This morning I woke up and checked Threads and saw a conversation about the prescience of the late writer Octavia Butler. People were calling her clairvoyant and that immediately got my attention. I’d read Butler’s book Kindred, a tale of time travel that I loved. In fact I loved it so much I’m not sure why I hadn’t read any of her other books, including the two that were the subject of online conversation, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.
Apparently in Parable of the Sower, Butler writes about how the city of Altadena, where the tale is set, is being ravaged by wildfires. Altadena is sadly one of the hard hit regions of Los Angeles in the current wildfire tragedy. Home to historic Black middle class neighborhoods, Altadena is also where Butler lived for a time.
I would probably write this off as coincidence except this isn’t the first event that Butler seemed to predict something historic through her writing. The book Parable of the Talents, in fact, tells the story of a far right political figure who vows to “Make America Great Again.” I’m not making this up, and Butler published the book in 1998.
Butler, for the record, said she is not psychic but rather she studied history and she came up with those events because we should all be able to see where we’re going in a society characterized by inequality, racism and some of those other isms that rule the day. Ok, I could see predicting wildfires in California, since there is a precedent for them and we’ve all seen the effects of global warming. But history even gave her the MAGA slogan? That’s a bit of a stretch for me.
I think many of us assume we’re ‘lucky’ in certain areas of our lives or we just happened to get things right when in reality, we’re tuned into our intuition and following what it tells us. She also could have been engaging in automatic writing when she was in the flow. I think a lot of writers and artists channel their content from Spirit rather than make things up in their brain.
