MAPS
explore the stories behind the story of
The Ash Girl
facts, truths, images, links, treasures, and juicy bits by chapter
Reader Map
where in the world is The Ash Girl on its quest?
MAPS: Chapter 0
The Ash Girl opens in the North African region now more commonly called The Horn of Africa. In 1886 modern day Eritrea and Northern Ethiopia were a part of the Abyssinian and Nubian Empires. Why would the Greek Goddess, Artemis, be hunting so far from home? We might say that gods and goddesses as storied forces of nature know no boundaries of place; we might also look to historic record.
MAPS: Chapter 1
When Amelia’s disappearance made itself known as the trigger that started the events of The Ash Girl, I began to dig a bit. The excerpt above inspired the character of Billy Courtright, a US Navy radio operator who receives her last transmission in morse code. Yes, this is a little fictionalized bit of a theory about a historic unsolved mystery!
MAPS: Chapter 3
Doors between worlds are everywhere in The Ash Girl . . . door in the floor of an attic, the door to the goddesses’ cavern in your dreams, a god and goddess slipping into the body of a man and a woman to experience, briefly, the pleasures of flesh and bone.
MAPS: Chapter XIII
ATU XIII DEATH deserves to be Re-storied for our times. The Thoth deck took this on explicitly. Harris and Crowly laid the groundwork for contemporary readers, mystics, and makers of Tarot decks not to fear the Death card, or instill fear in their clients, but to take the metaphor into one’s bones and face the grief and the glory of re-making one’s self out of light and dark and ash and heart.