Empty roads

I don't know how old I was, but I remember at some point realizing that mythology was just a religion that no one believed anymore. I must have been in early middle school somewhere, fifth or sixth grade. Something like that. It was while I was reading Asterix the Gaul. I was an obsessive Asterix reader when I was a kid, even though I didn't know my latin, and missed a lot of the jokes. I think the allure was that it was hard to get a hold of them where I lived. I only got Asterix when we went out of the country. I'm sure that there were places in the US you could get them, but I got my first Asterix in Australia, and most of the rest of my collection came from England, Australia, France and Germany.

But I was reading Asterix, and I kept wondering why they swore in Juno's name. Didn't make any sense. I actually took to swearing by Zeus and Orion and stuff for a while, because the biblical command is "Thou shalt not take *my* name is vain." And then I made the connect. It was a weird moment. I remember wondering, heretically, if that would happen with Christianity. If we'd have people studying the testaments as mythology and literature, rather than Revelation. Anyway.

This plays heavily in my book, for those of you who haven't caught on to that yet. There's a whole religion in Veridon that's on the cusp of being abandoned. The last shrines are crumbling, the last supplicants are changing their vestments. I want to do more with it, in the future books, but for now it's just a little setting. So much like that; things I just touch on in Heart, but really want to build out later on. We'll see. You'll see. Everyone will see.