Audio - God is Change: Polaris Manifesto, Part 2

¹Check out the essay companion to this audio dispatch. It’s full of links, resources, and other reference materials you may find interesting.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to "between starshine and clay", a weekly meditation on myth and culture by Jasmyne D. Gilbert. You are listening to the audio companion to my weekly newsletter with the same title.

[00:00:14] Today's recitation comes from my January 29th, 2025 dispatch called God is Change, Polaris Manifesto Part 2 and it's about some of the ways that we can approach change with support from my beloved Octavia E.Butler. So it opens with a reminder of the definition of myth that I'm working with for this entire series. Quote, A myth is a world building, often cosmological and cosmogonic story that explains how something came to be. A myth is not merely a religious fiction or collective delusion, but a narrativized set of organizing principles that shapes the reality of entire groups of people.

[00:00:56] That quote comes from me, in part one of the Polaris Manifesto, Starshine and Clay. Quick sidebar, what a flex to be able to cite my own scholarship. I love being at this point in my writing because it shows me how much I've meditated on the words of brilliant thinkers like Lucille Clifton, from whom I got the title of this newsletter, and Octavia Butler, who I cite over and over again. So it shows how much I've meditated on their words and allowed them to shape my own ideas. You'll hear a couple more self references in this dispatch, just FYI, and frankly, I love that for me.

[00:01:34] Anyway Back to the task at hand, so many of the great mythic traditions of the world emerged as reactions to change or resistance to a social and material reality that their founders wanted to defy.

[00:01:49] For example, Siddhartha Gautama resisted the class hierarchy of ancient Hindu society. Muhammad ibn Abdallah saw through hypocrisy and inequities in Mecca. The Enlightenment was a response to the violence and instability of the supposedly irrational Protestant Reformation, which itself was a revolt against the elitism and strictures of the Catholic Church.

[00:02:14] Each of these traditions —Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity— introduced sweeping, world changing movements that continue to reverberate in the present. Other examples of the ways myth has shaped culture include the Renaissance and the counterculture movement of the roughly the 60s, 1960s, most notably for how the convergence of the religious institutions, wealth, and the state influenced or suppressed resistance.

[00:02:42] Though the people living through those periods likely did not call their practices myths, their mythic traditions transformed their cultures and have had a lasting influence that echoes even now.

[00:02:53] What does all this tell me? First, resistance is our inheritance. Even religion, which I previously understood as peaceable, emerged and grew from conflict. Second, the ways we live are malleable. If I don't like the way my life is going, I have the power to change parts of it, or at least my perspective on it. And if enough people don't like the ways their lives are going either that dissatisfaction is fertile ground for a movement. Finally, change is inevitable and we have some capacity to influence how it impacts us.

[00:03:32] I can guarantee that my body and the world will change given enough time. It is up to me to decide how I will respond to those changes and whether and how I will resist or embrace them.

[00:03:49] All that you touch, you Change. All that you Change, changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change. Oh, yes! Okay. So, in all its delicious iconoclasm², that line is the first tenet of Earthseed from Lauren Oya Olamina, the protagonist in Octavia E. Butler's Parables series. I lovingly refer to Olamina as the High Priest of Change because she is the founder and leader of a new religion called Earthseed.

[00:04:27] And there's a quick sidebar, there's a footnote. In the written version of this that says why I call her that I'm not going to get into it today, but it's just fun for like tarot enthusiasts. Okay, so, uh, Olamina created Earthseed to guide herself and others through devastating and life shattering changes they were witnessing in their lifetimes. Earthseed grew from Olamina's defiance of her Christian upbringing, and in the aftermath of a failed US government corrupted by corporations and religious extremism. She was living during a period of dangerous instability, but she saw the writing on the wall and decided to respond to change directly and intentionally.

[00:05:11] People often call Octavia Butler a prophet. Take the recent wildfires in Los Angeles, for example, which many say Butler predicted in the Parables.

[00:05:21] Citing myself again. Quote, people describe Butler as a prophet for writing those novels. Whether she was divinely inspired is less important for this conversation. Instead, by focusing on the definition of prophet that emphasizes visionary leadership—the ability to recognize patterns and project them forward— we can see prophecy as the outcome of a series of events. In that light, a prophecy is subject to influence rather than an immovable matter of fate. Put another way, if the Parables predict our future, then Butler has offered readers a skeleton key for unraveling the current sociopolitical climate and transforming our communities.

[00:06:07] That quote comes from the dispatch titled, “You Don't Need Another Octavia Butler Think Piece” that I published on July 24th, 2024, which was an important week to Butler stands in the United States. So you should go read it if you're interested in the notion of prophecy as a practice.

[00:06:25] Referring back to the current piece. After the recent fires in Los Angeles, I noticed some folks online taking umbrage with others calling Butler a prophet. And for good reason, since it would be all too easy for people who misunderstand her work to fuse the Magical Negro trope with the Black-women-will-save-democracy BS.

[00:06:47] I am a student of myth, however, so I'm less interested in discarding the possibility of prophecy, precognition, premonition, and other extrasensory ways of knowing. Regardless, it's futile to argue about whether Butler was a prophet or whether prophecy as a concept even exists. We can't know the answer to that question, at least not in the way the world currently exists. And to me, her skill with reading the patterns in history and projecting them forward is something we can also learn to do.

[00:07:18] That's the whole point. That is the whole point of her body of work. Okay. Before I go off on a rant, let me, let me finish what I'm saying.

[00:07:28] So this eerie and skillful prescience is why Octavia E. Butler. is one of the most lauded speculative fiction authors and why her work has lasting resonance. Her novels have inspired real life resistance and community building efforts. A local bookstore named in her honor, Octavia's Bookshelf, has been organizing recovery efforts in response to the Eaton Fire that tore through Altadena mere weeks before the second inauguration of Donald Trump, events she tried to warn us about in the Parables.

[00:08:01] Just like the founding of major world religions, Butler's legacy demonstrates that the work of resistance and change is the practice of prophecy—a practice that demands vision, kinship, strategy, and will—and a little magic wouldn't hurt either.

[00:08:18] Turning now to the creative prompts, Every part of the Polaris Manifesto includes a set of prompts to encourage you to pull a new world from your imagination. Whether you're a writer, a visual artist, a musician, or something in between, use that spark of imagination to invite us into your creative vision.

[00:08:41] One, what does change mean to you? How do you handle change? Two, what cultural shifts have you noticed or do you perceive coming? What type of sense perception tells you that? Three, when do you expect the changes to manifest? Do you sense any of them coming in your own lifetime? What is your plan if or when they do manifest?

[00:09:10] Four what changes are you hoping to avoid? What changes do you want to see? And finally, five. Review your responses to the Polaris Manifesto Part 1, Starshine and Clay, and consider how the stories you are living shape your responses to these prompts

[00:09:32] It's also important to me to share other audio, text, and video resources that may help you tap into the wave of wisdom that informed this part of the Polaris Manifesto. I've curated several free resources for you to enjoy. Here's a quick rundown of the list, but please visit Jasmynegilbert.substack.com for more details. Obviously Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler are on the very top of the list. They are foundational texts and all Polaris roads lead to Octavia E. Butler. I don't know if y'all caught it by now, but I referenced, have referenced and will continue to reference her until my dying breath.

[00:10:18] The rant I was going to go on earlier was about the whole point of Octavia Butler's work is not whether she is a prophet or she was a prophet or magic is real or whatever. It's about pattern recognition, like the question isn't actually about prophecy. The question is about can you recognize a pattern and imply and, and apply that pattern to your life and the best ways that you can tap into what she was trying to show us are the Parables series and, unfortunately, the series is not finished.

[00:10:52] She left this world before she could finish the final one, Parable of the Trickster. But the first two, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents are widely and readily available. In fact, if you go to my Bookshop page, which I will link in the transcript and have linked in the previous, written version of this recitation, you can pick those books up in audio or in text, and I'll get a small commission. So please consider doing so.

[00:11:20] In my list of resources, I also included a link to my first ever peer- reviewed scholarly article called "From the End to Eden: Exploring Myth and Literature for a New World." It was published in the 2024 Mythological Studies Journal in December, and the subsection focused on speculative fiction and dominant narratives is especially relevant for our discussion here.

[00:11:47] The Octavia's Parables podcast is another great source, walking listeners chapter by chapter through Butler's works, and they start the podcast off with Parable of the Sower. Karen Armstrong also wrote an insightful book about how religions have shaped one another and the world. It's called The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. Again, also linked in my Bookshop. Help a sister out.

[00:12:13] Recently, Hyperallergic published an article about Octavia's Bookshelf, the local bookstore offering mutual aid and support to families impacted by the Eaton Fire, that I mentioned a little bit earlier.

[00:12:26] And finally, two of my most cited Butler scholars, adrienne maree brown and Ayana Jameson, had a public conversation about Octavia Butler and prophecy, which you can see on the New York Arts Live YouTube channel.

[00:12:40] There's also a separate list of PDF and EPUB materials available exclusively for paid subscribers, so if you're feeling abundant, and want to back my public research in cultural mythology, please consider signing up for a paid subscription to "between starshine and clay" at only 6 dollars a month.

[00:13:00] That concludes the Polaris Manifesto Part 2, God is Change. If you enjoyed what you heard today, catch up on the rest of this series about myth, speculative fiction, and social change by visiting jasmynegilbert.substack.com.

[00:13:15] It would mean the world to me if you subscribed to "between starshine and clay" and shared this dispatch with a loved one. I'm looking for people who share this vision and I know you can help them find me.

[00:13:29] Thank you for listening. Enjoy the rest of your week and I look forward to being back in your inbox very soon.

1. Dispatch cover art: John Jude Palencar, cover art for Parable of the Sower (1995).

2. Iconoclasm is not quite the right word here. I tend to use iconoclasm, sacrilegious, blasphemous, heretical, etc. interchangeably but they are different.