Amelia Disappears
“This was like no cloud cover, fog or mist she’d ever flown through before. The needles on every gauge juttered, wouldn’t settle on a reading. She wondered how low they really were, wondered if the rush across her belly was a mirror response to the rush of (air? water?) across the belly of the plane. It had happened before . . . one skin riveted together out of flesh and aluminum. Hitting the face of the ocean at this speed, without eyes on to angle her in . . . iron wall to starling blinded by the sun. Nothing left but pinfeathers. She cracked a smile toward Noonan and focused back on the radio, listening for the dispatch from the Itasca that would fly them home.”
Amelia Earhart’s disappearance in 1937 triggered a storm of articles, books, and theories about what happened to her and her co-pilot fueling the avid interest of entire nations that still simmers today. As happened with much of this book, Amelia’s part in the events in The Ash Girl revealed itself in what felt like serendipity. I had been writing about Artemis’ story and The Princess of Disks on and off for several years when my eye turned to Frieda painting the cards.
One July 2, the annual media reboot of Amelia’s mysterious final flight caught my attention, particularly the date. I forgot about it and went on with my day. The following day Amelia was on my mind again. I had been fiddling with a timeline of when Frieda painted which cards based on the letters back and forth with Aleister Crowley. I had also noted major events around WWII to see the context of her endeavor. See how it all fit together.
July 2, 1937 Amelia disappeared. The year Frieda began painting the cards. The cusp of WWII.
I write.
Percy and Frieda at the breakfast table. He reads her the headlines (as is their imagined habit) about Amelia’s disappearance. She is stunned . . . because they were friends (a plausible but unconfirmed situation). Serendipity strikes for Frieda too, Crowley has asked her to take on painting his tarot deck. She hesitates. Then the sign comes while her marmalade stains the linen. Princess of Air. The nickname the women of her social set gave to Amelia. Princess of Air, Frieda’s preferred name for the Princess of Swords in Aleister’s deck, her feeling a deep affinity to the natural elements and a deep distaste for the weapons of war.
The undeniable urge to create.The glance upward and inward in wonderment and thanks when a message is delivered from the guides | gods to the artist heart-to-heart.
I feel her. It happened to me for years making this story. Is happening still.
Then the pull up to a bird’s view - who else felt it when Amelia went silent for good?
My research on her last radio dispatches gave birth to Billy Courtright, a fictionalized naval operator stationed in Hawaii, dreaming of home while monitoring the frequencies as part of the days long search for Amelia. An old man in Oxford, England listening to the radio at his kitchen table. Athena, the Goddess of War and ruler of creatures who travel by air, who was grooming Amelia to help her prevail in the midst of two Worlds Wars, hell bent on being declared the most powerful of all of the goddesses once and for all. A teenage girl, Charlotte, who has been drawing herself in the same night sky of stars since she was nine and on this day she draws herself in a plane sucked into a vortex, another vague symptom of her strangest of summers. Frieda dances and paints. The prophecy and The Ash Girl commence.
In story craft an initiating event triggers a new desire, amplifies wanting and need, and opens possibilities for the characters that weren’t possible before. We follow with growing interest as they make their way through the maze following breadcrumbs, counseled by wise guides bearing gifts, and fighting chthonic monsters (often one another) at every turn. Our human brains seem to be wired for this story shape, the more ups and downs the better, with a surprising end that leaves us both hungry for more and wholly satisfied.
The purpose of myth is threefold, Joseph Campbell (world expert in myth) said: in the form of story they teach us how to live in accord with another our families and communities, and to live in accord with our nature as human creatures as a part of a whole ecosystem; as ritual myths engulf us in an experience of unity that transcends both personal and community—shows us the true shape of the universe(s). He went on to say that we were in dire need of new myths. Ones that spoke to our times and our Age. Who will write them, Bill Moyers asked him in The Power of Myth? The poets, writers, and artists, he said. Could that be me? Then JC suggested that making a myth takes thousands of years and I despaired. I had only fifty more years of my life at the outside.
Then The Ash Girl began to answer the question, how is a myth made?
I have come to believe that the myths are making themselves all of the time. That the rituals are there for the making and the leap into the abyss of other planes and worlds. That the stories are in the ether, the dark matter, the river of collective consciousness looking for the storytellers to give them voice and shape. And looking for the readers to lean into them deeply and listen to the rhythm, the lessons, the ways of knowing how to live in accord vibrating through the ages.
A mythmaker knows this story and gave it to me. Now I give it to you.
