Martinez Dettinger: A Wrinkle in Time and the historical transcendence of primal cultures

 A Wrinkle in Time  is a story about a young woman who time travels with the help of a tesseract to save her scientists brother. I couldn't help but think about this story, when we discussed the framework for how time works in oral traditions. Rather than a spiral with other spirals spawning from it, time in this novel folds and bends. Hence the title. When the main character, Meg, travels throughout time, her guides bring her to strange new places like the planet Uriel, third planet of the star Malak, a dystopian earth-like place called Camaztoz, and the home of Aunt Beast Ixchel. These names are each examples of allusions to important figures in religious oral traditions. Uriel refers to the Archangel Uriel and Malak is the Hebrew word for angel, these figures dating back to Jewish oral histories. Camaztoz is a bat god in Mayan mythology, and Ixchel is the Mayan goddess of love, medicine, and the moon. The author, Madeleine L'Engle, chose these names from her experience with ancient traditions, and they each hold significance within the novel to support the religious connotation of the battle between light and darkness. This same book that holds within it allusions to Christian beliefs and which highlights the similarities between the Christian faith and that of Buddhism and other faiths was banned in Alabama schools because it names Jesus as a human figure in the fabricated history of the novel. This is interesting when paired with the observation that all the religious references begin once the main character goes through time travel. They exist outside of the main character's own time and beyond her conception of what time can be. I think this is an interesting allusion to how oral traditions and the religions that stem from them are not confined by the historical contexts in which they were created because they are not defined by written history, and thus are not fixed in time itself. 

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