most of the ghosts in the series. Every time I added a new layer of detail to the series, I would realize I didn’t have a good enough backstory for how each piece fit. I had too many unanswered questions. I thought back to the ancient Greeks and their mythologies but thought it was too overused. So, I decided to go further back in time – which eventually led me to the Mesopotamians.
The more I read about early Mesopotamia, the more fascinated I became. For instance, here is a short but fascinating list of Mesopotamian achievements that changed the world. In that research, I first learned of the Maqlû – considered the world’s first magical text.
The Maqlû is an anti-witchcraft ritual, written around 700 BCE. I found it especially interesting because the ancient Mesopotamians thought of magic as a normal part of life – thus an anti-witchcraft book. I loved the name and the history so much that I named my series after the book and the main magical objects in it.
Sadly, though, as I did additional research for this post, I realized that most of the available online information for magic was heavily biased towards the Judeo-Christian, western world perspective – completely ignoring earlier cultures. It was depressing to see the bias (it also made it hard to get lots of good information). For instance, one article said the first book of magic was published around 1100 CE –that’s almost 1800 years later than the Maqlû! Also, Christianity made magic appear dark and ominous, whereas the early Mesopotamians practiced magic openly, thinking of it as a handy tool for their use. For a little more perspective, you can read a brief history of magic.
So, as you read my books, I encourage you to read up more on a fascinating and important part of humanity’s history.
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