Why People Are Schizophrenic: A Myth

Some people might have seen my forum posts asking for help with thinking of a topic for a myth; well, I ended up thinking of one on my own, and this is the result ! Thanks to everyone that gave me suggestions, you were helpful.

There once was a small, riverside village in the northernmost regions of Europe. Not far from the island of Thule, it was nestled snugly between two parallel fjords. While houses lined the riverbanks, for convenient closeness to water, villagers had erected their occupational establishments all along the beaten paths that wound up the fjords' more accessible sides.

In one of these working huts lived a man who was both a blacksmith and a tailor: his blacksmith services were provided during the day so that village men who needed their nights' rest after long days of working hard didn't have to interrupt their evenings to visit the blacksmith's shop, while his tailoring was done solely at night so that the village women could have their children and husbands' clothes repaired for the very next day.

The man was an honest and hard working soul. He always did what he could to help any of his customers, and worked endlessly to meet their needs. Despite his charitable behaviours, however, the man would never consent to assist a customer in one of his practices if it was not the time of day to do so; he claimed that he needed to be fully focused on the task at hand in order to maintain any helpfulness on his current pursuit. On this point, the villagers knew, he could not be persuaded.

But the villagers were beginning to feel twinges of frustration with their local blacksmith and tailor; the women did not want to wait to be serviced and no more did the men. All within the small community were soon agreeing that the man's stubborn refusal to switch between trades whenever called upon to do so was selfish and ignorant of the village's needs as a whole. Finally, the village men hammered on his workshop door and demanded that he begin catering to their commands at once.

Despite the violence of the villagers' demands, the tradesman did not lose his head; instead he kept calm and politely refused their enraged bellows to heed their yellings, explaining once again that he simply worked better as a blacksmith when he was thinking of nothing but, and that he made a better tailor when he was surrounded only by clothes.

Eventually the men grew tired of pounding on their blacksmith's windows and doors, and they all headed off to the local pub to drink and discuss the useless tradesman's behaviour.

"Aye, the man is a selfish fool," grunted the barman as he wiped down a grimy mug with a greying dishcloth, "There is but one option that I can see to put an end to his disregard of us all―we must take him to the shaman on the fjord's peak, and see what god's magic she can work to make him see sense."

The announcement was met with a strangled silence. The men were clearly choked by the idea, and tied for an answer; the shaman was known to work in mischievous ways, and often had a way of twisting one's words or finding loopholes in requests, frequently giving the most innocent of requests terrible outcomes. She was generally left alone and only bothered in cases of extreme dire.

But the men, drunken and angry, felt breath trickle back into the silence and rose up in a great shout.

"To the tradesman's hut! Tonight we show him our true wrath!"

Back at the tradesman's home, he was resting, shaken, on his chair. Though he didn't regret his decision, he was sure it would end up in a violent ruckus; it was only a matter of time. Sure enough, behind shut eyes, the man suddenly heard the sound of an oncoming mob, and what sounded like the voices of drunken men coming to his hut to capture him.

He ran to his basement, just as the mob's loudness reached its peak and they smashed through his flimsy front door. It didn't take the enraged men long to find the tradesman, and when they discovered him down in his cellar they hoisted him up, binding him with rope, and marched him out of the little hut on their shoulders.

The journey to the top of the fjord was long and steep, and the careless men dropped the tradesman on more than one occasion, but just before dawn the shack belonging to the shaman came into view and the raucous men quieted their noisy progression in a wary hush.

They entered the shack, upon the shaman's commands:

"Ah," she spoke, in mystic tones, "so you seek once again the assistance of the gods..."

The men explained their village's peril and frustrations at the man who would not obey their requests to make available both his trades at one time. The shaman, twisting beads which looked horribly like the vertebrae of small animals between her spindly fingers, listened patiently to the tale, and when it was done, spoke once again in her croaky, mysterious voice, this time to the tradesman himself.

"Tradesman, your peers and foes alike say that you have neglected the needs of your community, granting them services but only to your own convenience. You must now feel the wrath of the gods for this selfish act. From now on, you will live a cursed life, doomed to obey the requests of your fellow villagers. Should a woman ask you to mend their child's trousers at noon, you must mend the trousers then. Likewise, should you be asked to craft a sword at night, you must hammer out your best right then. Go now."

As the shaman croaked her words, the village men looked on, wary of what they had done but grateful all the same. While the shaman had been making her curse, the tradesman had lifted into the air, emitting an unsettling blue light which had burned the ropes from around his body. He had fallen with a resounding crash at the end of the shaman's speaking, and now the men picked him up and made their progression back to the village once again.

Once back home, they dumped the cursed man on his doorstep and filtered back into their own homes, eager to tell their families of the night's adventure. The man himself crawled back inside and cowered, dreading the arrival of the morning's first customer.

Predictably, the first customers of the day were a group of wide-eyed women, goggling in awe as they handed over their torn clothes for the part-tailor, part-blacksmith to repair, and as he forcibly accepted the bundles. The same disorder happened all day, men and women bringing him clothes and swords to repair in alternation, and each time, the tradesman found himself unable to refuse them. His arms extended themselves willingly while inside him his mind and heart seethed at the unfairness of the fate that had befallen him.

Days went on like this, until the time stretched into weeks, and eventually months, and with each passing hour the cursed man felt himself grow more and more distant from the world around him, his will to hate the men that had did this to him serving as the only bridge between his sanity and insanity. He traversed this bridge more and more frequently everyday, until he knew that he could no longer handle the wearing and destructive journey between planes. His mental self finally collapsed, unable to make the journey back to sane mind, and now he could know nothing but anger and hatred, for he would never be able to make it back to reason and sanity again. His curse still remained, but he was no longer helpful in his new state, flickering back and forth between trades but unable to carry out the duties they entailed.

The villagers recognized the man’s demoted sanity and skills and grew angry at him yet again; they felt he had left them stranded again, and so everyone in the small town persecuted and looked at him with spite from then on. No one could understand his woes.

It was discovered that the tradesman’s children, all of whom had grown up long ago and left their small village to see the world, had also transcended into this state, an effect of the shaman’s horrible curse. Now, it is said that all who are what we today call schizophrenic are descendants of the poor man who was once a tailor and a blacksmith, but ended up as nothing more than a deranged and lonely soul.