Occasionally Something Strange Happens

Mythology has a lot to teach us about how to make a product of any kind, and I woke up this morning chasing around one of the ways I find the most compelling and useful. Most of the interpretations of legends these days are psychological, i.e. what do these stories reveal about the people who are telling them. But I’ve also found them to be a template for how to cultivate depth and magnetism around a central text or object. Mystery is perhaps the most attractive part of being alive after all (at least for me). We don’t know what might happen, or why something might be happening, and the uncertainty of the entire enterprise pulls us further into the environment we find ourselves in, whether it be physical, conceptual, spiritual, etc. And if you’re the sort of person who enjoys building environments (products), then studying them can also be incredibly valuable in more literal ways.

As relates to a product, let’s say the basic transaction or exchange is an ancient culture. You discover over some period of time what your neck of the woods is best at, or even capable of, producing (candles, bread, livestock, coffee, paintings, clam bakes, leather coats, etc) and you spend some time getting better at making them. Eventually, as you’ve started to get into a groove over some number of generations (months/years), you add more form and structure to everything you need to make more of those things at the best quality you possibly can. To stick with the metaphor, you might invest in irrigation for your fields, or a school for training people to make clay pots, or construct farms or mines to gather ingredients for your famous dyes or wares at a more reliable pace. But where things go from being functional to fascinating is when, occasionally, something strange happens. And the emergent pattern of happenings, over time, becomes a mythological central text spread by various forms of word of mouth before eventually being written down.

Let’s say the culture above is ancient Greece, and let’s say the strange things happening start with the construction of Delphi. How the famous Oracle came to be there, and how long it had been there, is historically disputed in various and unnecessarily complex ways for the point of this piece. So, I’ll just point out that it’s referenced in the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are very old, and at that point it seemed like it had already been doing its thing for a while. The Oracle began to prophesy for visitors who made the trek to Mount Parnassus, and some of these prophecies began to come true in various ways, shapes, and forms, with some being more helpful than others. As an example of something helpful, the Oracle once told the King of Thera that he should start a colony in Libya, but the king didn’t know where that was. After 2 more trips for prophecies he found out and eventually did it, and the new colony went really well. As an example of something less helpful, Croesus (the king of Lydia) was told by the Oracle that if he attacked the Persians a great empire would be lost, and he proceeded to get his shit rocked by Darius.

Over a long period of time, Delphi became known as the omphalos, or belly button, of the world for the Greeks and an important location for most of the surrounding ancient cultures. It made Greece a place where something peculiar and haunting could happen to you in a non-reproducible way. You might lose a kingdom, and you might gain one. Or you might just end up getting high with a priestess in a cave. And where that connects to the matter at hand, at least for me, is that there’s always an opportunity to take something basic or straightforward and make it deeply interesting. How we each decide to do that is up to us, but I would recommend using the blueprint the Oracle gave you before making any serious plans.