What's going on here Karl?

In order to try to harness my fertile imagination for the ambiguous Forces Of Good, I have attempted to create fiction. Naturally, its more constuctive and productive to write about something that one is interested in. I continue to be fascinated with the concept of 'transmigration of the soul'. As a limited experiment I attempted 'resurgence', a short story about two people whom had known each other during past lives. Almost immediately, I had a problem. The premise was that one person recognizes, and approaches the other in the street. Try as I might, I couldn't portray that realistically. In my mind's eye, the second person becomes alarmed and seeks a policeman to resolve the unexpected harassment. Other than that, I had an interesting story. A secondary problem was that I kept having great ideas that I simply had to incorporate into the story. As you can imagine, there has to be a definite limit on content or it is no longer a short story.

The best solution was to write the short story as it was, take all the wonderful ideas to a separate project, and perhaps revise the short story later. The separate project, however, is shaping up to possibly be a multivolume novel. In an attempt to avoid just making up a bunch of malarkey to support whatever plot I devise, and because truth is much stranger than fiction, I needed to do some research before I could make much headway.

In the story I envision, the concept 'transmigration of the soul' is more a character than a setting or plot device or religious context, so it was necessary to get that right. This caused me to research Hinduism and its precursors: Brahmanism and the early Aryan and Vedic cultures, and the Indo-Europeans before that. When I learned about the Indo-Europeans I hit a mother lode of possibilities for my story. Elements of their cosmology instantly solved early plot difficulties and gave my vision more clarity.

Folklore to us is mostly amusing fol-de-rol, vestiginal remnants of things that were much more significant to earlier cultures. These ancient religions and customs are 'quaint' to us now, but what we see is only the current version of what has evolved and changed over time, adapting and mutating from its original version. There is a place in the world where the old Indo-European Earth Goddess was simply replaced with the Virgin Mary - with almost none of the surrounding ritual altered! What if, like old legends, these old religions were built on, or evolved from a kernel of truth? What if mysticism or pantheism, when practiced properly, was a viable, potent, and powerful practice in its time, and did not require the masquerading of coincidentally good fortune as gifts from the gods - as we believe the common practice was? What if the Indo-Europeans failed to communicate to posterity the protocols for practicing real majikal or religious power, because of a lack of writing? What would they be capable of doing if they walked the streets today?