Myth, Magic, and the Mind of Neil Gaiman on Wild River Review

Myth, Magic and the Mind of Neil Gaiman on the Wild River Review.

WRR: As time marches on and cultures collide, new cauldrons of belief are stirred and new faith systems arise from reformulated archetypes. In American Gods, you’ve presented the collision of old and new culture in a poignant way where the gods of the old world fight for survival against the deities/archetypes of the modern age. Do you feel that we are at the crossroads of belief?

No, I think that we are in more or less exactly the same place we’ve been for probably the last 250-300 years which is to say that on the one hand you have – you have the forces of science, you have materialism, you have religion as something advanced and for want of a better word, fairly liberal. And you also have fundamentalists, back to the book religion, and all of those things -I think that’s where we still are.

And it’s where we were, where we’ve been at for a long time. I find it bizarre that here we are in 2007 in a world in which there are states in America arguing about, still fighting about whether or not to allow evolution onto their syllabus, it’s bizarre and strange. And I have to say I find it quite reassuring in some ways. At the end of the day, some things really don’t change.