Although all my work is about loreologizing, loreology deserves its own category here because it involves a methodology for melting down the literal stuck parts of our guiding stories (personal or collective) into lore, ready for alchemical reshaping and expanding into new “loreways” forward.
My initial thinking was of loreology as a transformative restorying and reimagining set of practices within the work I had done down the decades, but I realized eventually that loreologizing IS my work and involved in every key part of it.
As a methodology, the phases of loreologizing begin in self-assessment and exploring whatever guiding story no longer serves, and why. We honor what the story gave us even while melting it down into its constituting beliefs, values, mythic motifs, and archetypes. Then, listening in to ourselves while keeping an eye on events in the outer world, we recraft what remains into a loreway, a new path forward.
It was gratifying to realize that all my work–personal myth, terrapsychology, and all the rest–were forms of loreologizing.
Loreology resources:
- “Loreology: An Alchemy of How Fictions Change Reality” presentation.
- C. Chalquist. Restorying Our Lore: Fiction, Vision, and Imagination as an Earth-Honoring Wisdom Path (doctoral dissertation).
- C. Chalquist. Lighting Our Lamps: Sparking Reenchantment in a World Gone Mad - in press.