Octavia Butler Parable Series

[Tisa Ammann]

Thankyou for this! I've thought a lot about Earthseed, but I've never considered it's lack of an underworld. I've thought that Earthseed lacks transcendence because the "heaven" it holds out is just another physical place, and one that is actually much less nurturing of human life than the Earth. From what I've read, in Butler's drafts of the third book, space colonization always ended in tragedy, the hopeful vision of Earthseed unfulfilled. This actually seems much more inline with Butler's other work, where there is no escape from physical and interpersonal struggles of human existence. I'll have to think more about what an Earthseed underworld might look like and imply.

I recently did an interview with my old friend, the radio producer Jesse Dukes, for his podcast Upper Middle Brow. He co-hosts the show with his friend Chris Bagg and most of the episodes feature the two of them discussing a book. Not a new book, just an upper middle brow book. They also have a format for shows with guests, where we can discuss one of the books that have already been featured on the podcast. I decided to talk about their episodes on Octavia Butler\u2019s Parable of the Sower.

You can listen to the episode that I\u2019m featured on here (and this is where you can find their original discussion of Parable). In addition to Bulter\u2019s Parable of the Sower we discuss a number of other things, including my book, Sister Death, and why I used to refer to theology as \u201Cspeculative fiction\u201D.

Since this discussion, however, I\u2019ve been thinking about Octavia Butler a lot. I\u2019ve been thinking, especially, about the idea of earthseed. Butler apparently intended to turn the parable series (which includes Parable of the Sower as well as its sequel Parable of the Talents) into a trilogy. But despite the fact that she drafted and drafted that third book\u2014the book that was supposed to have taken the characters off of the earth and into the heavens\u2014she didn\u2019t end up writing it. I\u2019ve found myself wondering if one of the imaginative challenges she faced was that her vision of earthseed had lost track of its underworld\u2014the underworld that it needed to germinate, and take root.

Earthseed is, in the most basic terms, a religion that Butler invents in Parable of the Sower. Well, it\u2019s actually the religion that her main character Lauren Olamina invents. It\u2019s not entirely clear that this is Butler\u2019s own religious vision, though there are some indications that it is. It sometimes seems to me, for instance, that the story itself exists as a vehicle of expression for earthseed. That is to say, earthseed feels less like a feature of the narrative than the narrative seems like a vehicle for earthseed.

Lauren Olamina is living in a postapocalyptic America that feels eerily close to our own world, perhaps in large part because the novel (written in 1993) was set in a near-future doomscape in the year 2024! That\u2019s not where the uncanny similarities end. But I will leave it there for now. What\u2019s important to know, in order to understand earthseed, is that it\u2019s a religion Olamina begins to invent as she\u2019s living in a gated community near Los Angeles that\u2019s only just barely keeping the social and political chaos of the outside world at bay.

The core of earthseed is the idea that God, the divine, is change. God is change, and change is divine. It\u2019s not so much the case that Olamina is calling people to worship change. Rather, she\u2019s calling for them to recognize that change is the principal of the absolute. Change is the truest thing. Life and death themselves are just manifestations of change.

Earthseed is a path toward recognizing the inevitability of change. But it\u2019s also an affirmation of a kind of deep mutuality between humans and the divine. Olamina tells us that we are not simply subject to change, it\u2019s not something simply imposed upon us. Rather, change is responsive to us. Change shapes us, and yet we also shape change. Understanding earthseed calls for an adaption to this reality in both its heaviness and its uplift.

But earthseed also offers a kind of promise. \u201CThe destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars,\u201D Olamina writes. I love that vision of roots and stars (that\u2019s why there are roots and stars in the icon for my substack!) The practice of earthseed is to aim for the heavens. Not a fantastic afterlife that may or may not exist. Instead, she\u2019s talking about the actual heavens\u2014outer space. It\u2019s a vision of life beyond this world\u2014a vision of grand possibility.

I recently learned that earthseed is actually a religion that people practice. On the Internet, at least! I can see the appeal of it, though without Lauren Olamina it\u2019s not immediately clear to me how the community dimension would form. I can\u2019t imagine, for instance, that if I started an earthseed chapter many of you would want to follow me! But maybe that just says something about me.

At any rate, it\u2019s also not clear to me that Butler would have wanted earthseed to live off of the page, as a real breathing tradition. One of the lovely things about books is that we can immerse ourselves in them, in order to imagine another reality. But it\u2019s never as easy as we might think to lift that imagined reality of out a book and make it real. Was Butler just offering a beautiful vision, while also installing some elements into the story (skepticism, or critique) that would prevent this religion from actually coming to life?

Maybe these novels were a vehicle for Butler to create a form of religion, while also offering a scathing critique of the way that religion and power often tend to work. Butler was suspicious of religion, and this included the religion that she herself created. She was critical of the way that Christianity had turned divinity into a kind of sky cop, who policed the behavior of people on earth. But no religious figure is above criticism for Butler, not even the prophet of earthseed. In Parable of the Talents, which is narrated by Lauren Olamina\u2019s daughter, Lauren herself becomes a more ambivalent figure. It starts to become apparent that the religion of earthseed, and the power it gave her access to, may have done something to her.

And yet Butler also recognized the sustaining social influence of the black church that she grew up within. The theologian Delores Williams\u2014a womanist theologian\u2014wrote about what she described as a kind of survival, or quality of life theology in the black church. It was a theology that she found among black women, who found in God not a figure who saved them from the terrible things that happened but that gave them the power to make a way out of no way. I think about Octavia Butler as someone who, perhaps, saw that survival theology at work and understood the power of it. She knew that this sort of theology wasn\u2019t something she could completely dismiss.

So, Butler explored what this sort of religion could look like, or might look like. In the postapocalyptic context of Parable of the Sower, earthseed is what gives her main character the power to imagine a life outside of her gated community. And she ends up building a following, in large part because she has a community and a vision. Or at least that\u2019s what it seems like. It\u2019s earthseed\u2014her theology, her vision\u2014that seems to keep everyone together.

The key to earthseed is that it\u2019s not bound to this world. Jesse and I ended up having a discussion (a debate, really) about this element of earthseed. I thought it was crucial that earthseed be something that could be separated from the world, but without losing its earthiness. It\u2019s an afrofuturist imaginary that can break with this world, and its antiblackness, without losing its earthiness. Lauren Olamina (like Butler) is a black woman. And Butler was both inspired by, and an inspiration for, afrofutrist imaginaries. Earthseed is a religion with the power to seed the most human and most beautiful elements of earthiness in another world. It\u2019s a path for the survival of earthiness, in another world.

The otherworldly hope and expection of earthseed is the reason why the religion is so focused on the heavens: the reason why it\u2019s rooted in the stars. Lauren thinks of earthseed as a religion with the power to take people into the actual heavens. Into space; not a figurative or spiritual heaven, but a real one, a material one.

It\u2019s also this challenge, of taking earthseed into the heavens, that seemed to challenge Butler imaginatively in ways that she wasn\u2019t necessarily up for. She couldn\u2019t write the book (or just didn\u2019t write the book) that took earthseed off of the earth.

A seed won\u2019t germinate unless the conditions are favorable for its growth. It needs the right growing conditions, and typically this means soil. Most seeds need soil\u2014earth\u2014 for their growth and development. They need to be planted in the underworld. They need something chthonic in order to change or transform.

Butler retains some of the popular elements of Christianity in earthseed. There\u2019s a divine figure: change. And heaven remains a central figure of hope and expectation. I think that she arguably even has a hell in the story: the world. Hell is just life in the new world after the old world (which was no paradise, either) has fallen apart.

But in the earthseed imaginary, there\u2019s no underworld. There\u2019s no world of the dead that Lauren Olamina can come into contact with in some way, for instance. Earthseed takes root in the heavens, but not even the heavens seem to have a notably chthonic dimension where things can root.

Without an underworld, it seems to me that earthseed becomes just another vision of a heaven without something to hold it up. An unreality, an impossible spiritual fantasy. Part of what makes earthseed so appealing is its earthiness. Not that it\u2019s tied to the world, per se, but that it\u2019s earthy. It\u2019s a seed that contains the best of the earth within it. It has a kind of ground; it\u2019s grounded, and grounding. It feels real, tactile, and tangible (rather than fantastic and unreal).

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