Wake Up: An Interview With MythoAmerica
All images curated by MythoAmerica
Wake up.
This is the message spread by MythoAmerica, which is without a doubt one of the most important aesthetic accounts operating in American culture today. You have likely seen one of their iconic images on your timeline: an eerie snapshot of American life—an abandoned church or empty mall—often paired with the caption “good night” or “wake up.”
The viral images that MythoAmerica curates are intimately familiar to anyone who’s grown up in this country, and yet still somehow unsettling. A cross towers over a suburb at night. Darkness permeates the corners of bowling alleys. Trailcams reveal snarling deities prowling suburbia. The project excels at transforming the seemingly mundane aspects of American culture—movie theaters, supermarkets, 24-hour diners—into spots of ancient magic, horror, and myth. See, as much as outsiders and saboteurs like to denigrate the value of American culture, MythoAmerica is doing some of the most important work there is: archiving it, romanticizing it, and re-animating it, asking its audience to fill in the blanks.
The MythoAmerica project runs deeper than a popular found photography account on Twitter. It spills over onto Tumblr, Instagram, and most notably Substack, where the admin Zantae opines on the metaphysics of Waffle House and the spirits haunting the American wilderness. He brings a dissident, compelling take on everything from cryptids—“America’s cryptid phenomenon is mostly comprised of Native Gods of the New World, rejected and unincorporated into American Protestantism”—to thoughts on how the the 24-hour American diner is a “metaphysical triumph of Christian universalism over pagan perennialism—linear time over cyclical. A light that stays on, refusing to die every night. A place of relief and refuge that mirrors Heaven in its eternality and accessibility.”
For their very first interview about the MythoAmerica project, Countere interviewed Zantae, who’s also an experienced musician, designer, photographer, and hiker. We spoke about Christianity, his favorite states, and what “wake up” really means in postmodern America.
Why did you decide to create MythoAmerica?
It was a total shot in the dark—a completely impulsive decision I made the day I created it. Ambitions of running an aesthetics page or presenting some consolidated mythos for the country never crossed my mind once. But God has a funny way of making everything come together before you can even realize it's happening. And then you look back one day and it all makes sense, like His angels were guiding you there all along.
In hindsight, the trajectory was inevitable. I was a multi-disciplined artist who was never given the prosper space to develop my talents or hone in on my vision, especially not in school or university where that kind of thing is stifled. It was only from being among Rightist circles online that I was able to purely express myself. Lurking around Pine Tree Twitter in 2019, getting swept up in the thrill and tragedy of MAGA 2020, then developing a fascination with the religious spirit of QAnon and their fever dreams of a Great Awakening—it was through these that made me begin to “wake up” to the secret artistic statement I sought to make with MythoAmerica. And the overwhelmingly positive response I received upon creating it gave me all the confirmation I needed that I was onto something that needed to be out there.
“Guided by the Christian promise of Heaven, America’s ultimate ambition and fate is to produce utopia. It might even have already. But so, too, lurks the Satanic plot to manifest his own mirrored communistic dystopia. America’s future is a clash between these two visions.”
Where did you grow up, and what was your childhood growing up in America like?
I grew up in a suburb of Northeast New Jersey, in a town that looked about as picturesque as one could imagine a suburb to be. I’m left with a lot of beautiful memories of riding bikes, hanging by the community pool, and partaking in youthful mischief. But looking back I realize how fragile it all was—how behind every moment there was this apocalyptic sense that my idyllic upbringing would eventually collapse, and it eventually did. But such is the aesthetic of family life in America. No matter how blissful or healthy a nuclear family presents, there always exists a suspicion—in their composition, in their smiles. We become convinced that something must be going wrong behind closed doors, underneath the surface. But somehow, that’s not how we remember it. Even the bad moments eventually appear rosy with enough time. Nostalgia makes it so the images of childhood memories will never not appear like the best of times. And so they were, even if they weren’t.
How did your childhood inspire the themes of MythoAmerica now?
One of the things I explore with MythoAmerica is the phenomenon of nostalgia. How, for example, even the rancid chocolate milk we’d drink in school will eventually be remembered as sweet to the heart—how we become immune to the poisons of this plastic and junk food American existence by route of our sentimentality. I’m often accused by dull, misunderstanding leftists as being a propagandistic “Return to Tradition” account, but these people can never know the overwhelming rush of emotion one feels when I unearth even the most banal childhood memories. The miracle behind the games we used to play, the toys we used to have, the places we’d frequent that we never think twice about in person but make us cry when seeing them in picture. Each reminds us of a Paradise lost, of an Edenic innocence we wish to preserve—no matter how seemingly futile they were. My ultimate ambition when posting on MythoAmerica is to realize even a fraction of the all-seeingness of God so that I can continue to remind us of everything we forgot we once had. Few things resonate more to the soul than recognition.
Can you tell us about your faith and how it relates to your work?
I’m proud to say that MythoAmerica is the only account I’ve seen to unabashedly champion American Protestantism—both for its aesthetic and its spirit. It has become quite trendy to go after the unsophistication of our national Faith, whether it comes from Catholics or Liberals. But in the simplicity of our churches and the privacy of our practice is a certain mystery… a darkness that is unattainable anywhere else in the world. And I make it a point to not only visually capture this, but also defend it with my entire heart.
I believe the glory of Protestantism is in its pioneering character—its self-interpretation and the exaltation of religious experience over mere doctrine. For an artist, it is an inspiration to move away from abstraction and wordy analyses and instead to provide an immersive, evocative experience in an audience. It is to evangelize the people with captivation and passion above all else. It means breaking the rules, to be a heretic to the Church and the State. That’s what true American art is for me.
Is there a particular absolute favorite image(s) you have posted, and why?
I’d be lying if I said anything other than “all of them.” I put a lot of consideration into each post—each image is so heavy with meaning and sentiment. Nothing is for cheap engagement. I think that’s why the account resonates so deeply, people can feel the sincerity. And so it’s very difficult for me to choose when every post has that weight to it.
What percentage of the MythoAmerica photos do you take, versus how many are submitted by the audience?
As of right now, MythoAmerica is almost entirely a found photography project. I get an overwhelming amount of submissions everyday from people, but I am extremely particular on what I post. I take great pleasure in the process of divining from the algorithms and search engines a personal pool of images that move me. It is a small demonstration of that American exploratory spirit to amass images from every corner of the nation. I’ve developed a solid catalogue of personal photography from my travels cross-country, and will seek to appropriately introduce them into the feed. But I believe the impersonality of MythoAmerica lets its contents shine foremost and I want to preserve that. It’s bigger than me.
“Many comment on how eating the exact same foods in America as they did in other countries makes them inextricably fatter and unhealthier. This is because the food here is cursed with the blood of old Gods long forgotten.”
What are some of your favorite natural locations in the country and why?
It should come as no surprise that it’s America’s forests that inspire me most as so many of my posts come straight from Appalachia. The foliage gives off a certain darkness—be it a mystery or a privacy—that preserves it as a forgotten region where unseen things happen. Some say cryptids, some say witches, some say Klansmen. But ultimately whatever boogeymen we conjure between the pines emanates such a haunting creativity. It’s initiatory if you can feel it, because once you do you’re just compelled to just get closer and explore its secrets.
What is your favorite city in America?
It is perhaps the least “American” city in the country but my favorite city in America is New Orleans. Its occult energy, mixed with its unique culture and clear colonial roots makes it rife with contradictions, which is everything for a person like me. It is one of only two, maybe three, cities in the country with undeniable spiritual and creative energy. I’ll add that New York, which is the city I’ve spent the most time in, is no longer on that list.
You’ve written on your Substack that America is a microcosm of the world. What state do you think is the most a microcosm of America?
I think for any state to be a microcosm of America, it would have to be just as big. Not in size, but in perception. It would have to make you as egocentric as a child, thinking you are the center of the world, and everything in your immediate sight is the full extent of the universe—completely ignorant to anything that exists outside of it. That’s the American experience. And so, for me, I would say New Jersey. Your microcosm could be elsewhere, but mine is New Jersey because it was home. It was my entire world growing up. At a time where culture tries to reduce you to feeling insignificant by showing how small you are in the immense size of the universe, the fractal nature of the United States makes you feel unimaginably self-important. Each state, county, town feels like its own world—and not just its own independently, but also *your* world.
What is the association between the MythoAmerica project and Gnosticism?
This is a very important question, and something I’ve been wary of laying out too much because Gnosticism has become such a buzz word for pseudo-intellectuals who want to make names for themselves renouncing sin and heresy in Biden’s America. But moralizing and shrieking over the decline of our civilization isn’t conducive to art or the creation of anything new.
“Horror is the true American genre—fueled by the lingering paranoia that even in the most sheltered and secure suburban utopia, something from the Dark will emerge and penetrate it, leading to the collapse of their safe world.”
We live in Post-Modern Times. Everything is being deconstructed into nothingness, re-evaluated for their legitimacy, and redefined at will. Few believe in the foundations of anything anymore, especially in America where there exists such a blazing suspicion that everything being fed to us is “fake”—the news, the elections, the politicians. In the same way Gnostics distrusted the Church, we distrust the Republic. And through this we are able to seek out our own truths, by the ferventness of our belief and our experiences. In America, we choose to find out for ourselves what is real or not. And from the ashes of our national decadence, we can birth something new. We can have faith in a new mythos—no matter how scandalous or simple its origins, or whether it be the foundation of a New World in early America or the creation of an aesthetics account on Twitter.
You’ve posted stills from Donnie Darko in the past. What are some movies, or other pieces of art, that help illustrate this dark, chthonic force of America that you write about?
Oh man, yes, one of my favorites. If there’s any true inspiration for MythoAmerica it was an extension of all these Y2K movies that were explicitly Gnostic—Donnie Darko, The Matrix, The Truman Show, Vanilla Sky, Pleasantville, Eyes Wide Shut, etc. Each presented the world we know in America as artificial or a dream, and that there’s much more going on elsewhere, under the surface. David Lynch really explores this, too, with each film revealing that behind the construction of our serene towns exists a dark and uncanny realm if you look for it. It’s a distinctly American fascination.
In the same spirit, MythoAmerica might consist of posts that appear banal, but what I’m trying to “wake up” receptive viewers to is the magic between the seams—all of what you can see through what you can feel. Critics might say that behind all art is propagandistic intention, but that’s too hollow. Behind all art is sentiment, and that’s the new world I try to open the door for you to. Dismissiveness only serves to remove you from that depth.
What are some songs or musicians that accompany the MythoAmerican aesthetic?
It’s likely more from ignorance than arrogance that I say this, but—my own. I couldn’t really point to you music that captures the chthonic, haunted nature of the American wilderness or the sweet nostalgia of 2000’s suburbia in the way I see it. There are so many scenes in my head that I feel this deep compulsion to soundscape—the buzzing energy of an American diner late at night, the pulse of death trap rides at a state fair, the occult gatherings in the woods. I treat it like I’m composing a soundtrack for the film that is MythoAmerica, offering a real cinematic experience. I go so far as to take live field recordings from different scenic locations and have them breathe life into each track. I’m moved by a religious duty to provide full immersion into every pocket of this country. I want you to see, feel, and hear everything.
What is your advice to younger Americans who might feel disillusioned or disconnected from our American mythos?
Many say America is an idea—it’s not. It’s a spirit. It can only be known through action and experience, and revealed to pioneers and those daring enough to go where they shouldn’t—where it’s dangerous and where few else would go.
“The Americas are the promised land. The final frontier. The end of the world. It is here that all of history will reach its climax, and the battle between God and Satan will be waged. Its divine importance was substantiated by the fortuitousness of its forefathers. We are its blessed heirs.”
Your response to the darkness inherent to life is either to insulate yourself away from it or to jump right in. American history is comprised of these two instincts, but what’s common is the acknowledgement that that dark mysterious world exists. MythoAmerica is just a reminder of that, but its up to you to F around and find out for yourself.
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