Stories of heroes and villains.

Stories, for centuries, have described heroes, generally focusing on men who took risks and perhaps sacrificed their lives for the benefits of others. In the past, heroes were presented as models for correct social behavior, generally for males. Females were taught quite different things and rewarded for certain behaviors (but that story is for another day. During the initiation rituals performed by the Aboriginal people, the boys were told a series of short stories about the ancestral heroes who lived in the Dreamtime. These stories taught tribal history and, Elkin (1964:156) writes and “instilled into the minds of the younger men present, for most do today what the great heroes did in the dream time”. The Bemba of Zambia tell stories about heroes and villains as they can illustrate the consequences of behavior; the good are rewarded and the bad are punished. As each generation listened to the triumphs and tragedies of their heroic ancestors, their behavior changed. Courageous acts of sacrifice became goals for the young to emulate, while the derision heaped upon selfish characters would arise in their minds as powerful obstacles whenever circumstances tempted them to shrug off their obligations to others.

Detective stories are a unique type of hero story that, written in French and English, made their sudden appearance during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. By 1901, they had become so popular that the famous art critic, theologian and philosopher, G. K. Chesterton, published a paper to explain their popularity, explaining that these stories were “a perfectly legitimate form of art”, one that confirmed beliefs that there were absolutes in life – rules that universally held – and when one ignored or violated those absolutes there would be serious consequences in life. As such, detective stories could be agents for societal good. He also wrote his own mysteries, one of which, Father Brown, describes the father in a small town in England who uses his understanding of religion to solve local crimes. These books more recently have been described as preachy and moralistic, in contrast to the more popular stories of Sherlock Holmes, a flawed hero who was led at times by his passions, but capable of using calm reason to solve crimes. Since the early 20^th century the number of detective stories has proliferated; today, they are one of the most widespread narrative forms today. And while the detectives who become heroes tend to be moral people, working for justice, the books are not explicitly moral tales. However, their influence may certainly be in that direction. The moral message is more subtle now. 

The storytellers of today

Although some claim that no one tells stories anymore, that is not true. We have many storytellers among us today. Children continue to hear their parents tell them bedtime stories that teach them about perseverance (The Little Engine that Could) or honesty (Pinocchio). There are, however, storytellers for adults. Our doctors and nurses tell us stories so we can understand our problem and its treatment. Our prophets, priests, and  and rabbis tell stories to help us understand doctrine. Our professors and teachers, the ones whose lectures interest us the most, are storytellers. From them we can and do, painlessly, learn a great deal.  We hear stories in operas and radio broadcasts. We hear stories from salespeople trying to convince us that their products are best and those who build the most elaborate stories are trying to sell snake oil to naive buyers are selling snake. Perhaps surprisingly to some, our newscasters, lawyers, politicians and scientists all are or can be storytellers.

Lawyers, who are known to be articulate, do not refer to themselves as storytellers. All lawyers, however, realize that the lawyer who tells the most captivating story will win. Lawyers weave together lines of evidence with legal precedent and create interesting stories that will lead the jury to exonerate or convict.

Politicians, too, are storytellers and some are very good storytellers. Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln both recognized the power of Stories. Church, during the second world war used stories to remind the people of Great Britain of their heroic history, of the strength they had shown in time of crises, of the bravery of their soldiers and the moral value of the people. In doing so, he was successful in convincing them to persist in their battle with the Nazis. Lincoln, during America's Civil war energized his people and was able to preserve the Union by appealing to the best in each person. 

The ancestors of journalists were news carriers, or criers, who carried information from one geographic area to another and one people to another. They were trusted to provide, in a plainspoken manner, accurate information of use in decision making. Today, our journalists walk a fine line between two roles, news carrying and storytelling. They need to provide facts, but must do so in an intriguing way so that they can keep their jobs and can attract and keep an audience.At time,as Marchese (2020: 43) explains, they cross the line.

We used to have news and we had entertainment. Now these categories are totally intertwined – to the extent that it’s not far-fetched to say that we just have categories of entertainment.

Historically, few scientific discoveries were shared with the public; Darwin provided an interesting exception. He used a quasi-lyrical style to write the Origin of Species. His writing style was interesting and easy to understand and his theory came to convince many nonscientists. Today, science is advancing more rapidly than ever before and many of the discoveries scientists are making can have a serious impact on all our lives. To make sure that the public is aware of their discoveries, scientists have begun using a storytelling format, not only with the public, but with politicians and funding agencies. 

Most of the example we provided above are drawn from the "good" storytellers. However, as example of the the snake oil salesman makes clear, we can be duped, deluded, confused, or cheated by storytellers,not only snake oil salesmen, but even those who seem to be legitimate  journalists, scientists, politicians and teachers. Stories - those told not just to entertain - are mechanisms to convince us of some point - the little engine persevered and was successful, the ants taught the grasshopper an important lessons (though it isn't always clear why they were so altruistic), politicians can use stories to fill their own pockets and incite wars. Stories, when well told, draw and hold the attention of the listeners. We listen to stories differently than we listen to other forms of speech and it may be possible that hearing a story activates important sensory areas in the cortex of the brain, making it possible for listeners to actually visualize what they are hearing and the outcome of that visualization - the snake oil cures you! .

 

Art, stories and rituals

Traditional oral art genres can be distinguished from ordinary speech by a unique architecture that involves the use of such things as fictive details, arresting images, mnemonic devices, alliteration, and metaphor and simile. These features make the oral arts, and the messages they contain, more attractive, in the sense that they attract and hold attention, and thus more effective in influencing social behavior in the directions outlined in the narrative. Here, I discuss rituals and the connections they have with the oral arts and describe the key elements of rituals, including the incorporation of the arts -- dance, music, stories, costumes and masks -- and the acts of gifts, feasting, and sacrifice. These elements make the oral art and its message even more attractive, more memorable, and more influential. I will end this post with a discussion of simple and complex rituals and how they might be used to build and repair the social relationships that have been of fundamental importance to humans.

 

Discussions of rituals, for decades, have linked them to stories. Lord Raglan (1955:454), for example, claims that for many scholars, a myth was “simply a narrative associated with a rite.” Segal (2009:366), who writes that myth “does not stand by itself but is tied to ritual,” would agree. Early discussions of the connection between myth and ritual often centered on whether ritual was created first and myth followed, or vice versa (Davis, 1974). William Robertson Smith (1894) for example, argued that myths were derived from rituals and this was implied in an anonymous paper published in Science in 1888, which attributes the origin of myth to rituals associated with ancestor worship. As we will never answer the question of the primacy of ritual, we turn to a question that may be answerable – Why do myths and rituals so often occur together and why do they seem to be, as Malinowski (1926) argues, intricately interdependent?

 

While this entire series of posts will focus on the characteristics of myth and the intertwining of myth and ritual, to begin the discussion of the interrelationships, the claim is often made that the connection between stories, usually referred to as myths, and ritual occurs because, as Hocart (1933:223) explains, “Knowledge of the myth is essential, because it has to be recited at the ritual.” The story explains the ritual, as Raglan (1955:454) describes:

Consider the pilgrimage to Canterbury, which resulted from the murder of Becket. As the pilgrims performed the ritual of touring the cathedral and singing hymns or praying at spots connected with Becket’s life and death, the story of these was recited.

This connection between myths and rituals, Bennett, Wolin, & McAvity (1988) explain, makes them mutually reinforcing. Tomorrow - or one of these days - I will describe the characteristics of rituals. 

once upon a time, long long ago...

 

           Our stories carry with them the whispers of voices from our distant past, from the long-lost stories our distant ancestors once told. Those stories, which held the listeners attention until long after the evening fires turned to glowing coals, were so memorable that listeners, years late, repeated them to their children who repeated them to theirs, until, finally, the practice of telling stories came down to us. The stories we tell and read today have much in common with those ancient stories. Our stories’ structure is built on the one they developed. The emotions described in their stories - fear, excitement, love, hate, jealousy, loss – fill the pages of our stories, and our stories continue to address many of the same themes – faith, conflict, reconciliation, and love. As the years and centuries passed, they left their mark not only on the content of our stories, but on storytellers and listeners.

The path that that begin to lead people away from their ancestors and the stories they told began millennia ago. Our ancestors, carrying their stories and art with them, migrated out of Africa in small family groups and were able to settle in new places that were isolated from one another. At some point in prehistory, they became very successful in the sense that they had healthy children, who had healthy children, who had healthy children and, repeating this pattern, they, over time and across generations, increased in number. They, in other words, did, as it is written in Genesis 9:7: "As for you, be fruitful and multiply; Populate the earth abundantly and multiply in it."\

Families now included not only parents and children, but grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, and even people more distantly related, beyond second and third cousins. These people formed themselves into larger, tightly integrated social groups and lived dispersed across a limited but shared geographic area and remained in regular contact and, with slight differences, told the same stories. We now use words like extended kinship, bands, clans, tribes or ethnic groups to refer to such collections of people.

Eventually, these extended families increased to the point that resources became scarce. Families were forced to begin migrating farther from their ancestral homes and the traditions they had cherished for millennia and the stories they once had told. Some of our ancestors, eventually, were drawn to urban centers in Mesopotamia; by 7,500 BC agriculture in the Fertile Crescent was able to provide a more reliable source of food for more people. Here they stayed. Once a wheat surplus was available, wealth was consolidated and hierarchies emerged. Unprecedented power was placed in the hands of a leader. Our ancestors now were living in crowded urban centers, some with up to 200,000 residents. They were surrounded by large numbers of strangers who bought with them their own distinct stories, art, and rituals. The social environment was transfigured from a small, insular one containing only close kin, all concerned with one’s well-being, into one in which individuals were surrounded by strangers who could be kind, helpful or, equally likely, self-interested, competitive, and, at times, lethal.

The art of storytelling begin to change; grandparents, once the storytellers, were, in some cases too old to travel and were not available. The ancient ancestral stories, if told at all, were no longer repeated as carefully as before or, if told, were likely to be highly modified. Social rules such as honor the elders begin to break down as elders often were no longer around to be honored or to remind others now to continue retelling their traditional stories.