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.