The amount of small things yellowjackets seems to utilise from so many religions, faiths, spiritual traditions, etc, just keeps racking up. Like there are just so many allusions to multiple spiritualities beyond the obvious. particularly when we’re looking at spiritual approaches to altered states of consciousness: to the oracle of delphi, shamanic rituals, and mediums communing with the dead. At its core, the story might be asking “is god an external force or is divinity internal?” and the answer its giving might be “both”, because, as Lottie says: “is there a difference?”. Does it matter where divinity is rooted, when the result of it is the same? When its impact on human actions is the same. It’s delving so deeply into how faith connects people. And not even faith in a god, but in the people we love, in ourselves, the world around us. What rituals and symbols do we come back to for comfort? How do we grieve? Where do we see signs from our god or gods in the world around us? Are our dreams and nightmares divine messages, or the compensatory mechanism of a mind that’s striving to understand itself?
And is divinity good or bad? Does it have a morality at all? When it can drive both the worst and best of human actions. Is divinity just a form of love? Is it the deepest, darkest depths of our emotional wells? Rage, desire, baser instinct; what Shauna and Lottie (and Other Tai) are so connected to, for better or worse, but can’t face exactly because of that. Because truly confronting your emotions means confronting what it is that makes you feel so deeply. And that’s true whatever belief system you subscribe to. Maybe we just project ourselves onto the world. Onto signs and symbols, onto “gods”. Maybe the girls are just projecting their own darkness onto the wilderness, and the shadows Javi and Ben saw in the caves are just the same as the antler queen Lottie saw; internal divinity made manifest.
