I was already interested in Greek mythology before cancer. After my diagnosis, it initially became a way to get my mind off everything that was happening. Instead, I found that mythology gave me another way to understand it.
To me, the Greek gods gave form to forces of nature, emotions, and experiences that can otherwise be difficult to explain. The healing light of the sun could become Apollo. The changing seasons could be understood through Demeter and Persephone. Inspiration belonged to the Muses. Even emotions such as hope and fear had faces and personalities.
That way of thinking eventually became part of Canceromachy.
Giving Experience a Mythological Form
Cancer brings with it an enormous amount of information, but facts alone do not always explain what it feels like to live through them. Mythology gives those experiences another language.
Fear can become a presence in the room. Strategy can stand beside a treatment plan. Pain, grief, memory, creativity, sleep, nature, and recovery can all take forms the reader can see and understand.
The same idea can extend into the body itself. Cancer biology remains biology, but the microscopic struggle between disease and treatment can also become an epic battlefield within the story.
The mythology does not replace the real experience. It gives the experience another way to be seen.
Mythology Beside Science
Canceromachy does not use mythology as an alternative to medicine or science. Mutations, treatments, scans, medications, and biological processes work according to the real mechanisms studied by researchers and understood by medical professionals.
The gods do not cause a treatment to work, guide a doctor's decisions, or control the outcome of cancer care. Those achievements belong to medicine, science, and the people responsible for them.
Mythology operates beside that reality. Medicine can explain what is happening inside the body. Mythology can help tell the story of what it feels like to live through it.
Why Greek Mythology Specifically?
There are extraordinary mythological traditions throughout the world. Greek mythology became the foundation of Canceromachy simply because it was the tradition I had already fallen in love with.
Its gods are complicated, its heroes are vulnerable, its stories contradict one another, and its world rarely pretends that suffering is fair. People succeed, fail, grieve, adapt, make terrible decisions, receive unexpected help, and continue through circumstances they never chose.
That felt remarkably appropriate for a story about cancer.
