From MIT's Media In Transition series. I asked Neil Gaiman, who created the Endless, a question.
Question: I am the founder of the Small Denominational Order of Loose Change and what I have done with this website is play with the mythologies of the people I know. I have also been interested in the recursion between the story that somebody tells and the myth that people adopt in their daily lives. ...Whether you are aware of it or not, Mr. Gaiman, the Endless have actually become godforms for quite a number of people. They actually use them the way that [occultists] would use angels and things like that.
I am sure that both of you have had interactions with fans that tend to take things a step further, so I was wondering how it is for you to find these people who have taken your fiction and made it a part of their daily lives?
Gaiman: I suppose the most honest answer is "It has nothing to do with me." I have been astonishingly lucky, I have nice fans. Clive Barker's fans slash their wrists and ask him to sign in their blood and present him with severed cat's heads and things. And Stephen King's fans turn up in his attic claiming to have bombs. But my fans are really nice people and tend to be astonishingly well-balanced too, which seems to be kind of unfair, but they are. They tend to be reasonably sensible.
I think most of the ones who do incorporate The Endless into their own personal mythologies, do it because The Endless are anthropomorphic personifications of things which it is very helpful sometimes to be able to anthropomorphically personify. I created Death as the kind of death that I would like. At that moment when I am looking down at this wrecked body, I want somebody sensible and kind of nice to say, "You know you really should have looked both ways before crossing that street." And not some skeleton who is going to make me feel creepy. I want somebody who is good at this, somebody who has obviously been doing this for a long time. So I created Death and that's who she is and what she does. Without getting too weird about this, I'll say that there was definitely a sense with all seven of them that I wasn't so much inventing them as I was discovering them. As if I was carving them out of blocks of marble in which they had been waiting the whole time. But also they are useful -- they are nice ways to think about things and if they help, I think that is great.
The only time that I was ever really troubled and worried about any of this stuff was in early 1991. Sandman 19, Midsummer Night's Dream hadjust come out and I got a phone call from my editor, Karen Berger saying, "Look we just had a suicide. Someone just killed himself and they found a copy of the Sandman on the body and a suicide note signed,'The Sandman.' We discovered this because a bunch of police came down to the local comic book store with TV cameras. You may well have caused a suicide." And this seemed very strange to me since I could not imagine anyone having just read Sandman 19 and then killing themselves. Okay yes, this is a dark, strange, occult thing. It's like what? Charlie Vess's fairies in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, I don't think so. But I had had a really bad weekend so I thought, what if I did? What if something I wrote something sent somebody over the edge? Eventually the conclusion I came to was that I am a responsible creator.
I create as responsibly as I can. Anyone who would kill himself after reading Sandman 19 would have killed himself after watching Married With Children or reading the Bible. This is too weird. And later it actually turned out that it was a murder, it wasn't a suicide. A guy called Ed Houseneck murdered his lover and tried to make it look like an occult and satanic murder by leaving a copy of Sandman, which neither of them had read! It turned out they were X-men fans. And the guy hung himself when the police found out and he left sort of an apology. So that is the nearest that I have come to worrying about that stuff. On the whole I don't. I figure my job is to make up stories and other people can incorporate them into their lives if they want to. And they are free not to. You'd be astonished at the number of them who don't.
This last was said with a look at me which implied I might need to get a life. That's okay. He doesn't know me. As far as I'm concerned, he did, in writing, cut away the marble. Do you know the joke about the sculptor? When asked, how do you sculpt an elephant he said, "I just take a block of marble and cut away everything that doesn't look like an elephant."
Back to the Chapterhouse
Back to the Loose Banishing which uses the Endless as godforms.