SPIRITUAL SOAP: Weird & Güd - We Live Between Nightmares & Dreams
Heaven & hell, but make it psychological.
Before we were The Black Sheep, we were a newsletter named Spiritual Soap. Please enjoy this article from our history!
I enjoy research too much and I’m a shameless critic. Weird & Güd is the conjoining of those misanthropic qualities into something useful: recommendations and fascinations neatly packaged together for you every week, some hermit-ism required after all.
The Weird
It’s almost spooky season, where the dark side of our mythological traditions comes to light — just in a more consumer-friendly, marketable manner. Despite science and society doing their best to neutralize the ghosts and crazed killers we’ve always dreaded, humans remain a fearful animal.
Sure, we’re at the top of the food chain now that we’ve put the rest of the food chain into zoos or history books, but nearly all of human existence was spent negotiating that chain. We’re predators for many animals, but we’re prey for others. Being a part-time prey animal with the ability to tell stories has birthed an unending genre of fear-focused creations, from modern horror movies to ancient demon tales.
Zdzislaw Beksinski — He painted nightmares, but he also lived them.
Figures of fear are often tailored to their culture. The monsters that terrorize us are the products of a universal recipe — history, location, and religion. The half-goat, half-demon called Krampus that threatens Central European children every December is a blend of Christian and pagan beliefs. Monsters are also inhabitants of the lands they haunt; desert cultures don’t need rituals against sea monsters.
There are monsters in every culture. They might not have the same name, the same magic, or the same appearance, but they are all borne of the same need — putting a face to our fears.
When life is as dangerous, painful, unpredictable, and unexplainable as human life has always been, having a name to curse is comforting.
I’d probably let Krampus take my kids away too if they looked like that.
One monster that’s reached celebrity status in its universality has many names but serves one purpose — scaring your kids into submission. Known as Saalua in Iraq, Namahage in Japan, and Baba Yaga in Russia, you probably know this monster best as none other than The Boogeyman. This icon amongst monsters exists in some form in any culture where children are occasionally insufferable — meaning every culture.
The Boogeyman is a versatile figure, taking the form of whatever scares you most. Not one to worry about stereotypes, in Hispanic cultures, El Coco (The Coconut) conveniently wants nothing more than to eat children who refuse to fall asleep. You’d think kids would eventually wonder if their parents were in cahoots with El Coco.
Death Looking into the Window of One Dying, Jaroslav Panuška
Fear finds us in every culture and climate, from the tropical environment that produces a coconut monster to regions where the endlessness of unexplored forests hides its own monsters. Slavic mythology features yet another monster on a diet of humans, but her motivations are a little more complex than getting kids to sleep.
Baba Yaga is the typical forest-dwelling witch in some ways, with her long nose, decrepit appearance, and hut built of bones. Yet in other ways, she transcends the child-control role of a boogeyman. Baba Yaga sometimes helps the unfortunate figures that encounter her, offering wisdom and magical solutions like one might expect of a village matriarch.
This paradox between Baba Yaga’s giving and taking isn’t just messy storytelling. Like many monsters, she’s a product of something universal manifested locally. Baba Yaga is the face put to our ancient fear of nature, a force that both gives and takes just as unpredictably. In one story, an unmended fence, an unfed cat, and the forest itself turn against Baba Yaga and block her from pursuing a pair of children who are sent to her by an evil stepmother.
The natural world itself rebels against the indifference of mother nature to their degradation and suffering.
Baba Yaga with Moth and Beetle by Tin Can Forest
Whatever boogeymen haunt your shadows, they have a story to tell. Though a foreign feeling today, we once lived almost entirely as prey; it’s no accident that our monsters have a taste for human flesh.
As spooky season draws near and we indulge in our ancient companion called fear, remember that it’s only our present safety that lets us enjoy imagining its absence.
The Güd
Love is one of the few kinds of insanity we appreciate. Talking to yourself on the sidewalk? Social distance, please. Pathologically picking fights with people on the internet all day? It might be time to talk to someone. Don’t find The Office funny? Such insanity is a danger to society.
Love can drive us just as insane as any substance or disorder because it’s bigger than us, beyond our control, and exists in the realm of the unknown. Love can both empower you and leave you powerless. It has fascinated us philosophically for centuries.
We’ve tried to understand it as a form of the supernatural — a magical root being the only possible explanation for such mysterious power.
We’ve tried to understand it as an institution — a higher form of partnership achieved through the civilizing force of society.
We’ve tried to understand it as biology — a flurry of hormones and evolutionary mechanisms that preserve our species through the use of pleasant hallucinations.
None have satisfied our understanding enough to settle on any single definition. Love can be all these things or none; like the hard to pin animal it is, love transforms itself for each person it visits. For some, love is patient and steady, for others it’s the chaos they’ve always known, and for others yet, love is another lurking monster they run from.
For all, love is the great unknown.
Much of our lives are lived in the unknown, though we desperately pretend otherwise. With love, there is no pretending; you come face to face with the unknown in another person and must choose whether you accept this adventure into the unseeable.
The unseen aspect of love is what makes it a force of such mystery, misery, and joy.
How much can you enjoy a movie whose plot and ending you already know? How much can you grow if every challenge you meet is perfectly planned?
The fantasy that fuels budding love isn’t an error, but intentionally designed. We meet someone new and immediately project our idealized version of them onto the gaps in our knowledge. You fantasize about adopting a dog together only to find out later they’re ethically opposed to owning pets. Oops.
The early stages of love get a lot of criticism; “It’s not real love. Early relationships are just infatuation.” There’s a hint of love hipster-ism in the passionate decrying of early love. “Wait til you’ve been together 5 years, then you’ll know what love is,” only shortly followed by the next one-up, “5 years? Might as well be dating. You don’t even know each other until 10 years of marriage.”
Young love isn’t a hazing or a scout’s badge to earn, it’s a crucial step that begins a never-ending endeavor.
The start of love is the boldest confrontation with the unknown — is this person my future spouse or my future murderer? As you get to know the person and decide they aren’t a murderer and might even be a good partner, the fantasy you hold about who they are isn’t some newbie mistake, it’s a core part of love that carries the relationship into the future.
The fantasy we hold about our partners is our belief in who they could be. If your fantasy and their goals align, you’re creating the Michaelangelo Effect.
Named for the famous sculptor’s belief in bringing out the perfect form already within a stone, this phenomenon describes how we mold our partners with nothing more than our beliefs about them.
This isn’t the green light for running back to your raggedy ex wielding a head full of fantasies meant to transform them. The crucial clause for the Michaelangelo Effect is sculpting a piece of marble into, as Michaelangelo believed of his marble, what the marble wanted to become. If you’re sculpting a stone that loves its life as a stone, your fantasies of turning it into an awe-inspiring statue of David will only make you and that stone miserable.
Some marble would rather crumble.
Another example of the power in expectations, the Michaelangelo Effect is about how we see each other. It’s a reminder that your belief in the goodness or lack thereof in a person doesn’t exist only in your head. The fantasies we hold in love are love; we treat people based on what we believe about them.
If you think your partner is trustworthy, you’ll treat them as such. If their belief about themself aligns with your belief, they’ll respond to your trust by being even more trustworthy. If you believe your partner is a great cook and eat what they cook like it’s your last earthly meal, they’ll put more effort into their cooking and move closer to your belief about them being a great cook.
Your beliefs about your partner can shape them in the opposite way, too. Just like our high expectations are a powerful influence for achievement, expecting the worst from your partner can bring out exactly that.
Love terrifies and thrills us because it is born of delusion.
We step into the unknown of another person and fill the darkness with our dreams for what they could be. Wishing for the person “of our dreams” isn’t as cliché as it sounds. The match between those dreams and our partner’s dreams for themself is what creates the magic needed for something as wonderfully insane as sharing your entire life with another person.
Perhaps love grows best with someone who’s just as delusional about your brilliance as you are about theirs.
I hope this makes your week a little weirder and a little güder. Now go forth, be weird, and above all, be güd.
I sit alone at a desk biting my nails to bring you every edition of Spiritual Soap. Is it worth it? Don’t tell me, show me.
This writeup was beautiful. The only thing to fear is totally forgetting what true fear is, we're very fortunate to live the way we do now. The world could be a lot scarier.
I will show this article to my next partner and insist they believe me into being an ethical business tycoon. Is it possible? Well that's for them to imagine. I love love.😍
I love when I am surprised by the subject in “The Gud.” Your selection of topics are sometimes particularly imaginative in the way they relate and differ. Also how do you have a such a wealth of appropriate retro comic book images to fit your thoughts!?