Category Archives: Anthropology

I’ve written so far about the conditions necessary for an oral narrative to be passed down unchanged. To be preserved at all, the people who tell the story must find some value in it for their present lives, regardless of what it meant to their ancestors. And to be passed down unchanged, it must be told for some purpose that would be hindered if the story is altered.

These conditions are difficult, but obviously not impossible, to meet. And, just as obviously, a narrative can potentially be perceived as worth being told by any society that encounters it. If a story were to emerge anywhere that, for whatever reason, resonates with people in most cultures, it could easily spread worldwide in a remarkably short amount of time; certainly much shorter than the 4,000 years calculated for an individual to become a universal genealogical ancestor. This might even happen if, after the story began to spread, it ceased for some reason to be told in its culture of origin. However, if a society that adopts a story uses it for a different purpose than did the society from which the story was learned, the likelihood of it remaining unchanged would be altered as well.

The conclusion that this all leads to is that, even if it were known that a particular traditional story were inspired by a historic event, the observed present distribution of the story could not be used to determine the location where that event had occurred, or to reconstruct the specific details of the event. That information would need to be obtained from a different source.

Back in February I explained why the ultimate origin of a traditional story isn’t an especially interesting or important question. However, I don’t want anybody to misunderstand what I was saying. I’m not at all claiming that a traditional story can’t be passed down essentially unchanged over long periods of time; I’m saying that it won’t be passed down unchanged, or at all for that matter, without there being a reason.

In societies without writing, like Mesopotamia at the time the Gulf Oasis would have last been above water, stories can’t sit unread in an archive waiting for some scholar to rediscover them at a later time. There’s no possibility of a story surviving unless it’s told. And people don’t just randomly talk into the air; storytellers have a purpose (or purposes) in mind. So a story that nobody has a reason to tell will disappear.

The willingness of the teller to make changes in a story depends critically on the purpose for which it is told. If a story is told purely for entertainment it doesn’t matter how it changes in the telling, as long as the audience finds the result entertaining (compare the fairy tales of Charles Perrault with their Disney descendants to see a great example of this). If the story is part of a magical ritual, or an invocation to a deity who might be offended if everything isn’t done perfectly, there is a very strong incentive to tell the story exactly the same way each time. It’s not enough just to say the story is sacred, however; it’s the purpose that matters. A sacred story used to instruct children in the proper way to behave might be capable of absorbing some changes, even while other parts of the story remain constant. The only way an oral story remains constant over time is if it has to in order to fulfill the purpose for which it is told.

(And, of course, all of the above only applies if we’re considering things from a human perspective. If an omnipotent God wants a story to be passed down unchanged, he is quite capable of causing that to happen.)

I said last time that the origin of a traditional narrative is not a particularly interesting or useful question. That seems counterintuitive, but it’s easy to understand if you think about your own stories. Every one of us has stories we can tell about interesting or unusual things that we’ve experienced. If you’re like most people, you know a few stories about things that happened to your parents before you were born. And possibly a few from your grandparents, although most likely not very many. The more generations back you go, the fewer stories you probably know. Why don’t you know those stories? Obviously because nobody told them to you. Even extremely interesting stories don’t tend to get passed down once there’s nobody alive who remembers the people who experienced them. They don’t become sacred history.

The principle here is that narratives are only passed on if they are in some way important to the living people who hear and tell them. An interesting anecdote that happened to somebody you know is important because of the relationship you have with that person. A sacred story – a myth – is only passed on as a sacred story if it is relevant to the lived reality of the people telling and hearing it. Just being old doesn’t make it sacred. When considering myths, therefore, the question that needs to be answered is not how did this story get started, or what historical basis it might have, but what does it mean to the people for whom it is sacred.

Now, this is all assuming we’re talking about an oral narrative. Written texts are a little different. A text that is considered sacred may contain passages that are not especially important to current readers, because the sacred character of the text as a whole precludes changing or removing them (c. f. Biblical genealogies for many modern Christians). With a written text, the question to be considered is what did this story mean at the time it was added to the canon – which may or may not be the same as the time it was first told, or even first written down. Oral traditions, however, do not have the kind of connection with a greater whole that would keep then in the “canon” once they are no longer relevant to modern listeners.

So when you find that certain myths are present in many different cultures all over the world, that’s an indication that certain ideas are relevant to the lives of people in a huge variety of natural and cultural environments. And that’s a very interesting finding, because it may be telling us something about the way the human brain works, if we’re just clever enough to figure it out.

Following up on my last post, the worldwide flood is easily the most commonly encountered myth just about anywhere you look. Generally the flood leaves only a bare handful of survivors who frequently, although certainly not always, stay alive by taking refuge in a box or other container. In some myths the survivors are human, in which case everybody in the present world descended from them. In other cases they are divine or semi-divine beings, and the creation of mankind occurs after the flood. In any case, the flood seems to serve as a type of return to the primordial, watery chaos out of which the world was first formed, and serves to separate an ancient world of supernatural beings from the current world dominated by humans.

Now, before I go any further, I need to make it clear that I am approaching this subject as an anthropologist. Therefore, by “myth” I mean a sacred narrative, believed to be true, which often plays a central role within a larger belief system (Lehmann, Myers, and Moro 2005:54). I specifically do not mean that it is fictitious or false. Myths express sacred truths to believers, and there is nothing about the status of a story as myth that prevents it from also being historically accurate. (Nor, it must be said, is there anything that requires it to be. The historical accuracy, or lack thereof, of any narrative, is simply not relevant to its being a myth.)

In addition to the Great Flood story, there are some other myths that are found all over the world. Examples include:

• A man makes a long journey to the world of the dead to try and recover his wife. He finds her, but on the return trip he violates some sort of prohibition, resulting in his being unable to bring her back to the world of the living (often called the Orpheus myth, after the protagonist in the Greek version of this story).

• With the world originally covered in water an animal, often a duck or other water bird, dives down to the very bottom and returns with bit of mud from the bottom under it’s fingernails. From that bit of mud, dry land is created.

• People obtain fire by stealing it from a group of divine or semi-divine beings. Often the theft is carried out by animals, who are pursued and pass the fire from one to another as a sort of relay.

Many other myths are widespread within geographical regions. (The monster slaying Hero Twins being one example that is found throughout much of North America.)

To relate this back to my last post, when we’re discussing narratives like these, that are widely distributed throughout the world, it must not be assumed that the story in question had not been part of any particular cultural tradition for millennia prior to the oldest textual record of it that survived to the present day. In the absence of evidence that the story was not part of certain cultural traditions prior to a particular date, we can not make any assumption about who had that story first. Therefore, any speculation about borrowing in one direction or another is unwarranted. Applied to the specific situation of the ancient near east, I consider it likely that the Great Flood story did not originate with any of the historically identified cultures of the region, but is quite a bit older than any of them.

In addition, we also need to keep in mind that the origin of a traditional narrative isn’t a particularly interesting or useful question. That, however, will need to addressed in another blog post.

I’ve been reading Ancient Israelite Literature in its Cultural Context by John H. Walton. Chapter 1 gives a good survey of the cosmological material, that’s accessible to people (like me) who don’t read any ancient near eastern languages. The discussion of various theories of borrowing in one direction or another is interesting and seems, from my layman’s point of view, to be reasonably well balanced. But any time I see any discussion along those lines, it always leaves me desperately wishing that scholars of ancient near eastern literature would do at least a little reading in world mythology and the anthropology of folklore. There seems to be no recognition whatsoever that some of the themes that are the biggest areas of contention – especially the flood story and the idea of a watery primordial chaos – have a worldwide distribution. These elements are far more likely to be revealing something about the way human brains work than to be cases of borrowing from one “original” story.

That said, the comparisons of ancient narratives (irrespective of any borrowing that may or may not have occurred) has been interesting to read, and I’m looking forward to see what Walton has to say about other literary forms.