5 Men
Blue Overtone Eagle
Song of Persephone*
Lord of the
Underworld –
You captured me,
abducted
Overwhelmed and took
me down
Down to Darkness and
Chaos
Down to the Soul of
Night
Down to your Kingdom
below us
Down where there is
no Light
To the Land of the
Dead –
Shades of long ago
and might-have-been –
Where Obsessions
rule, Ghosts live
Old Sins revive and
breathe again
Ignorant was I in
Ways of Seduction
Masquerading as Love
– perfect Prey
For the rapacious
Wolf of Desire –
The Eagle of
Transformation
In your long black
Chariot
You came for me
inevitably
Now I am Queen of
the Underworld
I am Priestess of
Mystery
When Innocence is
Violence bound
Then is a Maiden
lost –
And there a Myth is
found.
*Persephone, the
daughter of Demeter and Zeus, was the wife of Hades and Queen of the
Underworld. The myth of her abduction by
Hades was frequently used to explain the cycle of the seasons.
©Kleomichele Leeds
Octavia E. Butler signs a copy of The Fledgling, October 2005
Octavia Estelle Butler (June 22, 1947 – February 24, 2006) was an African American science fiction writer. A multiple recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, in 1995 she became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.
Butler was born in Pasadena, California. After her father died, Octavia was raised by her widowed mother. Extremely shy as a child, she found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing. As a teen she began writing science fiction. She attended community college during the black power movement, and while participating in a local writer's workshop was encouraged to attend the Clarion Workshop, which focused on science fiction. She soon sold her first stories and in the late 1970's Butler became sufficiently successful as an author that she was able to pursue writing full-time. Her books thereafter drew the favorable attention of awards judges. She taught writer's workshops, and eventually relocated to Washington. Butler died of a stroke at age 58.
Early life
Octavia Estelle Butler was born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California, the only child of Octavia Margaret Guy, a housemaid, and Laurice James Butler, a shoeshine man. Butler's father died when she was seven. Octavia was raised by her mother and maternal grandmother in what she would later recall as a strict Baptist environment.
Growing up in the racially integrated community of Pasadena allowed Butler to experience cultural and ethnic diversity in the midst of racial segregation. She accompanied her mother to her cleaning work, where the two entered white people's houses through back doors, as workers. Her mother was treated poorly by her employers.
"I began writing about power because I had so little."
Octavia E. Butler, in Carolyn S. Davidson's
"The Science Fiction of Octavia Butler."
From an early age, an almost paralyzing shyness made it difficult for Butler to socialize with other children. Her awkwardness, paired with a slight dyslexia made schoolwork a torment, led her to believe that she was "ugly and stupid, clumsy, and socially hopeless". She became an easy target for bullies. As a result, she frequently passed the time reading at the Pasadena Central Library. She also wrote reams of pages in her "big pink notebook". Hooked at first on fairy tales and horse stories, she quickly became interested in science fiction magazines, such as Amazing Stories, Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She began reading stories by John Brunner, Zenna Henderson, and Theodore Sturgeon.
"Why aren't there more SF Black writers? There aren't because there aren't. What we don't see, we assume can't be. What a destructive assumption."
Octavia E. Butler, in "Octavia E. Butler: Telling My Stories."
At age 10, she begged her mother to buy her a Remington typewriter on which she "pecked stories two fingered". At 12, she watched the televised version of the film Devil Girl from Mars (1954) and concluded she could write a better story. She drafted what would later become the basis for her Patternist novels. Happily ignorant of the obstacles that a black female writer could encounter, she became unsure of herself for the first time at the age of 13, when her well-intentioned aunt Hazel said: "Honey ... Negroes can't be writers." But Butler persevered in her desire to publish a story, even asking her junior high school science teacher, Mr. Pfaff, to type the first manuscript she submitted to a science fiction magazine.
After graduating from John Muir High School in 1965, Butler worked during the day and attended Pasadena City College (PCC) at night. As a freshman at PCC, she won a college-wide short story contest, earning her first income ($15) as a writer. She also formed the "germ of the idea" for what would become her novel Kindred. An African-American classmate involved in the Black Power Movement loudly criticized previous generations of African Americans for being subservient to whites. As Butler explained in later interviews, the young man's remarks were a catalyst leading her to respond with a story providing historical context for the subservience, showing that it could be understood as silent but courageous survival. In 1968, Butler graduated from PCC with an associate of arts degree with a focus in History.
Rise to success
Although Butler's mother wanted her to become a secretary in order to have a steady income, Butler continued to work at a series of temporary jobs. She preferred less demanding work that would allow her to get up at two or three in the morning to write. Success continued to elude her. She styled her stories after the white-and-male-dominated science fiction she had grown up reading. She enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles, but switched to writing courses through UCLA Extension.
During the Open Door Workshop of the Screenwriters' Guild of America, West, a program designed to mentor minority writers, her writing impressed one of the teachers, noted science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison. He encouraged her to attend the six-week Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Clarion, Pennsylvania. There, Butler met the writer Samuel R. Delany, who became a longtime friend. She also sold her first stories: "Child Finder" to Ellison, for his anthology The Last Dangerous Visions (still unpublished), and "Crossover" to Robin Scott Wilson, the director of Clarion, who published it in the 1971 Clarion anthology.
For the next five years, Butler worked on the series of novels that later become known as the Patternist series: Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), and Survivor (1978). In 1978, she was finally able to stop working at temporary jobs and live on her writing. She took a break from the Patternist series to research and write Kindred (1979), and then finished the series with Wild Seed (1980) and Clay's Ark (1984).
Butler's rise to prominence began in 1984 when "Speech Sounds" won the Hugo Award for Short Story and, a year later, Bloodchild won the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award for Best Novelette. In the meantime, Butler traveled to the Amazon rain forest and the Andes to do research for what would become the Xenogenesis trilogy: Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989). These stories were republished in 2000 as the collection Lilith's Brood.
During the 1990's, Butler worked on the novels that solidified her fame as a writer: Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). In 1995, she became the first science-fiction writer to be awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship, an award that came with a prize of $295,000.
Octavia E. Butler, reading the self-penned description of herself included in Parable of the Sower during a 1994 interview with Jelani Cobb.
In 1999, after her mother's death, Butler moved to Lake Forest Park, Washington. The Parable of the Talents had won the Science Fiction Writers of America's Nebula Award for Best Science Novel and she had plans for four more Parable novels: Parable of the Trickster, Parable of the Teacher, Parable of Chaos, and Parable of Clay. However, after several failed attempts to begin The Parable of the Trickster, she decided to stop work in the series. In later interviews, Butler explained that the research and writing of the Parable novels had overwhelmed and depressed her, so she had shifted to composing something "lightweight" and "fun" instead. This became her last book, the science-fiction vampire novel Fledgling (2005).*
MEN
Kin 135: Blue Overtone Eagle
I empower in order to create
Commanding mind
I seal the output of vision
With the overtone tone of radiance
I am guided by the power of abundance.
The 13 Moon/28-day cycle is the key that opens the harmonic frequency knowledge of the solar ring which precipitates heightened awareness previously unknown.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2017-2018.
The Sacred Tzolk'in
Sahasrara Chakra (Dali Plasma)
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