Words Rah Loves: Cabal

Cranky Rah has been using the word cabal a lot lately. Also, bifurcated.

(Don't ask why; when someone uses the words cabal and bifurcated a lot, it's safe to assume you should keep your distance from the mess that is that person's life at the moment.)

Anyway, cabal is a pretty cool word. A cabal is a group of individuals meeting secretly, usually for political purposes. One might use it like this:

The cabal summoned to Cranky Rah's cave during the new moon is scheming to take over the world.

(Please note: This is not a technically accurate usage of the word. If Cranky Rah was scheming to take over the world, she would not employ a cabal. She would just do it herself.)

Not this kind of madonna.

Anyway, cabal comes from the Medieval Latin cabbala from the even older Hebrew qabbalah. If one is of a certain age, one might equate the word with the Jewish mysticism tradition weirdly embraced in the 90s (that would be the 1990s) by the weird, multi-talented, once-upon-a-time-Catholic singer-actress Madonna.

The word qabbalah means, loosely, "something received," and the related mystic tradition is, like most mystic traditions...well, mystic and esoteric and kind of hard to pin down. In any event, some of the ideas of Jewish kabbalah-ism were embraced by a sect of occultist Christians during the Renaissance, and it seems to be at that point that the word took on its flavor of secrecy (occultism not really being mainstream in the world of Christianity).

The word retained a purely religious meaning until the 1660s and the reign of Charles II, he of, officially at least, England, Scotland and Ireland. Poor Charles Stuart had a rough time getting to the throne. When he was 19, his dad Charles I was beheaded, and II had to flee to France in order to retain his own gorgeous black tresses. (Those Stuarts had some good hair.) In 1660, after suffering the mind-numbingly boring rule of Oliver Cromwell (turned out that not only did Cromwell not have good hair, he was down on theater, sports and colorful clothing), the people of England asked Charles to pretty please come back and be king. Which he did, and on his 30th birthday no less.

Seriously. Check out
that hair.

Charles II was a man who knew how to party. When he entered London, bells rang, fountains flowed with wine, and the nobles got decked out in all the cloth of silver and gold they hadn't been able to wear during Cromwell's days.

But had II's luck changed? Not really. In the first years of his reign, England was hit by a plague that killed somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 people in London alone—the year before the Great Fire burned through 373 acres of the city. And II managed to get himself into a war with the Dutch.

It was in part because of that war with the Dutch (the second of four Anglo-Dutch wars) that one of II's closest counselors lost the king's faith and was replaced by a group of five ministers: Thomas Clifford, Lord Arlington, George Buckingham, Anthony Ashley and Lord Lauderdale. These men got together (more or less; they weren't so much of the "all for one" ilk as of the "more for me" persuasion) and arranged a secret treaty pulling France into the fray against the Dutch.

So check out the first letters of their last names: CABAL.

Isn't that cool? It's just a coincidence, but it did help popularize the word at the time, and it's carried carried sinister connotations ever since.

II, by the way, kept his head and his crown on top of it. But he didn't leave behind a legitimate heir, so his unlikeable younger brother James took the throne, a misfortune that led directly, 60 years later, to the massacre of Cranky Rah's peeps on a desolate Scottish moorland and to the vote for Scottish independence happening today.

So it just goes to show that good hair does not a good leader make.

Where Do We Go From Here? The Hero's Journey, Part 1

Cranky Rah loves to get out of her cave if it means going on a journey. The Great Ocean Road in Australia, the tiny walled town of Rothenburg, Germany. The Rocky Mountains, the Okefenokee Swamp. The Highlands of Scotland, of course.

Maybe this is why I dig the Hero's Journey so much—and why, as The Three know, I can go on about it. When I do go on about something with The Three, I usually ply them with cocoa and treats (okay, they bring the treats; I just give them excuse to bake something chocolate). Since it appears I can't deliver cocoa through cyberspace (is that why there's chocolate on the floor under my desk, or was that just the Poet-Accountant eating ice cream at 6 a.m. again?), I'll break this into three posts. Today, we'll just tackle the question What the heck is this thing, the Hero's Journey?

You can read entire books about the Hero's Journey (I particularly like The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler), but I broke it down a little for The Three. I also focused on the first half of the journey for them because the first thing The Three told me when we started getting together was that while they love making up characters and developing backstory, it's the plot that snags them—figuring out how to make the ideas they have happen in a way that makes sense, figuring out where those characters are going to go.

First, the backstory of the Hero's Journey: The mythologist Joseph Campbell studied myths from around the world and believed that the reason certain stories are repeated over and over in vastly different cultures is because they deal with universal questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? What is good and evil, and what should I do about it?

Not Godzilla,
but copyright free!

Most stories are, in essence, about a search: a girl searches for love or freedom or herself; a boy searches for the mother who abandoned him or to make a name for himself or to discover the antidote to a poison; a detective searches for a murderer; Japanese citizenry search for a way to escape Godzilla. This search is what we call the Hero's Journey, and you'll find it in The Odyssey, Shakespeare, Cinder, Agatha Christie, Shrek and The Hunger Games. Some books and movies are obvious journeys, like Star Wars, The Lightning Thief and The Lord of the Rings. Others don't involve a physical journey but are Hero's Journeys nonetheless, like Iron Man, Pride and Prejudice and Divergent. All very different stories, but all with similar characteristics.

Here's the Hero's Journey in a nutshell: A hero starts out in her ordinary world but soon ventures (or is dragged) into an unfamiliar world where she must accomplish a task. She encounters challenges and tests, and she confronts a villain or villains. In the end, she either succeeds at her task or doesn't, but she's grown, her outlook on the world has changed and life will never be the same again.

Don't be turned off by the words hero and villain. By hero, we mean the main character; the person the story's about; the person who has the most at stake and who will change the most by the end. There are lots of different types of heroes, including dark, troubled anti-heroes who are their own worst enemy and heroes who aren't particularly heroic. And by villain, we mean the character who's getting in the main character's face in some way; a villains doesn't always need to mean the main character harm.

Also, don't be turned off if you think this all sounds a lot like an adventure story. It's true that the Hero's Journey is easy to see in quests like Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz. If you read about the Hero's Journey a lot, you'll come across words like supernatural and fabulous forces and battle language like victory and power. But the Hero's Journey is just as relevant to stories that don't have a physical or mystical quest. The Hero's Journey is, at its root, a character's inner journey. Writers who are sitting around scratching our heads and wondering what's going to happen next can use the Hero's Journey as a guide for developing a strong plot and memorable characters.

Another kind of caveat,
the ungrammatical kind

Before we get into the ooey-gooey viscera of the Hero's Journey, there's one caveat (there's always a caveat): This is an art, not a science. The steps I'm going to outline are just pieces in a puzzle. Each one can be left out, twisted or put in a different order. It's up to you, after all: You're in charge. (Bwa-ha-ha!)

In the next post, we'll explore plot and how to get your character on her journey.