JK: My ancestors truly believed that the world was created once, and that Jesus Christ came to redeem the sins of Adam, and that he would come again. They lived in a very singular, Christian worldview. I don’t live in that story anymore – after Darwin, and Freud, and Nietzsche, and Weber, and DNA, and everything else, I live in a kind of big-bang cosmology that’s evolutionary in nature, and we don’t know where it’s going.
That’s what I refer to as the “super-story” in the Mutants and Mystics book – I think we’re living in a fundamentally different story now than our ancestors did, whether those ancestors were Christian or Jewish or Hindu or Buddhist or whatever they were. I don’t think any of those stories really work anymore, even though we sort of hold onto them and pretend they do. But they actually don’t – they actually don’t work.
MS: Can you talk about what it is for a story to move from its original perceiver into the general culture, where it becomes a myth or a genre or a collective memory or a collective article of faith? And when a story makes that transformation, does it gain or lose power?
JK: Most stories do not survive the death of their storytellers. Right? If we know anything about religion, it’s that 99.9% of religions die with their founders – they don’t survive.
Some religions, however, do survive, and can get very big and very successful. And those things often happen for political and social and psychological reasons that might have very little to do with the original seer or founder or visionary. And we do know something about that process. But I think it’s really hard to predict what stories are going to last and what stories are going to be picked up and become cultural stories in a big way. I mean, what we now call the world religions certainly did – Islam, Christianity, Buddhism. But those are rare, those are extremely rare, rare events.
So I don’t know, because I think it’s hard for us to see what’s going to stick and what’s not.
But the meta-story here is that human beings are storytellers. The meta-story for me, the true story for me, is that we need story. It’s not that any particular story is true, it’s that the truth of story is true, if that makes any sense. Human beings need to live inside a story, and they need to be told, as well as tell, a story. But I’m not sure that the content of that story matters a whole lot, if that doesn’t sound too cruel.
MS: No, I don’t think so. A single phrase sets the stage for storytelling as such. At the end of The Super Natural, you talk about the need to see story as story, and I was thinking how, whether the phrase is “Once upon a time,” or “Let me tell you how it happened,” or “It went like this,” the very presentation of it in that form is the conjuring of the world of story.
JK: Yeah.
And maybe – the thing I think about a lot is, are stories species-contingent? Do dolphins have stories? I don’t know, I kind of doubt it. Do ants have stories? I don’t think so. So maybe storytelling is something very human and it’s something very specific to our species. It’s the way we relate to the world, and one another.
Not very well, by the way. Stories exclude and do violent things. It’s not all goodness, sweetness and light.
MS: Sure. But do you see stories as also having the potential to open up into an array of possibilities and suggest an array of possibilities, rather than close into just one possibility alone?
JK: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that’s how I read the paranormal. I think – what I think the paranormal is, on a deep level, is a kind of growing awareness that one is caught inside a story. And generally, one realizes that because it’s not going so well for one: one does not like the story that one is caught in. And so what paranormal awakenings are about is a kind of prodding, is a kind of – okay, well tell a different story now. Let’s live in a different world, let’s leave this world and this story that isn’t working so well, and let’s tell a different one.
And I think a lot of the people who experience this most profoundly are those people trying to create another world. And someone like Whitley Strieber, for example, I think is a perfect example of this. [See footnote]. I think he’s a science-fiction writer and a storyteller for a reason, and he’s also a famous abductee for a reason, and those two things go together. He’s a part of a cultural process that I think is going on all around us, and has been for decades. That’s how I see the paranormal, as a kind of opening up of the cultural framework into something else or other.
MS: I want to bring this conversation around to the specific theme and exploratory front of our magazine’s first issue, which is the “Forest Issue.” As a comparative scholar, what comes up for you in thinking about world mythology, or world ritual practices or mystical experience, with forest stories?
JK: With forest stories? Well, a lot.
The forest is essentially the place of non-civilization: it’s where you go to escape or move away from civilization, but it’s also where you go to recreate civilization. The wilderness is the wilderness because it’s not civilized, right? Assumedly, assumedly [not] civilized in the human way.
So I think of retreats, I think of ashrams, I think of monasteries, I think of mountains, I think of deserts – all of these things are really rich in religious allusions and associations. It’s really where you go to not be socialized into the story of the time, and it’s where you go to recreate another kind of story, that again is not represented yet in the city or the village that you left.
MS: The forest, for all these reasons, can be a deeply nourishing and positive influence in people’s lives, and has always been in mine. And yet for me, as an inheritor of narrative traditions, the two most obvious, prominent genres of forest stories both treat the forest as the home of the predator: the fairy tale – “Hansel and Gretel,” “Rumplestiltskin,” “Little Red Riding Hood” – and the camping-trip subgenre of the horror film. So that’s almost like a warning-away from desocialization.
JK: Yeah – one of the things I did when I was in the seminary, actually, was I worked at a summer camp in the Rockies that was run by the archdiocese of Denver, actually. And it was interesting. It’s where you sent your kids not to be in the city, to go out to the mountains, but also to be I guess socialized into a very Roman Catholic kind of space. So it wasn’t the horror camping movie you’re talking about, but it also wasn’t the place of fairies and demons and things. It was a different kind of wilderness.
Of course, wilderness today brings up all kinds of environmental and ecological themes that my students have taught me are very resonant with the paranormal, again. The paranormal is very much about one’s embeddedness in a society or in a natural environment, and ecology is very much moving in a very similar kind of direction: it’s about the whole, it’s about being embedded in a particular ecosystem. And a lot of paranormal phenomena that people report in the wild or the wilderness is very much about our non-separateness from that ecosystem.
1. The science-fiction and horror novelist Whitley Strieber insists that the decades-long series of encounters he had with strange beings, as documented in books including Communion, Transformation, and Breakthrough, did, on the one hand, really happen – he was there, he experienced them, and he is certain they were not mere hallucinations. Strieber insists on that point – but he is not at all dogmatic about any interpretation of his experiences, or of their meaning or implications, and remains open to a range of diverse explanations. Kripal and Strieber are friends, and co-wrote The Super Natural (in which their chapters alternate in dialogue). [Return].