The Legend Begins
We proudly present the opening of The Legend of Sai Rayanna in this
30-minute audio clip. You can listen to it right off the page with the
mini-player provided here or load it down to put on your iPod.
Right-click here to download the sound file.
The Legend - True or False?
Thank you so much for letting us hear the beginning of The Legend of Sai Rayanna. So let us start with the obvious question. Is this story a truthful rendition of legend and history, or is it fiction?
Both. We are dealing with the actual history. The demon invasion and the Outland Wars did take place. Sai Rayanna was a real person (if it is proper to call the Solar Avatar a person). She was our first Empress, and her descendants govern the Empire today.
The Legend of Sai Rayanna is the story of the dawn of the current Age. Everything that has happened in Sai Herthe since then - for the last three-and-a-third millennia - is fundamentally related to this story. We are living the Rayannic Heritage.
However, when we decided to make this a novel, it became apparent that we could not deal only with the great historical figures - Sai Rayanna, Queen Caran and so forth. We needed to tell a lot of the story from the perspective of more minor characters that history and legend do not record. Obviously, these characters have to be fictional, as do most of the non-major events.
So the maidens in this first section are all fictional characters, and the events are fiction?
Yes. But at the same time they represent the kind of characters and events we know to have happened. The Outland Demons did raid and burn villages, so here we imagine one of the villages they destroyed and a survivor from it. Before Queen Caran raised her Chenti, many Raihira-maidens were already being touched by the spirit of Sai Vikhë, the great battle-Angel, and their contemplation brought about the beginning of the Vikhelic (martial) Arts as we now know them. So we are imagining the kind of individuals that we know must have existed.
Is there an advantage in your view to telling this story in novel form rather than as, say, a traditional verse-Epic?
Yes - it is more approachable for the modern mind. And that consideration goes deeper than it may at first appear.
This story is set at the beginning of the present phase of the great World-Cycle. Things were changing, not only in the modern historical sense, but on a deeper level. Maid was changing. She was becoming more a creature of the earth - as we know her today.
The history of maid, as we know, is the history of a spiritual being becoming ever more deeply enmeshed in matter. The events of the Rayannic era were a watershed in that process. Part of the reason the Outland Wars could happen at all is that maid had become vulnerable to physical attack. New things were happening that could not have happened before, and new ways had to be found to deal with this crisis.
We don't think this is something the traditional Epic can quite convey, because it depicts events in their Archetypal Wholeness - not as they appeared to individuals at a particular point in history. The true Epic is superior to the novel. But the novel can do certain things the true Epic cannot,and those are the things we are trying to do in this work.
It is rather like the late iron-age itself. We can do technical things that we could not do before, although those technical things are of a lower and lesser order than the spiritual achievements of the societies of an earlier Age. On the psychological plane, the novel is analogous to modern technics. It does things at ground-level - on the level of individual consciousness in this case - that older societies would never have tried to do. They are things that belong exclusively to our Age of deep materialization.
We are using the "literary technics" of the end of this Age of Iron to look at its beginning.
So part of what you are doing is trying to depict the sensibility of an age very different from our own?
Yes, exactly. And only the novel can do this. And at the same time, in order to convey that very different sensibility, we need at times a poetic approach that is not strictly novelistic. So it is an interesting undertaking.
Part of what we are doing is depicting the transitional state of maid and her world from semi-aethyrial to almost-fully-materialized. Our aim is to capture not only the great events that lie at the foundation of our current feminine civilization, but also a particular and seminal moment in the history of the consciousness of maid.
It is very exciting from the little we have heard so far. How long before we see the book?
It is a large undertaking but we are working on it quite rapidly. There is a huge energy behind this. We feel that Dea is guiding us. It is not imminent, but we are hoping to keep you informed of news and progress via this site.
