Multiple Origins of Earthseed

In response to Jes’s post inquiring into the possible role of Heraclitus in the origins of Earthseed, I would like to do a hard loop back. In the Spring 2015 section of the Octavia Butler class, I wrote a post noting the similarities between Earthseed and Daoism—the author of which, in a striking coincidence, seems to have been roughly contemporary with Heraclitus. This seems to suggest another kind of looping—Butler’s own, a looping back from the problems of the present and the future to the solutions of the ancient past. It also begs the question of whether Roach’s idea of circum-Mediterranean circulation was really as sealed off during this period as he believed. There is evidence, in fact, that the Greek philosophers were influenced by Indian philosophy—Pyrrho, the founder of skepticism was exposed to it when he traveled to India with Alexander the Great. It wasn’t too long after Heraclitus and Lao Tzu that the Silk Road began its own intercultural circulation. In my 2015 blog post I couldn’t find any evidence that she drew from any particular tradition in creating Earthseed, but the cultural currents that prefigured her writing were not as autochthonous as we sometimes imagine, and in an environment of circulation such as this there is room for multiple origins.